Redslo

The situation is more complicated than that. If we could sell a significant number of additional tickets over the course of a season and thereby generate a significant amount of additional revenue and if Leibherr was filling to fund the expansion, the additional revenue would be available under FFP to spend on salary and transfer fees whereas the costs of expansion would not count against FFP. If Liebherr is not willing to fund the expansion, then cash flow limits probably dictate against the expansion.

Brighton makes sense but isn't Pompey's stadium completely inadequate for a World Cup? It only holds 21,100 according to my in depth googling.

I don't and I spent close to 40 hours researching the issue.

I agree. Also, it just occurred to me that this might lead to strange strategies like scouting nations who rank in the 50s to find players would be eligible for work permits if their nation was ranked at 50 or above and then signing them right after their national team wins a couple of games and jumps up past 50.

Except the newly proposed rules change the time to become home grown from when the player turns 21 to 18. This means that Schneiderlin, for example, would not be home grown. For that matter, neither would Shane Long since he was already 18 when he left Cork City for Reading. (Steven Davis is ok since he arrived at Aston Villa at a young enough age.) Canadians are so rude. The change to 18 years old means that virtually all home grown players will be English. You would have to bring in a foreign player when he was 15 to get him to qualify under the new rules. This does not happen often--well maybe it does with Scottish and Northern Irish players. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this would affect us. Mane had not played enough to qualify under the new rules--although I suspect he has played enough recently to change this. Japan is not in the top 50 so Yoshida would be unable to get a work permit. The same applies to Kenya and Wanyama.

I am aware of the identity of our association trained home grown players. See here: http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2015/01/southamptons-european-roster-issues.html I am also aware that under the newly proposed rules we would only have two club trained rosters spots to fill. I just believe that we would never be able to fill them because the players who would qualify would be bought away by bigger teams. These new proposed rules open a lot of questions and create a lot of problems. First, will UEFA changes their homegrown rules to be consistent. If not clubs may have very different rosters for Europe vs. the Premier League. And English clubs would be at a severe disadvantage in European competition. Second, our club trained players who are good enough to play in the Premier League will be very valuable to Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Spurs who will want them to fill their need for 10 Association trained players. How will we be able to retain them? Answer, we probably won't but we can fill our need for association trained players by buying from Hull or Sunderland or some other poorer club. If you increase the demand for something that is in limited supply the price will go up to the point where only a few buyers remain. This will mean that the good English players will all gravitate to the richest clubs. The poorer clubs will be forced to fill their rosters will players who are not good enough because the English roster spots must be filled. Consider this article : http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11661/9774272/fa-home-grown-rules-bad-news-for-man-city-arsenal-and-chelsea I have not checked their work but consider what the article says about Man City. They would need six more English players. Possibly one or two of them would come from their academy but most of them would come from us or clubs like us. On the good side, under these rules we probably could have sold Shaw and Lallana for 50 million pounds each. On the other hand, Long would probably have cost us 25 million pounds.

Exactly. Of course, we will do some of that raiding ourselves to make up for the players we lose to the richer clubs.

Sure it is. Under the new rules we have no one who qualifies right now and only Lloyd Isgrove will qualify next year. I realize there is a phase in period but how exactly will we hang onto our Premier League caliber English players when the richer clubs need to buy them from us to meet the new requirements. Sure we can buy some players off the poorer clubs, but they will not be club trained for us. Also, unless UEFA adopts identical rules it will be a mess and grossly disadvantage English clubs in European competition. As an American fan of Southampton and, to a lesser extent, the Premier League as a whole, these new rules will be a disaster since I only have a slight interest in the success of the English National team.

I didn't see that provision. I am not sure I like it since the last thing the Premier League needs is more rules that favor the rich established clubs and these new rules have that written all over them.

My experience as an American is, of course, quite different. I get to hear racism virtually any time a Republican politician talks. Also, remember that public expressions of racism are legal in the USA because we are number one.

He might have been speaking metaphorically.

In case anyone cares, I discussed the racism issue in two posts on my blog last fall. I caught some flak on the Ugly Inside Forum but not so much here which sort of caused me to focus my posting here since then. Here are the links: http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2014/10/racism-in-english-football-and-rooney.html http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2014/11/racism-in-english-football-and-rooney.html

Except that, unless you are lying and I am not suggesting that you are, you have reported a racist incident to police. That would make the initial premise false all by itself no matter what else might be going on.

You ought to be more concerned about this issue. I have heard that Orange is the new Black.

I addressed this issue in an earlier blog post. http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2015/01/financial-fair-play-friend-or-foe.html Basically, I concluded that while FFP could limit our ability to compete, it only did so if we have an owner who wanted to spend in excess of 12 or 13 million pounds a year on the team and that the owners of Man City and Chelsea would be willing to spend a lot more than that. On the other hand, it blocked teams with lower income than us from competing with us--even if they picked up a new rich owner. The new Crystal Palace ownership will be interesting to watch. They are rich. So long as they do not qualify for Europe, they can out spend us by a net of around 27 million pounds a year. Will they do that? We shall see.

I thought so too. But it was interesting to read their reactions without the personal emotional distress involved in the similar threads there. I was mainly surprised that many of them assumed the RK was objectively and indisputably a bad manager.

And Mane's eligibility was iffy under the current rules. He had not played the required percentage of his nations games.

(77/42) times 38=69.6666666666666666667 so 70 points it is.

I just posted "Great Moments in Recent Southampton History (Part 12)"

You could be right, but keep in mind that if that happens we have to hope Liverpool does not win 6 out of 8 or Tottenham does not win 6 out of 8 plus a draw. Neither seems that likely but they are additional barriers to our qualifying with just six more wins.

I believe so. That would be my guess. I assume the rules wouldn't be retroactively applied to current players but who knows. I think all four of the ones you mentioned would still qualify even under the new rules. However, we also have Ramirez and Gazzaniga--although Football Manager claims Gazzaniga is also Spanish. Some of our younger players are foreign citizens but, according to Football Manager, they all also eligible to play for England or some other EU country.

If the newly proposed rules were in effect now Morgan would not qualify as homegrown for us or for England. Of course, since there is no sign that UEFA is going to change their rules, he would still qualify for European purposes.

Yes, but for different reasons.

I don't think the data was collected with the specific intent to disprove a hypothesis. However, I would imagine that is this data were available over a long enough period of time you could test the hypothesis that minutes played by internationals is positively correlated with club performance. If this turned out to be true you could use the information as a proxy for club and, possibly, league quality. You might be able to determine whether international status correlates with player costs (salary and transfer fees) and then do some kind of regression analysis to see whether international status is overvalued or undervalue and then conduct recruitment accordingly. No doubt other lines of investigation would occur to other people--or to me if I spent more time thinking about it. I do agree that the information just presented, by itself doesn't prove or demonstrate much of anything.

To be fair, KD doing poorly in 2012 and doing well now would be the reason it would be the stuff of legends.