A Beautiful Thread for the Beautiful Game

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The Top 4 EPL teams, individually, each outspent 75% or more of the rest of the league—on transfer fees and players' wages alone—this season (and the gap between the top 25% biggest spenders and everyone else is vast). The Manchester teams are, by far and away, the biggest spenders of the season, and Chelsea outspent Arsenal by less than £25million (~£16mil more on incoming transfers and ~£8mil more on wages). And this is without factoring in outgoing transfer gains, on which Chelsea netted a £7.5mil profit for itself while Arsenal, City, and United all lost substantially more money.

If this is analogous to a prep school bullying, if anything, Mourinho is a middling rich kid gloating over the other richest kids in the class (who we don't need to feel all that sorry for).

edited 27th May '15 6:24:48 AM by SeanMurrayI

That's true if you look at this season but if you go from the time Abramovich came in you'll find that Chelsea have had an advantage of over £1 billion over most other Premier League clubs. Only Manchester City are in the same boat as Chelsea in that regard. (I would say that Manchester United in the Glazer era is also there but they're actually having to pay out those debts unlike Chelsea and City so it's not the same.)

FFP actually came at a very convenient time for the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City, as they had already established themselves as top clubs with the huge losses they made over the preceding decade and now no one else can match their spending if they're not already up there.

Arsenal basically are up there now, though; but paying for the stadium for almost 10 years while the owners didn't spend anything on the club put Arsenal on the same level as Sunderland and Crystal Palace for that almost-decade.

So I think my analogy stands. Obviously Arsenal are now financially very big compared to Southampton and other mid-table clubs, but over the long term it's more accurate to view Arsenal as the financial equivalent of Stoke or Sunderland than it is to compare them to Chelsea or even Liverpool or Tottenham.

And the other thing is, if Arsenal had won the league this season Wenger wouldn't be going out of his way to mock everyone else. He'd be praising all of the other teams and managers, just as he (almost) always does. Like Mourinho he'll sometimes criticise an opponent for parking the bus if asked about a specific game where it happened but he wouldn't make a presentation where he points out the failures of all of the closest competitors. Neither would Pellegrini or Rodgers, by the way. Only Mourinho is that petty.

edited 27th May '15 6:29:12 AM by BestOf

Hugely enjoying the FIFA meltdown. Might even pour a glass of malt.

I'll be honest. If I was an Arsenal fan (luckily that particular cup has passeth away from me, unluckily I used to be a Celtic fan, so spare me any pity ), I would much rather have Mourinho and league title and cup wins than Wenger and next door to fuck all wins in any competitions in over a decade. I'd also be wondering why Wenger is still at the club with such an almost unbroken unmitigated record of failure.

I don't rate either of them as men - in fact I dislike both of them quite a lot as people, but as managers I would want Mourinho, with his faults, seven days a week and twice on Sundays, and I would't keep Wenger if I got him in a Lucky Bag*.

• https://www.mrluckybags.com/

The Emirates is a giant revenue-building machine that clubs on the level of Sunderland and Crystal Palace in no way have the pleasure of enjoying. The revenue from executive skyboxes at the Emirates alone makes the club more money in a single season than ALL of Highbury ever did previously (and the money from luxury skyboxes goes 100% to Arsenal, unlike gate receipts for general admission seating that is shared, in part, with visiting clubs).

Paying back for the Emirates is slow because Arsenal have many different expenses and pay corporate taxes, but their revenue and available spending still puts them in a class FAR above the clubs you're drawing comparisons to.

Even if Arsenal has spent much more conservatively on the transfer market in previous seasons, and we wanted to compare that to the spending of bottom-table sides, there is no way of arguing that the many star players Arsenal already had on the books were being paid the same wages as Sunderland players; they were earning figures much more comparable to the players of the other big clubs.

