The Evo-Web Football Thoughts Blog

http://www.theguardian.com/football...ro-transfer-system-european-courts?CMP=twt_gu

This is really interesting - basically asking why it's only really in sports that employers can demand a 'fee' for their employees wanting to change companies.

Could be a huge deal if the EC were to deem this illegal.

I can understand forcing a player to 'buy out' his contract - that's fine - but the additional money for a 'transfer fee' could be wiped out.
 
This is rather off-topic, but I wanted to post this article written by David Babunski, Barcelona B player.

http://www.skyself.com/en/news/multinationals-societys-cancer.htm

He and his brother (Dorian, who plays for Real Madrid) have a philosophical movement called Sky Self, which is focused on spiritual, economical, health and society causes. The main thing they focus on is using the values they hold from sports to change the world for the better. Really interesting to see this from a footballer, especially from a young footballer.
 
You're welcome.
I actually stumbled upon this article on reddit.com/r/soccer, you can find some interesting stuff there.
 
The national soccer team of Sweden for mildly intellectually challenged made it to the world cup but couldn't afford to go to Brazil. Zlatan payed $50,000 so they could go.

Source (in swedish) : http://www.dn.se/sport/fotboll/ibrahimovic-betalade-landslagsresa/

Translation (courtesy of Reachground from reddit) :

The soccer team for mild mental retardation qualified for the World Cup in Brazil but could not finance the trip. Then the team got unexpected help.
Assistant coach Stefan Jonsson got in touch with Zlatan Ibrahimovic, asked for a shirt to auction off - and received 350 000 SEK.

  • He said, "What the hell are you going to do with a sweater? What does it cost to go? "When we said that we need to SEK 350 000. He asked for the account number and deposited it says Stefan Jonsson to helahalsingland.se.
To help the national team for mild mental retardation was an easy decision, says Ibrahimovic to handikappidrott.se.
  • Football should be played by anyone, regardless of gender, disability or not. And when we missed the World Cup, I was deeply disappointed, but when I heard about "the unknown team" I said to myself that I wanted to do everything in my power to help them to experience the World Cup. There was nothing to think about. It was a given, says Zlatan Ibrahimovic according handikappidrott.se.
Sweden took off towards Brazil on Monday night. In the group play they play against Japan on Friday and reigning champions Saudi Arabia on Sunday.
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And then there is Eibar, who almost couldn't play in La Liga, because they have no debt.

Eibar did unexpectedly well in the second tier and as they edge towards the top flight, thoughts turn to financial implications. They're debt-free and self-sustaining, but a law passed in 1999 requires every team in the top two leagues to have a capital equal to 25 per cent of the average expenses of all second-tier sides (apart from the two richesty and the two poorest clubs). Essentially, Eibar are too small to have that amount of capital. If they weren't able to raise 1,7 Euro, they won't just miss out on La Liga, but they would be demoted to the third tier.

What would have happened is that a well run club would have been punished for other clubs' overspending. They would have been barred from progress while the combined debt of both Real Madrid and Barcelona amounts to circa 1 billion Euro. According to Spain's supreme sporting council, the law guarantees viability in the short term..protecting public interests and those of potential investors, while looking out for the competition.

In april 2014, Eibar launches their 'Defend Eibar' campaign. Members of the public can buy shares in the club, from 50 Euro upto 100.000 Euro per investor. Among the investors is Xabi Alonso.

In june, Eibar are confirmed champions in division two (the other promoting club, Deportivo La Coruna can house the entire town of Eibar in their stadium).

In july, it transpires that 'Defend Eibar' has reached it's goal and the club will be the smallest ever to compete in the Primera Division. Their president declares, that Eibar will not change their philosophy and won't go on a crazy spending spree. I hope they can stay up.
 
Thanks for the insight, I didn't know 80% of that.

Unfortunately, in France there is Luzenac, who have been forbidden to play in Ligue 2 eventhough they sportively deserve it due to finances.
FFF actually suggested that they play this year in CFA2 (French 4rd division) this year because National (3rd division) already started 5 weeks ago.

