Serie A is using the same ball this weekend.

And the defences have been suitably charitable. 38 goals (I think) so far this weekend. What's the record for goals in a single Serie A weekend?

Sean of the Shed wrote:
They were the polar opposite of Bradford, not paying inflated wages or outlandish transfer fees

The transfer fees we paid were hardly out of the ordinary for the time; David Hopkin cost £2.5m (likely to be the record for a very very long time), Ashley 'relegation jonah' Ward £1.5m, Dan Petrescu £1m.

Yes, Carbone's contract was a killer in terms of wages (and perks, read the "Six Weeks of Madness" chapter in The Beautiful Game by David Conn), but of all the players signed that summer he was by far the one who came closest to justifying them by performances and workrate on the pitch. Say what you like about rest of the team, he was trying. It was just a shame very few other players were on his wavelength.

It was the likes of Peter Atherton, Ian Nolan, Ward, Hopkin (he played nine games for us and was sold at a £2m loss), Petrescu that were the really bad value for money signings from the point of view of their wages. Lee Sharpe was another, from the season before. Collymore was on pay-as-you-play and only appeared in seven games before scarpering to Real Oviedo.

The end for us was the day Jewell walked out having had enough of Richmond's incessant interference from above. He told Jewell, after staying up, "we've had a very poor season". WTF??? Chris Hutchings was seemingly much more 'compliant' and less of a hindrance to player recruitment. The long propagated story locally is that Jewell wanted to sign Jonathan Greening and Jordi Cruyff from Manchester United, and that wasn't high profile enough for GR.

We also haven't helped ourselves in our fall from grace with some some (in hindsight) really poor managerial appointments; Jim Jefferies and Nicky Law spring immediately to mind.

Bradford's transfers and wages expenditure was coupled with a massive and unnecessary ground improvements programme. The Kop had been converted into a two tiered all seater stand throughout the promotion season, but did the Main Stand really need a second redevelopment?

Did I read in WSC a few months back that the 25,000 capacity has been utilised once since the Main Stand was redevolped again?

No, it didn't need doing at all. A proper training ground and youth academy was a far more pressing issue. Richmond might have presented himself as some all-seeing leader, but that was a real failing of his. Ten years later we still train on the same patch of mud by the Leeds-Liverpool canal. In bad weather, we have no large scale indoor surface. Talented kids from the area still leave to go to clubs with proper facilities: Dean Windass's son went to Huddersfield, John Hendrie's son recently went to Manchester United.

The stand was opened at a reduced capacity in the home game against Liverpool after we were relegated. Attendance was sold out at 22,500ish. The full 25,134 capacity has never been sold out, with the possible exception of Stuart McCall's testimonial.

Etienne wrote:
No, but it is a charity thing.

Ahh, so it's a Nike marketing thing masquerading as a charity thing. That would have been my first guess.

The most surprising of opening threads lead to longish threads.

It's always Oldham that surprises me and, somewhere along the line, I thought Huddersfield had crept in. Madness

We were close in 99/00 (top at Christmas with Marcus Stewart and Clyde Wijnhard firing on all cylinders).

Then Steve Bruce told the chairman to accept our closest promotion rivals Ipswich's £3m offer for Marcus Stewart, claiming he had a perfectly good replacement for £300k in Sheffield United's Martin Smith.

Wijnhard stopped scoring, Smith didn't score enough, we stayed down, Ipswich went up and the rest is history...

Since the Premiership began, football has become a game massively over-populated by cunts from top to bottom.

hmm, reading eamon dunphy's book about matt busby, it would appear that if anything football was worse the further back you go. the glazers may be fucking pirates, but they didn't make their money selling dodgy meat to school canteens. footballers may get paid too much, but their predecessors were financially raped in the past and treated as vassals.

and no-one has died because of criminal negligence since the mid to late eighties. (when all of the dreadful things that could have happened at any point over the last hundred years all happened at once) Football may have been better in many ways in the past, but it was at a massive cost. It's a shame that the improvements have had new and different kinds of cuntishness tacked on like on of those american laws that has something unpleasant buried somewhere inside.

Since the Premiership began has also been an excuse to reset the historical statistics of over 100 years of football and treat 1992 as a footballing Year Zero.

If I hear that sodding question about how many players have scored 100 Premiership goals just once more. Once, just once I would love to hear how the 100 goals Scholes or Rooney have scored stack up historically against the all time greats, not just the ones of the past generation.

Copy and paste everything above and replace Premiership with Champions League for an equally annoying reinvention of European Cup history.

Cavalry Trouser Tips wrote:
We were close in 99/00 (top at Christmas with Marcus Stewart and Clyde Wijnhard firing on all cylinders).

