General Football Discussion

[ZoefdeHaas]

Cool, but leave the guy alone he proll. would think youre a stalker

[Kowalczyk]

What do you guys think

Are you taking the piss...?

I can't believe they would show you ID or give you their personal contact info... Amazing. Did this really happen?

K.

[SE6Ajacied]

What do you guys think

Are you taking the piss...?

I can't believe they would show you ID or give you their personal contact info... Amazing. Did this really happen?

K.

I'm amazed that the board were travelling by train - where were you? I take it you must have been wearing an Ajax shirt or something for them to speak to you. Frankly apart from Van Eijden who is fairly distintive to look at I wouldn't recognise any of the board (or ex board ;) ) if I tripped over them....

[Blind3]

Should've told 'em how glad you were to see them travel by rail; the better to save money and buy a few players of quality.

[Ayman]

Kowalczyk said:

Are you taking the piss...? I can't believe they would show you ID or give you their personal contact info... Amazing. Did this really happen?

I asked for their I.D because I couldnt believe they said who they actually were.

SE6Ajacied said:

I'm amazed that the board were travelling by train - where were you? I take it you must have been wearing an Ajax shirt or something for them to speak to you

They were speaking dutch...so I approached them, and said 'spreek u nederlands, and thats how it started..btw bryan...next time you are at the de Hems I will show you the complimentary cards they gave me, and Fonteins card which had his number, I trust you wont take his number down:)

I know you guys dont believe me, but come to the de Hems in london and I will show you anytime.

[SE6Ajacied]

SE6Ajacied said:

I'm amazed that the board were travelling by train - where were you? I take it you must have been wearing an Ajax shirt or something for them to speak to you

They were speaking dutch...so I approached them, and said 'spreek u nederlands, and thats how it started..btw bryan...next time you are at the de Hems I will show you the complimentary cards they gave me, and Fonteins card which had his number, I trust you wont take his number down:)

I know you guys dont believe me, but come to the de Hems in london and I will show you anytime.

Ayman, not saying I don't believe you but you have to admit it's an unusual tale, on a train and all that......having said that did once meet Blackpool's chairman (woman?) on the train back to London from Watford (lost 4-0) once so not all that strange I suppose.

Who needs De Hems when "Red Stripe" is about 85p a bottle?

[Ayman]

Who needs De Hems when "Red Stripe" is about 85p a bottle?

Is red stripe another dutch bar, or just another general bar? Does this mean you wont be coming back to the de Hems for the champions league games for Ajax in febuary?

[666]

If Red Stripe would make it's diagonal red stripe vertical they could be the official Ajax beer!

[SE6Ajacied]

Who needs De Hems when "Red Stripe" is about 85p a bottle?

Is red stripe another dutch bar, or just another general bar? Does this mean you wont be coming back to the de Hems for the champions league games for Ajax in febuary?

I think 666 answered that one for me (thanks :xyxthumbs: ). Yep, I'll be back in De Hems sometime soon assuming I don't go the game but for now am here in the land of Reggae and Red Stripe until Sunday. Came out for my brother-in-laws wedding. Have been before but have to say I'm chilling out here more than before this time around. :yes:

[DanK]

Bosman ruling set to turn 10 (aka - The ruling that almost destroyed Ajax)
AAP - From www.theworldgame.com.au

The 10th anniversary dawns on Thursday of the result of the court case that shook the football world - the Bosman ruling.

But rather than rein in the financial excesses of Europe's football elite, the ruling has actually fuelled them leading European football's governing body UEFA to announce last week that it would work with the EU to curb some of the ruling's negative effects.

And a decade on the man who started it all is a bitter exile living off his court payout.

In 1995 Belgian journeyman midfielder Jean-Marc Bosman won his five-year battle against his club FC Liege in the European Court of Justice after it blocked a post-contract move to French club Dunkirk - but would only offer him 25 per cent of his wages in any renewed employment.

The ruling from Europe's highest court opened the door for out-of-contract players to change clubs without transfer fees.