What a shame and what a bad insight Federations gives to small teams, it seems almost impossible to join top football these days.
 
I had also heard Luzenac's story.
Isn't Luzenac the team where Fabien Barthez is manager ?

I have a soft spot for underdogs/Cinderella's like Eibar, Luzenac and others...
 
I'll definitely watch Eibar this season after knowing these facts.

And yeah Luzenac chose Barthez as their honorary president, but it seems that they haven't accepted the situation that I've explained earlier : they've made all the players free agents (17 players) and will continue to play with their reserve team in DHR.

Here is an article in french : http://www.lequipe.fr/Football/Actualites/Luzenac-l-histoire-s-arrete-la/497952
 
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So genuine question as a long time football fan/fanatic - what are some tips to 'getting over' football? Particularly results?

It's shocking how much a United loss can put me in a funk. (so lots of funkytown lately!). It's really depressing how much a silly, generally broken game can influence our mood!

So what do you guys do to get over a crap loss, or a huge disappointment? How do you enjoy watching games when your team puts some good stuff in, but ultimately gets undone?

The simple answer is obviously 'it's just a game, go do some real life-ing' but personally despite having a lovely life I still find it hard to shake the annoyance. I'm not even young anymore!

Not very high-brow like the other topics here, but just curious for peoples' approaches. I know there are some passionate fans on here, so figured people must have opinions!
 
My favourite team Genk is in a very bad spell at the moment and Spurs, well...Spurs are Spurs...they are perpetually in a bad spell.

My philosophy is that you need the lows to fully appreciate the highs.

Maybe a story about my 11 year old son will help.
He started playing football when he was 4 years old, because his friends in class started playing. Before that he played with dolls and wasn't interested in football.

It turned out that his team was phenomenqlly good and barelen lost a match. Last season two things happened. He tot a serious injury and his friends got a serious growth spurt. He is vers small himself, They got this coach who wanted to make a point to their previous coach (me). So at the beginning of this season he reshuffled the teams. He put all the big Guus in one team and the small ones in another. On top of that the club made a mistake. The litle team has to compete against 12 and 13 year olds, They played 3 matches until now. All of them defeats: 21-0, 0-6 and last weekend 18-1.

At frist Thomas was devastated that hé couldn't play with his friends. But i've never seen him play better as this year. Last saturday the opponents' coach singles him out as the best played on the pitch by a country mile. Hé doesn't care about the heavy defeats, he saus he loves football too much to give up.
 
beachryan said:
So genuine question as a long time football fan/fanatic - what are some tips to 'getting over' football? Particularly results?...
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I usually like to be alone when I'm sad/depressed, because I don't want my sadness to affect other people's mood or be a killjoy to them.

Last year though when I found myself in such a situation, I would go for late jog after the game: nothing but me, my music and the endless seashore (it just puts my emotions to rest) Once I was done, I'd shower and then call my friends to pick me up and I'd spend the evening/night with them (very important detail, NEVER spend that night alone)... I always woke up feeling better the next day.

I think that sums it up, give it a try :)
 
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amineken22 said:
I usually like to be alone when I'm sad/depressed, because I don't want my sadness to affect other people's mood or be a killjoy to them.

Last year though when I found myself in such a situation, I would go for late jog after the game: nothing but me, my music and the endless seashore (it just puts my emotions to rest) Once I was done, I'd shower and then call my friends to pick me up and I'd spend the evening/night with them (very important detail, NEVER spend that night alone)... I always woke up feeling better the next day.

I think that sums it up, give it a try :)
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That's a good thought. Don't currently have the sea shore views, but I'll schedule my jog for tomorrow morning after we lose to West Ham :)
 
Yep I get pissed off and don't watch any of the highlights of other games usually. I don't know why, but it just annoys me.

Mainly for the big games though or ones where we have played particularly shit.
 
