Brilliant. This is why I come to this thread...not for the endless essaysstony said:flb said:https://vine.co/v/OvBUDvguVWM
Hahaha, fucking brilliant.
billymumphrey said:JoeMercer'sWay said:Prestwich_Blue said:Dalglish was the reaction to Hodgson and really wasn't the right candidate longer term but I could see why they asked him to do it. Wasn't the purchase of Carroll/downing part of the 'Moneyball' theory, with Carroll scoring the most headed goals and Downing supplying the most crosses beibng the justification? I'm sure that's what I heard at the time but whatever, we all know you overpaid horribly. However both doing a good job at West Ham now so clearly not bad players.
I can certainly see the justification for writing this season off & giving him another season to try to get things right. After all, he bought a lot of players in the summer and it's hard to integrate that number quickly. But can he integrate them at all? There's no evidence he can organise defensively and little more that he knows how to set a team up. He seems to lurch from one disaster to another, without knowing his best team. That would worry me more than anything. He needs to sort out his preferred line-up and get them playing together regularly.
James Pearce in The Echo is now reporting that this Transfer Committee of yours votes by a simple majority and that Rodgers didn't want Balotelli (which he stated publcily) but was outvoted. Also that other managers turned the job down when they found out they would not have the final say on signings and team affairs but would have ot report to a DoF. Seems like relations between Rodgers and the rest of the committee aren't good and they've dragged their feet on the chance to sign better players (like Vorm, Costa, Sanchez & Willian) because they wouldn't sanction the spend or (in the case of Sanchez) pissed about on the negotiations. It really doesn't sound good for you if that's true. Your owners really don't understand the game and whoever is advising them clearly isn't doing a good job. Having read all that, I actually feel a bit sorry for Bodger, although he's certainly partly the architect of his own downfall.
Liverpool side on Sunday: Jones, Johnson, Skrtel, Lovren, Moreno, Henderson, Allen, Gerrard, Coutinho, Lallana, Sterling.
Subs: Mignolet, Toure, Lucas, Can, Markovic, Lambert, Balotelli.
What they could have had for the same net spend in the summer:
Team: Vorm, Manquillo, Skrtel, Alderweireld, Moreno, Song, Gerrard, Sterling, Coutinho, Sanchez, Mandzukic.
Subs: Mignolet, Johnson, Sakho, Lucas, Henderson, Tadic, Valencia.
Sales = £83m.
Current Spend: £116.5m.
New Sales: £48m.
New Spend: £56m (excluding Sanchez who is included in Suarez deal).
Considering you had a net spend of £33m last summer, you'd then have £27m to spend on another player, maybe a Lovren, Lallana or Markovic, but perhaps someone else top draw. Don't think that's an unreasonable change from what you did.
That's some flawed logic.
Doesn't take into account wages nor the desire for players to join clubs.
JoeMercer'sWay said:So with what Liverpool spent their numbers don't add up to any value at all, which makes you question just who exactly is in charge of the money there.
JoeMercer'sWay said:billymumphrey said:JoeMercer'sWay said:Liverpool side on Sunday: Jones, Johnson, Skrtel, Lovren, Moreno, Henderson, Allen, Gerrard, Coutinho, Lallana, Sterling.
Subs: Mignolet, Toure, Lucas, Can, Markovic, Lambert, Balotelli.
What they could have had for the same net spend in the summer:
Team: Vorm, Manquillo, Skrtel, Alderweireld, Moreno, Song, Gerrard, Sterling, Coutinho, Sanchez, Mandzukic.
Subs: Mignolet, Johnson, Sakho, Lucas, Henderson, Tadic, Valencia.
Sales = £83m.
Current Spend: £116.5m.
New Sales: £48m.
New Spend: £56m (excluding Sanchez who is included in Suarez deal).
Considering you had a net spend of £33m last summer, you'd then have £27m to spend on another player, maybe a Lovren, Lallana or Markovic, but perhaps someone else top draw. Don't think that's an unreasonable change from what you did.
That's some flawed logic.