I'm going for the cheap heat...

edited 27th May '15 7:33:21 AM by SeanMurrayI

If you watched that game you'll remember that Wenger was walking towards his player who had just been tackled very hard, and as you can see from that and other videos of the incident you'll see Mourinho stepping in to stop Wenger from getting there. Mourinho explained it as preventing Wenger from entering his (Mourinho's) area, while Wenger said he was walking directly towards his fouled player to see if there had been an injury. Wenger shouldn't have pushed Mourinho but Mourinho shouldn't have stepped in front of Wenger, either. I'm not equating them, though - Wenger was worse in that incident. (He never poked another manager in the eye, though. Again, that's not to say pushing Mourinho is OK but even if Wenger can be petty he's nowhere near Mourinho in that regard.)

On the finances thing, you can do what I did and look up each Premier League club's net transfer spending for each season and over a 10-year period (actually a bit more than 10 years) you'll find that Arsenal are a mid-table club at best. The clubs I mentioned all spent more than Arsenal on an average year over that period - it's only changed now that most of the stadium's been paid off and the club have officially allowed Wenger to stop making net profits in the transfer market. Between 2006 and 2012 the board usually didn't allow Wenger to refuse an offer to sell a player at an average rate, and anything Wenger bought would have to be more than matched with sales.

Obviously Arsenal were already a big and successful club before 2003 or so when the stadium project got under way - if they hadn't been they could never have pulled it off in the first place. The problem was that they didn't predict that two different clubs would get more than a billion pounds each, while Manchester United would also continue to grow, over the period Arsenal would be paying for the stadium. If Arsenal had been a mid-table club at the beginning of that they would be in the same place as Sunderland are now.

It's frankly amazing that they managed to stay a top-4 club through all that, when the likes of Liverpool and Tottenham haven't managed it for long and even Manchester United faltered (albeit following the exit of a legendary manager).

Wenger has had offers from PSG and Monaco and various other clubs where he would've been allowed to spend more than he got from sales and I think it's to his credit that he stayed.

If you followed the Robin van Persie transfer situation you might remember that one of the central talking points was that the club wouldn't agree to offer anyone wages over £100 000 a week - that was a gap they couldn't cross. At the time there were clubs where several players were making that, and some were making twice that or more; but Arsenal weren't able to go there in 2012 and that's one of the reasons the likes of Nasri and Van Persie and Cole left over the years. (The other reason, obviously, is that as long as Arsenal were a selling club they weren't getting trophies and thus players wanted to go and thus they weren't getting trophies and so on.)

Currently Arsenal have at least 3 players who have, since that wage gap was finally lifted, been given contracts over £100k a week. Those players are Walcott, Alexis Sanchez, and Özil. I don't think anyone else at Arsenal is currently making anywhere near that, but some of the other recent contracts could be over that - not everything gets published, and I don't read everything. If Van Persie had stayed for another season he, too, would've been offered over £100k but I've seen reports that he's getting twice that at United and Arsenal aren't going to be paying that sort of money to anyone any time soon - they can't afford it.

I maintain that Mourinho and Ferguson together wouldn't have done better than Wenger with the resources Wenger has had. Of course neither of them would've agreed to not making any losses in the transfer market over an 8-year period in the first place, but if Chelsea or Manchester United or Manchester City had that sort of rule in place - and a wage gap set at below £100k a week - they wouldn't have been winning titles, either. Wenger did come close a couple of times, but when you're constantly rebuilding to make up for the stars you're having to sell every summer it's quite unreasonable to expect titles.

I presume you would've fired Moyes from Everton, as well. And Allandyce from West Ham and Pardew from Newcastle, and so on.

@ 7223: At long last, someone is doing something about FIFA's rotten obsession with corruption and money laundering. I don't want to jinx any further developments about the crackdown on the Fat Swiss Bastard's regime, so that's all I'll say about it. However, it will be interesting to see how it will affect future FIFA events moving forward, so Pass the Popcorn.

As for Mourinho, . Don't get too cocky just cause Abramovich financially juiced the blue scum. Then again, the Emirates and the Etihad can make plenty of money from corporate hospitality, so I think Arsenal and City have that going for them. I do think that clubs in the Premier League should consider reducing the prices of their regular tickets though. It's getting a bit ridiculous that the "working-class man's game" costs a fortune to see even a single match. Thoughts on EPL ticket prices?

