dats y dey send mi bak 2 da villa forum fml :doom: It's also why I'm taking up a new role as porno director. CarlosFilmaballs.
Muahahahah. As more and more clubs slip into financial crisis, some of their ignorant fans will start to realise that our model really is genius and not so bad after all.
When the Thai owners arrived we were promised Premier league football because Leicester City is a footballing behemoth whose brand would reach as far as Asia. In truth, we're not a very big team and we've been turning over enormous losses every year since the late 90's, including a period in administration and an unnecessarily large and expensive stadium. As the last three years have passed by their slow realisation of the situation has been painful to watch, as we've gone from Sven, Yakubu, a friendly with Real Madrid and a mid season tour of Bangkok to having a no frills manager, scraping into the playoffs and Jamie ****ing Vardy. They arrived with best intentions, but are clearly inexperienced in managing expectations and sustainably developing a football club that isn't what is once was. They have pumped a lot of their hard earned money directly into a drain basically, with nothing to show for it. The delegation of duties is baffling, allowing Sven, Sousa and Andrew Neville free reign to sign whoever they could get their hands on. A complete change in attitude is needed, and that includes many of the fans. An overhaul of the playing staff, a far more reasonable wage structure and some kind of advisor/conduit to the owners who actually knows what they're doing is needed. I don't fear for the long term future of the club yet, but its a very slippery slope. Recently completing a deal for outright ownership of our crap stadium is a decent start, but so many aspect of our recent history have simply been a tale of wasted money and it cannot continue.
Football clubs aren't vanity projects, and are very, very rarely a way to make cash, especially when you're buying about £60million worth of debt.
Asians are very successful in much that they do but getting involved with football clubs always ends in tears.....The fact is Asia is not a footballing continent and Asians have no idea about running a football club. From yourselves, to QPR, Blackburn, Birmingham and yes even Cardiff the proverbials have yet to hit the fan there.
Is football big in Philippines? Apart from Barca's Alcantara I don't know anything about their footy history.
Now that made me laugh, and for the record I nearly wet myself. Gambling with other peoples money with such great stakes is never a good thing. Having all that money, wasting it and now answering for it. What fool's to invest in something that was never guaranteed. Cheat's never prosper.
Football is almost, not quite but almost, non-existant here. Chelsea have formed some kind of academy or something which I know nothing about (just seen someone wearing a shirt on a jeepney with the Chelsea logo on and the name of the academy). Being an ex United States colony the only team sport here that has any interest is basketball. Live Premiership, Champions League and the World Cup are shown on cable tv but I'd wager they have a viewing audience of about 0.5% of the population and then mostly expats like myself. The international team (until last year coached by a Brit) has made some gains up the FIFA rankings...they were not even in the top 200 just a few years ago but now have crept up to 143. The team consists of mostly military plus foreigners with some kind of Filipino connection. To my knowledge there is no professional club football here. I think Chelsea are barking up the wrong tree if they were hoping to get any kind of foot in the Asian market by coming here. The LA Galaxy played the Philippine national team in Manila at the end of their 2011 season and Galaxy won 6-1 with Beckham and Keane getting one a piece. There was far more media attention on Beckham than the game though.
Unlike Thailand, where English football is everywhere. All Premier League games are on TV every week. One of my main reasons for wanting promotion!! We do get the Sky live Championship games on satellite, Watford been on a few times this season so thats made it a good year. In the airports of Thailand you will see no football regalia on sale, except... Leicester City stuff. Always make me smile. Pretty much no one here has heard of any of the championship clubs, even if they were recently in the Prem. Leicester are shown live on FTA TV every game but i don't know of anyone that watches them, (Thai's) that is. It's Premier League or nothing here.
There is a family in Italy that seem very successful in running clubs this way, I think they're called the Pozzas or something?
