Nothing compares to the World Cup

Oh well...the weekends coming up so a fresh round of brawls might see them ramp up for you.

and with that it's . . . Over to you Nick !!

Again ti man confuses football & the A-League, why because in his game there is only 1 competition.

Ha!

I think you'll find you're wrong (again).

That's a fair enough way of looking at it. There are only 180 Australian players on A-League rosters, whereas the AFL can employ a minimum of 720 players. The 180th best Australian player in the A-League, i.e. the worst player in the league, will be earning around $45,000, while a recently drafted 18 year old in the AFL automatically starts with a salary double that, and may not play an AFL game in his first two seasons. The 180th best AFL player, i.e. just scraping into the top quartile of players in the AFL, will be on a salary at least 10 times what the 180th best player in the A-League is earning. Having said all of that, the 180th best player in the A-League has a good incentive to persist because if he can improve, he stands a chance of landing one of the hundreds of thousands of professional football contracts available all around the world. For example, just the other day, Liam Rose was let go by the Mariners, and he is pursuing a footall career in Armenia. These are the sorts of opportunities available to all A-League footballers, and will continue to be an attraction to youngsters.

Middy, I think you'll find Nick Symonds is another alias used by Mr AFL, Grobbelaar, MyLeftFoot, MQ, etc. etc. We're dealing with a person who has significant issues.

Nick, I think you've misunderstood why players leave football in their teens. Players that were good junior footballers that ended up being professional Aussie rules or Rugby league players generally would've left football in their teens because they were good at football, but not good ENOUGH! In reality, it is much, much less competitive in those other sports when you are looking at making a professional career in Australia. Some, with extra work and coaching may very well have been able to go on and be pushing for a spot as a lowly bench warmer in an A league reserve team, or who knows maybe even crack it for a first team spot, but they are able to go on and have high paid careers in those other sports as star players.

NIck has been putting up posts on the football board for as long as I've been here.

Nick Not sure I have seen you about much. Please be advised you can say anything you want in reply to a post I make. I read this one and O how typical. Anywho, I don't read or discuss with the seagulls chasing a chip mob anything. Given I will never ever read a post of yours again, feel free to write whatever you want

MASSIVE BREAKINNG NEWS...is... ...a book release? Hm. I preferred the other Massive Breaking News: “I really liked the World Cup”.

good stuff, thanks mid. i would love a similar piece on the last 32 of the ffa cup!

36,000 tickets, or was it 37,000, to the World Cup in Russia were sold in China, even though China did not qualify.

Can code switching be a success for players and fans? By Ian Syson, 4 May 2011 "While the AFL was sitting smugly in the glow of all of the publicity surrounding the defection of Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau, a dilemma was never far away. If the players failed to make the grade, the ploy would be seen simply as a cynical exercise in attention seeking. But that was not the worst that could happen. Their success might prove an even greater problem because it would raise the suggestion that Australian rules football is not that hard to play and that any developed athlete could learn to play the code with relative ease. Footy might then be painted as a fall-back sport for athletes who don’t make the grade elsewhere. It could also create a further disconnection between the game’s grass roots and the elite level. Why should a boy play his heart out for a club, rising through the pathways and representative football, struggling in second tier footy hoping for a breakthrough when ‘elite’ athletes from other codes and sports are waltzing in through the side door and getting paid millions in the process? Nonetheless, the code-switching of Folau and Hunt is a historic moment in Australian sport. Even if their shifts are complete flops (which seems to be a distinct possibility at the minute) the impact of their decisions and the way they were engineered will be lasting." - "As a soccer supporter this proposition had me vaguely excited. The prospect of league, union and Australian rules players giving our game a fair suck of the hydration bottle is appealing. One long-standing frustration for soccer in Australia is that many of its tens of thousands of juniors end up playing (and supporting) other codes of football at the senior level – this drift might well be the game’s fundamental problem in its ongoing efforts to establish itself on an equal footing in Australian sporting life. At the elite level, AFL players like Adam Goodes and Brad Green were standout junior soccer players. Rugby League’s Andrew Johns starred with the round ball as a junior in Newcastle. Preston Campbell loved playing soccer as a boy. Each of them left the game in their teens." https://www.theroar.com.au/2011/05/04/can-code-switching-be-a-success-for-players-and-fans/

Clipper I think in the short term, having 48 teams will see a watering down of close games, but over time as more of Asia and Africa improve we will see more competitive matches and then upsets. We see it first hand when the Socceroos come up against supposedly inferior opposition, but they often have much more technically gifted players than us. So it's only matter of time until they fix the other areas of their game which holds them back. If anything it will probably the excitement around qualifying for the world cup.

Just not having either Brazil or Germany in the last 4. I think that was the first time that happened since 1930.

Great article. We should have been talking about 19 year old Daniel Arzani, unfortunately he didn’t get enough game time, pity the Socceroos didn’t get further in the tournament, hopefully Australia embraces the world game and the A-League becomes more popular.

That's a good summation of the relative code's strengths re the world cup, Midfielder. Do you think the expansion to 48 team (albeit not until 2026) may water down the excitement and closeness of games or will it allow for more upsets?

Spot on At Work

Trip of a lifetime Mid, long service leave.