Football 2010-2011

[TheGayTent]

yes, you do. So shut the f**k up.

You - the RETARD - do not have unchallengeable opinions about football.

If you were half as smart as you like to dream you are, you'd be manager at West Ham and they'd be top of the table.

[eFestivals]

Stop trolling and get back on topic.

says the person who started the trolling.

Discussion at the time was alternative co-commentators to Andy Gray - I threw STB's name in the ring. Since then all you have done attributed words to me that I've never thought, said, or posted.

I was on topic by pointing out that he's as flawed as any other example.

You have made yourself look like a retard by claiming fans are more keen on attending matches they believe they are going to win than they are attending matches they believe they are going to lose. Take your anger out on your own foolishness. Do not attempt to put words into my mouth to cover up your idocy.

I said no such thing. I said something very similar - but with a different meaning. I did not say what you claim.

Take your anger out on your own foolishness. Do not attempt to put words into my mouth to cover up your idocy.

[TheGayTent]

I was on topic by pointing out that he's as flawed as any other example.

[TheGayTent]

Whilst Adam has looked the real deal this season, were I a manager, I'd not be too sure about him. After all he has only played 21 Premier League games so far. In my eyes he has yet to 'prove himself' and therefore if you were to pay big money you'd be taking a gamble.

Michael Ricketts was top drawer for a season once...

[worm]

Because there's no way of being able to properly value any player, then there's room for a difference of opinion, with that difference of opinion based in how much that player is worth to either club.

[eFestivals]

You said exactly this:

It's only "exactly" with the rest of its context.

(the 'so' shows it's coming off the back of something else that'd been said).

Which demonstrates perfectly what a retard you are.

but it's not retarded for you to think it's a stand-alone statement, oh no. lol

FYI:

Its context was about wanting a win, because a supporter by definition wants their team to do well (win). And when they do well, a greater sense of satisfaction is had than when they lose. So a person going to a game they think they'll lose will have a lower expectation of enjoyment - and so willingness to go (if only a tiny difference) - from their attendance than they will if it's a game they expect to win.

All of that stands alone from other expectations from games, such as hope that you might win anyway, particular rivalries, or 'big games' - things like that have their own influences on how much a person might want to go, and when all mixed together it might mean that a person wants to go more to the game they're expected to lose (say) against Utd than they would the game they're expected to win (say) against Wolves.

Now, please. All of that is sensible, rational, and logical, and not a bit like you've been wanting to present it for your own retarded purposes. Hopefully now you'll have the good grace to shut the f**k up once and for all, and we can get back to discussion about footy, rather than it being about how you want to bring up a 3 year old gripe all the f**king time.

[eFestivals]

You can apply that to absolutely anything. You're talking about a system of barter:

There's no way of being able to value anything, so it's all a matter of opinion, with that difference of opinion based upon how much the thing is worth to either barterer.

Liverpool thought they could get him for 4M, Holloway proved them wrong. No need for over-indulgent bullshit, we all know that there's no such thing as objective value.

I was stating a pertinent and true fact. The fact that it's a long-standing economic viewpoint of which you're unaware does not make me wrong, or what you say above as more worthy.

There IS something that is recognised as properly operating market in certain goods and services, via which (for that moment) an absolute value can be placed on those goods or services. The economist's view in regard to footballers is that there is no such proper market operating there, and as a result values are invented from nothing and mean nothing unless an agreement is reached at that price.

[TheGayTent]

FYI:

Its context was about wanting a win, because a supporter by definition wants their team to do well (win). And when they do well, a greater sense of satisfaction is had than when they lose. So a person going to a game they think they'll lose will have a lower expectation of enjoyment - and so willingness to go (if only a tiny difference) - from their attendance than they will if it's a game they expect to win.

All of that stands alone from other expectations from games, such as hope that you might win anyway, particular rivalries, or 'big games' - things like that have their own influences on how much a person might want to go, and when all mixed together it might mean that a person wants to go more to the game they're expected to lose (say) against Utd than they would the game they're expected to win (say) against Wolves.

Now, please. All of that is sensible, rational, and logical, and not a bit like you've been wanting to present it for your own retarded purposes. Hopefully now you'll have the good grace to shut the f**k up once and for all, and we can get back to discussion about footy, rather than it being about how you want to bring up a 3 year old gripe all the f**king time.

Edited January 24, 2011 by TheGayTent

[eFestivals]

That isn't what you said in the first instance. So either you're lying now or you were lying then.

that's what it was all about. Believe it or not, I really don't care. End of.

[pink_triangle]

It smacks to me of Adam not really backing his own talent. If he continues to play well then he'll go to a much bigger club come summer whatever happens, but he obviously thinks that it's now or never for Liverpool.

As for the valuation thing, you can't possibly use the Van Der Vaart figure as your benchmark as it was freakishly low. Adam has shown he can more than hold his own in the premiership, and that's without much support around him. To me he's certainly worth at least £10m.

[worm]

I was stating a pertinent and true fact.