It also effectively ended European leagues from limiting players from other European countries.

The balance of power shifted from clubs to players and their agents as their bargaining power increased and soon only the biggest clubs could afford the best players.

The divide between rich and poor became a chasm as the biggest clubs dominated Europe and reaped the financial rewards of a Champions League designed to milk money from television.

The training of young players also slowed while the traffic of players from Africa and South America increased since the ruling.

Bosman became a pariah as smaller clubs counted the cost of losing the financial compensation of selling contractual rights to their off-contract players.

"He gave his career to a court case to serve a cause and he sees that the transfer fees are still there, quotas on homegrown players are making a comeback and the rich clubs are richer and the poor ones are poorer," said Bosman's lawyer on the case Luc Misson.

Bosman is bitter that even the players recognise what he did for them: "I contributed to the enrichment of a whole host of players but they did not, in turn, give me much recognition while at the same time claiming they had helped me."

"An example. Gianluca Vialli was at the end of his contract at Juventus and was able to leave for Chelsea. He made about 300,000 euro ($A476,379) net extra per season and could have said 'Thankyou Jean-Marc' at some stage."

UEFA director general Lars-Christen Olsson said that he did not blame Bosman for all football's ills but that it was evident that the ruling did dismantle clubs' financial structures without replacing them.

"UEFA is not going to try to change the ruling, as that would not be worth the trouble, but it is going to try and work with the EU to fight the negative effects of it," he said.

Olsson said he was happy with last week's decision that UEFA and the EU would create a working group which would try to find solutions to the problems of football in Europe.

Olsson claimed the "specificity of sport", mentioned in the 1999 Nice Treaty, had not been recognised by the EU and that football could not be run on purely business terms.

[Ayman]

Are any of you guys attempting to learn the dutch language. I have started already and Im perservering the language, mind you its quiet hard, and this dutch package isnt enough I need to intergrate more with my dutch friends. What about you guys? I mean depending on how long you have supported Ajax and the dutch national team, me personally I have supported them for 9 and and a half years (YES A MILESTONE APPROACHNG :cheer: !!!) so it really is about time I started learning the language.

[aveslacker]

Are any of you guys attempting to learn the dutch language. I have started already and Im perservering the language, mind you its quiet hard, and this dutch package isnt enough I need to intergrate more with my dutch friends. What about you guys? I mean depending on how long you have supported Ajax and the dutch national team, me personally I have supported them for 9 and and a half years (YES A MILESTONE APPROACHNG :cheer: !!!) so it really is about time I started learning the language.

As an Ajacied, there is really only one Dutch word you need to know: kakkerlak. Everything else is just gravy.

[SPL]

I was reading an article on Bosman yesterday and the article finished by saying that one day soon paying transfer fees for players still under contract will be challenged as under EU Emplyment law this is almost certainly illegal. At best a club could expect the balance of a players contract to be paid for.

Evidently there is already a challenge being made in Denmark into the paying of compensation to youth players under the Bosman ruling. As I have said a couple of times recently with regards to De Jong , if you are under 23 and been with a club since 16 then compensation is paid for when a contract ends. Thus Ajax will get money for De Jong next summer and ought to be between £ 500000 and £ 1m ( Pennant , an Arsenal reserve went to Birmingham for £1m and a full back called Harding went from Brighton to Leeds for £450000 )

To go back to the main topic, if Bosman has made a hugh difference to football what effect would banning transfers make??

Under this the most we would ever have got for a player would have been for Zlatan,who had 2 years of a contract left and was being paid possibly £20000 per week £1m a year so we would have got £2m in compensation.


One day the transfer system will be challenged and if it is abolished then what will become of football ?? The rich clubs will of course get richer and players paid even more money but little clubs will fold up .

What would happen to Ajax ??? Well we do not have a great record for selling players at what they are worth but we would be faced with putting young locals into the first team at 18 /19 and losing them to richer clubs after a couple of years for nothing.It would not be worth our while to have a great youth system as we would not benefit .

