Page 133 of 149

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 6:41 pm
by The Professor
Mine was:

Burki

Vida
Godin
Lahm

Kante

Gerrard
Verratti

Silva

Van Basten
Maradonna
Ronaldo

Real, Juve and Milan proved really difficult. Both Ronaldos and Zidane was a heart breaker.

Surprised how late I left Spain and France and no Brazilians.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:07 pm
by Gingerfinch
Southall

Maldini
Godin
Lahm
Terry

Platini
Iniesta
Silva

Zico
Batistuta
Van Nistlerooy

Think that's ok?

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 10:44 pm
by GGAS
Sorry to be that person, but I think Batistuta had a season at Inter, as did Godin.

:hide

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:11 am
by Gingerfinch
GGAS wrote:Sorry to be that person, but I think Batistuta had a season at Inter, as did Godin.

:hide


I knew about Godin but didn't realise Batistuta had!

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 6:52 am
by Gingerfinch
Gingerfinch wrote:Southall

Maldini
Godin
Lahm
Terry

Platini
Iniesta
Silva

Zico
Dalglish
Van Nistlerooy

Think that's ok?

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 9:01 am
by sussexpob
GGAS wrote:Sorry to be that person, but I think Batistuta had a season at Inter, as did Godin.

:hide


Godin is at Inter now.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 9:48 am
by sussexpob
GK - Peter Shilton

LB - Bixente Lizarazu
RB - Javier Zanetti
CD- Franco Baresi
CD - Ricardo Carvalho

AM- Paul Scholes
AMR - Messi
AML - Pavel Nedved
DM - Carlos Valderrama

FW - Shearer
SS- Totti

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Tue May 12, 2020 11:39 am
by Arthur Crabtree
I only saw some headlines, but I think recently the USA women's team took legal action to petition for equal pay with the men's team. And didn't succeed this time. I'm sure others will have better developed views on this as I don't follow football, but it feels the consequences of their succeeding would have great impact. Potentially leading to the end of gender divisions. Which would end female professional sport in many disciplines.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Tue May 12, 2020 10:14 pm
by sussexpob
Arthur Crabtree wrote:I only saw some headlines, but I think recently the USA women's team took legal action to petition for equal pay with the men's team. And didn't succeed this time. I'm sure others will have better developed views on this as I don't follow football, but it feels the consequences of their succeeding would have great impact. Potentially leading to the end of gender divisions. Which would end female professional sport in many disciplines.


Its not the gender divides ending female only sport thats really the issue, its the fact that woman athletes want to have their cake and eat it on a financial level. The cold hard fact is, pretty much all of womans soccer is a lost making venture; the players are trained and earn a living through the surplus built by their male teams. To even consider that Arsenal ladies could somehow pay their star players 200k a week when the team generates 5k a week in total revenue is not even beginning to be realistic.

To force clubs to pay women as much as men would be to ask each club to support a womens team at a 400 million pound loss. Of course at the moment the investment in a small loss in a womens team is great for optics, great for building womens football, and a sound investment; but as soon as people are forced to pay women anymore than now, it disrupts the balance. All the big clubs would shed their ladies teams in a heartbeat if forced to pay them high wages, the returns on a business level simply dont justify them. Happy to cough up a million for it, anymore and its gone.

So on the one hand you accept women currently get a ground to play in for free, a decent wage thats enough to play professionally full time at the top levels, somewhere to train for free that in many cases mirrors the world class facilities of the male teams, great coaches, an infrastructure that has lawyers, doctors, travel planners, dietitians, all coming with zero financial pressure or price......

Demand to pay employees the same irrespective of sex, the male clubs would ditch these teams, and theyd be left working out how much is left from their 5 grand gate revenues after their ground, staff, travel and match day expenses is taken out.... and they would quickly realise rather than a paycheck, theyd all be selling their car and remortaging the house to try to stay above board. You know the sexual equality debate is totally blown when someone suggests people in an industry that generates billions should be paid the same as an industry that generates a loss. Definitely how the world works.

Of course there are feminists that think this sort of charity is not only possible, but absolutely essential??Raving mad

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Tue May 12, 2020 10:50 pm
by Arthur Crabtree
I'd guess it would mean that male players would have to be paid the same too. Which is a long way from the case now. Equality means your first team left back is paid the same as your leading scorer.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Wed May 13, 2020 10:06 am
by sussexpob
Arthur Crabtree wrote:I'd guess it would mean that male players would have to be paid the same too. Which is a long way from the case now. Equality means your first team left back is paid the same as your leading scorer.


Wage equality across the board was never the intention, and its arguable had the USA Womens position not been turned into some dramatically over hyped generic feminist question to uncover the the inequities of society against women, they might have won; in the end the reams of articles and campaigning for flat out equality turned the debate into farce, even at one point suggesting Ana Hegerberg should be paid 400k a week like Lionel Messi when he club generates not even 5 percent of that in monthly revenue.

Their original point was that their central contracts with the board remunerated them only 30 percent of the male team. This was found to be overblown tremendously and used data based on a defunct and previous collective agreement. The actual agreement set that measure at about 90 percent of the men, but again the way its calculated is far more nuanced. Women could earn less than men, but in short, they didnt. In the unlikely situation that the male team won every single of their 20 annual games, their bonus based pay paid slightly more, but the women received a flat 100k guaranteed annual fee for being named in a team. The men got 5K per win plus a small apperance fee if they played. So hypothetically, a lady squad player in a team that never won a game and who didnt play would earn 100k, the male counterpart earned nothing. As USA have never won 20 matches in a row, it also meant no males actually earned more.

