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"Upwardly mobile QPR face another long distance away trip tonight as they attempt to back up the weekend win at Yeovil by slaying another of the division’s strugglers Hull City."
Apparently there are clubs in Germany who refuse promotion to their third division because it forces them to become professional and undertake stadium upgrades.
The PL and EFL are completely separate legal entities. Leicester successfully argued that point last season when the PL tried to impose PSR penalties on them in the EFL:
Obviously it's a hypothetical question. The reason Championship finances are crazy is because clubs overspend in their desperation to wet their beak in the PL, even if only for one year.
Aside from anything else you would need the PL TV money to pay the players their Championship promotion bonuses!
And if a promoted club did turn around and say we're happy where we are thank you very much, the players and coaches would be straight on to their agents and unions to protest.
So love it or loathe it we are stuck with the PL. At least until the super-elite decide to take their ball away and play amongst themselves.
(apologies for the Fake Hoops link, but it serves a purpose!)
Hull were four points off the playoff places and in Jarrod Bowen had arguably the outstanding talent in the Championship that season.
Instead of pushing on to see what they might achieve they sold their two best players assuming they had enough points on the board to coast through the rest of the season.
The Championship has too many clubs of similar size and resources for us to ever be taking our foot off the gas and thinking we can be comfortable at this level. Once the other clubs think we're a soft touch they will clamber all over us.
It has been a lean decade since our return to the Championship. We haven't had many sniffs of the top six. But when we get the chance we have to go for it. The fans will expect us to push on, and if we want to keep attracting talented young players and coaches then they will expect it too.
Do you really want to be playing Preston and Blackburn year-in and year-out forever more?
I was surprised no one pointed out that the prize money for PL positions excuse doesn't apply to us.
I did look for online info about prize money for EFL league positions but couldn't find any official statements on the subject - it seems we really are not allowed to know anything!!
The best I could find was a post on the subject on a Foxes forum from last season:
The fifth post down by Lambert09 has a breakdown of the Championship prize money for last season.
I can't verify the details and have no guarantee it's correct, but it's all I could find so I will run with it.
If we had finished 12th last season we would have got £150,000.
If we had finished 16th last season we would have got £50,000.
(the difference between 12th and 16th in the PL is over £12m)
There isn't the same massive drop in earnings as the PL if a club has a go at the cups even if it means slipping a few places in the league.
So I can see why a mid-table PL club like Brentford might think it's a big risk, unless they can scrape their way to the QF with soft draws and then the chance of a day out at Wembley in the semis is on the horizon. Then you can please the fans and expect to make some decent money from a bumper gate and TV money.
But none of that explains why a mid-table Championship club wouldn't take a good run at the cup.
I guess there are lots of good reasons: - no guarantee of getting past the third round - 46 league games compared to the 38 the PL play - Less squad depth and squad quality to cover for injuries to key players, etc
The state of the game is depressing, largely because it's all dominated by the interests of a few mega-rich clubs at the top who don't care less about anything but themselves.
A cup run might not result in relegation, but fixture congestion and possible injuries to key players might drop you three or four positions down the table. Ultimately that could cost a club £9-12m for a competition they know they're unlikely to win once they get drawn against one of the big boys.
And when you compare this to the FA Cup prize money per round, the winner gets £2m which is less than they would lose if a cup run only cost them one league position in the end:
17 league appearances for us out of a career total 33.
So in plain English he hasn't played very much senior football. Certainly less than a player his age ought to have.
I don't know if that was his decision or the Premier League clubs that are supposed to be developing our young players, but if they insist on hoovering up all the best prospects they should be doing a better job with their career progression.
Sorry to be a pain but for that to be a fair comparison you would also need to take into account the previous fixtures of all those opponents.
Had they also just played a cup tie or were they well rested?
Had they won or lost in the cup?
Did they field strong teams or rest players?
It isn't all just about us.
Also, I think we're drifting off the point of numptydumpty's original question which I read as:
- will shipping six goals affect our long term morale?
It's a fair question and we have seen this in the past.
In 2001 a very strong Arsenal put six past us and it did appear to drain the morale of the group (to use the modern jargon).
But circumstances were different back then. We were struggling in the league and (as always) we were skint and there wasn't much scope to do anything about it. We had also been in and around the relegation scrap the previous three seasons. And perhaps most importantly the fans weren't too happy about things back then. Luckily we didn't have social media back then or there would have been a lot more negativity about the place.
I don't see any problems with team spirit this season and I don't see much despondency in the fans (albeit there is legitimate anger with the team selection at Leicester).