How many clubs would be left if there were no transfers? Alot of clubs would go out of business. Outside the premiership the only big rich clubs left would probably be reduced to Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan AC Milan , Juventus, and possibly Bayern Munich. If you add Chelsea, Moan U Arsenal and Liverpool then these 10 clubs would probably be the only ones left in business( and some of them have debts now!!) With no competion then fans would even turn against these 10 in time and Tv would stop paying them inflated fees!!!


Most countries would end up with semi pro football.

What are your thoughts on this??? As I said they are not just idle ramblings but could well be reality in say 10 years time.

This is something to take your minds off Inter Milan.

[AjaxPDX]

Interesting discussion, SPL. If this were to ever happen, as someone with an American perspective, I could hypothetically see one potential new outcome. In the major sports leagues here, teams don't pay transfer fees to other teams for players... they trade player for player, rather than player for money. So, in this hypothetical scenario, if, for example, Trabelsi wants out of Ajax while still under contract, and say, Arsenal is interested in him, Ajax might say, "okay, we'll trade you Trabelsi for Flamini." That's just a random example of players, but you see what I mean.

I think this would be very difficult to implement in football, but if the scenario you give regarding transfer fees ever does come true, I could see this as one potential outcome.

[Frans]

Maybe clubs could stop paying their players massively over-inflated salaries. A good player could earn $500,000 a year, and an average player maybe 100,000 or so. Then clubs wouldn't go bankrupt by having $100million wage bills. May have to introduce a salary cap to keep the smaller teams competitive though.

[aveslacker]

In order to survive, clubs would have to start doing the smart thing: signing all their players to longer-term contracts. If you're worried about de Jong leaving at the end of his contract, sign him for five years. That way you get maximum use out of him. You'll also save money signing him to a five year deal at age 19 rather than signing him for two years and then having to re-sign him.

If he wants to leave after five years, let him. You might not get a transfer fee, but you've probably saved the club quite a bit of money by signing him to a long term deal before he became a household name. If there are no "big" clubs lurking around to throw huge transfer fees at the smaller clubs, the smaller clubs might actually have a chance to make decent teams.

I think Major League Baseball is the most analogous here. As AjaxPDX said, there are no transfer fees in baseball, but player trades are common, as is free-agency. There is no salary cap (unlike NBA and NFL). You would think that the biggest teams (the devil Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox) would win all the time, but the truth is that a lot of the smaller payroll teams do quite well and win quite frequently.

[SPL]

Following my posting yesterday where I said that transfers as we know them will be a thing of the past in the future well there are already developments by FIFA to allow players to buy themselves out of the final 12 months of their contract.

The Daily Mail has run a story that Chelsea want Henry and will pay him
£150000 per week , double his current earnings. Henry's contract runs to summer 2007 and he is not going to discuss a new one with Arsenal before next summer. The article states that Chelsea , who offered £50M over 2 years ago could get him for as little as £ 4m ,if a new FIFA ruling is ratified allowing players to buy themselves out of the last 12 months of their deal, hence next summer £4m would get him.

My posting yesterday caame from an artivle that just hinted there could be a change in the future but todays story could change transfers immediately if it is brought in.

It will be interesting to see if FIFA get it through but this is the first I have heard of it.

[SE6Ajacied]

Hopefully not coming to a league near you any time soon. From today's Guardian newspaper and www.guardian.co.uk :nooo:

"Fanzine fight for the right to print fixtures

Small websites are being threatened with closure as the leagues insist on payment for match data

David Conn Sports news reporter of the year
Wednesday December 21, 2005
The Guardian


With the season of comfort, joy and compulsive over-eating almost upon us it is sad to report that the troubling case of the Watford Two still rumbles on. Ian Grant and Matthew Rowson argue they are guilty of nothing more than the words in the title of their Watford fanzine website, which Grant, 35, a web designer, launched in December 1994. The internet was then in its rapid ascendant; Watford, it would be fair to say, were not. Grant saw a band play in Brighton and decided its name encapsulated perfectly the Watford fan's existence: Blind, Stupid and Desperate.