Doesn't take into account wages nor the desire for players to join clubs.
not really, Mandzukic and Sanchez are the only 2 "notables", and if Liverpool have pushed hard enough Barca would have forced Sanchez to join them to get Suarez, plus with Mandzukic it's not like Atleti are a huge, renowned name, yes they've done well in the past couple of years but Liverpool have a rep, CL footy and are a prem side.
Plus in terms of wages, I reckon most are on wages affordable to Liverpool, and not only that but there is still £20m odd left over in my budget compared to their spending that could have been put into the wage bill, which adds up to about £385,000 a week extra to spend on wages, more than enough to pay Sanchez, Mandzukic and whoever else handsomely.
So with what Liverpool spent their numbers don't add up to any value at all, which makes you question just who exactly is in charge of the money there.
I wouldn't say that but they are starting to realise that they don't really have much idea about running a football club. They have implemented a structure that can force a player on the manager that he doesn't want and won't pay a bit more for quality players.stony said:They're slowly waking up to the fact that FSG are just another Hicks and Gillette.
Prestwich_Blue said:I wouldn't say that but they are starting to realise that they don't really have much idea about running a football club. They have implemented a structure that can force a player on the manager that he doesn't want and won't pay a bit more for quality players.stony said:They're slowly waking up to the fact that FSG are just another Hicks and Gillette.
I believe that John W Henry thought he could come over here with his experience at running a US franchise and teach us Brits a thing or two about running a sporting business.stony said:They're slowly waking up to the fact that FSG are just another Hicks and Gillette.
gordondaviesmoustache said:I believe that John W Henry thought he could come over here with his experience at running a US franchise and teach us Brits a thing or two about running a sporting business.stony said:They're slowly waking up to the fact that FSG are just another Hicks and Gillette.
It's akin to an owner of a pub assuming he can successfully run a restaurant. There are similarities, but many, many differences, where anyone approaching the challenge who fails to acknowledge and appreciate those differences is much more likely to fail.
Running a Premier League club is about having deep pockets, but it's about much more than that. It's a brutal world inhabited by a smorgasbord of egomaniac billionaires where the prize for success and the cost of failure are much more polarised than in American sport.
I expect he looked at the prize and ignored the cost as he did his sums when buying the club.
The Premier League is a fucking jungle and he's got his work cut out to survive.
If Mrs Merton had ever had Simon Jordan on her TV programme, the question could have been along the lines of: "Simon, what is it about your £6 million Marbella villa, Chelsea penthouse, suite at the Grosvenor House hotel, £2.5 million boat, 15 luxury cars, 100 tailor-made suits, perma-tan and blond highlights that makes football fans take against you?"
Not only fans. In an autobiography to be published on Thursday, the former chairman of Crystal Palace describes Dave Whelan telling him with some pleasure after a 5-0 loss to Wigan: "You must be very embarrassed, your team are pretty crap." The consoling words from Charlton's mild-mannered chairman Richard Murray minutes after Palace were relegated from the Premier League in 2005 were: "Enjoy the Championship, tosser," a reference to a typically forthright newspaper interview in which that was the word Jordan used to describe many of his fellow chairmen, while adding a line that the newspaper left out – "I suspect they may well think the same thing about me."
Many clearly did, and there was doubtless much schadenfreude about his spectacular fall from financial grace, brought about by Palace's collapse into administration in 2010, 10 years after he bought the club. His peers may, however, have a touch of empathy too when he addresses the old question of what happens to a successful, hard-headed businessman rash enough to buy a football club, which is essentially the story of the book.
Jordan was quite sensationally successful after moving into mobile phones at just the right time in the early 1990s. He matched a partner's £15,000 investment (a redundancy payment after "one fierce row too many") to create the Pocket Phone Shop, which they sold six years later for £78m. By that time he had decided to buy Palace, the club his father used to take him to watch. His friend Theo Paphitis of local rivals Millwall told him "don't do it" which you suspect is a red rag to Jordan, who after some serious last-minute nerves, paid £10m to become the country's youngest football club owner at 32. In the space of a decade he would become "the former owner of £75m", more than half of which loss he attributes to football.
