Quote:
Originally Posted by jeccross
(1) This isn't baseball. There's plenty of clubs over and underachieving their size in the league at the moment - Swansea and Southampton v sunderland and Newcastle - there's sensible ways to spend money.
(2) I just think it's funny that after years of ups and downs in football, suddenly people think everyone's expected position is set in stone.
(1) You have dozens of clubs trying to accomplish what Swans and Saints are currently accomplishing though. Sunderland and Newcastle are still way ahead of most of them. Someone is bound to catch lightning in a bottle for awhile. (This is the same reason assuring a top 4-6 finish has become so damn expensive. You don't just have to hold off Everton or Swansea, you have to hold off the field. One year it'll be Aston Villa who the stars align for. then it'll be Newcastle. Then Everton. With all these clubs out there *someone* is gonna wind up in the juicy part of the bell curve. You have to pay a pretty premium to make sure you can outperform whoever that is, which you can see in the price tags on guys like Lallana, Lamela, Nasri, Fernandinho, etc. You're forced to pay double, triple, quadruple the fee and wages for a player who might only be 10-20% better than the alternative bought by Southampton or West Ham.)
(2) I don't think anyone is implying that any club's position is set in stone. Looking to a club's budget is simply a useful way to establish a benchmark for identifying over- or under-achievement. From that point different clubs will have different standards based on the circumstances. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the team with the third or fourth highest budget will be more or less satisfied if their league position stays in line with that. There will be temptation at times to roll the dice and maybe win the league, but ultimately the fear of losing the bird in hand will cause them to stand down. The calculation is much different for a team in the position of Spurs or Liverpool, or a team plummeting towards relegation. They will have far less fear of abandoning the status quo. I know some people get their kicks by mocking LFC's ambitions, but they seem to be rooted in logic to me. Getting where Arsenal have been would be a tremendously rewarding coup, whereas the only consequence of tumbling down to 9th would be avoiding the Europa league and giving American* Spurs fans something to crow about. I think the owners who should be targeted for criticism are the ones who *should* approach decision-making this way but are instead content to sit on their TBTDITW profits and call it a day.
*Edit: I should probably explain this comment. Maybe I'm wrong but in my experience it seems like UK-based supporters are a little less consumed by schadenfreude. My theory has always been that many American viewers chose to support Spurs because of a perception that they were the happy medium between feeling like a front-runner and feeling hopeless, and therefore enjoy the suffering of anyone who wasn't so honorable in their choice (kinda like: "picking the Yankees or Red Sox would be cheap, but I don't want to never win anything either......I know, I'll support this fun young Cubs team! That should pay off in a year or two without being tacky!" Only if you then found out that baseball was structured in such a way that unfortunately no, you in fact weren't going to win anything ever). No offense -- I'd perhaps be right there with you if I'd been team-less when NBC came along and brought five games a weekend into American living rooms.
Last edited by Dean Manifest; 10-09-2015 at 12:26 PM.