- Jun 5, 2004
- 32,221
- 64,290
- Staff
- #201
But what about the investment of overseas fans? I would love to know the figures, but surely that must be at least comparable (if not more than) what UK fans pay to support their team? There are, what? 10 million footy fans in England. There must be ten times that at the very least around the world.
I don't think talking about "investment" is the right way to discuss this - I balked at KY's use of it and explained it wasn't simply the FatCats' decisions. Overseas fans are brilliant. Awesome. Massive respect to you guys. And if all the clubs were to do a quick tour in pre-season and play matches against each other, then that's fair enough but you can't seriously think you can rationalise it enough to a league game?
And if we truly gave a shite about making it an ENGLISH Premier League, would we not ban foreign owners? Or players? Or supporters at the turnstile?
There's extremes and there's extreme extremes though, Matt. Surely the constant factors have always been English clubs, from areas of England, competing in a League at English grounds. That can't change - that's the fundamental definition of an English league surely?
The Premier League has become far bigger than 99.9% of people realise. Danny Levy has been on Sportscentre a lot today saying it has become impossible to ignore looking into this idea.
I think the reason mostly expats are supporting - actually, thats not fair. I absolutely don't support this. I just don't oppose it. Especially as I've heard very little about it so far - this proposal, is that we understand how big EPL is, and how more could be done to bring the game to the fans: which is ironic given most English-based supporters objections to this is that this is the opposite of what they think will be achieved.
The English Premier League is big. Well that's well done to England. Carry on. Same format. Keep it successful. You're going to piss off a lot of people if your simply marketing the club and whoring it out to other countries. We're already whored out to the max anyway, increasing ticket prices, new shirts every year - but there are extremes, and taking a domestic League game away from the country it's based in is nothing, nothing, but lunacy. There is no other argument to that. It compromises the definition of domestic league. Yes? Can you disagree with that?
One final comment: It would be nice for some of the people objecting to this to at least admit that researching and debating this proposal has merit.
If it's a league game - then no, not for me, it doesn't have any merit. It undermines our league and the proposed destination country's league.