Gold Medal Standard

There was news last week that the only Olympic Sport with tickets available was football. Some people were surprised at this, saying that Football was the Nation’s sport and they thought the tickets would be snapped up.

In actual fact the figures of the thing are quite interesting. The tickets start at £20 but rise to a quite astonishing £125, and there are around 800,000 that have been sold. This makes football the most popular Olympic sport, a fact the organisers have been keen to trumpet.

However, that only tells half of the story. The 800,000 sold still means there approximately 1.5m left and tickets are apparently available for nearly every men’s group game as well as the Quarter Finals and one of the semi’s. For the women’s game the situation is even worse, with no game – including the final – sold out yet.

On one hand this is a shame, as football really is the only truly UK wide event in London’s Olympics. Matches are taking place at places as geographically diverse as Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Cardiff as well as at Wembley.

So the inquest has now begun as to why this should be. It seems to me that there are all sorts of reasons for the 1.5 million tickets being left. At cheap5aside.com, to be totally honest we are not gripped with Olympic fever anyway, but that is especially true of the football tournament.

People are right, we do love football in this country. But we don’t have any affinity with the football tournament in the Olympics. Team GB has never been represented before, and of course there is an on-Then there is the rather more important matter of Euro 2012. The battle in Poland and the Ukraine ends an on-going battle surrounding the availability of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish players for the tournament. matter of weeks before the Olympics begin and herein lies perhaps the biggest issue that five ringed football faces: Simply it is not the pinnacle of their career for any of the players involved. Winning the World Cup, The Premier League, Euro 2012, the FA Cup, whatever it is, they are all more important, surely than the Olympic tournament is.

The four year sporting extravaganza is about athletics, mainly, then to a lesser extent swimming and cycling. For these people the medal is what they have worked for all their lives. Is that really true if, say, David Beckham?

The organisers are anticipating a surge in interest when the draw for the competition is made, but I cant help feeling that this pie in the sky and the football in the Olympics whether it is the men’s or women’s tournament will be shown in little highlights packages to a disinterested TV audience who are eager to watch Chris Hoy, Mo Farrah, Jessica Ennis or Usian Bolt.

And if you think I am being harsh let me pose you a question: Without Googling it, who won the 2008 football championships in Beijing?

No, I don’t know either.

Value For Money - Only Matters When You Win

So Fabio kissed goodbye to a £6m a year contract last night, and apparently did so on a point of principle.

Good luck to him, but as someone remarked this morning it’s a damn sight easier to have principles when you are on £6m a year than when you are on £6 an hour.

The fact of the matter is, though, that no one would actually give a monkeys what Fabio Capello had earned during his tenure as England boss if he had actually done a good job.

People talk about value for money (and god knows this website wouldn’t exist if people didn’t demand it) but what people value more than anything – and this is especially true of sport – is that the person we are paying these exorbitant sums actually wins something and in turn makes us feel good.

On the BBC News last night the journalist Mihir Bose was trying to make the comparison between Capello’s (it must be said exorbitant) salary and the bonus which Banker Stephen Hester refused last week under public pressure. But that rather misses the point.

As much as the callers to phone-ins like to say words to the effect that “if I did my job that badly I would be sacked” in relation to a player who has a bad game, or more likely a referee, the same employment rules do not apply.

With sports (and most importantly football seeing as that’s what we are about at cheap5aside.com) we live vicariously. Think of the language you use: “We played well.” “We were crap”. When things get really bad there will be some variant of “you’re not fit to wear the shirt.” Will be sung, you can bet on it. The teams we support are part of us, in a way that wear you bank isn’t and never will be

The big difference between any footballer and Stephen Hester is that we love football, but we have to go to the bank.

That doesn’t mean though, that we are here to be ripped off. Which is why footballers get abuse when they don’t perform, its why Managers are under pressure, its why Capello was never widely loved. If they don’t provide us “value for money” then we will come down on them like a tonne of bricks – and all of a sudden we will care what wages they get.

Of course, this loyalty only refers to the 11 aside game, when it coes to 5 a side, we only want a good product. Here we genuinely want value for money and here, we will all happily leave on a point of principle.

Rip us off at your peril.

Value For Money In The January Window

The news that spending was down 70% in this transfer window will have come as a surprise to no-one who follows these things.

According to accountants Delloite spending in January 2012 was estimated to be around £60m amongst the Premier League clubs, which of course is considerably less than the money spent on taking Torres to Chelsea and Carroll to Liverpool last year.