Edited January 24, 2011 by worm

[worm]

p.s. of course he's worth more than 4 million. He's playing well in the Premiership in a Premiership side. Holloway obviously found that sort of bid indicative of a player of his callibre playing well in the Championship, thereby making it something of an insult.

[Steve P]

I disagree.

Because there's no way of being able to properly value any player, then there's room for a difference of opinion, with that difference of opinion based in how much that player is worth to either club.

From Liverpool's point of view, it might be the case that £4M is the max they're prepared to pay for that player, because they see other options elsewhere which they believe will improve their team to the same amount for a similar price (or one of the various variations on that).

[eFestivals]

While completely missing the point at hand, being patronising and self indulgent in the process.

The poster felt that he was worth more than 4 million in relation to the market trends at present and that many people would agree.

PMSL about missing the point!!! That's you that is.

There is no "market trends" at the moment or at any time, because there is nothing which can be properly described as a "market". There is just agreements. That's the whole bleeding point about what I was saying.

A person could choose to take (say) Bent as the benchmark to use to value Adam, but it's no less wrong for a person to take (say) Pinaar (sp?) as the benchmark, or even what Blackpool paid for Adam in the first place. There is no market, there are only numbers to be plucked from the air.

VDV at the bargain price of £8M is no less of a benchmark than skippy at £80M.

we all know fine well how bidding for player's works.

yeah, you've got it, haven't you? That's why you think there's a market when there isn't.

However, we all attribute things like skill, ability, potential and age as factors according to the relevant buying trends,

which buying trend?

Bent at £18M?

VDV at £8M?

Pinaar at £2.5M?

Adam at £500k?

etc, etc, etc?

Which trend do you mean? There are a large number of 'trends' and all of those 'trends' are different. That's because there is no trend, there is only numbers plucked from the air.

thus we can say that a player is currently worth x amount of cash.

"we" cannot. An individual can, and another can agree. That's it, there is nothing more, there is no way a player can be valued outside of an individual agreement where people have used numbers plucked from the air. Because there is no market.

If you don't get any of that, I recommend the ecomonics course that you're certainly missing for your highly valued education. Coming back with an answer yet again like the one above says that the education you've had has been a waste of resources.

[eFestivals]

I can see why he'd want to go to Liverpool but I think they should have to pay a fair value for him.

From where Liverpool are sat, if £4M is the most they'll pay for him, then that's the only fair price for him.

Just because you think he's worth more, it doesn't mean that any lower bids are unfair, it means that you and they disagree.

The reason that two clubs often can't settle on a price that they're both in agreement with is because there's no proper market to give an indication of a 'fair' price. There is only each of their opinions of what is fair.

I realise we disagree on what a fair value is.

me and you, not necessarily.

You (and me) and Olly & Liverpool, yep. Because the only 'fair' in this is what any individual thinks, because there is no proper market to give a true indication of exchangeable value.

The problem Blackpool have is that with only 4 mill to spend they won't be able to sign anyone of note because they can't afford the wages.

Oh, I know. The whole thing is a mare for them, I can see that.

You mention that there are other players Liverpool could sign for the same amount that would improve them but I can't think of any.

No, I said nothing about improvement. And I only said "there *might* be other players" that they'd be prepared to buy if Olly wants more than £4M. That's Liverpool's choice to make.

I think they are just hoping that their name will force Adam's hand and it looks like it's worked.

And Olly will have done little different I expect when he bought Adam. It's the only way to work it for best value, because there is no market.

Because there is no market, if a club wants to ensure a particular signing, they have to do what Villa have just done, and go in with a stupidly high offer that the selling club will bite your hand off for - from that side, that method is the only sure way of getting the player.

The 'market price' could be said to be anywhere between those two methods, not at the mid-point. that's because there is no market.

[Sparticus]

For what it's worth unless something drastic happens adam will be gone by february.

Overheard him discussing it yesterday, and let's face it, not really worth lying about football on a forum catering for music festivals.

[Matticus]

what i found pathetic about the Charlie Adam situation was that Holloway went nuts at Villa at what he saw as a pathetic bid for his star player, unsettling him, yet a few days later he bid i think it was £50,000 for Bradley Wright Phillips, a few days after a reported £400,000 bid by Reading collapsed.

Hypocrite?

[Kowalski]

Guardian journalists are falling over each other to have a go at Gray and Keys. This is a brilliant read (IMHO):

Fronting their hyped intergalactic Sunday showdowns, Richard Keys and Andy Gray are products of modern television's habit of recasting broadcasters as "personalities", celebrities, players in the great drama on field and screen. With this power, often, comes an arrogance and an inability to size up the world outside the studio.

On the circuit the two suspended Sky comperes are a tight double act. In the football media Gray is quite open about his disregard for anyone who "hasn't played the game" but will at least say hello and talk over a drink. He radiates the frustrated energy of the ex-pro and wears the look of a man who sometimes struggles to control his passions.

Keys, supposedly the professional journalist of the two, is unrelentingly aloof, as if to talk to print reporters might lower the wattage of his fame. He affects the air of a TV star who has become an extension of the game he is meant to be presenting and describing. As the temperature rose after Sunday's exposé it was left to his sister to come on the airwaves and say, in effect, that Keys is not sexist and that some of his best friends are women. He even has some in his family.

