ExiledAjax

Less distance and time than Marseille to Brest, Marseille to Lille or Seville to Bilbao. Plenty of other national leagues and fans cope with those kinds of distances. Even only a little further than Plymouth to Carlisle. The question was asked how to integrate the Scottish clubs into the English league system. What I posted would be my suggestion. There would be issues, but it's a hypothetical question.

Saves on production costs, transport costs, storage costs. Allows the company - for better or for worse - to combine the "cards" with a game. If that stays as a simple fame then that's fine for me. I play fantasy football using the draft method, there's one copy of each player in the game I play with my mates. That's fun, it adds a dimension to the game, we enjoy it. But we don't trade players for money, and we don't spend money on it. it's harmless, it's a pastime. There's nothing fundamentally insidious or evil about NFTs, crypto or blockchain. There is sometimes something fundamentally insidious about the people using and marketing them. Agree, I recently had a client who say they are going to use blockchain and crypto to revolutionise...dog walking. This is clearly bollocks, and is actually aimed at them monetising dog walking. Is nothing sacred anymore? But I do see applications for blockchain in document storage, replication, and verification. Things like project bibles, the Land Registry, even Companies House, could be made secure using blockchain, and then copies of documents could be verifiable via NFTs. That is unsexy, and wouldn't be linked to a proprietary cryptocurrency, and so wouldn't artificially inflate someone's crypto holdings. There is also a very legitimate question to be asked which is - do we need to bother? I can understand if your answer to that is "no". Totally agree with this. To be clear, I absolutely do not endorse or encourage Sorare. I posted this as an interesting and very relevant story that may very soon impact our own club. I don't want our club to sign up to Sorare as I don't think there's any point. I don't think it will drive fan engagement, I don't think the revenue is going to benefit the club much - although I don't know exactly how much the club gets from this. You mentioned money laundering. Yeh there's a huge risk of that, and I suspect it is not one that the clubs have considered here. The fact that only Norwich issued any kind of investment disclaimer tells us that Sorare don't require that element of the press release, and that's shitty of them.

When Is ay POTD I mean any ticket not bought as a season ticket, so yeh online sales as well.

Yeh, and that's where I heard about it. I then looked it up further, including reading all 5 indentikit press releases. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole tbh, but I'm not as against it as @IAmNick might be. As I say, if the card games move online and if NFTs are used to code those, that's not an issue for me. But it needs to be sold as a simple game rather than an unregulated investment market. NFT and Blockchain tech does have useful applications, but not as investments. Yes you own only a license to use a link stored on a server, but that is little different to Spotify, iTunes, or Steam. I've bought video games for years on Steam, I don't get a CD, but I don't call that a scam. A shame maybe, but I know what I'm buying there and that's fine. Same applies here imo. I do take issue with the trading side of it, and the fact that some "cards" are unique (or at least unique until the company decide to mint more of them). Look at Football Index for an example of how these companies go bust dramatically and quickly.