So I don't think we will fall away because of one heavy beating.
But the next two games are both long away trips with not much rest in between. And we might lose both games. Plymouth is always a tough place to go, and Hull away three days later is crazy fixture planning.
Even if we do lose the next two games it doesn't mean our season is falling apart because of the Leicester result.
But the club has backed itself into this corner when they didn't have to. We're midtable and on a good run of form. Clive has made this point many times before, if we aren't going to have a decent go at the cup from that position then when will we ever?
I get that you're angry, and kudos to you for going to the game.
And you're right, if we play them in the league next season we will be fielding a better team than this.
But on a different point, if this had been a league game would it even have been played in that fog? I think at least one of the managers would have been throwing their toys out of the pram and demanding it be called off. Which to me suggests that aside from a small number of clubs with very strong squads the cups are becoming a distraction that most clubs at our level would happily do without. Which is a sad state of affairs.
You can't say that this is a similar Leicester side to last season and then say they're shit.
Leicester won the league last season with 97 points and 89 goals. For a long time people were talking about them getting 100 points and 100 goals. And by rights they probably should have done.
By comparison we finished with 56 points and 47 goals. Not much more than half what Leicester achieved on both counts.
Yes they have been on a losing streak, but that included games against Liverpool, Manchester City, Newcastle, Villa, and Wolves. Better sides than Leicester wouldn't get too much from that run of games.
They might be shit by Premier League standards but that doesn't make them easy pickings for us.
For what it's worth I was disappointed we didn't go with a stronger team. But even their own fans didn't expect them to go with a side as strong as they did. And even with our strongest team we would have been looking at penalties as our best shot of getting through.
My starting point would be to ask what sort of average time was Eddie Izzard running? Probably nowhere near the sort of pace a professional athlete would have set!
You probably also need a particular sort of obsessive mindset to tackle a challenge like that.
As for the weight. It might seem counter intuitive but carrying extra pounds can help with endurance activities, and the lack of body fat can affect the stamina levels of professional athletes.
When Frank Bruno was in his prime he didn't have an ounce of fat on him, but if he didn't put his opponents away early he tended to run out of steam and rarely lasted the distance.
At the other extreme. When David Walliams swam the English Channel in 2006 it was widely reported that he achieved one of the top fifty times ever recorded:
From this we might conclude that David Walliams and Eddie Izzard were in better shape than Frank Bruno!? Hmm, maybe not.
Medicine and sports science is a growing business, for those who can afford it. I read an article recently about Barcelona being a global leader in sports medicine and was selling its knowledge to the health sector and other sports clubs around the world. Can't find that article now but there is an old ESPN piece on Barcelona and its investment in sports medicine:
At least no one has tried to pin it on poor training and medical/rehab facilities!
We certainly don't have that excuse anymore. Not with a state of the art training ground.
But it does add to the frustration with players being unavailable to soft tissue injuries, which current sports/medical science experts seem to think are avoidable.
Maybe the science isn't as good as the experts tell us it is, or maybe we are doing it wrong.
But having spent many years and a lot of money to build this new facility the club should be looking hard at why we are still losing players to "avoidable" injuries. And from a PR point of view it wouldn't hurt to be a bit more open with the fans at some point (perhaps not until the end of the season - don't want to lose that competitive advantage!) as to why they think we're still struggling with these injuries.
I think it was Sepp Blatter who wanted the football calendar to be synchronised globally so that all domestic tournaments around the world were played at the same time of year. That way clubs could concentrate on their domestic programs without interruption. Then there would be time set aside at the end of the season to concentrate on international fixtures/tournaments.
Problem is that our winter is someone else's summer, and vice versa. You would end up with games being played in extreme weather conditions.
Another idea that works better on paper than in practice,
You could increase squad sizes for EFL clubs, but that just increases costs and gives more scope for parachute clubs to hoard the better players.
You could also change the rules for international breaks so that all EFL fixtures go ahead, regardless of the number of call-ups. It would allow fixtures to be more evenly spread and reduce the number of three-game weeks. But there would be opposition from clubs and international bodies.
I quite like the idea of regional leagues for the reasons you explained. But would the clubs agree to it? That's the real sticking point.
Also, teams coming up from the Conference aren't restricted by the sort of P&S rules we have to deal with. Open the doors for a load of them to come in and they will be starting with stronger squads and better finances than the rest. You'll just get more millionaire vanity projects like Salford and Wrexham.
And again, you haven't thought through the impact on L1. Eight teams would need to move down. That's a third of the division. How many of them would really want that?
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