Television does this to people. It raises them to a plane of imagined grandeur. What has this to do with the pair insulting Sian Massey, the assistant referee at the Wolves-Liverpool match, in a leaked exchange that arrives while Gray is suing Rupert Murdoch's News of the World over the phone tapping scandal? The point is that if either has a warning siren in his head alerting him to the folly of parading stupid prejudices at work then it has been knocked out of service by a life in football and TV.

Gray and Keys, who are unpopular with many viewers, and are often suspected of not understanding the offside rule, if the public reaction to this brouhaha is any guide, are the two main faces of a brilliant service. Sky's football coverage is symbiotically linked to the growth of the Premier League: first in the money Murdoch's empire pitchforks into the top division but also in the breadth and vibrancy of its programming. But by mistaking a live television show for the clubhouse at an especially backward golf club they have presented their employers with a mighty PR calamity. A light is now cast on the amazing and presumably coincidental prevalence of attractive young women presenters on Sky Sports News, and the presence of Charlotte Jackson, say, to read out the scores on Champions Leagues nights, like one of Bruce Forsyth's assistants from the 1970s.

Had Gray and Keys been eager to resign, they might have pointed out some of these anomalies on the way to the car park. Sky on the other hand would spell out the difference between hiring women for their looks (which conversely means not hiring other women, for their looks) and Keys saying, to Gray, about Massey: "Well, somebody better get down there and explain offside to her." Both are guilty of risible chauvinism. But the extra sting is that Massey was required to make a highly marginal offside decision for Liverpool's first goal and called it right. Grumbling away as they might in a bar, Gray and Keys appeared to think a man who has not played professional football might make a correct offside call, while a woman who has not played professional football is denied that capability at birth.

This is partly another object lesson in the difference between what people in public life say to the world and the things they think in private. These double standards are built into society. Usually, television's front-men are sufficiently aware (or calculating) to suppress ugly thoughts before they reach the mouth.

At the risk of offending all footballers from his era, Gray brought something of the old dressing-room myopia to his incorrect appraisal of Massey's work: a kind of worn-out misogyny. He might have learned from Ron Atkinson's racist outburst that the mic is never really off. Keys, all oiled and polished, has reached such a stage of self-inflation that even the self-protecting part of his broadcasting brain has shut down.

"The game's gone mad," he said. There are many sound reasons for saying "the game's gone mad": obscene wages, outrageous ticket prices, the Portsmouth scandal, leveraged buy-outs, diving. Here, the game had gone mad because a woman was going about her work and going about it well.

However deeply Gray and Keys held those views before Sky gave them jobs they were bound to be made worse by the blokeish culture they constructed around themselves. They detached themselves from the basic rules of their profession, perhaps because they thought they were too big for the code to apply to them, and will pay the price now every time they encounter a female colleague, or a woman in football: a narrow world that pretends to be inclusive.

"See charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism?" Keys asks. "Yeah. Do me a favour, love." There is another TV character who would have killed for that line: Alan Partridge.

[worm]

There is no "market trends" at the moment or at any time, because there is nothing which can be properly described as a "market".

[Sparticus]

Scumbag journalists will pounce on anything though.

Anyone see bbc news stating andy gray was in further trouble. Absolute non story, if anything the reporter was trying to twist andy gray's arm into saying anything, and they weren't even discussing football, they were discussing if a different female linesman was fit or not!

First and last time i'll ever support andy gray, but it was a joke how they were reporting it.

[worm]

because there's no proper market

because there is no proper market

because there is no market.

Because there is no market

because there is no market.

Edited January 24, 2011 by worm

[eFestivals]

You repeated this five times and it's complete bullshit. A market is a place where value is decided between the seller and the buyer. It's that simple. What on earth do you think a market is?

That's the simple view of a market. It is not a proper market. How many times?

In a proper market there is a way of putting an absolute value on a particular commodity, and everyone agrees on that price. You don't get shares in companies trading at (say) £10 in one moment and £1 in the same moment because no one is able to put an exchangable value on them, do you? There is enough of a proper market for shares that ensures they have a fixed price at any moment that enough people agree on, meaning that the price of that moment is always achievable for a seller and the shares buyable at that moment at that price by a buyer. This is a proper market.

In football, there is no proper market. There is only the price that someone will sell for and the price that a person will buy for. A transaction can only happen if they can agree, there is (in the way there is for shares, or commodities) no other buyer stood on the sidelines ready to pay the asking price.

These are properly recognised economic principles*, which you'd know of if you had the remotest grasp of economics beyond doing your weekly shop.

(* I'm not claiming to have done a perfect job of explaining this, but the idea I'm presenting is a solid economic principle)

What I have said is not bullshit. The only bullshit is your dismissal of what I've said, because of your own ignorance of this subject.

Edited January 25, 2011 by eFestivals

[The Nal]

Amazing result for Bolton last night!! Even Drogba seemed happy for them.

[Paul ™]

[worm]

That's the simple view of a market. It is not a proper market. How many times?