The Mailbox queries whether Liverpool could afford to turn down a £200m move for Mo Salah from Saudi Arabia after the transfer window shuts. Plus, Saudi endgame, sportswashing is nonsense and lack of strikers…
Get your views in to theeditor@football365.com…
Where have the strikers gone?
Dan brought up this morning about where have all the strikers gone? I think it is more the fact that over the last decade we have seen the game become a more possession based style, long gone are the days where a striker is a striker and is expected to simply score goals, they have to contribute more to the team, track back, set up teammates, make the manager a cup of tea at 3pm every Thursday.
These tactical changes to the game have resulted in the out and out striker becoming close to extinction, it is a genuine shame because i for sure would rather see an end to end game where a striker hits a shot like a missile into the corner than 90 minutes of passing, which is ironic since Chelsea seem to have 70%+ possession in most games, which i admit can become boring, i cannot count how many times i have seen Jorginho make a sideways pass, im still getting therapy for that.
When it comes to the best classic style strikers in the European game right now the list is not long and some are even well out of form as you will see, so that list is:
- Harry Kane
- Erling Haaland
- Victor Osimhen
- Robert Lewandowski
- Dusan Vlahovic
- Alexander Isak
- Romelu Lukaku (i know, i laughed too, but he does fit the style, just well out of form)
- Jonathan David
- Ivan Toney
- Lautaro Martinez
- Sebastien Haller
I am certain i have missed some notable names off that list, but those are genuinely the only names that come to my mind when i think out and out strikers, they say that fashion repeats itself, we have seen 90’s fashion return again, so maybe just maybe we will see the 90’s style of football return to the tactical minds that are in the game, would be great to get a remake of that Premier League advert from when they launched the league, the soundtrack of Simple Minds, what an iconic advert, i bet some will now head to YouTube to check it out!
The Admin @ At The Bridge Pod
Saudi endgame
City fan here. Last week I wrote in querying what the Saudis could possibly hope to achieve by spending squillions on top players from around the world. I said supporters follow teams and not players and, that unless there was some secret plan to admit a Saudi team or teams into the CL or another top European league, I just couldn’t understand the point of it all and asked mail boxers for any ideas.
No replies were published. Then, in Friday’s mailbox, Chris C, Toon Army DC, wrote a very similar mail with an added angle of a Newcastle PoV. And then it dawned on me.
And this is a perfectly genuine question. What is there to stop one or more Saudi owned football teams from (ahem) ‘loaning’ any of their new players to Newcastle United? After all, that’s precisely what my club did with Frank Lampard wasn’t it? Further, the City Football Group, the owners of multiple clubs around the world routinely transfer players between these sister clubs.
Wouldn’t it also mean that The Toon would be able to legally circumvent current FFP rules? Especially if the parent clubs paid the players wages. Because if so, then BINGO. Players like Neymar, Benzema, Mahrez etc, still get to play in one of the best leagues in the world with an excellent chance that CL qualification will follow in this season and the Saudis get the sportswashing ‘top’ football team they obviously desire. And a damned sight quicker than Chelsea, City or PSG did, for example. Now THAT would make sense. For the Saudis that is.
A further advantage for the Saudis v PL teams is that their transfer window, as I understand it, stays open for two or three weeks (can’t remember which) after ours shuts. Meaning, of course, that more outrageous bids could be coming in for the likes of Mo Salah. Would FSG turn down a reported £150-200 million for an aging Mo Salah knowing they wouldn’t be able to replace him until January? (How many clubs could/would?). And a player who, allegedly, would be on a daily salary of £350K. No, you read that right. £350K every single day. Think Mo would be motivated in the Merseyside derby if Liverpool denied him that chance?
Grateful if somebody can tell me, definitively, why it couldn’t happen. The ‘loaning’ of players that is. I’m fairly sure the Salah situation will be generating plenty of column inches on its’ own!
Mark (This tin foil is making my scalp itch). MCFC.
