haven't posted in a while but just thought I'd rant a bit about this ESL and LFC.
I listened to Henry's mealy mouthed apology this morning and noticed that not once did he apologize to the wider football world or to the other clubs and fans that he was shafting.
I moved to Boston 13 years ago and made a concerted effort to get in to American sports. The Red Sox story was quite remarkable. A few years earlier they had considered flattening Fenway and moving to the burbs, but Henry took over, saw its value, invested and won the club a hand full of titles for the first time in generations. Fenway reminded me of Goodison, you can sense the ghosts of players and fans past in the place. It's pretty special. I saw the Sox steel home to beat the Yankees there in a night game. It was great.
Then, as blue bill scavenged around for investment, FSG turned their sights on that lot across the park. I knew henry would win them a title. To rub salt in the wound, his first game as boss would be at Goodison. I wish the yak could have shoulder barged him in to oblivion. Then they put up Shankley gates outside Fenway and Liverpool started coming every Summer. Their fan base was growing fast.
Why couldn't FSG just have invested in Everton?
Well thank you Bill for waiting for the right buyer. And thank god FSG have nothing to do with Everton.
They have intentionally blighted parts of Anfield for profit.
They tried to copyright the name 'Liverpool' and the liver bird.
They stood behind Suares with t-shirts.
They started project big picture last season and no one said a thing
and this year they tried to steal football.
As Evertonians, we've stood with their club (and rightly so) in the fight for justice for the 96 and boycotting the sun, and in response they didn't give a second thought what effect their actions would have on their neighbors. They knew well about BMD and the steps we're making. It was just added incentive to pull up the ladder.
And I don't want to hear a thing about how hard it must have been for Klopp or Henderson. Klopp could have said what Guardiola did but he didn't. Henderson could have voiced opposition to this when Richarlison did, but he didn't.
And I don't want to hear a thing about fans of the 6 clubs saving football. OK Chelsea fans, where's the protest to get Abramovic out??
There was always a fierce rivalry between our club and LFC but a weird bickering brothers thing also going on. Not for me any more.
They are a vile club, rotton.
UEFA should ban all 12 from europe for a few seasons and if this coefficient wild card thing does happen, all 12 should be banned from qualifying that way for 10 years. The 3 respective leagues should deduct points. And don't give me this 'fans suffer' nonsense. All these fans have had amazing champions league nights on the back of their wealthy greedy owners. It's payback time.
What's more likely to happen is that they will be fined which won't bother them in the slightest and there will be a sub committee set up to select a committee to oversee an investigation in to the possibility of establishing an oversight committee, in other words, nothing.
I'm so proud of how Everton handled this. We can be a bit of a mess on the pitch but they generally do an excellent job deciphering the difference between right and wrong off it.
As I’ve said I grew up a rabid Red Sox fan, about an hour and a half from Boston. Your take on the beginning of Henry’s tenure is spot on. The Red Sox had not won a title since 1918, despite several dominant teams with all time great players, they had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the most cruel fashion in the most improbable ways imaginable, most often at the hands of hated rivals New York Yankees.
Goodison - Fenway is an excellent comparison and one of the attractions of Everton for me. Old, oddly shaped but because it’s built right into the fabric of the city around it, seats right on top of the action, decades of history, fans howling at the opposition players only inches away. “You’re gonna need a diaper” is how Sox legend David Ortiz describes the atmosphere at Fenway when the fans are in full voice in a big game and he’s right - just like I hear about Goodison, from you.
Henry oversaw a revamp of the park and instituted a data-driven model of player acquisition that turned Boston's fortunes around. The Red Sox won four titles, staring with 2004, their first in 86 years, where the Sox lost the first three games of the American League championship series to the Yankees and then won four straight. The only time in 101 years that a team has ever come back from 0-3 down to win a 7-game series, and against the Yanks, who had won 26 titles to our zero in those 86 years.
But it was all about maximizing the yield from an underperforming asset. Same pattern as with LFC- get them up the summit, get some trophies in the cabinet, enhance the value of the brand name to the wider world, but make lots of little decisions along the way to show contempt for the fans and their values, in the name of shaving a few pennies here and there. Most recent being to decline to offer a new deal to Mookie Betts, one of the two or three best players in baseball, and a genuinely nice guy and fan favorite. He was due a monster contract and he got one - 10 years, $365M, from the LA Dodgers. Boston declined to match it, which is defensible from an on-field competitive standpoint because few players will perform to value over such a long contract. But the Sox tweeted self-congratulations that they had stayed under the luxury tax threshold (every dollar spent on payroll over the threshold of $X million is taxed at Y % and the proceeds spread to the poorer teams, to restrain runaway spending by the rich teams). So in other words, not just because they saved money, but because they stayed a dollar under the threshold, so that their next dollar of payroll spend would not cost them a few extra cents. It wasn't about being able to divert that $365M into contracts for other exciting players who would win titles in the years to come, it was about ensuring that the team wouldn't have to pay $2M to Milwaukee and Kansas City because the $365 took them over the threshold. And this was supposedly something to celebrate! As thousands of kids cried themselves to sleep in their Mookie jerseys.
He isn't even a cackling cartoon villain with a handlebar mustache and cartoon sacks of cash with
$ on them. He's not even that interesting. He's a slide rule with an alimentary canal.
Here's what Wikipedia says about Henry's futures-trading strategy, this is how he made his billions:
The firm's management methods make mechanical, non-discretionary trading decisions in response to systematic determinations of reversals in each market's direction, with the explicit intention of precluding not only human emotion but also any subjective evaluation of factors outside of price behavior (such as the so-called fundamentals), to trigger each decision to be long or short each market, or not.
You can't think of a mindset more diametrically opposed to any sports organization but especially an English football club. Not only does he not understand, not only does he not want to understand, but his mathematical model for making money is to squeeze the human emotion out. But it's so freaking dumb. The big clubs don't exist in a vacuum. The hundreds of clubs throughout the country, no matter how small, and their players, managers, coaches, fans, academies, etc., that's the lifeblood of the ecosystem. You can't maintain the value long term by ripping clubs out of that system, that's the soil they grow in.
I've really fallen in love with the English game just because of that, I watch more football now than I do the American sports I grew up with. I loved watching Marine have a go against Spurs at their ground in the FA Cup, with the houses of the supporters overlooking the pitch. I loved that Marine nearly drew first blood when they hit the crossbar early on, and that Spurs showed respect by playing first-team players. I loved that guys who had been supporting Marine for thirty years and had gone with their dad and their dad's dad were having a grand time with Spurs in town. Some of you reading this are those guys, yes? I'm sure someone reading this was there.
It was 1000x more memorable than Spurs - Milan for the fifth time in two months would be. Or, say, Jets-Bills or Colts-Jaguars, who play twice a year, every year, in the NFL, to no discernable consequence.
And I've written John Henry a letter, letting him know that this Evertonian, who went to his first Red Sox game in 1976 at the age of seven, has been to his last for as long as he owns the franchise.