Sorare, a French company that has created an online digital trading card game (and marketplace) has just announced that it has brought 5 Championship clubs on board. Watford, Burnley, Coventry, Norwich and our weekend opponents Millwall have all recently joined the platform. Sorare will clearly be looking to sign up the whole of the Championship, and that obviously includes our own fine club. In doing so they allow Sorare to create digital trading cards of their players. These cards are then bought and sold online, at reactive prices, using either cold hard cash (or credit), or Etheruem cryptocurrency. The purchaser can then use those cards to compete in fantasy football style competitions on Sorare's platform. Crucially it is also possible to trade cards between players, in doing so offering the potential to make a profit if you bought a card low and sell it high. The cards are NFTs which means that Sorare can control how many of each card is produced, and so can manufacture rarity and manipulate their market. Therefore some cards cost £10, others are trading at north of £2,000, and some are trading at truly mind-boggling levels of hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds. A nice way to get rich quick you might say...but there's literally only one Haaland card on the system, and if you want to buy it then it's current owner is asking £580,000. A very small number of people will make a lucky packet, the vast majority will probably lose money, or at least spend money in order to take part in the games. In many ways this is not so different o the old physical Panini and Merlin stickers I used to collect. Those companies also manufactured rarity, they produced special shiny cards, and limited production of the biggest players in order to drive you to by more packets of stickers as you tried to complete your collection. Indeed, a secondary trading market emerged in school playgrounds as well, in which cash was sometimes traded for cards, and cards were regularly swapped. Crucially however, Merlin and Panini did not control that market, did not take a cut of that market, and did not use that market to bolster the value of their Ethereum holdings. Merlin and Panini also did not encourage users to compete - and also offer a method of paying to win by buying better players - with the stickers. You collected stickers as a small pass time, spending pocket money and then chatting to your mates about it. You can also apply to be an "affiliate" where you promote the platform and get 10% of the revenue generated by people you introduce. So that's like the The five Championship clubs to join up have all released identikit press release promising that "By combining a free-to-play fantasy game with digital collectibles - underpinned by non-fungible technology to create digital scarcity for each card - Sorare brings fans closer to the game they love. Sports collectibles have long helped fans celebrate their love of football and with Sorare. [INSERT CLUB NAME] fans can now experience a new world of online fandom where they can own and manage cards of their favourite players and hone their passion for the game." Only Norwich have included a disclaimer stating that fans should "Please note that the value of Sorare’s digital player cards are forms of non-fungible tokens and that their value is variable and can go down as well as up." Sorare talks a big game about "fan engagement" and offering clubs a revenue stream, but I fail to see where the true fan engagement is? You don't have to be a fan of Watford to buy the Ismaila Sarr card, and once it's bought there's no further reason for you to look at Watford. Ultimately I don't have a massive issue with this idea. People have money and they might want to spend it, that's broadly fine. What gets me is the implication that this is a sensible investment, and the promotion of it by the clubs involved. It's really little more than a pay-to-play gambling scheme dressed up as "fan engagement". I suspect City will sign up for it soon enough, and I just hope if we do then we properly explain it to our fans and make it clear that it is a game, not a financial investment plan.

The entire Scottish (and Welsh and N Irish) leagues should be absorbed into the English League system. Which should then be renamed and rebranded to be the United Kingdom Football League. The top level of each regional league should sit alongside the current National Leagues North and South, and then each of those five leagues - the English North and South, the Scottish, the Welsh, and the N Irish, get one team promoted into the National League each season. The lower leagues of Scotland, Wales and N Ireland continue to operate to feed teams into the National League. At each step above this level I would increase promotion and relegation by 1. Basically properly integrate it all into a single national League system. Then let Rangers, Celtic, Aberdeen, Hearts, TNS, Linfield and the rest find their place within the system. Simultaneously the regional FAs become true regional FAs under the current English FA. As ana side I'd also generally dispense with the 4 national sides and amalgamate a single UK side for all international competitions. I am well aware that this will not happen.

I echo everyone's comments on Klose. It's good to have him back. Is there now a case for pushing Naismith into midield and using Atkinson, Klose and Vyner as our back 3? In doing that are you moving to a solidified defence but also getting Naismith's ability to start attacks? Also if Naismith makes an error in possession in midfield then there's an extra layer of defensive cover to protect. You also get Naismith's dead ball ability. What do you lose? If Massengo is truly bombed out then perhaps it's even necessary to get Naismith into the midfield rotation? James, Williams, Naismith, Scott, Weimann and King to cover the two central midfield roles and the attacking midfield role. Seems like a decent group.

An announced attendance of 17,300 will include all 13,500 season tickets that are always counted. PNE were allocated 1,000, but probably didn't sell all of those. There will be a few gratis tickets to players etc, but that's never more than a couple of hundred. So that means we still shifted somewhere around 3,000 POTD tickets. Which seems like a lot.

Decent play tonight. Good pressing in midfield and we've won loads of ball in their third. Just so frustrating that the ball into the box has been lacking in precision. Preston have been pretty limp going forward as well. Just the one-on-one that O'Leary did well with that I remember.

Decent 5 minutes. Is Woodman deliberately wearing camouflage in goal?

So what happens when each of those companies buys a packet of games each? Fans then need a subscription to each platform. Some may already have that, but others won't. I'm on the fence, but generally believe the EFL and it's clubs would be better off investing in improving iFollow and club TV formats than chasing the unicorn of new TV rights.