Even hypothetically, if male were to earn more than women by being tremendously successful, this is based on revenue streams in play. The argument is women bring in slightly more revenue, which seems true if limited to ticket sales and sponsorship.... but if the males qualify for the world cup, the revenue prize pot is 450 million.... the womens equivalent is 30. Its not hard to see how actually, relative success of the women is not equivalent in financial terms. If the males make a world cup, there is a massive windfall. If the women make it, the money hardly justifies the expense on a whole. And the men can fail to qualify for years, make on one world cup, and instantly wipe the success of the women under he carpet in money. So if the men were to be as successful as the women and got paid only 11 percent more, it would be tremendously unfair... the men would justify millions in prize payments.

It boils down really to how valuable these women are to the status of American sport. Is it fair that such a dominant force is paid so low, regardless of what males earn? The answer to that question relates to what economic value that success has, and in truth they probably earn as much as their worth... if thats too low, its tough luck. You cant demand wages from your employer that completely destroy your profit model. Football is a sport that on a whole is a net loss, most teams plough all revenues into wages and being the best team they can.... so really, as a fair business model; the women can complain. They get a great cut of the available pie until its all gone, if there is no pie left for a bigger slice, its because people arent interested in what you are doing.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Wed May 13, 2020 11:12 am
by sussexpob
And without wanting to sound like a horrible gammon, I do get tired of people continually moaning about these things like they are a victim, when in reality they really should look at the opportunities they have been given and appreciate that someone else is footing the bill for it, and the reality is they should be extremely grateful. I have no problem with sports clubs having an inbalance in funding or profits to promote womens sport, I think its great, but we never celebrate it at all. The immense generosity is instead sold as some horrendous system of oppression against women, which seems pretty baseless.

To illustrate it, lets look at USA womens top paid and marketed player, Alex Morgan. She gained a scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley to play soccer. The Cali Golden Bears are one of the worlds most staggering examples of sporting success, arguably the greatest American sportsman ever, Aaron Rodgers, also went there. They have produced 207 Olympic Gold medals. Hosts of NFL and NBA pro bowlers and a handful destined for the hall of fame shortly. A factory of talent. Using their latest sporting accounts, they made 96 million in revenue last year. American University sport is crazy big, someone like Ann Arbor Michigan can sell 115,000 tickets for one college football game. The NCAA rights are huge money spinners; the key is, they are also not allowed to be profit orientated, meaning every penny is given back to those teams and to support the students involved.

Out of that 96 million revenue, womens sport as a total is not broken down because it represents only 2 percent of revenue as a whole. Out of the 1.5 million revenue, most of it is charity donations from previous alumni that attended the college, to the tune of nearly 2/3rds total. 117k on ticket sales for all sports combined, 5k sponsorships, zero money generated from media rights....the rest is payments made from other assets the male teams own that gets filtered down. So in short, the teams generate about 125k themselves.

Then we come to costs......

Scholarships for womens sport....6 million dollars
Coach salaries.... 4.5 million
Travel, equipment, other related match day costs....4 million
Total around 16 million costs
Ironically to sell 117k tickets for womens sport, they spend 111K on marketing and promotion
The united facility costs are absorbed by the male NFL team.. they are nearly 20 million a year in costs.

So in general, to replicate those world class facilities, coaching, medical and technical support and to pay for scholarships, it requires around 36 million dollars off a revenue of 1.5 million, of which only 125k is not charity donations.

So next time Alex Morgan makes a few million on marketing her face for FIFA 21s cover and has an inclination to moan about how much she earns, she might to well to reflect on the fact that all her sporting opportunity was given to her on the back of the revenue her American male NFL team made and was donated to her far past the basis of proportionality . And also worth remembering that those guys in that team also dont get paid a wage, and many retire with lasting physical injuries or suffer horrendous concussions. And only a fraction will make it pro, and even then probably as undrafted free agents on a league minimum, non guaranteed wage structure.

Money talks in sports, and if Universities in Europe were making 34.5 million losses on womens sport to fund one varsity sports programme, they too would be dominating the sport. The program these ladies have access to is the reason for their success, and the reason they can earn way above the average wage and become icons. If we had equality, theyd be relegated to playing on astroturf pitches at power league, and playing in hand me down kits.... let alone travelling to ply other teams or having coaches or scholarships.

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Tue Nov 03, 2020 10:32 pm
by Durhamfootman
I see that Maradona is going in for surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain

I can only hope that someone has the very good sense to kick him in the bolllocks while he's under the anaesthetic

the fat strauss invective

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Wed Nov 25, 2020 5:50 pm
by Durhamfootman
I have intentionally not put this on the RIP thread, but the world's biggest ever footballing cheat has died aged 60

I imagine I'll shed as many tears for him as I did for Thatcher

Re: Random footie

PostPosted: Wed Nov 25, 2020 6:29 pm
by Arthur Crabtree
Greatest player I ever saw. Operated on another level from everyone else on the pitch. A cheat, yes, one of very many.