It’s me unBEARable…
We are happy with it, as Bluetounge stadium was surrounded by bush fires….

laddie,
Lowy Jump … ??? He’s too busy with the 2018 world cup preparations and accepting trophies from the Yanks in America .. However, when you do decide to jump, can you have a relative of yours put it on Youtube.. I would love to see it…

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FIFA the real 1 and Only Master ..

Less than 10K at an A-League final last night.

How very very very dismal. Maybe Frank Lowry is standing on that ledge

I have a dream…

~~~~~~~~~~
FIFA The real 1 and Only Master ..

What a waste of a life

Agreed…! and to say finally Pimbo and I have a point of view that we both can agree on… My dream .. as a still living old Senior Australian Citizen .. To be still alive to witness an Australian Born National Manager with a home grown National Football team to win the 2018 WC on Australian Soil… That’s my dream … Starting from the beginning of watching the Socceroos playing in the 1974 World Cup in West Germany ..

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KB

Goal: Your own country, the Netherlands, is so small but so often produces brilliant players and coaches. Asia, with over a billion people, still looks to foreign influences in its football, particularly in coaching. Is there a solution?

PV: With all due respect to the Asian coaches and culture, we shouldn’t forget that in the Netherlands we started playing football in around 1890. For us, football is in our blood. I saw my first professional football game when I was three because my father played in the Dutch professional league. But that’s not just the case for me but for everybody in the Netherlands. Where we live, we see Belgian football, English football, German football, Italian football all at the right moments, in the evening or by day, so football in Europe is so much a part of our life and here it is just starting. It will take a little bit more time.

Here in Australia, for me it is very similar to the Dutch league; we don’t have the money, we will always lose our best players and we will always have to produce new players, young players and make them better players. We don’t have the money to say “he’s not good, let’s buy another one”. We need to look at how we can make them better. That’s how we think in the Netherlands and that fits very well in Australia as well.

Goal: So you don’t see the exodus of Australian players overseas – particularly to Asia – as a problem?

PV: No, because if you see it as a problem then you have a problem, otherwise it’s not realistic. In the Netherlands we have some big clubs with the money to pay but in the end, every player wants to play in England, Spain or Italy, not necessarily for the money but for the leagues. That is what is going to happen here.

The question of whether we should be happy with our players going to the other Asian leagues, I can understand it, because of the new experience it presents. The money is better but whether they will be a better player, that’s what we’ll have to find out in the coming years. I know how difficult it is to play in the K-League because it’s a tough league and the J-League and even the Chinese league is coming strong again.

Goal: Do you think Australian players are better off playing in other Asian leagues?

PV: As long as the league only lasts for seven months here then the other Asian leagues have an advantage. The J-league starts in March and finishes at the end of December, it is a league with tough games, a lot of games, a lot of travelling, it is a different story than over here and the Korean league is exactly the same. It is a tough league because of the intensity and the media attention.

Here it is still “nice”; on page 9 there is something about football but in Korea there is something about football from page 1-10, every day. OK, you probably can’t read it and that’s the good part but there’s always pressure, you can feel it on the shoulders of the clubs, the coaches and the players. So mentally, it can be good to another country but football-wise, Adelaide showed that the A-League is not that bad at all. Yes, we will lose our best players from here but there’s nothing I can do about it.

I think Millster or Midfield have pointed to the Bundesliga in the past where they have a quasi-cap linked to your revenues. So if the team with the most revenues has double the income of the team with the least, that would essentially equate to the top team having double the cap available to it than the lowest, with everything in between.

The sounds like quite a fair system that also works to keep clubs financially responsible, while offering incentives for clubs to get bigger and better (which doesn’t exist at the moment).

Mind you, where there is a 2:1 ratio, I’d expect that team to have a much better roster. On the other hand, a team spending only 10 to 20% more than a team, is not necessarily going to beat them every time they meet on the park – I reckon that much is certainly true (whereas a gap of 20% in a game like AFL is massive, and you’d put your house on that team winning every time).

There is no transfer fees for clubs overseas.

However, Melbourne may become the first with Carlos Hernandez.

Question – have any A-League clubs paid a transfer fee yet?

Would that change when the money from ACL and CWC comes in?

the limits could be adjusted but thats just one option. still better than a fixed cap. Someone already said that some clubs dont spend the max cap now so there is already inequality in player payments.

