You don't often get lateral thinking from footballers but Stan Collymore made an interesting suggestion on Talk Sport last night. Talking about the fact that northern clubs find it difficult to recruit overseas players because they all want to be based in London, he wondered why Liverpool, for instance, didn't invest in a training ground near the M-25. That way their players could live in London and just travel to Liverpool once a fortnight to play a home game.
It's not without precedent. FC Anzhi Makhachkala are based in Dagestan on the Caspian Sea. Because Dagestan is an unlovely spot with a terrible reputation for violence the players live in Moscow, which is almost two thousand kilometres away. The club's owner has suffered some financial reverses of late so Anzhi is running on a smaller budget right now but only a few years ago they could afford to make Samuel Eto'o the highest paid player in the world.
Every couple of weeks the players would board a chartered jet in Moscow, take the long flight down to Makhachkala, be conveyed to the stadium under armed guard, play the match and then be on the plane back to their Moscow penthouses before their fans had got home. And did those fans complain that the men wearing their shirt weren't rooted to the local area - or at least in some luxurious gated community an hour away - or did they just figure that as long as they were winning it was fine? What do you think?
The big thing for players today seems to be regular Champions League football.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, enough money will gloss over a little bad weather.
Liverpool are no longer one of the big clubs, they don't pay the best, don't have a big enough stadium, don't fight for championships and don't play champions league football.
Man City does, and get the big names, even if it was achieved using financial doping.
Football is so far up its own earole, when it comes to the obscene chase for cash nothing surprises me anymore.
ReplyDeleteIf overseas players, or even players from dahn sarf, don’t want to grace such bastions as Melchester Rovers, who cares. Spend some money on home-grown kids. What’s that? Home grown kids won’t bring in the crowds/money. Oh well.
About time supporters stopped throwing their hard-gained loot at the money grubbing suits who control the very unbeautiful game.