EPL 2020/2021
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@kiwipie said in EPL 2020/2021:
@kiwiwomble Yes it is a midweek competition to take over the UCL and guarantee the "founder clubs" a spot every season no matter how crap they are in the previous season.
On Bayern/Dortmund - the German teams all have a minimum of 51% fan ownership (as far as I know) so cannot easily decide to jump ship.
yeah, that's how i saw the German club situation explained, in principle they're "in"...but need to take it to a vote of their fans/owners and that takes time to arrange
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@bovidae said in EPL 2020/2021:
- 20 teams will participate, including 15 founding clubs. Five further teams can qualify annually based on achievements in the prior season
- A group phase will start in August, featuring two groups of 10 teams playing home and away fixtures, with the top three in each group automatically qualifying for the quarter-finals. Teams finishing fourth and fifth will compete in a play-off over two legs for the remaining knockout spots
- The quarter-finals and semi-final will take place over two legs before the final in May, which will be staged at a neutral venue
- Midweek fixtures with the ESL claiming clubs continue to compete in their respective national leagues
So the 15 founding clubs have a life-long membership to the top table.
So a minimum number of games is 18 for the 10 worst teams. Maximum is 25 if you're 4th/5th and make the final.
Given the UCL is only 13 games if you win it (and don't have to pre-qualify) that's a game every midweek for all but the winter months when presumably they will halt as they do now? With 38 EPL games, that doesn't leave much of a gap in your calendar for anything else.
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@kiwiwomble said in EPL 2020/2021:
@kiwipie said in EPL 2020/2021:
@kiwiwomble Yes it is a midweek competition to take over the UCL and guarantee the "founder clubs" a spot every season no matter how crap they are in the previous season.
On Bayern/Dortmund - the German teams all have a minimum of 51% fan ownership (as far as I know) so cannot easily decide to jump ship.
yeah, that's how i saw the German club situation explained, in principle they're "in"...but need to take it to a vote of their fans/owners and that takes time to arrange
I’m thinking perhaps RB Leipzig being the most likely to jump ship. Officially RB means RasenBallsport but actually stands for Red Bull. They’re as manufactured as you can get and are universally hated in Germany anyway (or at least were).
The big permanent members and qualifications for the small fish make this look more like Eurovision.
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This is really quite unbelievable, but in reality should have been expected as the money in the game reached the levels it has, and the inevitable struggled caused by the pandemic.
Ultimately, the biggest clubs have a business model which means they must play Champs League football to survive. Ticket sales, merchandise and broadcast rights bring in colossal amounts of money and has time has gone on, the costs of running have also increased massively (salaries, transfer fee's etc) to the point that you still need an oligarch / billionaire to prop you up. And billionaires are first and foremost, business people. What brings in the money, is all that matters. So as the pandemic as destroyed ticket sales, and then the big clubs losing their colossal fans / cauldron atmosphere's, things have evened up somewhat (as can be seen by the tables). So suddenly all the CL places are up in the air the business boys get together and BOOM. A breakaway league for the rich.
It's shocking, and it shows just how little of the tournament is about the sport now. You've got to earn your right, not buy it, to play European football.
I have no idea how this will play out. I think it will come down to how the players feel. The fans hate it. The pundits hate it. Governments hate it.
But it seems to be set in stone. Interesting times ahead.
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@majorrage Surely it is their own fault if they have a wage bill that is not covered by their income. From my understanding it is not a written bylaw to the rules of the FA that you must pay more than you can afford in the salary department and any organisation that does so on an ongoing basis will/must eventually go broke - Law No. 1 of Economics. Off the top of my head I offer up Bury and Portsmouth as fine examples of this. Oh and Rangers in Scotland also had financial problems that saw them turfed to the lowest SFA League a few years back.
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@higgins It is of course completely their own fault, although they would argue that they've had to do what they have in order to survive. The only other real option is the Ajax model, whereby they basically have accepted they will never dominate, and produce home grown talent then sell it at a massive profit.
I do wonder who the other 3 teams are. It simply can't be the German ones due to their model. PSG surely must be one of them.
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@rapido said in EPL 2020/2021:
It can be the German ones, their model of minimum 50.1% fan ownership doesnt prevent it if 50.1% are in favour.
Barca and Real are 100% fan owned.
The other 3 are PSG, Bayern and Dortmund.
Difference between owned and controlled.
@rapido said in EPL 2020/2021:
Just not all are on the same page with how far to push this big bluff.
Yeah, agree. It must be one big bluff, mustn't it?
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@majorrage said in EPL 2020/2021:
Ultimately, the biggest clubs have a business model which means they must play Champs League football to survive.
Watching a few media pundits talk about this, the move to an ESL is being driven by 4 clubs - Liverpool, Man Utd, Real Madrid and Juventus, and in particular, their owners/presidents.
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@kiwiwomble said in EPL 2020/2021:
@rancid-schnitzel said in EPL 2020/2021:
Is this intended to replace the CL or run concurrently with it? As if they don’t already play enough games as it is.
i had understood it as replacing the CL, that they were saying its normally won by one of these teams anyway...so let them run it and negotiate their own deals etc
Which is why I don't understand why the EPL Inc - for example - cares? Is this because the domestic leagues are effectively bound to UEFA and FIFA?