Then Steve Bruce told the chairman to accept our closest promotion rivals Ipswich's £3m offer for Marcus Stewart, claiming he had a perfectly good replacement for £300k in Sheffield United's Martin Smith.

Wijnhard stopped scoring, Smith didn't score enough, we stayed down, Ipswich went up and the rest is history...

I never knew that about Martin Smith before.

And I guess you never knew this about Martin Smith before:

With Kieron Dyer just sold for £6m up front, and Bobby Petta having just left on a free, Ipswich desperately needed a left winger, and number one on Burley's shortlist was - Martin Smith. Smith was on his way out of Sunderland, but both Sunderland and Smith were pissing about. We'd tried a few trialists in pre-season, just in case Smith didn't sign, but none of them worked out.

Just before the season starts Smith signs for Sheffield United because Ipswich was too far south for him, leaving us starting the season with just two left sided players, one being so usesless (Sean Friars) that the only reason he appeared to be allocated a squad number was because of an internet campaign - so Burley has to go with Plan B, swicthing from 4-4-2 to 5-3-2 with boo-boy James Scowcroft moving behind the front two. The system works to perfection, Scowcroft finds his niche and silences the boo-boys on his way to winning Ipswich Player of the Year with one of the biggest margins in history. Burley switches his top priority from a left winger to a striker - Marcus Stewart - only picking up a wide player in Martijn Reuser once Stewart signs.

And the rest is history...

That kind of thing never works out for us. Not once can I ever remember a boo-boy eventually having the season of his life. They just get shitter and shitter until we sell them (whereupon they inevitably come back with their new club and score against us)

I did acknowledge that in my opening post, dalliance, and agree with you.

The Premier League did mean a change in the running of the top division and in football generally and I did wonder whether it has meant that football has, indeed, ended up being populated by a bunch of cunts or, as has been suggested, not much has changed.

What hasn't been suggested yet us whether it has been better football generally, the clubs or fans. I don't have Sky but I would have thought that a lot of people feel that football benefits from the TV deals set up by the Premier League.

It's a bit simplistic to counterpose 'old football' and 'new football' like this.

Football has to a very great extent been run by the same sort of cunts as ran it in the pre-Premier age. But structural, financial and technological changes have allowed them to find new forms of cuntiness (and discard some of the old forms), and to find additional cunts to join them.

People like David Dein, Dave Richards and Co bridged the gap between old football and new football with effortless, grasping opportunism.

Wot he said.

bored, I have a video of manchester united's 1991-2 season somewhere, and to be honest, football had reached a serious fucking low that season.

I think from a footballing point of view the premiership's arrival coincided with the end of the tackle from behind, the end of the pass back, and I think there was a change to the offside rule. I would argue that football changed fundamentally around the exact date of the start of the premiership, but it wasn't down to the premiership.

I suppose the one thing that the extra money in the premiership brought about was that since there was more at stake, maybe it would be best if the players weren't actually drinking on the pitch.

dalliance wrote:
Since the Premiership began has also been an excuse to reset the historical statistics of over 100 years of football and treat 1992 as a footballing Year Zero.

If I hear that sodding question about how many players have scored 100 Premiership goals just once more. Once, just once I would love to hear how the 100 goals Scholes or Rooney have scored stack up historically against the all time greats, not just the ones of the past generation.

Copy and paste everything above and replace Premiership with Champions League for an equally annoying reinvention of European Cup history.
Hear hear.

The four most striking changes that I can recognise since roughly 1992 would seem to have no real connection with the formation of the Premier League, namely:

The improvement in pitches which has favoured more skillful play in general.

The adoption of sports science, application of scientific performance management and general vastly improved fitness levels which has resulted in far less time on the ball and hugely increased athletic ability by the players.

The gradual tightening of the refereeing standards particularly on the tackle from behind, so that there is less and less value in the "destroyer" type player who were a common feature of top level teams up to 20 years ago.

The gradual movement towards a lighter ball and the tinkering with the rules in general, the alteration of the back pass rule has probably had the biggest effect on the way games are played closely followed by the madness of the offside rule changes.

I think most of these changes have favoured more skillful players which in turn has underlined the advantage of the wealthier clubs over the rest because they have the money to employ the most skilful players.

The increased fitness levels is the odd one out and it has become increasingly possible for lesser clubs to use this and work hard to close down better teams for the whole game.

The mega-money that the Premier League generated, started the foreign player invasion.

Foreign players changed the game hugely, and they were they ones who kick-started the upward spiral of technical ability in the Premier League.

There were always a few foreign players before. But they were always the exception. Now they are the rule. I believe Arsenal were the first to field a fully foreign team, and that was a fair few years ago now.

And stadia too of course, there are not many areas in which we are world leaders but few countries have such a selection of fine stadia as England now.

From an administrative perspective it's miles better now too, the Football League were so embarrassingly amateur.