leffe186

Panama have to wear three different kits . I loved that ESPN have ranked all 105 kits, mind you. Might get a spreadsheet out and try to do the same. https://www.espn.co.uk/football/story/_/id/48352807/world-cup-2026-kit-ranking-canada-mexico-united-states-argentina-australia-brazil-england-france-germany-portugal-spain Also anyone got any recommendations on the best World Cup wallcharts? I used to do the Guardian and WSC way back when, but this is my first World Cup in the UK for 20 years, somehow. Fuck, only just realized that.

I meant everything we did was within any of those parameters, before they were rules. That might not be the case, but you’d have to tell me how because I can’t see it. We were consistently making a profit and our wage bill was a small percentage of our turnover…because it had to be - that’s how we generated the money to make the off-field improvements and make the stadium project viable. We’ve gone over the Big 6 thing a million times. I couldn’t care less if we’re considered “big 6” or not, but I definitely want to be consistently in the top six of the Premier League. Which we were from 2010-2020 until COVID and Levy’s hubris. We still then got 8th, 4th, 7th, 5th before it caught up with Levy. Cartel 6 is fair enough because Levy was a prime driver of FFP/PSR - because he didn’t want all his and our work of the previous 10/15 years to be rendered pointless. Cartel 6 is also justifiable because he was involved in the pathetic ESL crap, which we like all fans were disgusted with (https://www.football.london/tottenham-hotspur-fc/news/tottenham-fans-protest-daniel-levy-20606898 - warning, it’s nearly as shitty a site as the Chronicle). However, Cartel 6 in the context of refereeing decisions is where I draw the line. I fucking wish we were that . Thankfully we’ve fucked Levy off now, although the ESL stain lingers.

Well that makes a lot more sense. If you really think that, then I get why you went down that line. We absolutely did not only “box clever with player trading”. Levy came in as Chairman after ENIC bought the club and realized that to compete with the top teams he had to tear it all down and build it up. I remember being at the first game in 2004 - it was almost an entirely new squad and we were just trying to work out who everyone was. Pretty much everyone from the previous season had been released or free transferred away. We signed a ton of cheap youngsters and players from the lower leagues and abroad. Our wage bill was £25M that year. He brought in Frank Arnesen to be a DoF (our first IIRC) and completely revamped the youth and backstage teams, totally new scouting teams etc. That was the Santini/Jol year. The wage bill had been stripped to the bone and would stay that way for a while. Everyone was on bonus-led contracts. We were saving money so that we could revamp other things - in 2007 we bought land for a new Training ground which was finished in 2012 or thereabouts, and obviously we were also saving and planning for a new stadium. As fans, it was exciting but also frustrating. Frank Arnesen immediately got poached by Chelsea. We’d get raided by bigger clubs regularly - Keane, Carrick, Berba early on, Modric, Bale, Kyle Walker etc later on. We lost out on a ton of players due to wages and Levy being tight, not to mention Chelsea’s shenanigans that just got them a slap on the wrist over Eden Hazard etc. We also were paying through the nose (although by this time I was out of London so no season ticket) for the privilege, being reassured by Levy “no pain, no gain”. So (IIRC isn’t that one of your Pet Hates, starting a sentence with So? ) yeah, we did operate within PSR criteria, and it was often really irritating and tough. If we’d got to where we are by ENIC giving us a billion pounds and buying tons of players - or even just by “clever player trading” I wouldn’t be in here having these arguments. It took us 8 years or so to build a new training ground, over a decade to build a really good squad, and 15 years to build a new stadium. Could we do exactly that now? I dunno. The first year the Saudis came in you got Bruno, Chris Wood, Willock, Burn, Trippier. The next year you got Isak, Gordon, Botman, Targett and Pope. In contrast, back in 2004 we brought in eighteen players, and the highest spend of them all was £8M on Andy Reid and Michael Dawson from Forest. Everyone’s got more TV money now and there’s so much more risk involved. We’d probably be able to spend more for starters. Your Saudi money will accelerate things massively. Success is obviously not a matter of waiting, although it often feels like it’s all we can do as fans.

Yeah my bad, didn’t realize I’d said it was always the case.

I think it’s very often true, and I suspect it’s far more often than you think. Flav the Spurs podcaster did a survey a couple of years back (around a time that the Qataris were rumoured to be interested in us) and was taken aback by how many Spurs fans disagreed with him (and me) and would be happy to be owned by a country. Just look at The Prophet and TRon. All fanbases have people who either care or don’t care about it, to varying degrees. And I suspect all fanbases have a lot of people who want unrestricted spending but don’t want to say so out loud.

I’d definitely be interested in what you’d propose, not least because I’m too old and tired to want to think about it that much . I’m guessing it would be very similar to what I’d want. I do agree with you that PSR is the main reason you miss out on players, but as you say the reason for that is that if you had unrestricted spending you could blow everyone except Man City or presumably anyone else owned by billionaires out of the water. That’s kind of the point of the argument. Every single time a Newcastle fan says “PSR stopped us from buying X and that’s annoying” they are by extension saying “we want to have unrestricted spending”. That’s what puts people’s hackles up.