Sportswashing is nonsense
Dear F365
Can I suggest that you stop parroting so uncritically this nonsensical concept of sportswashing? I don’t seek for a moment to defend the actions of the Saudi royal family or any other authoritarian regime. But the idea that, when they spend their billions on footballers, or golf tournaments or car races, they are doing so to win over liberals who would otherwise be appalled by their human rights records is ridiculous. I’m using “liberals” as shorthand for people (me included) who believe in LGBTQ rights, equality for women, freedom of the press, workers rights, democracy and all of that good stuff.
Firstly, if sportswashing is their aim, it really doesn’t seem to be working. Does anyone believe that hosting the World Cup improved the Qatari regime’s reputation among liberals? All it did was draw attention to the ways in which it falls short of liberal norms. If winning over liberals were the aim, these regimes would have realised by now how counterproductive “sportswashing” is and tried a different approach.
Second, why would the Saudi or Qatari or UAE regimes care about the opinions of bien pensant westerners? I’m sure they do care about global influence. But why would I assume that Mohammed bin Salman and his type cares what I think of him any more than I care what he, and his type, think of me?
So, if it’s not sportswashing, why are they spending all this money? There are three plausible explanations.
The first is just the normal human desire for shiny toys, given grand scale by access to huge amounts of money. Who among F365 readers hasn’t dreamed of somehow becoming hugely rich, buying or creating a football club, executing some brilliant plan to develop it and basking in the resulting glory? I certainly have. And it’s not because I’ve been running a government with a horrible human rights record to distract from. It’s because I think it would be great fun. My guess is that this is the single biggest factor. The superyachts and the palaces and the private jets tell me that these people are not averse to spending chunks of their countries’ wealth for no purpose other than their own amusement.
The second is global influence. While I don’t think that these people particularly care what western liberals think of them, I do believe that they care about competing with the US, and the West more broadly, to be seen as an important world centre. And, in that aim, influencing the billions of people in China, India and Africa (yes, I know Africa is a continent, but it’s comparable in population terms) is a much bigger, and more attainable, prize than influencing the hundreds of millions in Western Europe and North America. You might argue that it’s still sportswashing, just with a different target audience. But I really don’t think that failure to conform to western liberal norms is that big a turn-off for people in these countries. I’m sure there are people in these places who care deeply about these issues, and fair play to them, but I don’t believe it’s the norm. So I don’t see any reason to think that distracting from departures from western liberal norms is any part of the global influencing plan.
The third is local support. While these countries are not democracies, the regimes do need some base level of popular support to operate in the way they want. They may well believe that they could crush a popular uprising, but I’m sure they’d rather not have to. I imagine that signing your Neymars, your Benzemas, your Phil Mickelsons of this world gives some degree of credibility to these regimes when they say to their people that they’re taking the country forward. But, again, I see no reason to think this is sportswashing, in the sense of distracting from human rights abuses. Because I don’t think most people living in these countries see these issues the same way as western liberals do.
Again, this is not a critique of western liberal ideals. I firmly support those ideals. But it is a critique of what seems to me a fundamental misreading of the aims of all this spending on sports and of the over-inflated sense of western self-importance that seems to underlie it. I’ve tried to think of a better term than sportswashing. For all its flaws, the term does have a general recognition that makes it attractive to (lazy?) journalists. I lingered for a while on “sports-cock-waving”, but I doubt it could gain mass media acceptance. Sports-preening avoids the genital reference, but it really needs to be a portmanteau word to compete. So I’ll leave the creation of a successor term to the hive mind of the mailbox. But, in the meantime F365, please retire the current term because it’s stupid.
With best wishes,
Tom, LFC
Man City maths…
Just a quick counter to Mark, MCFC and his glee about Doku.. I agree, I think he’s going to be a baller. But the whole ‘Haaland and Alvarez for less than 70M” is a little disingenuous.. Haaland may ‘only’ have cost 60m or whatever, but City are paying him an astonishing salary of something like 850K a week.. so he’s not exactly bargain basement primark is he??
Dan, London
Pump and dump
Clocked it mate, Simon, Bristol LFC
It’s a different kind of pump and dump, entirely.
