Rob W

Other than to toss a coin and hold up a trophy? In other sports (rugby, creekit ) the captain actually makes decisions on the pitch and, moves players around etc In football it's Mad Sir Alex raving on the touchline, waving his arms in the air that does those things So why the big fuss about Captaincy???

We have 3 tough games left IMHO Derby & Swansea away and Forest at home - the rest are pretty drossy We also have a dream run in at the end of the season right now drawing the remainder of our games would see us in the playoffs

I'd be happier with an average 2 pts a game - win at home, draw away.....................

A new paper for the Journal of Economic Psychology by friends of the Fink Tank, Katie Page, a University of London psychology lecturer, and Lionel Page, of the University of Westminster - the authors have been studying whether home advantage is influenced by refereeing decisions. And to do that they studied a truly impressive data set. They analysed 37,830 matches from 1994 to 2007, covering a large number of world competitions. In all they looked at 872 referees in 58 competitions. Not bad. To investigate the impact of referees, the Pages built a model to predict goal difference. They included in it all the things you might expect to influence home advantage. So, for instance, the model takes note of different competitions, in case this makes the advantage vary, and the quality of the teams, too. If a referee always officiated at big games and the home advantage in those matches was different from the average, you would want to be sure that you ascribed the variation to the right thing — the big game, say, rather than the referee. Once the model was built, the authors wanted to see if their prediction of the size of home advantage was improved by including in it information about who the referee was. If referee bias was non-existent, it would be pointless accounting for who the referee was in the model. So what was the result? It mattered who the referee was. In fact, it mattered a lot. On average, the home advantage is a goal difference of 0.36 in favour of the home team. The results of this paper suggest that it can be as low as 0.05 and as high as 0.75, depending on the referee. The Fink Tank’s Dr Mark Latham sent me a summary of this result with three exclamation marks after it and the comment: “This is really a big deal.” So, using their big data set, the Pages have made a real breakthrough. They have proven that referee bias is a significant component of home advantage. But there is more. This is a paper published in a psychology journal, after all, and the authors have a psychological theory about referee bias. They hypothesise that “individual variations in the home advantage between referees is due to individual differences in the ability to cope with social pressure”. How do they test this? Well, if the hypothesis is true, one should expect “to observe differences between referees in the way the level of pressure affects the home advantage”. So they added in crowd figures into the model. And from this they learnt that the amount of bias shown by individual referees changes as the size of the crowd changes. For some, big crowds make little difference, but for others, it makes a large difference. The overall impact of crowd size for a typical referee was really quite large, as the graphic demonstrates. Again, a very interesting result from the Pages. One final point. When we did this work this year on the Barclays Premier League, we acquitted referees. This may be because of our methods (we did not use goal difference) or our sample size (much smaller). But it could be because Premier League referees do better.

I seem to remember the statos the Times uses looked at this last season I think they said there was a home advantage - a small part seemed to be due to the ref but the main point was the away club playing defensively - fewer shots on goal, less possession, defensive set-up to start with = its in the mind

"he’s inherited a paper thing squad, low on confidence and quality with little backing from the top brass to significantly change things." and we're top and have been top almost all season Why do people want to get rid of him - its crazy........................

Looking at the last eight years we need:- 1. Automatic Promotion - average 86.1 range 79-92 2. Playoffs - average 73.43 range 70-75 3. Relegation - 47.57 range 40-52 So we're safe from relegation anyway....................... O0

Silvio Berlusconi. Georeg Eastham - once players could ask for a transfer and get it and not be "kept in slavery" then the way was open for tapping up, agents and God knows what

Irish passports are a hell of a lot more acceptable in a lot of the world than a UK One...................... the Canadians are well thought of as well..................

who is this "United"??????? Presumably those scum bags in Manchester and not Leeds, Sheffield or us

God! and these clubs are supposed to be PROFESSIONAL How much does it cost to have a big white board in the managers office with the dates that people are banned on it???

well it's nowt to do with them....

The problem is that if get promotion then the Manager knows the players - but if we bring in someone else its all change, new staff, new players ..and no evidence that it will make any real difference personally I'd give Hughton some cash and some time No proven decent manager will come unless there is A LOT of cash - if we dump Hughton we'll be looking at the usual dreadful list of PL cast-offs

But its not about the state of the pitch why most games are off, It's about crowd safety mannnn. it's really about how much everyone wants to pay for insurance against a once in 30 year occurrence............. You can just imagine the Mail "millions of Rate payers cash wasted on Snow Ploughs & Salt"

been a lot of snow in Reading http://www.reading-travelinfo.co.uk/TravelInformation/TravellingbyCar-Parking/LiveTrafficViews/TrafficImages difficult to work out but Junction 11 looks open but the road into town past the Mad Stad is a bit touch & go

you have to think that any club that can't get more than 40,000 in every week is heading towards certain financial ruin

they all need at least a game a week to stay afloat

aye - tough to generate that sort of money when you are a feeder club for Real Madrid.............