There you go:

Gary Neville said:
The death of an ex-playing TV pundit is when he continually says: "In my day it was like this - and it was better". I find myself feeling that the Premier League is a far superior place than when I set out in 1992 - but one area of slippage is defending, as Sunday's Manchester derby may illustrate.
Both clubs have amassed a vast array of firepower. Yet each is currently struggling to balance defence with attack at a time of huge change in the way the game is played.
If you look at the Premier League goalscoring chart, it bursts into the thousands from 2010 on. There were 942 goals in 2009 and 1052 last season. That's a huge shift. Once you have a five-year trend of more goals being conceded and more scored it starts to look irreversible. It points to a permanent change in the sport.
With old school coaches, 60-70 per cent of your training ground work would be defensive. Where your foot would be, the position of your hips, how often you would have to turn your head to avoid ball-watching. I compare it to a musician stripping a song back to its elements.
I started off with a high defensive base. Players now are starting out with a high technical grounding and learn the defending later.
Bear with me while I take you back to the United youth teams I played in - because it sheds light on the point I am trying to make. What follows is the 'in-my-day' section.
Under Eric Harrison and Nobby Stiles we would do back-four work two or three times a week for 40 minutes. Conceding a goal in those sessions was seen as a crime. We would regularly do one v one defending, with the best attackers - Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Keith Gillespie, Ryan Giggs or Ben Thornley - running at the defenders time after time. You had to be able to stop them, or Eric would give his customary: "Aaagh!"
We did a game called man-to-man marking, down the whole length of the pitch, whereby you could tackle only that man. What it came down to was recovery runs when you gave the ball away. If your man scored you would embarrass your whole team and there was no hiding place. Those were the uncomfortable psychological moments you were dragged into.
We did a heading game. Eric Harrison was brutal with it. He would put Scholes, Beckham and Robbie Savage against us defenders and you could score only with your head. So you were continually doing heading practice and being tested in back-fours.
With England, I worked under a great coach in Don Howe, who was Terry Venables's defensive expert. He talked to me specifically about my feet and head movements. He would employ physios to lift up different coloured bibs on the opposite side to where the attack was coming. You could see the four defenders synchronizing their head movements. We had to shout the colour of the bib. If you failed, Don would yell: "You're ball watching!"
Don had a strong voice. I remember us conceding a goal against Japan in the Umbro Cup in my first game for England. Terry Venables was telling us how well we youngsters had done when Don cut him off and said: "Whoa, you may be happy, but I'm not. We conceded a goal from a set piece and that's ridiculous. We worked on that in training."
In youth team football I had problems one-on-one with moving my hips. I was quite stiff. United sent me to a mobility coach who worked on my feet movements: how close they needed to be to the ground to increase traction. We were taken into Eric Harrison's office to study the defending of Maldini and Costacurta in the great AC Milan team.
Each time we watched the senior United team at Old Trafford, Eric would ask us to come back with verbal reports of mistakes that had been made, with and without the ball. We had to watch the game with an eye on what Paul Parker or Steve Bruce were doing.
My era of men who retired around 2009-2010 were the last crop of predominantly defensively-trained players. Coaching has shot off in another direction, towards the technical. I've had that confirmed by people at academies. The technical and attacking work is now around 80 per cent with 20 per cent reserved for defensive skills.
Plainly the rule changes have contributed. Constraints on tackling have made it tougher for defenders. Grappling in the penalty area is hot news this week so you can expect that to be stamped out.
The minimum standards have dropped sharply. When I was brought through from 1991-94, if a full-back allowed a cross it was a crime. Nowadays it barely seems to register.
According to Opta, in the first year of the 20-team top league 79 defenders played more than 30 games. Now you're down to 44. So everything we talk about with defences - telepathy, consistency, playing together regularly - starts to break down. United's back-four, for example, is ever changing. But I see no road back to the old ways. It's like the guy who loves Ceefax pining for its return in the face of the internet. It's not coming back.
'Screening players' have not offset these fundamental changes to the way defences work. A Patrick Vieira of 10 years ago is now a Mikel Arteta. A Roy Keane is now a Daley Blind. And a Bryan Robson for England is now a Jack Wilshere.
It's not the fault of the players. Wingers are full-backs, centre backs are central midfielders, goalkeepers are sweepers, No 10s are central midfielders and wingers are centre-forwards. You're talking about a completely different game.
I look at some teams and feel: they don't know how to defend. They struggle with crosses, they don't deal with set-pieces, they don't know how to work one on one. They have a weak understanding of the game. When I look at players now we're comparing apples and pears.
We always interpret "philosophy" as the attacking style. We never read into that the defensive approach. Sergio Aguero scores goals where he cuts inside and scores with his right foot. I think: why did the defender not show him his left foot? Sometimes the basic attention to defending is not there.
The last thing I ever wanted to be was an "In my day" kind of pundit. But I'll have to change my mindset. It's not the fault of the players that what we would call "proper defending" is not uppermost in their thinking. I am a product of Eric Harrison, of Don Howe. I tend to look at every goal from a defensive point of view.
The speed of the game is so much greater. The technical level is fantastic. It's electrifying. And perhaps the very bold formations and big scorelines of the 1940s and 50s are what we are heading back to. Maybe attacking football was in hibernation during the 70s, 80s and 90s, when organisation and structure prevailed. Maybe now we are seeing football as it was intended.
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I think it's quite a poetic piece, although I agree most of what he said. Defending should get as much attention as it can atm.

