I'm usually first to defend the BBC but their bowing and scraping to the Premier League pees me off! They're currently celebrating 25 years of the damn thing. It's like nothing ever existed before it. All it's achieved is make players and agents rich at our expense, reduced the number of clubs capable of winning it to about six and created a vast army of armchair fans sitting in pubs cheering for clubs whose ground they couldn't find their way to with a sat nav. I no longer have the slightest interest in it. I don't care who wins it, which no mark team survives each year at the expense of fielding full strength teams in cup quarter finals or how many of them make the last eight of europe. I used to love the European Cup and rooted for the likes of Forest and Villa and Liverpool. They represented England in my eyes. Now all they represent is mammon. Rant over.
I'm with you 100% on this. In my younger days we saw Wolves, Ipswich and Burnley win the old First Division and Northampton Town, Carlisle United and Leyton Orient reach the top flight. For them to achieve that now they'd need an owner who made billions off the back of others.
It just shows how "blind" reasonably intelligent people can become when there's money involved. The money men have ruined grass roots cricket, the same is happening to football, and nobody except people like us on forums like this says anything against it. Surely it must all collapse soon? I sincerely hope it does. http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/40717176
Swansea also went from fourth division to first and all the way back again. At that time if you got a good manager and the right group of players you could go a long way. Modest investment and good management took clubs like Forest and Derby and Ipswich and.....Dundee United (see what I did there Ian?) to European glory. Now there's next to no chance of that ever happening again.
Sooner or later there's going to be a breakaway league, be it at either the top or the bottom. The "big" clubs will form some kind of super league, or the bottom clubs will reform in a different league, with salary caps and the like. All it would take is one concentrated effort from football fans to shun the product and the whole thing would collapse.
This comment is absolutely true and unfortunately makes supporting clubs like Barnsley absolutely pointless as real success at the very top of the league structure is impossible to achieve. Happens all over I'm afraid. Germany, Holland, Spain, Italy the same big rich clubs have the monopoly and scoop up everything year after year. BORING. At least we support our teams because we LOVE them but for how much longer can that continue. Far too many youngsters love wearing Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool tops and supporting them in the livingroom. This generation is lost to football as we know it.
The sooner the better for me. I know money coints at every level of the game but it's brcome obscene at the top level. Last season I watched about 10 non league games live and not a single minute of the pemier league on tv. I'd far rather watch realfootball than that circus.
Therein lies the problem. There are far too many people who are willing to pay through their noses to line the pockets of multi-millionaires, just to watch a football match on TV. I realise it's market forces, and that people have the right to spend the money they earn on whatever they want, but just how much longer is it going to continue? Top club turnover is now getting into the realms of GDP for small countries. It's utter madness and explains why we, and many other clubs, just cannot compete any more.
When we had our year in the "Promised Land of Milk & Honey", the bottom four teams in the football league were Brighton, Hull, Swansea and Cardiff. Bournemouth and Burnley were bottom half of League 2. All have played in the Premier League in the last few years, and at least a couple could probably think of themselves as established there now. Of the teams with us that year, Blackburn, Wimbledon and Coventry are now League 1/2, and us, Leeds, Wednesday, Derby, Villa and Bolton are Championship. Things still can and do change, but perhaps a lot slower than before. That does not mean that teams outside the top 3-4 are likely to win the League often, but at Leicester showed it is still possible.
And all now play in brand new and very nice looking stadiums which suits the football expectations of todays fans. But is the common denominator here not very weathy owners? Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. But the otherside of the coin with rich owners is the prospect of being owned by a Venky TBH the lot a Hull have been worrying for them.