Rowson, 32, a statistician by profession and lifelong Watford fan, began to contribute to www.bsad.org seven years ago and the pair, co-editors now, spend a difficult-to-justify amount of time maintaining the site's fond, ironic chronicling of life with the Hornets. They make no money from it; in fact it costs them £60 for an internet server. They have produced a book and some T-shirts but donated the proceeds to charity or, when the club was in financial crisis in 2002, to the supporters' trust.
So when, at the beginning of this season, the site received what Grant and Rowson felt were threatening legal letters demanding the removal of offensive content they were shocked. They refused, their server was contacted and BSaD was taken off the internet until Grant and Rowson backed down. The heinous material that caused the problems? Watford FC's fixtures for 2005-06. "We were extremely surprised and did feel bullied," Rowson says. "We do the fanzine for the love of writing about football, with about 1,000 regular hits weekly. We never thought the outside world was even aware of us."

That was reckoning without the keen commercial enforcers at DataCo. This is a company owned by the Premier and Football Leagues, whose job is to charge for publication of the fixture lists, as well as the increasing volume of other data, including match statistics, to which the clubs claim copyright. The operation makes £7m-£8m for English and Scottish professional clubs, paid by 22,000 newspapers, bookmakers, websites and broadcasters here and worldwide. The fee is standard: £266 plus VAT to print the fixtures of one English club. Newspapers printing the fixtures of all clubs, plus a delivery fee, pay around £6,000 plus VAT to DataCo. BSaD, oblivious, printing their own club's forthcoming fixtures, were asked for £266 plus VAT or told they must take them down.

"It was farcical," Rowson says. "With all the time and money I'm already spending on the fanzine, can you imagine me telling my wife I'm about to spend £266 for the right to print Watford's fixtures? It was never going to happen."

Rowson and Grant are, instead, enjoying a phoney war with DataCo, flagging up a few of Watford's forthcoming fixtures but without mentioning dates. "Why can't you see the rest of the fixtures?" the site asks. "Because we're not allowed to show you them. Never forget, people, that football is just a means to make money."

But DataCo is unembarrassed and has pressed on with enforcing its rights against other offenders. The Southampton site www.saintsforever.com has felt the sharp sting of contact from DataCo, as has Simon Wilson, who runs the excellent www.codalmighty.com, a Grimsby site ringing with joyful self-mockery. "It seems like pure greed," Wilson says, "the League squeezing as much from the devoted fans as they can."

If this seems a classic case of big-business football, Scrooge-like, screwing its own most loyal followers then David Folker, DataCo's general manager, makes a reasonable fist of an apparently impossible justification.

The story begins in 1959, when the Football League successfully sued Littlewoods, forcing the company to pay for printing the fixtures on pools coupons. At that time the League seemed a more deserving case: the clubs were charging pennies at the turnstiles and there was no TV income but the pools companies were making fortunes. The money, Folker says, became the clubs' major collective source of cash. That case has never been challenged and now, Folker says, the income of around £7.5m is shared equally between all clubs, so 56% goes to the 72 Football League clubs. Only 18% is paid to the 20 English Premier League clubs.

"That's around £67,000 per Premiership club," Folker says. "It's very little to the big clubs but for the 30 Scottish Football League clubs, 22% of their total revenue comes from DataCo. This is not the big clubs looking to make money from fans' sites, not at all. We recognise that the fans are the lifeblood of the game." Why so heavy-handed, then? Folker's argument is that they have no choice under competition law. "We have to be consistent."

DataCo argue that if they make exceptions, even for non-profit-making distributors - and Folker says, validly, that this is not always easy to ascertain as some fanzines do make money - they could be open to challenge by commercial organisations, like newspapers, who pay up only grudgingly now for what they feel is good advertising for the clubs.