There is also the argument that just because you have the most expensive player roster, doesnt mean you automatically win. I’m sure better coaching, conditioning, and tactics must come into it somewhere. Within reason of course, which is what a formula like the above provides.

Not good from what I’ve heard.

dasilva: “I believe we didn’t pay Blackburn a transfer fee for Griffiths”

It’s club policy not to pay transfer fees. It’s (one reason) why we didn’t get Mori for the first A-League season.

so how do you describe the KFC big bash domestic 20/20 tourney???

quarter rrrr’s'd??

I think most competition restrict transfer between clubs and have a dedicated transfer window. However they can’t stop free transfer of free agents and I believe we didn’t pay Blackburn a transfer fee for Griffiths.

But yeah – if the replacement players rule wants to be credible then they should cap the maximum wage to equal the wage of the injured players. If not then there’s no point of having a salary cap.

some teams obviously don’t want to fix it!

In which case – scrap the all the restrictions, rather than have teams work out ways around them.

No half arsed amateur comp in the land of any description would allow a team to bring someone in just for the finals.

If you guys can’t see that that’s a problem – we are clearly on a different planet.

However the question is – Do we want to fix it?

Interesting article here in 442:
http://au.fourfourtwo.com/news/95764,blog-excitement-reaching-a-peak–sort-of.aspx

I’m all for freeing it all up – let’s get rid of the silly rules, and let clubs do whatever they want.

I actually thought the youth league was all about providing cover for injuries.

Otherwise, for a cashed up GCU, injuires become a godsend because the replacement doesn’t come under the cap – or are you conveniently forgetting that aspect?

I look forward to wacthing GCU bring in 5 or 6 ring ins because a few of their no hopers have migraines.

Central coast done it with Aloisi. NEwcastle jets with Song which ended up winning the premiership.

If a players get injured – then we should be able to get new players. To me there’s no problem with that.

Pip

If you can live with a club captain by a thug then that’s fine as well

At Melbounre, we rely on the actual team to do the job for us.

Rostyn Griffiths is not the first player we have signed before a finals series (Greg Owens and Jason Spagnuolo in 2005/6) nor are we the only team to have done so (Sydney FC signed Jonas Salley on loan from the Knights in 2006/7).

None of those players made much of an impact, and neither side won the toilet seat. I expect that Griffiths will have little influence on the finals series and I believe you admitted as much elsewhere on this site.

Like it or not, we are operating within the rules and your club is entitled to do the same thing. Personally I don’t think clubs should be allowed to sign players specifically for the finals, even as injury replacements, but as long as the rule is there it is something we will have to live with. You are entitled to your complaint, but if Griffiths scores a hat trick tomorrow night I won’t be losing any sleep over it – same as if Muscat breaks Dodd’s leg in the 3rd minute and escapes even a booking you won’t lose any sleep over it.

C’mon – let’s get this discussion back on track!

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you or anyone here that the purpose of the salary cap is to ensure fiscal responsibility. The history of Australian football shows that clubs will kill themselves without such a restraint. Of course this happens overseas all the time (Leeds United, anyone?), but the difference in markets like that is that there are many other clubs ready to step in. With Australia’s lack of gradations (i.e., the next layer under the A-League is a long, long way below), our shop-window collapses if clubs go belly up.

So you address this by suggesting “FFA, please allow clubs to pay wage bills as a fixed percentage of their total income from all sources of revenue.”

Indeed, this does at least assure fiscal responsibility. However what it fails to address is the need for competitiveness across the board. Put simply, we have too many sporting choices here and we are too immature a footballing culture for perpetual losers to survive in terms of support. The fact is that as soon as a club stops winning in Australia, its support dwindles down to a core that is too small to enable long-term survival. I know it is hard for football tragics to understand this, but the fact of the matter is that football tragics are too small a proportion of our landscape (although they do make a disproportionate amount of noise!). Again, we are crucially different to the leagues of Europe in this respect. Our cousins in England seem happy to keep supporting all the also-rans in the Premiership even though there is no end in sight to its domination by just 4 teams. However the same would not happen in the A-League were it to be dominated year after year by superclubs in Melbourne and (say) Sydney.

Frank Lowy understands you but he also understands the above all too well. Until we have in place a large and unshakeable football culture, II don’t really see any alternative to Lowy’s vision of growing the pie (equally shared), as opposed to allowing unequal divisions of a pie that would probably stop growing.

Make sure a nothing player has a bit of a scratch and then bring in a ring-in from overseas just to play in the finals!