Originally Posted by
Riddickcule
I have this book which is basically called "The Football Book"
It's bloody massive and contains endless facts, laws, tactics, leagues etc.
It also goes through every country and it says the amount of registered clubs, which includes Semi-Professional and Amateur.
For Ireland it says 5,500. Now i did a bit of calculations as I have no life. I divided the amount of clubs by the population which is around 4.4 million.
Which brings it to about 1 football club to every 800 people. Surely thats too many clubs right there.
Now, i'll make some comparisons with some other countries, obviously I wont do every country, i'll do a few european countries, and from what evidence this book gives:
England : Pop. 60 mill. Clubs: 42,500...1 club to 1,412 people.
Scotland: Pop. 5 mill. Clubs: 6,500...1 club to 769 people.
Wales: Pop. 3 mill. Clubs: 1,900...1 club to 1,579 people
Norn Ireland: Pop. 1.8 mill Clubs: 820...1 club to 2,195 people
Denmark: Pop. 5.5 mill Clubs: 1,500...1 club to 3,667 people
Norway: Pop. 4.6 mill Clubs: 1,800...1 club to 2,555 people
Now I could've sampled any country, I just chose our neighbours and other countries similiar in population to ours. With the exception of Scotland, clearly this proves we have too many clubs.
I know this wouldn't be easy to do, but I think we need to crop down the amount of clubs we have. For eg. in a town of 20,000 we could have around 3 or 4 clubs. Tbh thats ridiculous. A lot of towns are like that so surely we should merge some clubs and in turn that would create better competition locally and nationally.
In my town, we have 2 clubs. Our towns pop. is about 15,000. However the catch here is that one is a schoolboy club only and the other is purely an LSL team.
Why not merge the two, put finances together, put together a decent senior team that could even compete in the LOI.
Anyway, would you agree with me on the purpose of my post? Was looking at this book over a cup of tea and noticed this, I think we need less clubs, concentrate the talent more and we can produce better players. etc.
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