How does this happen? "I deployed business sense into Palace," he insisted from Spain last week, "trying to get the right people in place, trying to restructure the place and buy the right players and trying to bring fans with us. So there is commercial sense, but sometimes you just take more risks, which was always my achilles heel because I'm an inveterate risk-taker.
"If you have ambition in football that's the dangerous thing because the ambition will drive you on to make decisions that commercially you might not make in any other business. The bottom line is if you want to own a football club you have to pay the price to have success.
"Call it investment, a gift or throwing it out of the window, if you don't spend, you'll eventually go backwards. It's this unwordly business that demands to be fed like some ravenous beast, because you've got 15 to 20 thousand fans with expectations that you have now increased."
He insists that "a few times I nearlygot it dead right", citing Palace's succesful youth development scheme and three of his seven managerial appointments. "Everyone says 'Jordan is a manager-killer', which is not true. One of the ludicrous myths I found in football is that people have got to be given time. Whether it's a year or 18 months, if you're seeing no progress whatsoever and you keep on giving them that time, then you keep on not progressing.
"Very quickly you find out whether someone's doing a decent job. I got Neil Warnock right. I got Steve Bruce right – albeit that unfortunately someone else [Birmingham City] coveted him and he had links with them. I got Iain Dowie right, because he was the manager who took us into the Premier League and should have been the manager who kept us there. If we'd kept the 2-1 lead that day at Charlton, we wouldn't be having this conversation today."
As it is, the talk is of how the costlyloss of ITV Digital preceded relegation and then, in 2008, the collapse of just about every financial market and sector Jordan was involved in, including Spanish property, restaurants and films (he invested £2m as the producer of "Telstar").
There was also the little matter of a lifestyle that included Christmas staff parties costing £100,000 and annual personal expenses of 12 times as much. From attempting to sell Palace, he found himself "trying to keep the club going" and on 26 January 2010 that battle was lost and the club went into administration – "the single worst moment of myentire life".
Yet despite it all, he cannot resist raising the tantalising possibility of returning one day. "My comment was that I'd like to get myself back to a position where I could buy my football club back, then God preserve me, hopefully I'll see sense.
"There's unfinished business there. I miss certain aspects of football, like having a voice. Then sometimes I think what would be the point of going back, because I've already done it. And if nothing's changed, it might be worse."
In the meantime: "I'm rebuilding, financially and psychologically. Losing £50 to £60m in a couple of years in assets and cash hurts you." We will have to take his word for that. But friend, foe and Mrs Merton must find it easy enough to believe.
billymumphrey said:JoeMercer'sWay said:billymumphrey said:That's some flawed logic.
Doesn't take into account wages nor the desire for players to join clubs.
not really, Mandzukic and Sanchez are the only 2 "notables", and if Liverpool have pushed hard enough Barca would have forced Sanchez to join them to get Suarez, plus with Mandzukic it's not like Atleti are a huge, renowned name, yes they've done well in the past couple of years but Liverpool have a rep, CL footy and are a prem side.
Plus in terms of wages, I reckon most are on wages affordable to Liverpool, and not only that but there is still £20m odd left over in my budget compared to their spending that could have been put into the wage bill, which adds up to about £385,000 a week extra to spend on wages, more than enough to pay Sanchez, Mandzukic and whoever else handsomely.
So with what Liverpool spent their numbers don't add up to any value at all, which makes you question just who exactly is in charge of the money there.
All i'm saying is that you can't simply say Team X spent Y dollars on player Z, so therefore every other team who spent >Y could have bought them.
That's simplistic to the extreme.
And from what I heard Sanchez did exactly what a previous poster said he wouldn't. Barca and Liverpool were pushing for his transfer as it was mutually beneficial, would help reduce the fee for Suarez, and would provide Pool with a quality player. The spanner in the works was that Sanchez didn't want to go to Pool - and the deal fell through.
I'm not defending Pools purchases - the proof is there for all to see in the performances and results - just that it's not as easy as you saying they should have got such and such. If Sanchez didn't want to go there then it makes it a much more difficult proposition.