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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Chelsea booked the greatest ever loss by a football club at £282 million, comfortably smashing Man City's record, though with much less to show for it. But both outfits should change their accountants.
| The Athletic wrote: | Newcastle United sold both their St James’ Park home and adjacent land to another company owned by the club’s shareholders last season, enabling them to book their first profit since coming under the majority ownership of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in October 2021.
The intragroup asset sales generated paper proceeds of £176 million and an accounting profit of £133m, resulting in a pre-tax profit of £34m for Newcastle in 2024-25. Without the sales, the club would have posted a record £98m loss. |
Hey, what about if Man City buys Chelsea, loans everything back to them and meanwhile Chelsea buys Man City but changes their name to Man... well, anyway, something along those lines.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Tomorrow is the Boat Race. For those of you under seventy, this is a contest between Oxford University's bought-in ringers and Cambridge University's bought-in ringers as to which of them could row a four and a bit mile stretch of the Thames tideway faster.
You may not believe this but at one time the country (the UK, I'm talking about) stopped everything they were doing and hurried to the bonny banks of London's mighty river or to their neighbour's black and white Ferguson nine-inch telly to find out.
The country (I'm still talking about the UK) was in those days divided not so much by Red and Blue political parties--you were born with those allegiances--as by the citizenry opting for either Light or Dark Blue. If, for example, you were dark blue (i.e. Oxford) you were evil personified.
PS This may or may not go back to the English Civil War when Oxford was Charles the First's capital and Cambridge was the chief stamping ground of Cromwell's New Model Army.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Did You Know? No 447
Despite there being 80,000 Chinese who play cricket regularly, China ranks number ninety-one in the world, between Saint Helena and Lesotho.
Did You Know? No 448
The international cricket rankings go down to at least ninety-two countries.
Did You Know? No 449
That Saint Helena played international sport.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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What do you when you've got the biggest and best stadium in the Premier League and you're a billion pounds in debt?
| The Athletic wrote: | | At a purported cost of £2billion, building the new ground represented a massive outlay for any club, never mind one in the midst of huge cost-cutting after five straight years of loss-making. How, exactly, were United going to pay for it? |
You could always ask the new mug on board.
| Ratcliffe’s INEOS business has financial concerns of its own, and has halted dividends for five years to try to tackle those, limiting his scope to add more to the £238 million he has already injected into United coffers since February 2024. |
You could always ask the actual owners to stump up.
| As for the Glazers, they’ve spent twenty years taking money out of the club rather than propping it up. |
But at least you know where you're moving to.
| Freightliner, owner of a rail freight terminal to Old Trafford’s west, wants £400 million from United for the land there, eight times what the club initially projected. |
Can you have a quiet word with the local power brokers about that?
| The MDC could force through a compulsory land deal if it chose to, though Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has previously played down that prospect in the immediate term. |
'Fooking Liverpudlian. What d'ya expect?'
Sounds more like a good Mancunian to me.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Iran ‘negotiating’ to move World Cup matches from United States to Mexico, FIFA says no plans to switch. Agencies |
Let's put it another way. If the World Cup was being co-hosted by Iran and Saudi Arabia, would FIFA be sympathetic if the Americans requested they play their matches in Jeddah rather than Tehran?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Patrice Motsepe, African football’s most powerful man – and heir to Gianni Infantino’s FIFA throne? Headline in The Athletic |
He's got all the qualifications.
| A qualified lawyer who took over a failing mine and emerged as South Africa’s first Black billionaire |
Blimey, if he'd been a qualified mining engineer he would have emerged a trillionaire. But it's not what you know in the modern South Africa, it's who you know
| Motsepe dismissed the idea in October that he might turn to public service, lead the ANC (African National Congress) and run for his country’s presidency — potentially replacing his brother-in-law, Cyril Ramaphosa. |
Not 'Down the back of the sofa' Ramaphosa? The very same.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Southampton 2 Arsenal 1
The most notable feature of this match was the presence of yellow balloons on the pitch. Since yellow balloons are the same shape, size and colour as the football being used, this led to considerable confusion and annoyance for all concerned, players and spectators alike.
As Southampton were playing in yellow (why, we were not told, their home colours are red and white stripes) the balloons were clearly some wheeze thought up by their Publicity Department. Who should be taken out and shot.
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Grant
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But I didn't see a single player jumping on any of the balloons. And if Arteta had run out of his area to do so, any yellow card would have been rescinded under review.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Jumping on balloons is more dangerous for the jumper than the balloon. The ref of course should have just stuck his pen in as he passed by but such stooping would have been beneath his tinpot judicatorial dignity.
Arteta would have been yellow-carded then red-carded as there were multiple balloons and you know what he's like. HE WILL NOT BE TOLD.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: | Southampton 2 Arsenal 1
As Southampton were playing in yellow (why, we were not told, their home colours are red and white stripes) the balloons were clearly some wheeze thought up by their Publicity Department. Who should be taken out and shot. |
It was because this was the 50th aniversary of Southampton winning the FA Cup and they wore yellow on the day of the 76 final.
