How the rest of the world see us....

[paul_oshea]

No, they're ****ing away money on a huge wage bill.

Well if you can't(afford) buy in good players, you might as well pay enough to keep the ones you have there.

Asset stripping stutts, you took literally, he meant the players as assets, selling the good players, is asset stripping.

[Stuttgart88]

No it's not. It's trading. OK, maybe I am being literal but asset stripping is taking a club asset and benefitting personally.

I'd love to fast forward 5 years and see does Financial Fair Play have an impact. I'm told UEFA is 100% determined to enforce it and would take hard action on Barca, Real, Chelsea, Milan - anyone, if needed.

[paul_oshea]

It depends whether you consider something over say 10 years a Fixed or Current Asset, in this case I would consider a player on a 5 year contract a medium term Fixed Asset, a bit like say a motor vehicle - taking in depreciation every year etc.

Current assets are more related to the financial year, though in old accounting terms Fixed, was always like a warehouse or building or land of some sort.

[Charlie Darwin]

Players don't depreciate - they amortise. If a club buys a player for, say, €10 million on a 5-year contract, he will recorded as a €10m asset and will amortise/depreciate €2 million per year until his contract is done. At that point he won't be considered an asset at all, and any transfer fee will be counted as current income. It would be tricky to record players as assets otherwise as you can incur large capital gains tax bills, whereas income is generally written off against expenditure.

[ArdeeBhoy]

http://footballrepublic.ie/mayor-poz...reland-person/

And no, doubt he's interested in the LOI either. Though maybe some far-sighted club should send him an invite. Would be good publicity...

[Stuttgart88]

Players don't depreciate - they amortise.

Owen Hargreaves?

[ArdeeBhoy]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18881087

Compared with the usual suspects which is just plain disgusting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18895671


And in a slightly related twist.

http://www.wsc.co.uk/forum-index/35-...it=20&start=20

[Stuttgart88]

Poznan mayor also talking about some hypothetical game in Dublin in February

http://www.independent.ie/sport/socc...n-3173225.html

[ArdeeBhoy]

Simply because it doesn't have too much to say.

You'd think you'd get a 'higher' standard of debate from such a self-important bunch;
http://www.wsc.co.uk/forum-index/35-...t=20&start=160

[Crosby87]

Ives sees Keane as MLS player of the month. So thats good, as to how the rest of the world see you.
http://www.soccerbyives.net/soccer_b...bie-keane.html

[mypost]

Good post and fair point, although this is where we should rightly expect the FAI to come in.

It's not the FAI's job to market the league. That's what they have a deal with RTE for. The FA doesn't market the EPL, that's Sky's job, and a job they do very well.

Marketing isn't an hour of highlights, or two hours of poorly-produced, badly-scheduled, and non-promoted live games. It's snazzy, imaginative advertising, showing why people can and should attend LOI football. Sky could market a league game between Morecambe and Grimsby and make it look appealing. What do RTE do?

the Irish League is on SKY and it hasn't exactly made it more glamourous

That league on Sky is 2 games a year. It receives no promotion, no advertising, no marketing, and no coverage outside of those two games. No it's not glamourous.

[SwanVsDalton]

It's not the FAI's job to market the league. That's what they have a deal with RTE for. The FA doesn't market the EPL, that's Sky's job, and a job they do very well.

The Premier League's doesn't have to market itself because it's blimming huge and people will pay to consume it 24/7. But club's - particularly smaller one's such as Swansea, Blackburn, Southampton - do need to market themselves. Fortunately the Premier League's incomparable SKY deal and ticket sales can budget for that.

Irish club's are not in that position and it's fair to say the FAI should do a lot more to market the league or at least assist each club in getting a marketing campaign together to attract punters. Its situation is world's removed from the EPL.

[OwlsFan]

People seem to think that football didn't exist before the EPL in England. A Sheffield derby in 1979 in the old Division 3 attracted over 49 thousand people. There were huge crowds in Division One at that time. All there was was Match of the Day and the Big Match on Sunday on ITV. Very little live football. The difference was the players were paid a pittance and the grounds and pitches were sub standard but the fans still loved it with little or no marketing. The difference is that football is in the culture of the Engish people to support their local team from Liverpool, Sheffield Wednesday, Doncaster Rovers or Carlisle United. The culture in Ireland is primarily to support your local county team in the GAA with diehard football fans staying loyal to their team.

I am not sure what the answer for local football is in this country. Something along the rugby lines perhaps (2 teams in Dublin north and south), Leinster, Cork, Connaught and Ulster. 6 teams but without other teams from perhaps Northern Ireland/Wales/Scotland like the Rabo Direct league, LOI will struggle like it mostly has, although I do remember almost getting crushed to death in Dalymount at a few cup finals involving the Hoops as a kid.

[Stuttgart88]

I think the key difference is that the EPL benefits from the marketing might of SKY and football is now ubiquitous, replica shirts are everywhere, the players are celebrities etc.

In the old days football was still popular but was seen as a slightly quirky pasttime and people like us who were fascinated by it were seen as a bit odd. Fever Pitch changed that perception.

This applies to both sides of the Irish Sea.

The Irish haven't attached themselves to football like the English have - as you say it's a cultural thing in England - but football has infiltrated Irish households now much more than it had done in the pre-EPL days. It's a big telly show now, just like Corrie or Eastenders.

[Crosby87]

For any of you old coots, what was football like in the 60s and 70s before there was an EPL? Did teams just arbitrarily play each other? Was it a free for all? Did you have to get the result via smoke signal? It must have been hard to follow unless it was still organized to some point.
I could never have been alive in those days. I would have gone crazy.

