KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Do you still feel 'connected' to the club??

There seems to be an inherent assumption here that LFC and Football clubs in general are fundamentally different from what they always were. I don't think they are. LFC started life in 1892 as a pretty aggressive business venture following the refusal of our previous tenants at Anfield to pay the exorbitant rent demands of our founder Mr. Houlding, preferring instead to move across Stanley park to a new ground of their own, Whereupon Houlding and his business friend John McKenna set up LFC at the vacant Anfield. They were profit motivated from the start, just as todays owners are. They recruited players from all over the UK and most were from well outside the Liverpool area, quite a few from scotland, wales and Ireland as well as from England. In addition the new LFC attracted supporters from all these locations as well. While it is correct to say most of the supporters came from the local area, it is incorrect to say or imply that LFC was ever a community venture, it was not, it was a commercial venture would and did welcome fans from wherever it could attract them. All that has changed is that modern technology and communication makes it possible to attract them from further away and in greater numbers. We should embrace that and both John Houlding and John McKenna certainly would. Regarding ticket prices they being the business men they were, they would charge what ever the market could sustain, just as todays owners do.

See I don't think there is a golden goose eleswhere. If there is where is it? Premiership football is heading for a crash you mark my words.

your right but i think the club and the premier league for that fact think their is

I agree...the penny's not dropped with them yet.

But I think the biggest problem is our lack of consistent success over the last 20 years.

OK, we've had a fair share of wins, but not close to what we had the previous 20 years.

In other words what we have to deal with now is a present which doesn't fit into our past - in terms of fan's expectation and also in terms of share owners demand for financial result.

Thing is Van Gogh Manchester United are not in that position they have dominated English football for the last 20 years. Yet they can not sell out their tickets anymore they have to give them to the kids fpor champions league games and they are nlot selling out for premiership. Man City too can not sell out and the FA cup game last week was not sold out. Football has a big problem its slowly dying out. I am talking here of going as opposed to TV or internet. To further make my case look at LFC website every home game as tickets on sale for next 10 games. A few years ago they were all sold out months in advance.

Its the nature of commercialism boom and bust, so yes Stanley, I would say we are near the crest of a boom, the biggest boom the game has ever seen, the fruits of communication technology and I would imagine a bust is inevitable. I suppose its a question of how well/long the television revenue and audiences hold up and plays out over time, together with merchandising and the corporate booking of seats...often left empty, but paid for. It may well be that in the short/mid term, football will become more televised theatre than participative sport, participative in the sense of a live audience interacting with and influencing the players. However having said that I would think that eventually the imperative for capitalism to control competition in the labour market will reassert itself eventually, and the massive wages paid to players will be overhauled, then we may see seat prices return to more affordable levels, but capitalism being capitalism some sort of bust will precede a return to sanity.

Yeah, but I think we may have a bit different problems among the clubs too.

We at LFC have a problem with not being able to produce the right results. Had Anfield been packed if the results hadn't been that great back in the good old days?

Manure are clearly not where they were a few years back when they had a few more top profile players in their team. Ronaldo for example.

About tickets not being sold out weeks before any game: Can it be that the world is simply spinning faster nowadays than it did before? I mean just because you used to make your vacation plans 6 months in advance before we got used to the internet, it doesn't mean that we go on holidays less now than we did back then. We just book later!

I don't know whether my arguments make any sense or not, but being an educated statistician I always tend to be a bit suspicious when it comes to correlation variables.

For instance: A large city has more priests. A large city has more crimes too. Does that mean that more priests leads to more crimes being comitted? Of course not. These 2 vriables have nodirect correlation whatsoever.

Ooh,a debate about variable correlation coefficient.

I think there is a problem there Van, but you can't ignore the inflationary effect the television revenue has had on competition for the best players and managers. It is obvious that all this television money and the merchandising money not to mention corporate purchasing of seats has created an enormous bubble, which has inflated wages and transfer costs out of all recognition. This is classic capitalist bust territory and Stanley is right it will bust sooner or later, probably sooner.