EPL ticket prices are ludicrously high and Arsenal are unfortunately the worst offenders in that regard. They've had plenty of flak for that and they deserve every bit of the criticism.

For Arsenal the main reason is that the club's owners view it primarily as a business, and that's how they'll run it. In effect Arsenal have been under FFP all along, except that it's worse because the owners sometimes take money out of the club. (Not all that often, fortunately.)

Raising ticket prices has been the default way for Arsenal to try to catch up to the financial assets of other Premier League clubs but it's not a sustainable way to go and obviously it limits the club's appeal to people like me who can't afford tickets to the Emirates.

When you compare EPL ticket prices to those in Bundesliga or La Liga you might very well do a Spit Take when you see the gap between the Premier League and everyone else.

LOL So Tam if you're an Arsenal fan, technically you're already are. The likes of myself are in a small minority even right now. But having Mourinho as manager just to win trophies? As said elsewhere, "that's like going gay because your first date dumped you".

Also at this time, Arsenal's average paid wage was listed the 15th-highest in ALL professional team sport, 9th highest in football, and 4th highest in England... as I've been saying from the start. There's no comparison to be made to mid-to-bottom table sides.

(For the record, I'm citing a .pdf "extract" of the Sporting Intelligence's 2013 Global Sports Salary Survey—the full report costs 9.99 dollars or pounds or something, and I'm not paying that, but the sample document includes a blurry page of the Top 45 biggest paying sporting teams around the world at this time. For this year's rankings, the list of the Top 333 highest-paid sports teams has been published here)

edited 27th May '15 8:05:13 AM by SeanMurrayI

Fuck pride. I would want the football club I supported to win, even if they played ugly assed football to do that. I have no time nor patience for any football fan that says they don't care about winning trophies or titles as long as the team they support plays "the beautiful game". I have next to no romance about football, there's too many players being paid absolutely obscene amounts of money to kick a leather bag about the pitch, for there to be any of that stuff.

Nor do I have time for the point of view that it's alright if the team goes out to maim the opposition players as long as they win, because that kind of point of view is equally stupid. Any idiot can win at football by hacking down opposition players to get the ball and kicking it in the net, unseen by the usually shockingly poor referees and linesmen who "officiate". It takes skill to play hard, yet fair, and still win the game, or at least not get beat. That's the kind of play I want to see in a club I would want to support.

Net transfer spending is the figure I was comparing, and from 2003 to 2013 Arsenal are below Sunderland, Newcastle, Tottenham, and QPR to name some examples. Even when Arsenal had high-ish wages (low for Champions League but high compared to mid-table clubs) they had to make up for that but constantly selling players. They weren't anywhere near the spending power of the other sides that were usually in the top-4. Chelsea, City, and United could afford to pay more than Arsenal in wages and transfer fees, and didn't have to make it back by selling their stars. This has only changed in the last 2 seasons.

EDIT: It seems the source I've cited before is currently offline, which is a shame as it had a handy list of transfer spending by each club for each season. While looking for an alternative I came across this◊. It's from 2011 and has Arsenal with a net transfer profit in the period from 2002 to 2012. That's before the sale of Song and Van Persie and the purchase of Podolski, Cazorla, and Giroud. Those transfers (IIRC) had Arsenal breaking even for 2012-13, as well. So as I said, Arsenal had a net transfer profit from 2002 until they bought Özil. After that it's changed.

Note that back when that table was published Arsenal were only above Blackburn in net spending over 10 years. Now that they've also bought Özil and Sanchez and a couple of other players (while selling some) Arsenal are probably somewhere around 7th or 8th in that table (assuming, of course, that the other teams' spending would also be updated to now).

edited 27th May '15 8:27:14 AM by BestOf

About time someone cracked down on Li

What this graph doesn't make immediately apparent is that, cumulatively, Arsenal had spending power in excess of £300million, over this same period. Arsenal's £4mil net profit on the transfer market came on the back of that much spending. Not only would pointing that out have shown that they did great business; it would have also shown the wealth of resources that they properly invested in the first place.