Being solid is considered cynical nowadays; most team don't have back-up plans when it's time to contain the opposition and some refuse to even consider one, it's like they're repulsed by the very thought of defending (I'm looking at you Arsène).
 
Very interessant piece.

About Wenger. After reading Bergkamp's book (co-written by David Winner a very big fan of Dutch football), i came to realize that what Wenger tries to do at Arsenal is his own version of Total Football. I never realised this, to be honest. If you look at the invincibles, then i can understand.

IMHO Wenger is too much of a romantic to be a real Total Football adept. The Dutch teams had some very cynical players, players like Krol, Hulshoff, Neeskens, Rijsbergen, Haan, Janssen and Van Hanegem (and i'm forgetting some players). The invincibles had Campbell, Viera and others, who also had the cynical edge...after Viera, i haven't seen that kind of player at Arsenal.

IMHO that is also what our national team misses. Vincent Kompany is a class defender, but he is too nice to be world class. If Belgium had playedwith Nainggolan, they could have won the WC (and i'm not saying we have the best team in the world, the WC is rarely won by the best team in the world, although one might argue about the German team that won it in Rio).

All in all i like a league with more goals. On the other hand, a team like Man City underachieves in Europe because they are shaky defensively.
 
The jump last season was probably more to do with City and Liverpool scoring 205 goals or whatever it was. Doubt the rest of the league was scoring all that many more
 
what bugs me about UEFA:


- back in 2013 i think we were playing a friendly against Israel and some of our supporters were acting racist on that match. we have to play a qualifying match without supporters as a ban. deal. btw it was the game against Romania at home without supporters
- still in 2013 in Bucarest, the Romanian supporters were booing our national anthem...kinda a weird but not a racist act says the UEFA
- a month ago again in Bucarest, the same thing happenend during our anthem, plus Romanian supporters were pushed out from a sector by the security, also they were using heavy pyrotech tools etc...they got a money ban and a closed sector for the next home game. no racist act says the UEFA
BUT WE WERE AGAIN DECLEARED as racists because saying ...yeah kinda racist words :D in our chants. we do it all the time against Romania and Slovakia. altough i dont support this kinda act but Romania did the same in their chants also booing our anthem. nah thats not racist says the UEFA.
what is weird that we got the same ban as the Romanian FA...ummm.whatever.i dont understand, lucky we are?


oh and on a romanian league match a year ago, CFR CLUJ(maybe, sorry if im mistaking) supporters were burning Hungarian flags, and 2 years ago Romanian supporters on an away match, Hungary against Moldova, put out a banner in Hungarian language saying "we hate you". NO FUCKING STEPS HAVE BEEN MADE BY THE UEFA.



SO dear fucking UEFA, where are the rightous decisions? Its kinda like our FA dont even dare to report these because UEFA will picking us on even more if we talk back. Or the whole UEFA team is an idiot, or i dont know why they are acting like drunk babies. Some of their actions dont make sense.
 
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