It stands for "Contract for Difference". Two parties, typically described as "buyer" and "seller", stipulating that the buyer will pay to the seller the difference between the current value of an asset and its value at contract time. If the closing trade price is higher than the opening price, then the seller will pay the buyer the difference, and that will be the buyer’s profit. The opposite is also true. That is, if the current asset price is lower at the exit price than the value at the contract’s opening, then the seller, rather than the buyer, will benefit from the difference.

Football, money, and dodgy deals. An all too common recipe that more often than not causes pain to many. I write this post to show just how easily a club can fall into what looks to be a potentially very sticky trap. All credit to journalist Martin Calladine, and thanks to @WolfOfWestStreet for putting me onto his work. A couple of weeks ago, Titan Capital Markets were unveiled as Fulham’s “Official CFD Trading Partner”. CFD's are highly regulated in the UK, you can't just sell them to everyone willy-nilly as they are complicated financial instruments. This new sponsor is an opaque trading firm which “guarantees” 248% annual returns and has a complex, multi-tiered rewards scheme. Fulham's press release from 29 Sep 2022 states "Titan Capital Markets is an integrated educational financial group providing comprehensive online and offline courses and systematic community trading training programmes to improve learners’ financial mindset and Forex Trading skills." Basically, buy our snake oil and you too can become mega-rich. The below is a summary of the following extensive post in which Calladine presents all of his evidence and argument to show that this glossy partnership is really quite odd https://theuglygame.wordpress.com/2022/10/04/cash-of-the-titan-fulham-mlms-and-impossible-returns/ Firstly, the company was formed on 28 March 2022, but on it's website (launched 3 days later) it posted proud boasts of the incredible returns it had made in January, February, and March of 2022...three months where it didn't exist. If those claimed returns are true (they obviously aren't) then £100 invested in January 2022 with the “Fire Fox” trading team would have been worth £657.80 by the end of June. That is the equivalent of an annual return of 1,216%. That doesn't happen. Other than its work with Fulham FC, Titan appears to mostly recruit customers and offer it's "comprehensive online and offline courses and systematic community trading training programmes" to consumers in emerging markets. It does this almost exclusively through Telegram posts such as the one below. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's perhaps not the marketing method you'd expect to see from a firm that is partnering with a grand old English football club. As Calladine says this makes sense when you actually sit through a Titan presentation. Rather than being a trading firm, it appears instead to be a multi-level marketing firm (MLM), which charges for membership and distributes rewards based on numbers recruited and trading performance in a range of tiers. Whether an MLM or a pyramid scheme, it's clearly one of them. Then (inevitably) we see the introduction of everyone's favourite get-rich quick scheme cryptocurrency. The “how to deposit” tutorial appears to suggest that investors must do so using Tethers, a so-called “stablecoin” – a cryptocurrency designed to maintain parity with the US dollar to facilitate crypto trading. Calladine asked Titan why crypto was part of the scheme and if people could invest in standard fiat currency, but did not hear back from them. Finally, Calladine goes into some detail demonstrating how most if not all of the people listed on Titan's website and in their materials as being part of the board or senior staff are either completely made up, or are lying about their qualifications, experience, or a combination of the two. In all I post this as a warning. Fulham are clearly in some trouble here. A failure to do some basic DD (Calladine states that finding this out took him a matter of a few hours on Google) looks to have gotten Fulham into some dodgy waters, and potentially worse. Their fans have picked up on it and aren't happy https://www.friendsoffulham.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=fc928f6253751c8fefa081455d2e1061&topic=88022.0 We have to be equally vigilant of our own Club. At the slightest hint of similar partnerships or schemes we need to be onto Gould, Barton, or whoever else signs it off. No club should be seen dead with companies such as this, and I especially do not want City to ever be in this position. We also have to make fans aware, make it known, make Titan infamous, so thanks for reading and watch out for scams.

It's already present in the more sophisticated models.