[Charlie Darwin]

It's not the FAI's job to market the league. That's what they have a deal with RTE for. The FA doesn't market the EPL, that's Sky's job, and a job they do very well.

Marketing isn't an hour of highlights, or two hours of poorly-produced, badly-scheduled, and non-promoted live games. It's snazzy, imaginative advertising, showing why people can and should attend LOI football. Sky could market a league game between Morecambe and Grimsby and make it look appealing. What do RTE do?

The FA don't run the Premier League though, but the FAI do run the League of Ireland. Sky do an amazing job of marketing the EPL but the clubs took the trouble of creating the product and continue to package it in a way that is attractive to Sky and rival networks. The FAI does fcuk all to aid promotion of the league and gives RTE next to no incentive to do the job for them.

[Junior]

Hard to believe that no local tv station have the St Pats game against Hanover tonight. They do have the Liverpool game however........

[Stuttgart88]

The clubs didn't do that much to be honest.

The definitive piece on the birth of the EPL was David Conn's "The Beautiful Game: Searching for the Soul of Football".

Basically, the late 1980s had seen crowd trouble and decrepit stadia etc. all damaging football's appeal, so change was required.

But there was a power struggle between the Football League and the FA. The Football League fired the first shots towards change, by producing a document calling for greater harmony between themselves and the Football Association (FA). The League and the FA often clashed on issues such as the release of players for international duty and, more importantly, distribution of money. Conn corrected the popular misperception that some elite club chairmen, in some kind of visionary manner, identified the commercial potential of televised football. The Football League’s document actually identified the changing broadcast landscape as representing “an era of unprecedented opportunity”.

However, the FA saw the Football’s League’s proposals as a threat, and in an effort to stamp its authority it embraced the idea of a breakaway from the Football League of several of England’s most commercially attractive clubs.

Conn said that this was a big misjudgment on the FA’s part. The Football League was certainly representing its clubs’ financial interests, led by the larger clubs’ demands for more distributions from the FA’s FA Cup and international match revenues. However, it was these same large clubs that were threatening to breakaway and which the FA supported in its 1991 Blueprint for the Future of Football. Most of the Blueprint was never implemented, except for the creation in 1992 of the Premier League. The rationale for endorsing the breakaway was purely for footballing reasons according to the Blueprint. A smaller elite league would place less demands on England’s international footballers. However, Conn identified the desire to “smash the Football League” as the real motivation. As it turned out, the Premier League was never reduced to its intended 18 clubs and the Premier League was never held to account for this by the FA. The anticipated flow of TV revenues materialised from the broadcast deal with BSKYB, and the vast majority of the revenues were now no longer shared with clubs outside the top flight, a break with one of the Football League’s founding principles. The club versus country conflict was never resolved – it arguably got worse.

In an effort to gain more control over English football the FA actually ended up with less! The EPL was allowed to call the shots and the EPL, in my opinion, is for all intents and purposes a captive vehicle for SKY / Murdoch. SKY did all the heavy lifting when it came to marketing and packaging. Where the EPL does deserve credit is for seizing the opportunity and for benefiting from the FAs incompetence / misplaced objectives.

[Stuttgart88]

Marketing isn't an hour of highlights, or two hours of poorly-produced, badly-scheduled, and non-promoted live games. It's snazzy, imaginative advertising, showing why people can and should attend LOI football. Sky could market a league game between Morecambe and Grimsby and make it look appealing. What do RTE do?

That's different though. Football is SKY's "killer app" opening up their channels and platforms to millions. For RTE football is an inconveniece I'd say - there's little upside to RTE compared to the return that SKY gets for its investment.

Take away the TV money from English football and it's a small business, a cottage industry almost.

Remember as well that promotion is only one part of marketing. Product (all important), price and place are critical parts of the mix too. I wrote in quite a lot of detail on this here last month (c'mon - I know you've read it!). In English football the "place" which in sport is a critical piece of the "product" actually benefitted from post-Hillsborough legislation and government subsidies (via the Football Pools (or state lottery type game) as far as I can recall).

For any of you old coots, what was football like in the 60s and 70s before there was an EPL? Did teams just arbitrarily play each other? Was it a free for all? Did you have to get the result via smoke signal? It must have been hard to follow unless it was still organized to some point.

I presume that's a joke. Jeepers, I really hope so

Hard to believe that no local tv station have the St Pats game against Hanover tonight. They do have the Liverpool game however........

Staggering.

[Eminence Grise]

All too true, Stutts, but marketing also uses physical evidence (two teams playing samba football in an all-seated stadium on a scald day in Bray), process (trouble-free administration of clubs and a supply line of talent from underage up) and people (high profile footballers and coaches).

The first is hard to achieve without funding for ground development. The second is costly and requires professionalising administration in clubs and the FAI. The first is achievable at very little cost...

There is a hankering for reality TV programmes, so pander to it. Apart from Shamrock Rovers on some TV3 cookery programme with Conrad Gallagher, I can’t recall seeing any LoI player on a non-sports programme since Stephen Geoghegan modelled that orange strip. If retired GAA and rugby players have a second life as celebrity banisteoirs, chefs, beauticians, farmers, dinner party hosts and what not, or plugging duh hoi performance vittuhmin or online degrees, then why, with a little orchestration, can’t current LoI players? Also, RTE could promote MNS at no cost: occasionally have an LoI player or manager (from a small panel of 5 or 6, all media trained) on the panel of the Premiership and plug the programme for all its worth. If something funny/interesting happens in world football, have an LoI player as the go-to for John Murray, Sean Moncrieff, Ray Darcy, local radio stations etc etc.

The key to increasing the league and players’ profiles is not targeting those who already know about them, but making them visible in areas where they’re not expected. It's not an overnight solution, but over time public awareness would increase.