Dude IS the ceiling. If he doesn’t get injured, he’s a GOAT candidate. If he does get injured, he’ll still be a generational talent, assuming it’s not too soon. “Injured” includes both physical and other issues of course, who knows if he decides to burn down his house with fireworks or crashes his fancy car.
More matches nowadays, and better fitness. Longer careers too, there’s money in the tail end years where guys used to just quit.
More concentration of talent (and money). The days when Steaua could win the European Cup have long passed. Instead we have a small number of teams that utterly dominate their domestic competitions. You didn’t have superstars in every position on a team, and so you didn’t have as many uneven matches.
Defensive tactics had to be unravelled by rule changes like the passback rule and various fouling rules. Average goals scored at the WC dipped in the era you’re talking about and came back later.
Requiring a fouled player to take the penalty sounds good, but what about hand balls? Nobody’s been fouled. Maybe whoever kicked it last?
I like the IDFK idea, it converts a lot of “I can’t believe that’s a penalty” situations into something more appropriate.
I don’t think we can move the spot back, it’s too ingrained in tradition. Also you’d have to move it a fair bit for it to make a difference.
Stuttered runs, I think do whatever you want mate, it’s your penalty. Perhaps put a timer on the kick, but for me it’s not a big deal.
There should also be a rule that stopping a clear goal scoring opportunity leads to a penalty, wherever it happened. Guy who springs the offside trap but gets flattened before reaching the box has been robbed.
Perhaps there should be an intermediate penalty such as the MLS penalties. Obvious goal scoring opportunity -> penalty as normal. Someone grazed the ball with his hand while facing away -> MLS penalty.
It’s a made up nonsense IMO.
It’s a team sport, everyone who is good is good because there’s a system around him and he understands his role in it.
It’s the world’s game.
Could have been any other thing, but it’s not. It’s this particular game with its history and enormous depth.
“Okay everybody, get your kit from 22-23 out. Don’t forget not to celebrate the players who weren’t with us at the time.”
It’s a vague distinction. The only clear thing is that the people who aren’t the head guy are called coaches. By that I mean Mourinho or Pep will have people to do coaching tasks, who are never called the manager. They still tell the players what to do and that type of stuff, they are just not the guy you think of when you ask who is deciding how the team plays.
The head guy you can call manager or coach, it somewhat depends on his power within the hierarchy of the club. Some clubs have one guy deciding on all the transfers, some clubs separate the person who decides on tactics from the money decisions. Depends a lot on what level of club we’re talking about.
If you’re going to claim this, you should come up with some definitions and some numbers. What teams are we talking about, and how many youth players are they playing now, compared to earlier?
Meh, can’t be that long before they’re back. Every team goes through this. They go stale, people are fired, they come back thanks to a massively deep talent pool.
In other news, Arsene Wenger opens shovel and pickaxe shop in India.
It depends on what they are forced to change financially. If they can just keep paying people the same wages it will be a quick holiday in the championship.
It’s possible but it doesn’t seem very likely that anything will be concluded this season.
Stripping previous titles seems quite hollow to me, people will still have the memories that they have about who won what, and it’s not actually easy to change by a paper decision.
That Boro deduction… they had a mass illness, they asked the PL if they could cancel the match against Blackburn, they were told yes, didn’t show up, then got deducted three points.
End of the season, they are relegated by 2 points.
Dumped out of the Premier league into the super league
Have to admit I’m surprised. Don’t they play each other fairly regularly, since forever?
You’d think over the years they’d have lost to Columbia, a country that has supplied decent footballers over the years, at some point. Also losing twice in a row, you’d think that would have happened as well. It’s not like it’s hard to lose a match against a league with two other world cup winners and teams with a decent selection of professionals.
They don’t train like you and me train. If I feel a slight pain anywhere, I just skip the session. I suspect most keep-fit people do the same. Professionals really pound their bodies in order to stay on top, and they are constantly managing niggling injuries or playing through pain by using painkillers. Do that enough, and you will have long term consequences.
Probably worth defining one club as someone who stayed at the club they became professional at for at least ten seasons or early retirement, rather than strictly one employer. Loans allowed.
If you don’t loosen the definition a bit you’ll find a lot of famous people associated with one club aren’t eligible, because they either got loaned out as a youngster or went to some retirement league at the end of their career.
Yeah but who would he take? It’s not just his parents, kidnappers could go for any siblings, aunts and uncles, and so on.
It’s also constantly primary school level discussion.
“Who is better, Ronaldo or Messi?”
“Can Haaland/Mbappe/Bellingham get better than Messi?”
“Is this guy overrated?”
Planet has 8B people, every single one of them is a football fan or knows a football fan. They aren’t watching Real Madrid or Man City playing each week, many of them are watching a local team nobody’s heard of. Many of them volunteer to hang around some no-name club every week to let the kids have some fun.
But no, we need more and more content about the absolute top.