By comparison, Sunderland and Newcastle both spent around £90million less than Arsenal over this same period, before failing to make a return on their own sales and player loans.

Before QPR were promoted to the Premier League, their transfer spending had never even exceeded £10million in a single season (only twice, before promotion, did they spend more than £5mil during this period, and a couple of seasons in this decade saw them spend less than £300thousand). Still, they didn't turn a profit.

Of the clubs you are drawing comparison to, only Tottenham has far exceeded Arsenal's £300+mil cumulative investment (Spurs spent nearly double), while also failing to record a profit.

edited 27th May '15 10:18:29 AM by SeanMurrayI

Thankfully, most of the posts here are civil. However, Best Of, you had one post where you took offense to Mourinho's speech the same way plenty of Arsenal fans took offense on r/soccer.

Besides, that was just... banter, I think. Celebratory banter. And Arsenal weren't the only team that got dissed by him.

And we should talk about the FIFA stuff. After all, while Blatter may still get elected, he'd be feeling a lot of pressure. Now, I want to know who might be the next target, since there were no UEFA or AFC guys getting arrested.

edited 27th May '15 9:57:17 AM by Quag15

Yet.

This could be the start of a glorious new trend where these people, who everyone with a pulse and a working braincell in their skulls at least considers to be corrupt, go on trial for their alleged corruption.

IF they get found guilty, they get fined lots of money at least, possibly sentenced to jail and possibly serve some time. If they get found not guilty in court, they're almost definitely going to be found guilty in the court of popular opinion, and at times that is the true arbiter of guilt or innocence.

With all of those arrested being extradited to the United States to be prosecuted, I'm wondering if anything will be done to "punish" US Soccer or even suspend/expel the US from FIFA in retaliation.

If US Soccer broke away from FIFA, I'd love to dream of private investors buying into a more "internalized" organization structure, akin to other major American sporting leagues. If a country had its own self-governance over the sport, I also wonder if that would make it a lot easier to push for "video technology", better protection for players suspected of having concussions, and other reforms Blatter & Co. are balking on, which would put a soccer organization outside of FIFA ahead of the curve.

And, hell, while we'd be at it, we'd need to bring back the offside line and 6 points for winning teams that score 3+ goals, too!

edited 27th May '15 10:15:06 AM by SeanMurrayI

Well, there is a very high rate for conviction on a federal prosecution level in the US, so, there's high possibility that they'll be put in jail. There's also a possibility of them ratting out others like a canary, in order to get a lighter sentence.

That could be a possiility, but the Swiss authorities are also helping out the US in this. Fucking with a CONCACAF nation is one thing (even if it's the US, who's very important for women's football), but fucking with an UEFA nation? There would be a severe backlash against FIFA from quite a few FA's.

Meanwhile, Sky News says that the Swiss Federal Office of Justice has opened criminal proceedings over the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups

The thing is, while there might be grounds to strip away Qatar's hosting rights and to relocate the competition elsewhere, there is the unfortunate possibility of Qatar suing the shit out of either FIFA. Which means that the organization could lose a lot of money, and clubs other than Barcelona would be severely affected (though I'm not sure if UEFA would be contemplated in the suing thing, and so forth).

FIFA 'took bribes from South African government for 2010 World Cup'. Yes, we might start to figure out the shit that the Blatter-propped African nations might have been doing as well.

edited 27th May '15 10:35:13 AM by Quag15

I was just thinking about the ratting out thing. That's probably the only way Blatter will go down. These officials won't want to do jail time if they can avoid it, and one of the best ways to do that would be to let the authorities know every dirty trick that that man has pulled since he got into football. Unlike his closest moral equivalents, the heads of the Five (Mafia) Families in New York, Blatter doesn't have the power to make people sleep with the fishes in order to stop them squealing on him.

He just wishes he did.

