Okay, fair enough. But then my point remains. This is a game for celebrity fans, not football fans. And Klopp's point remains. When are you going to play this game when we're already struggling to fit in the actual competitive games?
For me the obvious time to play it is the week before the CL final, there is normally a buffer week, and you simply exclude any players in the CL final like how the Americans leave out players in the Super Bowl from the pro bowl.
As for space on the calendar…this just isn’t a real argument.
The FA has added up to 96 (but probably 10-20) games to the calendar this year by bringing back FA Cup replays and no one will notice a difference in the calendar this year vs last.
20 of the 500 Premier league players having a fun kick about isn’t going to crash the system.
For the record, I’m not desperate for this to happen, I just think the arguments against it are entirely forced by people who have swallowed the idea that
all change in football is bad and must be immediately rejected out of hand without even listening to a proposal.
First people said it shouldn’t happen because it was an American idea - which doesn’t even make sense as an objection, but Gary James countered entirely by writing that great article on the history of representative games.
Second people said no one would ever go, and then last weekend 40,000 people bought tickets to see a YouTube all stars kick about and 22 million watched it which destroyed any notion that you have to have an elite sporting product to sell seats and you can’t have a fun exhibition.
Now the space on the calendar…it just doesn’t hold up when you look at the variance in the Calendar year on year frequently sees +/- 8 games for each team.
The Times had an article yesterday saying inter-league teams are being considered. PL vs La Liga or Serie A - just like the traditional representative games. Mostly people groaned at the topic coming up again l, but from the reaction I saw, 5-10% thought it was much better than North v South and could be good.
I would just like us to be able to entertain new ideas at face value when someone brings them to the table as fully formed ideas instead of getting whipped up into a frenzy by the media and pundits angry that some
American is trying to change our game (by bringing back a 150 year old tradition) when a snippet of a rumour or the first grain of an idea is thrown out in a spitballing session.
Ideally we’d even go beyond that and wait until something has happened before judging if it’s shit or doesn’t fit or won’t be attended, and if that were true then it would die on its own.
So yeah, I don’t think I can add any more to my position in this thread, I’d just like to see the fully formed idea before we decide it’s the worst thing that ever happened ever.