Some years ago, to recognise the contribution of fanzines, DataCo struck a deal. It agreed that clubs could officially "nominate" one fanzine each that would then pay a token £1 and be allowed to publish fixtures. None of the websites confronted by DataCo were aware of this at first. Rowson, anyway, saw problems immediately: there is more than one fanzine at most clubs and also, though BSaD has a good relationship with Watford, becoming officially "nominated" is a sure way to destroy a fanzine's credibility.

Some believe the Littlewoods case could be successfully challenged now and a law firm has offered its services to Rowson and Grant for free - they're currently considering whether they can face it. Folker, meanwhile, argues that however strange it seems this is for the overall good of the game.

"The news-papers, broadcasters and bookmakers are commercial organisations and it is right they pay for printing the fixtures. We're happy if fanzines write an editorial piece which mentions a forthcoming game but they cannot print a list of fixtures with the dates."

Where were we again? Oh yes, with a couple of Watford fans, running a fanzine full of warm, amusing reports and reflections on following their club. Blind, Stupid and Desperate - and now quite cross."

[SPL]

English football sumed up in one word GREED


Hopefully the Dutch will never get as bad as the money grabbing scum that operates english footy.

[Kowalczyk]

Very, very sad. The true supporters should be embraced by the 'suits in charge'. Not kicked in the bollocks as frequently as humanly possible. Why don't they understand that if they scare the real fans away, the bottom will fall out of football sooner or later.

By the way: I can't believe that DataCo would win this case, if the united fanzines threw the book at them. Football matches are public events, just like concerts, year markets and fancy-fairs. I think the dates for events like that can never be exclusive, legally.

They should take this case to court and see what happens. A match calendar, for f*ck's sakes. Come on.

K.

[jamcocteau]

Was watching the German Cup last night, Bayern v Hamburg, good game 1-0 for Bayern. But anyway, afterwards the highlights of the game between Hansa Rostock and Kickers Offenbach were on and seen the most bizarre incident. After 120 mins, the game was 1-1 and into a penalty shoot out. Each team had taken a penalty each when the goalkeepers got into an arguement during the change over. There was then a headbutt, both keepers fell down resulting in the Offenbach keeper being sent off. As you are not allowed a sub during a shoot out an outfield player took over. Offenbach went on to win the penalty shootout with no proper goalkeeper.

Highlights on here including the headbutt -about halfway down page beside with wee video sign next to clip

http://sport.ard.de/sp/fussball/news200 ... 1221.jhtml

[carcajou]

I have a question for you guys :

Is a victory obtained via PK shootouts considered a victory ?

The question being :

Is it possible to win a WC without winning a single game ?

PS : Do you know where I could find the rule for that case ?

[DanK]

Is it possible to win a WC without winning a single game ?

I guess you would have to qualify for the 2nd round with all draws (such as Holland in 1990), then go to pk's each knock out. What a shit way to win the WC hey?

[DanK]

Damn, part of me was hoping in some way Archie Thompson would find his way to Ajax. This guy is one seriously talented footballer. A perfect # 10 for the Ajax system. Can score (and how) with both feet and still holds the record for most goals in a world cup qualifier - 13.

PSV keen on Thompson
By Gerrit van Leeuwen (www.skysports.com)

PSV Eindhoven coach Guus Hiddink is looking to strengthen his attacking options with the capture of Archie Thompson.

Hiddink has sanctioned a loan move to Real Betis for Robert and is expected to offload Gerald Sibon to Vitesse Arnhem, leaving him short of forward cover.

He has set his sights on bringing in a cut-price replacement and Australian international Thompson is his primary target.

Hiddink is fully aware of Thompson's talents, having worked with him for Australia, and feels he would be a useful addition to his squad.

"It would be an inventive way to strengthen our squad, as it wouldn't cost us a lot, " Hiddink, who combines his work at PSV with the job of Australia coach, told De Telegraaf.

Thompson plies his trade in Australia and with their season due to end in February, he will be in need of regular football ahead of the World Cup finals.

"Something has to be arranged for him in the months before the World Cup starts and at PSV he can be an attacking reinforcement," added Hiddink.

[ZoefdeHaas]

How old is this guy?