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@junior said in EPL 2020/2021:
@kiwiwomble said in EPL 2020/2021:
@rancid-schnitzel said in EPL 2020/2021:
Is this intended to replace the CL or run concurrently with it? As if they don’t already play enough games as it is.
i had understood it as replacing the CL, that they were saying its normally won by one of these teams anyway...so let them run it and negotiate their own deals etc
Which is why I don't understand why the EPL Inc - for example - cares? Is this because the domestic leagues are effectively bound to UEFA and FIFA?
Is it because the other EPL clubs don't see an entry point into this new league (ie there is no promotion relegation)? And that the new league will devalue the UCL and UEL, therefore hitting them in the pocket?
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Spurs doing a nice job of sneaking this one in without to much fuss...
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Club can today announce that Jose Mourinho and his coaching staff Joao Sacramento, Nuno Santos, Carlos Lalin and Giovanni Cerra have been relieved of their duties.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/THFC?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#THFC</a> ⚪️ <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/COYS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#COYS</a></p>— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) <a href="
">April 19, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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@junior said in EPL 2020/2021:
Spurs doing a nice job of sneaking this one in without to much fuss...
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Club can today announce that Jose Mourinho and his coaching staff Joao Sacramento, Nuno Santos, Carlos Lalin and Giovanni Cerra have been relieved of their duties.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/THFC?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#THFC</a> ⚪️ <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/COYS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#COYS</a></p>— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) <a href="
">April 19, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Shit missed that!! JM has looked disinterested of late, like a dead man walking
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@junior wow. Although I shouldn't be surprised given the money spent and results.
Of course the timing is a bit shit a week out of a cup final.
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UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has accused the 12 clubs behind a proposed European Super League (ESL) of "spitting in the face of football lovers" and slammed the "snakes" at its centre, as he dismissed the plan to launch a rival to the Champions League as "disgraceful and self-serving." Ceferin, who has overseen the remodelling of the Champions League from 32 teams to 36, starting in 2024-25, spoke publicly for the first time since the ESL unveiled their blueprint for a new competition Sunday. The initiative has been condemned by fans, football organisations and national leaders, with UEFA and FIFA strongly opposed to the attempt of the game's biggest clubs to form their own league. Speaking during a Zoom media conference in Switzerland, Ceferin condemned Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli and Manchester United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward, who helped organise the ESL and resigned from their roles in the European Club Association, the body that brings together 246 major clubs. "I cannot stress more strongly at the moment that UEFA and the football world stand together alongside this disgraceful, self-serving project from a select few clubs in Europe fuelled by greed above all else," Ceferin said. "This idea is a spit in the face of all football lovers and our society as well. We must not let them take [football] away from us. I have seen many things in my life, I was a criminal lawyer for 24 years. I've seen many people. I've never seen anyone like that. "If I start with Ed Woodward, but he called me last Thursday, saying that he's very satisfied with reforms and he fully supports them. Obviously he already signed something else. "[Agnelli is] probably the biggest disappointment of all. I don't want to be too personal, but I have never seen a person who lied so many times as persistently as he did. I spoke to him on Saturday and he said these were only rumours, nothing going on. Then he turned off the phone. Greediness is so strong that all the human values evaporate. It's always good to know in life, who is who." Ceferin confirmed that any players who played in the ESL would be banned from participating in future international tournaments, including the World Cup. "The players who will play in teams that might play in the closed league will be banned from playing in World Cup and Euros," Ceferin said. "They could not represent national team in any matches." "We didn't know we had snakes working close to us, but now we know," Ceferin added. "Super League is only about money, money of the dozen, I don't want to call them dirty dozen, but UEFA is about developing football, and about financing what should be financed, that our football, our culture survives, and some people don't understand it. "We have the English FA, Spanish Federation, Italian Federation, the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and FIFA, unanimous in opposition to these cynical plans which are completely against what football should be. We are all united against this nonsense of a project." -
@antipodean said in EPL 2020/2021:
@junior wow. Although I shouldn't be surprised given the money spent and results.
Of course the timing is a bit shit a week out of a cup final.
Timing is perfect - more chance of winning it with Jose gone and much harder to sack him if they did fluke a win with him in charge.
The Jose reign at Spurs went pretty much to plan - except he didn't have any initial success. Surely no other English club will take him on.
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@kiwipie said in EPL 2020/2021:
@antipodean said in EPL 2020/2021:
@junior wow. Although I shouldn't be surprised given the money spent and results.
Of course the timing is a bit shit a week out of a cup final.
Timing is perfect - more chance of winning it with Jose gone and much harder to sack him if they did fluke a win with him in charge.
The Jose reign at Spurs went pretty much to plan - except he didn't have any initial success. Surely no other English club will take him on.
I agree. The team had checked out weeks ago. We simply aren't built to park the bus, the interim coaches will do well to let the attacking players do what they are good at. This way we are a slim chance, as opposed to basically no chance