Yeah, UEFA’s nonsense also highlights the broader point that complicates salary cap stuff of course. It’s not the closed shop of the NFL. Funnily enough, Tottenham the place has an almost identical salary range to Newcastle with obviously mental rents etc, although that’s just because it’s a relatively deprived area of London. I do agree, but I’d rather improve the criteria of PSR than get rid of it. Really all I want is for Chelsea and Man City to not have happened, and in the absence of a wishing stone I’d rather not have it happen any more.

It’s somewhere in between. Like you, I can completely understand people hurling scorn at the idea that PSR has been born from integrity and I have no illusions that football club ownership has ever been or aspired to be some kind of paragon of virtue. But at the same time I have been doing that additional deduction you talk about for nearly 30 years now. I’m really fucking tired You talk about wanting what Man U and the other rich clubs had for decades. You did have what they had. In the 1997-98 Deloitte Touché report, Newcastle had the 5th highest revenue in the world and the 2nd highest in England. I wish they had brought in some version of PSR at that point. Would it have preserved the hegemony? Maybe. Newcastle, Villa and Leeds had benefitted from being on an upswing just as the Premier League and its TV money came in. They were all in the world’s top 20 at that point. Some form of PSR in the late 90s might have stopped Ridsdale fucking Leeds up. It might have stopped Ken Bates overspending and having to sell to Abramovich, and if it didn’t it would have restricted him. It would have stopped Shinawatra and Abu Dhabi ejaculating money all over Man City. It might have even stopped Leicester going into administration in 2002, and despite @KingArthur forgetting it they did end up getting a billionaire owner. It might not have helped Villa under Deadly Doug, but it might have stopped them overspending to try to keep up with Chelsea et al. And I’d like to think it would have kept you guys at the top too. All water under Stamford Bridge now of course. What it wouldn’t have done though - and what it doesn’t do now - is definitively stop other clubs from competing. The idea that the successful clubs all pulled themselves up from their bootstraps is silly of course. But within the rules…Bournemouth did. Brentford did. We had far more resources than them…but fewer than you in 1998. And we did too. Fans just have to suck it up for the most part. It’s not your fault that your ownership squandered that opportunity and then totally fucked everything by selling to that cunt Mike Ashley. We couldn’t make Levy do all that stuff he did, although we could buy enough tickets and merch to help him along. I hate Arsenal by law, but they have been brilliantly run for the most part including longstanding support for women’s football that is now really reaping dividends - literally. Their fans are lucky bastards…but we could have done the same and so could you. I’m glad you don’t want unrestrained spending and I believe you - but there are absolutely loads of Newcastle fans that do. There are lots of Spurs fans that would think the same. I disagree with them all. I just think your club, supporters and owners can bridge that gap within the rules anyway, like we did. You’re a huge club, the only one in a large city with a big supporter base and big, beautifully-located stadium. The Saudis have already been upgrading infrastructure, put a ton of money into the first team squad, is working on (and ploughing money into) the stadium and new stadium possibilities, put a ton of money into upgrading the youth development team and taking players from other clubs. They’ve even invested in the women’s team, although that’s false-started. It will happen far quicker than it did with us because we were generating the money ourselves. Why not be patient?

Red Star Belgrade the controversial one? Capital of Serbia but not Yugoslavia.

What were the better podcasts during World Cup 2022?

If you get a chance, look at the Man City Spurs 1981 final. I actually can’t remember if it was in the first game or the replay, but the first thing Gerry Gow does is kick Ardiles miles up in the air. If it was today Gow would be back in the showers before Ardiles came back to Earth.

There’s uproar from me for obvious reasons, but also I genuinely love good football and hate cynical cheats and gamesmanship that goes routinely unpunished. It’s not that complicated. Also a fair few people on here have pointed out the irony of Arteta and Arsenal employing the same tactics he’s moaned about in the past. Then you factor in the way they have been demonstrably favoured by PGMOL - consistently, and to a greater degree than PGMOL admit. We all understand why Arteta plays the way he does. He thinks it gives them the best chance to win…or more accurately, the least likelihood to lose. Surely you can also understand why we all don’t like it?

It was Fast Show all the way here. I think if you don’t live in London you might not realize what a huge impact the Arsenal Women’s team have had. It’s advertised everywhere, and a million middle-class families with 2.4 kids go to the games because it’s relatively cheap, very easy to get to and you can get a ticket. They’ve played a blinder - it’s such a good way to build a fanbase, particularly at a time when kids, teenagers etc simply cannot afford to go to the men’s matches.

Sure. It’ll be a good Haitiwatch.

He was broken, man. I think Bobby D called it. Something going on on top of being an Arsenal fan.