The value of the club obviously matters, money is everything to these folks, but the potential sacrifice, if they screw it all up, is worth repaying their Saudi investment partners.
Take a small lose on a litany of transfers, maybe even the club itself one day, but that is still small change in the bigger scheme of Clearlake-Saudi things, believe it.
When the game becomes a business, and that’s accepted totally and indeed often celebrated, what can we expect but businessmen to try every trick-or-treat which they can think of, testing the limits of the regulations and such, just like they always do, until a line is drawn.
Manc from SA (The continued commercialization shows no signs of abating yet)
RE: Simon from Bristol, I assure you as a Chelsea fan that we are watching a club being destroyed from the inside out by staggeringly awful business management. Similar to Everton (except spending WAY more on trash than the Toffees have).
I’ve said before, the way Chelsea has been run over the last 18 months is either wilful destruction or criminal incompetence.
It’ll be interesting to see which year the club are forced into administration. I’m going with 2029 once all the amortization fails, FFP breaches finally bite and they are unable to sell on players for anywhere near the price they paid for them.
Will
To Simon, Bristol LFC and others asking about Chelsea’s transfer madness. Here is one explanation written by someone else that made sense to me, for what “is going on behind the scenes”.
Chelsea’s “project” is to sign players on the same career timeline. This has been a guiding principle in the NBA for awhile. It’s planning for long term success, year after year after year while acknowledging that the current dominant teams are on a run and not quite ready to be toppled. The young team needs time, experience, etc so maybe they lose more often, but it’s ok because the idea is it is better to be patient and finish 1st 3/10 years than to be impatient, rush in veteran guys, switch coaches, and finish 4th 8/10 years with 2 “special” years rising to 3rd.
For example, look at Man Utd’s last decade. They spent tons of money, brought in stars ready to win and now “success” is securing a CL spot. Now look at Arsenal. They found young stars and added players on the same timeline, accepted a learning curve of losing and still arrived far ahead of schedule, primed not just to challenge City this year, but for many years.
Hope that makes sense.
Mo
We’re all football idiots…
I often think about how tribal thinking affects our behaviour, and how we allow our (often arbitrary) loyalties to make us arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Luis Suarez is a good example for me, as a football fan. I thought he was a little hard done to with the Evra incident at the time. Contrary to what the media lazily report whenever the topic comes up, he wasn’t found guilty of racist abuse, instead he was found guilty of making unnecessary references to Evra’a skin colour. You might say potato/potarto, and you might be right. He tried to wind Evra up by constantly referring to him as black. That’s not acceptable, and it was right that he was punished. (As an aside, John Terry was found guilty of saying something far, far worse, but just the once, and came up with a bullshit excuse for saying it that somehow worked and his punishment was derisory.)
Anyway, I looked to defend Suarez at the time, and I am a bit embarrassed about that now. And I did this because he was a fucking amazing footballer who scored fucking amazing goals, and turned a decent team into a bona fide contender, and this made me happy. Happy enough to mean that I couldn’t see what was in front of me.
And although I didn’t wear a t-shirt in support of him, I am guilty of mindless tribalism, and I only really realised this when Suarez’s behaviour towards opponents and the club made me see him for what he really was.
And of course, I was not alone, and every time the Suarez/Evra incident comes up, fans – especially those of Manchester United – love to take the moral high ground and mock Liverpool, and frankly, who can blame them? The club showed itself up on many different levels.
Flash forward to 2023 and the Mason Greenwood situation. I am not suggesting that the comparison is just as stark, because it isn’t. I would say that the majority of United fans know that Greenwood had to go, and regardless of his legal guilt/innocence/whatever, his behaviour is there for all to see and the damage is done.
But not all United fans. We have seen many go through bizarre machinations on these very pages this week, and of course, social media is bursting with “fans” screaming blue murder at the treatment of Greenwood. It’s been a sight to behold, as posters like Bad Wolf (and others) have shown real flashes of anger, and have sought to defend Greenwood (often, whilst telling us that they actually aren’t), all because he is really good at kicking a ball, and they want him to continue doing this for their beloved club.