he's right tho isn't he -

Can Man Utd spend? Robert Peston | 11:15 UK time, Tuesday, 5 January 2010 This week's epistle to fans from Arsene Wenger muses on whether Manchester Utd will derive advantage from being knocked out of the FA Cup by Leeds Utd. Man U's Wayne Rooney and Dimitar BerbatovThe always counter-intuitive Arsenal supremo points out that FA Cup matches tend to be hard on the heels of Champions League games - which implies that Man Utd's players will be fresher for the matches that really matter. Bankers however take a different view of Man U's humiliation by a team two divisions below. They point out that debt-laden Man U needs posteriors on seats in as many games as possible to service the interest charge - and that the 3rd round exit from the cup deprives the club of important revenue. One banker with a close knowledge of the club put it like this to me: Manchester Utd as a business is a delicately balanced financial machine, which works when the team is winning and revenues are pouring in, but where there is not much of a financial cushion to absorb the inevitable occasional flop. He said that the huge debt that was taken on when the Glazer family bought the club was predicated on the basis that Man Utd would have decent runs in the Champions League and FA Cup in most years - which of course is typically what has happened. The important numbers are these, as of 30 June 2008, the date of the last published accounts for Man Utd's holding company, Red Football Joint Venture Ltd. Red Football JV had £519m of secured bank loans, on which it paid £45.4m. And it had £175.5m of so-called payment-in-kind notes, where the interest is rolled up into the principal rather than paid in cash. The interest rate on these is 14.25%. So the total annual interest bill was just under £70m (including rolled-up interest). That compares with a net cash inflow from operating activities (largely profit before interest and taxation) of £88m. So in that year, if Man Utd did not want to increase its overall level of debt, it had less than £20m to spend on players and other investments. In fact, it spent £43m - so its indebtedness increased, by just under £33m to £699m gross in total. Now Man Utd fans would presumably say that was money well spent, since the club won the Premier League for the umpteenth time last year. But the big question is whether the current level of indebtedness is excessive for this point in both the footballing cycle and in the economic cycle. To state the obvious, post-Ronaldo Man Utd does not look as invincible as last year's team. And a weak British economy deprives all clubs of incremental revenues. Which is why Man Utd is looking at ways to reinforce itself in a financial sense. As has been widely reported, Man Utd is considering taking on new debt to pay off some of the old debt. According to bankers, it would like to raise around £600m through a bond issue. The reason is that - in theory at least - the interest payable on the bond would be significantly less than the interest on the payment-in-kind notes (PIKs): Man Utd would probably have to pay around 8% interest on a bond, which looks very attractive compared with the 14.25% interest on the PIKs. But here's the funny thing. The interest on the much bigger bank loan of £519m is very competitive. It ranges between 2.125% and 5% over Libor. So right now it should be paying no more than 5.5% - which is cheap money. It does not seem to make sense to pay off that low-interest debt with the proceeds of a bond paying a higher interest rate. But that's to ignore the problem that the burden of the PIK is growing exponentially, because the 14.25% interest rate applies to the original principal plus the rolled up interest. In other words, Red Football JV is this year probably paying 14.25% on PIKs with a value of £200m - or more than £28m in interest. Which would imply that next year it will be paying 14.25% on almost £230m, and so on, to financial ruin. The point is that Man Utd's banks are the so-called senior creditors and have first claim on any money deployed to repay loans, so they would probably not allow the PIKs to be redeemed unless some or all of their loans were also repaid. So there is a logic to a comprehensive refinancing via a bond issue. This is a long-winded way of saying that the UK's most formidable football team is not without its financial issues. Which is also to say that the relative immunity of top-flight football from the impact of credit crunch and recession has been delayed, not avoided. The simplest way for Man Utd to alleviate the immediate financial pressure would be to spend very little in the January transfer window. And it certainly would not be the only club to sit on its hands rather than buy new players. With clubs like Portsmouth and Crystal Palace in serious difficulties, right now there are arguably more forced sellers of players than buyers with deep pockets. Man City may have a bottomless purse. But the noises from Chelsea suggest even it isn't likely to spend like it once did. Perhaps this is the moment when the transfer market will crack and player prices fall significantly. Which - of course - would further weaken the finances of clubs where the value of players represents a significant proportion of balance-sheet assets. The finances of the Premier League are probably as perilously poised as the finances of the British government.

bloody idiot Bolton fans have delusions of grandeur almost equal to ours but they don't have the cash flow or support to ever achieve anything he'll be unpopular and disliked in 3 months because they think they should be in the top 4 whereas at Burnley he stood a chance of building them into a bottom half of the PL club

thats my point exactly - they couldn't cover their own running costs FFS

"peanuts - tanner a bag!"

it would be like American sport - hardly ever any away fans at games = no atmosphere

Apparently even if thye filled the ground every week they couldn't pay the wage bill.......