Speaking of the women's game, can we mention how little FIFA cares about that?

And I'm not talking about repeating Blatter's "short shorts" tripe. No, the organizers for the Women's World Cup starting in Canada next week have given zero fucks about so much as providing grass pitches for the tournament.

edited 27th May '15 10:45:43 AM by SeanMurrayI

Oh yeah, read about that. A fucking disgrace, if you ask me. Maybe the next edition will be better than this one.

Meanwhile, apparently there was a mole: Chuck Warner, son of Jack Warner. Ouch...

The point is that whenever Wenger wanted to buy he had to sell first, and it had to add up or make a profit. Meanwhile, Chelsea and Manchester City could spend with barely any limit. Arsenal are by no means the only club affected by this; in fact their fan base, the squad they had when this development began, and the training grounds and other structures Arsenal had were a buffer that prevented things from getting even worse. Chelsea and City, with their infinite coffers, were driving forces in the inflation of transfer fees and wages in the Premier League; and that put pressure on other clubs to either increase wages or sell if they (like Arsenal) couldn't afford said inflated wages. Only clubs with wealthy owners who were willing to spend could compete on the same level.

Even the clubs I'm comparing Arsenal to - Sunderland and Tottenham and so on - were able to get large sums from their owners to spend on players. I would prefer it if owners had never been allowed to put so much money in the clubs because it's fundamentally unfair towards clubs that have thriftier (or less wealthy) owners. Alas, that's not how it went and eventually FFP was introduced as a compromise to at least cut out the worst of it.

As I said Arsenal have basically been under FFP all along, albeit it's been enforced by the board, rather than any outside agency. I'm not saying that Arsenal should've had the same sort of spending as Chelsea; far from it. I'd rather that no one do it.

My main point, though, is that Arsenal can be proud of their ability to stay up despite these constraints. I wish Arsenal fans didn't have to lower their expectations for so long but it was out of the hands of anyone connected with Arsenal. You simply can't account for a couple of clubs suddenly getting £1 billion in their account out of nowhere while you're spending only what you make.

Instinctively this feels like a brilliant idea, but I wonder if it would result in clubs perceived as underdogs playing even more defensively when they're up against a direct competitor, as well as top clubs refraining from attacking if they're 1-0 down just to avoid conceding more. Now when top clubs A and B meet both sides tend to play quite cautiously to begin with. If A then gets ahead B will start attacking more. If there was such a high-reward system for scoring more you'd instead have A attacking more and B defending more, rather than B trying its hardest to equalise. Essentially it'd make losing 2-0 hurt less than it does now.

Link is in Swedish. Apparently, FIFA bans Swedish TV channel from referring to the FIFA Women's World Cup Canada 2015(R)(TM)(C)(FML) as "the World Cup".

Link in Dutch. Dutch FA says Blatter is responsible as President.

And link in Swedish. Swedish FA joins Ireland in voting against Blatter.

And because things just keep on coming:

Link in French. Warner allegedly received bribes for the attribution of the WC to France in 98'.

UEFA calls for postponement of presidential election.

Blatter's first statement. Naturally, he's pretty much saying 'Not me' and 'We also helped, ya know? Ya know?'

To clarify a bit on the points system at the peak of the old NASL, it was:

• 1 point per goal scored, max 3 points (to encourage attacking play, which allowed teams losing 4-3 to still walk away with 3 points)
• 3 points for a win (hence a max 6 points to a winning team with three or more goals)
• 1 point for a "shootout win" (Americans don't settle for tie games)

And to clarify the "shootout"... it wasn't an ordinary penalty shootout. If a game was still tied, following an "overtime" period, the ball was placed at the aforementioned "35-yard offside line", and five players from each team were given five seconds to score from this position by either dribbling around, chipping over, or blasting the ball past an outrushing keeper.

Batshit.

EDIT: @0:21—Oh Christ, the "so-called 'mini-game'"... As if this shit wasn't already insane enough...

edited 27th May '15 12:10:15 PM by SeanMurrayI