I know the charges have been dropped. I know that the police have cited “new evidence”, but unless that new evidence is that it wasn’t actually Greenwood on that recording – and I think if that was the case then we would all know about it – then everyone who can look at this rationally knows what he is. Yet there is a significant minority who this won’t compute with, who are just not processing this rationally. I hope that they get the same epiphany that I did, and I hope they feel a little ashamed, like I do. I seem to remember some quite damning photos, too. No-one is talking about them for some reason.
If you think that Greenwood is being hard done to, if you think that he should be free to pick up where he left off with no consequences, if you declare him as innocent, using semantics instead facing an obvious reality, if you get angry when a prominent female United fan says she will turn her back on the club if he plays for them again…have a fucking word with yourself. How was it put? Ah yes. Be better.
As an aside, going to Saudi Arabia is a great option for him, and we all know why. This publicity will follow him anywhere in the western world, but if he goes somewhere that doesn’t really listen to what women have to say, somewhere that is still a complete throwback, then he’ll be fine. He’ll get super rich too. He won’t have the career that he would have envisaged, but things won’t end up too shabby for him. What a time to be alive. Football. The people’s game.
Matthew (we’re all football idiots, really)
Manchester United
Man Utd. Man Utd. Where do you start. Can’t sell a club properly. Spend 18 months suspending and paying Greenwood after all charges are dropped to only not play him again anyway as a bird who does maths on the tele wouldn’t be a fan anymore, which is something they should’ve done 18 months ago as after also not finding any charges they could press against him let him go, so never had an intention of bringing him back.
Gave away a goalkeeper to spend £47 million on another who isn’t really any better as a goalie but would make a good midfielder. Bought a striker with an injury which could eventually result in a broken back. Spent £60 million on a midfielder we didn’t need, won’t fit the system and is a bit crap.
Gave the captaincy to one of the most detestable human beings to ever grace the premier league who’d struggle to lead someone to their own death. And to top it off think a manager who won a cup after having to play one real side, lost against are arch rivals in a cup final, threw away a European tie in which they should’ve been 6-0 up in the first leg and stumbled in to a top 4 spot should be rewarded.
Dean R
Mike Dean and his mate
Mike Dean has admitted not sending a referee to watch the VAR as the referee in question was having a bad day at the office.
How is this admission supposed to help referees keep their authority and maintain consistency if the people meant to help them don’t do their job? How often has this happened and what if this happened in a bad tempered title decider or relegation six pointer?
Tom
Other Men and F365
Hey, Zdravko, if you don’t want to read more ‘men bashing’ articles in F365, perhaps you can get men to stop doing stupid, patronizing, misogynistic or downright abusive things towards women. But here’s a thought, perhaps they are just reporting a fact and not bashing the men doing those things.
I don’t think F355 caused Rubiales to grab his crotch (in front of his Queen and daughter) – (the international sign of respect for women?) – or his non-consensual kissing of Hermoso on the lips, or Infantino to tell women they need to ‘convince men’ that they are essentially worthy of equal status or Greenwood telling his partner to spread her legs or else. Unfortunately the list is literally endless.
Given that the audience of F365 would be predominantly men, it’s curious that you are the only one who has written in to complain that F365 displays hatred towards men. Perhaps you also missed that the bulk of the articles are written by men – if you check the bylines.
It’s rather disingenuous to claim F365 made your letter sound worse by changing the title when this is what you wrote in your opening sentence “The absolute hatred you display towards men at every given opportunity is sickening.”
30 is hardly middle aged but reading both the original letter and your rebuttal shows you have a long way to grow into maturity. If the only thing you took from the response to your letter were ‘toughen up’ it just reinforces your disingenuous rebuttal as NONE of them said that but simply pointed out outrageous misogyny towards women and women’s football over the years or complemented F365 on its work.
Your rebuttal would at first value imply you are the worlds leading supporter of women and not what it really was – an attempt to whitewash your original letter.
Paul McDevitt
