Keep Football Home

You can hear the cry now: "Let's make a fortress of wherever we play at home next week."

It most certainly wouldn't have helped the likes of Bury, perhaps it appeals to the "Super Six" who could save some of their fans a fortune by playing more regularly in Norway.

The lure of money outweighs the ire of your supporters.

I'd doubt if Everton, as things are right now, would figure in their schemes though.

And as Christine says, Money talks, loudly. Please… No!

This sort of icing is for preseason games.

Go half with me and I'll get a banner made of that!

With players' wages going through the roof year on year, the clubs are having to look how to maximize their income to pay these football mercenaries what they want, and maybe this is one measure they are looking at.

The Premier League Summer Series

The atmosphere at these games will probably be so shit that they'll have fake fan noises piped into the TV.

You can't use cash inside a lot of football stadiums right now, this is just one example, and this just seems to have been universally accepted with ease.

Money rules everything. Off the top of my head, I can't think of many things (anything) where money isn't the most important thing and the thing that is driving everything.

There's as many salmon nowadays as there used to be sheep, simply swimming up-stream chasing nothing but a death brought on by exhaustion, and a legacy of being a money hungry cunt.

Italian attendances have been falling for a long time and they can not sell their product to European or global TV audiences. No TV companies seem interested in Spanish games except the El Classico.

Real Madrid and Barcelona have a very fluid relationship with honest management and financial integrity. Still at least Barca no longer have Franco's army henchman persuading them that beating Real Madrid was not a viable course of action.

Is it any wonder that these two proposed games are Spanish and Italian league fixtures!

Can any of our American brethren explain why NFL clubs apparently don't mind deserting their home support?

Como had some nerve (but very little to lose) if they were part of the proposed Super League in 2021. I didn't look into who was involved with that too deeply as I never expected it would actually happen.

The pursuit of the money is potentially all-corrupting, however, with the big lie being that the customers always end up getting the best deal because of competition. If the corporations collude, then true competition is lost. I still can't see football wanting to lose all vestiges of traditional sporting competition for relatively small potatoes. This wouldn't be comparable to the annoyance of a bit of deferred celebrating of goals.

I'm not sure that PL2 is a ‘gateway competition' for treating your home support with contempt. Rugby League had a baffling fixture list until fairly recently and it was supposed to be more about true competition / big rivalries than seeking some sort of artificial stimulation.

I can't agree that a strong home market will necessarily trump the lure of tapping into a global market, I just think the global market seems happy to watch the games being played where they are now. I may simply not be of the right demographic, but do these millions of supporters who want the Premier League to become a travelling circus really exist?

The rationale at the time was growing the popularity of the game overseas. Why? Overseas fans can mostly watch all 380 games if they want, and have a few screens.

But there was no clarity on how the "draw" would be made. How that would potentially impact last day top or bottom clashes. But the clubs would all get £5m each, so they all voted for it.

We're not fans anymore. We're consumers.

Can any of our American brethren explain why NFL clubs apparently don't mind deserting their home support?

I lived there for a while and observed a different culture when it came to support. Firstly, a massive portion of the population, especially in the big West Coast cities, are transplants from all across America, as well as a lot of immigrants like me from outside the country.

It seemed that, for the transplants, it was the done thing to transfer your allegiance and support to your now local team — if there was one. A factor in this was the distance you would have to travel to go and watch your home team in person (but images of Danny spring to mind…) which made that virtually impossible.

So when the team (aka "franchise") ups and moves to another city (which is relatively rare), it's analogous to what so many of the fans have to do when they arrive in a new city — just switch teams.

I went a couple of times to watch the Seattle Sounders but it was not for me; couldn't do it. And then finally I was getting to watch every Everton game live on TV — which is something I can't even do here!

Mind you, if the Saudis have any say (buying Spurs, owning Man City and Newcastle and possibly Liverpool) all the fixtures will be abroad, and we will all be wearing sheets and headbands and carrying prayer mats, or you won't get in.

To expand on my earlier post, surely part of what people want to watch is those big name games in their natural environment. Inter v Milan at the San Siro, Madrid v Barca at the Bernabeu or Camp Nou just has to be better than those fixtures transplanted to Soldier Field or wherever. The febrile atmosphere has to be part of the spectacle.

The pre-season globe-trotting and glad-handing stuff is fine with me. That gives fans scattered around the globe some chance of participating, but only someone without a soul could believe you wouldn’t lose something significant if you tried to play league games somewhere other than their spiritual homes.

It's definitely different here. On Friday, all I saw were people of all ages rushing around town in the KC Chiefs shirts getting ready for the game. I assumed they were on their way to the stadium. But no, the game was in Brazil for some reason. But the locals didn't seem to act any differently than they do when there's a home game.

I asked about the whole home/away thing and no one seemed to be particularly interested in that, or the intolerable summer climate they'd have to play in. But it's a reminder in America even in a place like Kansas City with regular recent Super Bowl wins that boasts the “loudest stadium” and diehard fans, it's just an entertainment spectacle they'll happily watch on tv versus at the local stadium whether the game is in Texas, Brazil or on the planet Mars.

As Michael stated too, there's also the bizarre franchise mentality so one day you support the New Orleans Jazz, they move to Utah then you embrace the New Orleans Hornets when they arrive from North Carolina.

The nearest we got to that in England was when fanless Wimbledon toyed with relocating to Dublin. Universally condemned and didn't happen. But in America, fans have no voice – they just consume whatever is served up.

And a European Super League will be here within 5 years. The rest of football will die.