Soccer (Closing)

Barca literally sold their future income and merchandise rights for quick money. The gambled on short term success.

Holier-than-thou? Andy Hamilton is a Chelsea season ticket holder, or at least was until last year. He is one of your own saying this, its not rival fans trying to banter you, or the media getting their knives out for the club.

I just want to see fun competition. Eredivisie is high enough a level for me.

I do recognize I'm in the minority, though.

Your loan example doesn’t really make sense. Why would the choice be between loaning 10k at 10% or 100k at 2%? You’d loan ten lots of 10k at 10% and make 10k profit rather than 2k.

And profits don’t go to the board, the board is just representatives for shareholders.

paying ridiculous amounts with money loaned from banks.

That's how most of these transfers are paid though. It's particularly obvious with release clauses.

Clubs offer better value for transfer with a significant amount upfront. The buying club hasn't got that money but the interest they pay will be lower than the premium the selling club wants for more installments. Take out a loan and it's ok. Clubs are fairly low risk in terms of lending. Even a club massively in debt will almost always pay their loans eventually.

Neither me or the person I responded to mentioned loans to pay wages. Did you mean to respond to someone else?

Honestly, the biggest criticism about Real and Barca hurting the sport/la liga were negotiating their own tv deals instead of doing it as a whole. We see the EPL now reaping those benefits when small teams in the EPL have bigger budgets than most La Liga teams

Football went wrong years ago, it’s not a working mans game anymore. It’s a business for the big clubs, not a sporting enterprise, hence the superleague.

Eh, high quality football is also “””boring””” and data driven. So many cool football moves are as good as outlawed. You don’t need to look further than classic nr. 10 being a dying breed, replaced by players best described as ‘pressing machines’.

Much bigger problem/reason is that lower leagues aren’t media talking points(let’s face it, sports are men’s reality TV shows), finding a broadcast is hard, etc. It’s just much harder to get into if you aren’t local.

Like what?

It’s the cardinal rule of Reddit

You're not allowed to mention that, Milan fans will get pissy and defensive

That logic just makes no sense. The reason chelsea are the poster boys, is because they went from a stable club owned by a dirty oil Oligarch, who then due to geo politics was forced to sell, and he did so to American finance men who are just oligarchs and middle eastern billionaires with more governmental restrictions. And those men took transfer spending to a level no one ever could’ve imagined ball in 1 year. Not only that, but they have been utter shit. Spending a billion and still being so bad is horrific.

I mean, ignore my flair for a bit, but that's how loans usually work. 10% interest on 10k loan is 1k profit. 2% interest on 100k loan is 2k profit.

That is just doing simple calculation without factoring in duration of loans.

Also, RM and Barca(till recently) have been able to pay all those loans easily (except in some situations), and again they still pay whatever they make. There's no State/Billionaire pumping 10-20 mil in bogus sponsorship to bail them out(again, until recently).

What you're alternative is let RM make 100mil a year but they can only pay 30mil to their staff/players combined. What would they use 70mil for ? To pay dividends? Which they do btw. But I would rather see those pushed to employees (players/staff) than going into board's pocket.

And the result of this is that we can afford to offer thise wages, even taking loans, which btw, we took for renovation of Bernabeu.

I cannot think of one example where we took loan to pay wages as suggested.

He was an ex kgb agent surely they would have known he wasn't a good person yet.

Scenes when Chelsea recruit Thomas Crimp and Scumspawn as their new COOs

Ok so by your logic

American billionaire who spends a lot = oligarch

American billionaire who is cheap = not an oligarch

That makes a lot of sense

"People get inordinately angry. Sure, I grew up in a time of hooliganism, which was a manifestation of tribalism. What football is now is a 24/7 angry tirade. Now everyone has an opinion about everything, but it’s a destructive relationship. Spending your whole life getting worked up about Harry Maguire? Come on, that is not healthy.”

Dead right.

I remember a certain fascist who was the owner of an Italian team in the 90s when they had huge success.

And what was the Chelsea Loan Army beyond a "farm" system? It's the same thing lol

The hate for Saudis and American's is 100% warranted

Juxtaposing those two together is completely unreasonable. Whataboutism and sports washing in action.

Boehly and Chelsea's transfers have been absurd, the Glazers are leeching money out of ManU, but the rest have been more or less the same as any other group of owners?

Arsenal is at a high point they haven't been at for a while, and Liverpool had an incredible run of success under FSG. I also think ownership at Villa, Palace, Fulham, Leeds, and West Ham has been fine? As a whole I don't think those owners are any better or worse than those at Spurs, Wolves, or Brighton.

are you assuming that Roman kickstarted it despite Blackburn doing the same ‘overspending’ a decade prior.

Ties as in Saudi have money handled by Clearlake? i’m sure every team has someone tied to them that’s dodgy if that’s the thread you want to pull at.

Suppose Arsenal have one of those good billionaires that exist despite there being not a whole lot of difference between him and Todd

Personally I think Man City, PSG, Newcastle and RB Leipzig/Salzburg are better examples but Chelsea are definitely up there