if all the best players were in China, why would that make you sort Gillingham? Presumably you’re saying Gillingham would still have players? If so, the big teams would just buy them. So Saints would still exists just with worse players, so why would you stop supporting them? I don’t get what you’re on about.
If you’re asking if we become Ireland, a nation with a poor league of its own, spending all its time looking at another nation’s footy, I would say no. We’ll still see a lot of these players regardless. The money may be good in China, but the quality of life, especially for those with families, is better here.
Not a player, but Benitez’ family still haven’t moved off the Wirral.
We would be going back to being like we were before the Premiership. The old Divsion One was too bad was it? And to be honest, how many players will want to go and live in China? There is plenty of money sloshing aroung in N America but the better players only go there when their career ends, and that has the added advantage of a language most can speak. I dont think you will have to worry.
Echoes what I was going to say SOG, players going to China and the MLS are going at the end of their careers or because they have been offered stupid money.
The draw of regular Champions League football is what keeps, and will continue to keep, the better players in Europe.
That is the case now, ie retirement home for ageing superstars, but I heard a story of some Div2 player going there for 10K (pounds) a week, and I can only see this trend continuing. So, I expect the UK to lose quite a few potential Jamie Vardys or JWPs over the next few years, nevermind Shaw types. If a Shaw can get, say, 5MGBP a year at 19, compared to a measly 1M in the UK, he (or indeed she) will likely choose to get the coin sooner rather than later. Dunno really, it’s about whether money or ‘achievement’ motivates good players.
Until this year, conventional wisdom was that the teams with the highest wage bills would contest the league, predicated on the assumption that those players are worth the money.
A player going to the MLS or China takes that money knowing that other things are at risk. Antonio Conte has just been in the news because he won’t pick Pirlo or Sebastian Giovinco for Italy, because they play in the MLS (or so he says). Now Pirlo has been shite over there anyway. An ostensibly strong case for taking Giovinco (shitloads of goals) is diminished by the standard of the players around him.
The dip in quality has even been described in terms of a former Saint, the “Bradley Wright-Phillips effect”, never in a shout for a top league berth here, yet pulling trees up over there.
I love Saints and nothing will change that. It would be no different to supporting them in league 1 a few years back and that was some of the best times I have had supporting Saints.
I also go to a few of the city where I live games, Dundee United and Ajax (not so much nowadays), but nothing can replace the natural passion of Southampton Football Club, no matter who is playing/ managing them, or what league or state they are in, that passion is always the same!
if all footballers left this country for China then it would genuinely be a disaster. Imagine a country where we had no footballers left, it would be awful.
Well it’s not entirely fanciful speculation and whatifery. I was also musing, though not explicitly, on the possibility of 11 cloggers turning out for saints, but still supporting them. Of course, this has happened, and is the reality for supporters in the lower and non league. Still fun to watch, but you’d likely to actually have to get your ass physically there, so I’d likely watch Gillingham.
So it’s really the ‘money spoils football’ discussion. Further, I don’t think it would be a disaster at all, could be fun!