In the last couple of days there has been much discussion as to why, with Delliote’s own Director of Sports Business, Alan Switzer, blaming the onset of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations for the dramatic decrease.

"The 2011-12 season does now count towards the Uefa rules and that will be part of the consideration which clubs will be giving to any transfer,” he was quoted as saying on the BBC website.

Those financial fair play laws state that any club that loses more than €45m (around about £37m) in the two seasons between 2011-13 could be barred from European Competitions such as the Champions League and it does appear that this has played a part, with Arsene Wenger saying: “It looks like economically the whole of Europe is becoming a bit more cautious."

But if that is – no doubt – a part of the story then perhaps it is not as big a part as is being claimed.

Whether it is Real Madrid selling their training ground to the Spanish government, or Manchester City having their ground sponsored for astronomical sums, the big clubs can find a way round around these losses, and I am yet to be convinced that UEFA, for all its good intentions is going to kick a really big club out its competitions. Can you imagine Sky, for example, being happy if there was no Barca, Real or Man City in the Champions League? So in actuality surely UEFA are just talking a good game?

So perhaps it is not just a new-found desire of the massive European behemoth’s to get their financial house in order, and the lack of transfers is for more altogether pragmatic reasons.

Namely, is there any value in making transfers at this time of the season?

If you take a look at the big four transfers last time – those aforementioned two that saw Torres leave Anfield and Carroll and Suarez replace him – and the one that saw David Luiz bring his rather eccentric brand of defending to West London, with the notable exception of the controversial Uruguayan has any of these men delivered the goods?

Surely by their very nature transfers at this time of year mostly fall into the “take a punt” bracket. Teams that are struggling at the bottom of the league needing to strengthen their squads – such as QPR, who you have to say probably did the best out of all the teams, but the teams challenging for honours (and therefore the same teams that the fair play law is going to affect) largely feel its best to stay out of it. Unless, like Chelsea, you can get someone who’s contract is running out at a knockdown price before the inevitable scrum in the summer – but interestingly Gary Cahill is yet to start a game in the league for Chelsea, so maybe it was more with 2012-13 in mind anyway?

Getting someone at a knockdown price in 2012 is a lot different to spending £50m on a player that hasn’t performed yet since his transfer in 2011, and there can be no doubt that buying players in the summer, with all the opportunities that gives for pre-season training, team integration and so on, must be infinitely more preferable to managers than an unseemly squabble in January.

And viewed in that light, perhaps this £60m spend is much less about financial fair play than good, old fashioned, football sense?

Value For Money - Only Matters When You Win?

So Fabio kissed goodbye to a £6m a year contract last night, and apparently did so on a point of principle.

Good luck to him, but as someone remarked this morning it’s a damn sight easier to have principles when you are on £6m a year than when you are on £6 an hour.

The fact of the matter is, though, that no one would actually give a monkeys what Fabio Capello had earned during his tenure as England boss if he had actually done a good job.

People talk about value for money (and god knows this website wouldn’t exist if people didn’t demand it) but what people value more than anything – and this is especially true of sport – is that the person we are paying these exorbitant sums actually wins something and in turn makes us feel good.

On the BBC News last night the journalist Mihir Bose was trying to make the comparison between Capello’s (it must be said exorbitant) salary and the bonus which Banker Stephen Hester refused last week under public pressure. But that rather misses the point.

As much as the callers to phone-ins like to say words to the effect that “if I did my job that badly I would be sacked” in relation to a player who has a bad game, or more likely a referee, the same employment rules do not apply.

With sports (and most importantly football seeing as that’s what we are about at cheap5aside.com) we live vicariously. Think of the language you use: “We played well.” “We were crap”. When things get really bad there will be some variant of “you’re not fit to wear the shirt.” Will be sung, you can bet on it. The teams we support are part of us, in a way that wear you bank isn’t and never will be

The big difference between any footballer and Stephen Hester is that we love football, but we have to go to the bank.

That doesn’t mean though, that we are here to be ripped off. Which is why footballers get abuse when they don’t perform, its why Managers are under pressure, its why Capello was never widely loved. If they don’t provide us “value for money” then we will come down on them like a tonne of bricks – and all of a sudden we will care what wages they get.

Of course, this loyalty only refers to the 11 aside game, when it coes to 5 a side, we only want a good product. Here we genuinely want value for money and here, we will all happily leave on a point of principle.

Rip us off at your peril.