My understanding is that the answer to this is that each club is dealt with individually. So, whilst the same rules and regulations are applied, they may well be applied in a different manner depending on the precise circumstances that each club is in, and on t precise manner that each club explains those circumstances. So no we should not be held to different standards, but we could be held to the same standards in a different way. For example Stoke included their £30m "lost transfer revenue" in their actual accounts. We did not, and instead submitted a claim based on similar grounds in a more informal way. So there is a difference in circumstances and method of submission and so there will be a difference, perhaps only slight, in application. Honestly I don't actually see much wrong in that scenario, even if it ends up with us being disadvantaged. Quite possibly so. But power in the market is subject to forces beyond the financial regulations. Reading take Chelsea's loanees for reasons beyond just being financially able. If Reading are happy to be Chelsea's stud then so be it, but I'm glad we aren't acting as Villa, Wolves or Bournemouth's loan stable. I agree with @billywedlock's overall assessment of the grand picture of the loan system (and football in general), but I'm not sure I see the issues that you do regarding the particular loans and clubs that you cite.

Maybe we will win the game when you listen for a third time.

It's an important discussion, and one that will probably become applicable to us in the next decade or so. Thanks to @BigAl&Toby for bringing it up. Unless the fanbase are willing to accept a retreat into League 1 we will need a new sugar daddy when Lansdown sells. We cannot compete in the Championship for long without Lansdown's annual cash injection. The identity of that new person or persons is something that will hugely influence this club's future. What our future ownership model may look like is an important thing for fans to discuss. I hope to god we never have to do what fans of Blackpool, Bury, Wimbledon, Charlton Athletic or any number of other clubs have done. But, if we do, then if we've already laid the groundwork, if we've already identified the fans who have the legal, accounting, public speaking, marketing, or other skills needed to mount that kind of effort, well then we'll be one step ahead. The EFL won't protect us. The FA won't protect us. Other clubs won't protect us. We would have to protect ourselves. For me. **** the foreign "public investment funds". **** the oil money. I'd rather we were fan owned and never won another trophy than we sold out to that sort of owner.

@Mr Popodopolous. I'm sorry, I don't really understand the question here?

Ooh new graphics. It's almost as if we are slowly but surely improving.

Top work @Olé Also a top appearance on OSIB with @petehinton and @Shtanley. Despite the abject performance in the game that was one of my favourite recent episodes. Nicely balanced review that accommodated the idea that there's a difference between one terrible game and the bigger picture of the whole season. Rightly slagging off some of the horror performances, but not getting lost in "Pearson out" hyperbole. I'm also very keen for a trip to Crocodile World. I'd also like to let you know about Tropical Birdland near Leicester, just if you want to broaden your horizons regarding exotic animals.

Is there an argument that perhaps recording immediately after a game isn't always conducive to producing a balanced or measured response. Emotions are high at that point, takes are hot, there has been no time for considered analysis.

Sure he was poor yesterday, and yes he's not having his greatest ever season. I will happily point out that a save % of 63% is both quite low (although not the lowest) amongst his peers, and also very low compared to his own standards in previous seasons. However he's face a large number of good chances, so just as he should not be absolved for blame, he should also not carry all of it. @Logical-City wrote an OP that I took to suggest that Bentley was now so bad that he should be replaced. This poster has since called him "league 2 standard" and has suggested that Fielding is a better keeper thank Bentley. That's a load of crap. Bentley has faced 1,105 shots on target at Championship level. He's saved 763 of them. That's a 69% save rate over 7 seasons. He's saved 8 of 30 penalties faced in this division. A 27% penalty save rate. That's higher than average. He's not a perfect goalkeeper, but he's clearly good enough for the Championship.

Thanks for this. After you posted this I actually bought the book advertised in that Twitter profile. Am about 75% through it and it's brilliant. So thank you for recommending a great read!

Daniel Bentley is the championship goalkeeper who has faced the 4th highest number of shots on target. He's allowed the 3rd highest number of goals per 90 minutes. His save % is 63% which is low compared to his peers, most of who have a save % of around 70%. But he's also face the 5th highest xG from open play, and the 2nd highest xG from set pieces. Levelling all blame for our concessions at his door is to grossly ignore the fact that he's faced a very high number of decent shots and chances. Those shots and chances are allowed by the 10 other players in our team. He's a solid goalkeeper, we'd struggle to replace him with equal or better, and he's obviously better than Frankie Fielding.

Of course they don't. Most men's teams don't either. Just like the men's team they rely on the cash injection every season.