It was remarkably good of Arsenal to join in the party, including balloon celebrations, they also had lots of cake and a few pre-game drinks.
Thats the spirit.....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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There's 1001 ways of celebrating without spoiling the celebration.
At least they didn't do what the party-planners did to celebrate the home team reaching the 1978 World Cup final in Buenos Aires. They shot thousands of ball-sized and ball-coloured (white in those days) pieces of paper out of a cannon, most of which ending up on the pitch.
When the ref blew the starting gun--after the business about the plaster arm cast--we settled back to watch twenty-two Argentinian and Dutch footballers kick one of the white things to one another for ninety minutes. (They couldn't spare a few ballboys to pick any of them up at halftime.) No, siree, you only get one chance in a lifetime to ruin a global spectacle.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's that time of the year when I make my annual gripe about time trials. Not time trials themselves, I quite like them. But the way they are shown on telly. Not the time trials themselves, they are shown in brilliant detail and panorama.
And they're quite important because time trialing isn't bike racing as we know and love it, just individual bike riders going round a course on their Jack Jones. So who are they are, the time they're taking and where that's putting them overall is what we want to know.
| And no televised time trial knows how to do this. |
Not never, not in the hundreds of time trials I've ever watched, despite every one of them being exactly the same, format-wise. You would think someone, somewhere at some time would have cracked it. And everyone else saying, "Oh, that's how you do it."
| Take the Tour of the Basque Country TT yesterday. |
For a start, they've had the designers in. The first thing they tell you at Design School is 'Never have white writing on a dark background in a small box'. It makes it difficult to read. Impossible when everything is changing all the time as events unfold.
The second thing they teach you is 'Always demonstrate a designer has been at work. Why not use white writing on a dark background in a small box.'
If you're a Basque sport-on-TV designer: 'Make sure no competitor's nationality is denoted by a little flag next to their name despite every viewer needing that tiny piece of assistance in a sport like cycling, because we don't have a nationality.'
| After that it's the usual tale of... |
... finishing times not being shown for long periods ("We're having trouble with the feed"), ditto times at the various way points ("I'll let you know how Roglic is doing when I get the numbers myself"), not showing the state of play overall except when someone remembers to and, above all, no easily comprehended way of how, when each cyclist finishes (only show that capriciously, by the way) with a time compared to everyone else who's already finished.
There's other stuff too but no doubt these words will be read and applied by the time the Giro d'Italia prologue starts. Though probably not this year's Giro.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A Star Is Born
The two biggest beasts of commercial sport (that lets out the Olympics) are the NFL and FIFA. Usually they leave each to their own despite both being technically at the top of the football tree. This is all to the good because they are horses of quite different colours:
* one is a tight cartel of mega-rich people who are spending (mostly) their own money and doing it (mostly) honestly
* the other is a loose agglomeration of (mostly) non-rich people intent (mostly) on making mega loads of money dishonestly
* who have become awkwardly entangled because this year the FIFA World Cup matches are being played (mostly) in NFL stadiums.
| The Athletic wrote: | | Soccer’s global governing body requires all World Cup venues to scrub themselves of pre-existing branding. It does this, it says, to “protect its brands and the exclusive rights of its sponsors.” |
"Oh yes, you will."
"Oh no, we won't."
| So, for months, stadium operators have been in talks with FIFA and third parties searching for solutions. |
"Oh yes, you will."
"Oh, all right then."
"Please, sir..."
| Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, came to an uncomfortable conclusion this winter: it couldn’t figure out a way to cover the massive Mercedes-Benz star on its eight-piece retractable roof without risking significant damage. |
"Do ve vant to take on Mercedes, not just ride around in ze fleets of zem?"
| After roughly 18 months of discussions, FIFA agreed to let the stadium leave its roof as is. |
"But only viz ze non-disclosure agreement, verstehen?"
| FIFA, in a statement from a spokesperson, said it would “not comment on specific arrangements relating to individual stadiums.” | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The Balance of Power
All of a sudden we've become the Sick Man of Europe. All our sides were swept out by their sides--Liverpool being the latest--except Arsenal who have been jammy every step of the way including Atletico Madrid removing Barcelona from our path in the semis.
The difference, them and us, has been startling. The Premier League house style of busy/busy which has swept all before it for so many years is being shown up as obsolescent. (Arsenal v Man City is demonstrating the same principle.)
It's not as if our superiority man-for-man has changed. The sight of Gnabry who could hardly get into the Arsenal squad then, never mind now, being first choice for Bayern emphasised this. So we can't buy our way to supremacy as we were wont to do.
But Arsenal, arch disciples of busy/busy, winning the Premier League will put off emulation for another season. Something must give or it's doom/doom.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Talking of Arsenal vs Man City...
| The Athletic wrote: | | Wembley will be unable to host the Community Shield in August because the stadium is booked to host a gig by The Weeknd. The match between the Premier League champions and FA Cup winners will take place in Cardiff instead. |
You'd think Wembley would know about the double-booking since the match has been a fixture in the calendar since 1974, but I expect it was the only day Abel ("The Weeknd") Tesfaye could manage in his very busy schedule. I'll certainly be there.
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