vastman wrote:
God knows. It's pub talk, just knee jerk stuff based on nothing tangible.
No thought as to legal challenges, costs of setting up a new comp, massive loss of earnings from not playing the big club - shows to me why accountants and businessmen run clubs these days and not the supporters, can you imagine the carnage.
What the RL should do is make a film showing RL in the early 80's, with many of its players out of shape, playing in front of tiny crowds, in victorian sheds in the freezing cold and remind people how the game has improved. Sure it could be way better and should be, but this throw the baby out with the bath water mentality is destroying the game.
People need to grow up and adapt to the new world. Like it or not we are never going back to the sixties era of Bovril, Woodbines and local heroes. It's a commercial world and it's a commercial game. We retain what we can but we must adapt to survive. People can slag McManus and Heathrington but all they have done wrong is be smarter than the rest.
It's a very human thing to want to drag people down to your level, but the smart thing to do is to drag yourself up to their level. That's what we are slowly doing.
It's certainly a positive aspiration to want to improve each and every club both on and off the field.
The serious issue here is that ANY range of criteria could be changed to suit an agenda.
There are comments in the IMG "report" about expanding the game and whilst it infers this would be in the UK, it does not specifically say so and it further suggests that "initially" overseas clubs will be capped at 2.
Are we going to be back to the Toronto scenario or, having consortiums wanting to buy clubs to move them to a "new" city etc.
Once you move away from on field performance deciding promotion and relegation, you are opening up a real can of worms and things can, and no doubt will be manipulated to engineer a particular outcome.
We could have a situation where a club is relegated from mid table to accommodate a lower league club with a certain number of plastic seats ?
There were many, many grey areas left in their "report" and the key omission was funding and just how we increase the broadcasting deal and lets face it, without a TV deal, the game is screwed