fog wrote:Buying players simply so other teams can't, buying up the best young talent instead of having a proper youth policy and having a rich benefactor paying player wages instead of being able to generate the necessary revenue themselves.
Yeah I'd fefinitely hate the 'blocking' thing to happen. As I say, little is known about this group in the footballing sense yet. I really woudl hope they wouldn't pull that stunt.
As to the youth policy, that's fairly poor anyway. It seemed to be ignored utterly under Houllier. The younger lads who got a go last year (Raven, Ostemobor et al) are no longer seen. Warnock makes the odd appearance but that's a bout it apart from, Guthrie say, who played the other night.
fog wrote:
I know it's now a business but actions like the above are anti-competitive and, to use a cliche, it's not a level playing field.
There's the rub: business; we need Dubai-levels of cash just to catch up with the ManU's and Chelsea's. But, yeah, as I said, I agree with you with regards to the anti-competitive angle.
fog wrote:
Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea, Portsmouth, Aston Villa & West Ham are now being financed to an extent by rich new owners. They can't all be successful so what happens when one of them walks away because sooner or later one of them undoubtedly will.
When one walks then their team will fail, simple as. The game's changing utterly. If it's us who fails, I'll hate it, of course, but they're the stakes.
fog wrote:
And one final point about Liverpool not currently being able to compete. I'd argue that's more to do with bad management than it is finances. Your recent managers have always spent plenty of cash just not very wisely. (as a Newcastle fan that sounds depressingly familiar
)
Houllier's spending was probably the worst in my opinion. I think it would be unfair to lump Benitez in, in that category though. He's suffering from the consequences of the Ged era and has had to rebuild the squad almost from the ground up. Very few of the signings have been his 'first' choice.
We wanted Simao, then Joaquin but ended up with Pennant for example; Agger was 2nd if not third choice behind Alves. Ironically Alves will possibly end up at Chelsea and ironically, Agger has turned out to be one of our best buys this season.
My gripe at our inability to compete is deep-rooted and goes back much further than the late nineties and beyond team amanagers. Prior to that we'd enjoyed unprecedented success but commercially we've been pathetic IMHO. We've taken no advantage of our much-vaunted 'tradition' at all. Cannier commerical brains could have turned Liverpool into a commercial giant, IMO but it simply didn't happen. It's a long standing complaint round here. United are a great example of what could have been done. No tribalism here: I mean it. Everyone could learn a lot of lessons from them; a club who built on their image way before Beckham and co came along.
But anyway.
I hope it doesn't go the Chelsea way but concede that it might, which I'd hate, as do very many old-skool Chelsea fans. I just wish we'd been a better condition commercially waaaay before the Premiership came into being.
We need to bring in another striker in jan imo, but we lack cover just about everywhere.
