by YorkshireRoyal99 »
29 Nov 2022 15:24
Greatwesternline YorkshireRoyal99
Yes can completely understand why they are where they are, if they have players playing at the top level of football, they are going to be competitive against sides, even top nations. As you mention, it's only like Mainz playing Bayern, for arguments sake, Bayern would inevitably be favourites and in a lot of scenarios would likely win, but that doesn't mean to say Mainz can't, at minimum, compete with them and get a result on the likely minority of occasions.
I do think it's true that the top players in a lot of cases do tend to play in Europe, but I think that's a trend that is (slowly) beginning to shift. I listened to an interesting piece earlier about the myth of South America. It basically stated that many top European teams would wait for South American's to prove themselves in a more competitive league than the Brazilian one, such as the Portuguese league. However, Man City have bypassed this by going and directly buying both Gabriel Jesus and Julian Alvarez (plus a couple of others at other clubs like Martinelli to Arsenal), who were categorically the best players in the country at the time. These aren't exactly considered exceptions to the rule, but I think it's showing a shifting trend in the strength of leagues outside of Europe. There are also plenty of other examples outside the Premier League as well i.e. Neymar, Vinicious Jr etc.
Watching the Saudi Arabia game i thought, these attacking wide players are better than what Reading have, why dont championship sides come in for them. They all play in Saudi Arabia. But then thinking about it, maybe Saudi Arabia pays better. Its fabulously rich and i imagine home grown sports starts are quite the catch for corporations.
With the amount of money in the european game, you'd imagine the global scouting networks should identify nearly all global talent. And you only need 16 elite footballers within your population to compete. The only real thing that must hold back african countries with european sized populations is that talent goes undeveloped because life doesnt allow for all talents to be spotted and to pursue a career of professional sport.
I'm guessing unless you are incredibly exceptional and live in a big city by the time you are a young teenager in a developing country your talent will never have been known spotted, or developed.
Surely a country like China will in time, become a football power house.
Yep, agree. I think a lot of it can be difficult not just because of finances, but because players just don't want to move from the clubs they are at, and they probably are being paid a significant amount more than what a lot of Championship clubs and potentially even some PL clubs will be willing to pay.
I do actually think there is an unwillingness for some clubs to scout that far. Take Reading as the example, we probably only have a handful of scouts available to do what they need to do, why go and scout places like Iran, Morocco etc for players that might be good enough, when there will be a much easier (and cheaper) cost in England where the hit rate and knowledge level will be far better. For clubs like Man City that are capable of touching every corner of the earth, that's fine, but the quality of player available probably doesn't match what they are wanting in a lot of cases.
I think there is probably only a small window of clubs in England where the cost of the scouting, quality of the player and availability (in terms of willingness to join, matching wage demands etc) would make it worthwhile. But these same clubs have probably said, "why bother dropping into these areas when we could use this more effectively in better developed footballing countries in Europe".