The Red Sox are actually run in a pretty similar way. In fact, there 2004 team won the World Series using Moneyball tactics - using non-traditional metrics to identify targets which were "good deals" - not buy now players. Think of it as if they saw Coutinho was playing more key passes than any other player at Inter and had the most successful dribbling rate - but on a whole he looked sh*t to others and was out of the good wishes of management there. They see a good gamble in that and think with the right training, that player is a great investment.
The difference between the Red Sox and Liverpool is not with the owners willingness to spend or not spend money, it's with the personnel they had in place. They had Theo Epstein as their GM and he was/is an incredibly talented back office man who wasn't begging for tons to spend, was willing to let go of some of the stars they had, and knew how to properly identify and acquire targets that would fit into a bigger picture mentality. He went on to do it with the Chicago Cubs as well giving them their first World Series win in over a century.
There's a lot of parallels you can draw to the way the Red Sox were/are run and the way we are run. The differences are in the talent of the personnel we have and in the differences of the structures/regulations between MLB and EPL.
I think more than anything you don't have transfer fees, you don't need to spend big money up front; everything is structured if you want to dump payroll you sell off your players contracts and get off the hook. If you want to move ahead you can buy up player contracts and again not really be on the hook for them other than that particular year.
You have a luxury tax and money is spread throughout the league pretty equally. The teams that always do poorly are down to management in place, not necessarily because they lack money.
Moneyball ideas work wonderful in baseball, they don't translate into world football.
You can play the system and be smart and win in baseball....you can be smart and do everything in the system right with football and never win.
In one of the first interviews that JWH gave he talked about a flaw in the system that they thought they could exploit in regards to FFP coming into play.
Unfortunately unlike a league where rules are enforced within one country, FIFA can't manage to implement FFP across Europe and it's massively failed with the exception of a headline here or there to make it look like they are actually enforcing it.
So in truth the reason FSG....then NESV bought the club in the first place never happened and they are not financially capable of matching wallets with the big boys.
9th richest club in the world it may show on paper but the truth is we are for more similar in real spending power to Spurs, Dortmund & Roma then we are too United, Barcelona & Bayern, hence the trouble dealing with us in terms of structured payments, upfront money...etc..etc
« Last Edit: Aug 15, 2017 12:36:53 am by AZPatriot »
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