No doubt some of you have been hearing about this and have yor opinions.

Some football pundits and other people have said its just plain crazy. That in a considerable recession such things are possible. That a person gets paid £26m a year for kicking a football. People are saying its the beginning of the end for football.

I think that's BS. Lets look at things logically here ... This part of the world has a free economy. The price is based on what the customer is willing to pay. There is no such thing as getting paid "too much". That's just envy.

The only 2 real arguments against this are sustainability and tradition.

im pretty sure Man City can't affort this investment strategy based on their income. its reliant on the owner, who happens to be immensely rich, much like Abramovich. This means as soon as the owner sells up and fucks off, man city will have to liquidate its assets to break even (unless another megarich dude takes over). The impact here is to Man city alone. The strategy doesnt make economic sense if man city fail to become 1 of the top 5 performing clubs in the world within a year or two. Its not sustainable for man city.

second thing is tradition. what makes a club good nowadays is no longer the same thing as say 20 years ago. back in the day, it was a manager, a youth system, or the culture of the city itself that would win trophies ... now its mainly money and this investment emphasises that. It will affirm this trend. but who gives a shit about tradition? especially in sport? for gods sake the world changes. consider that football has perhaps grown economically and accept that as natural.

I'm not gonna go into a long rant about this but my view basically is while there are no money problems, people can pay waht they want and earn what they want. But while there ARE money problems (and when haven't there been?) why the fuck should someone be paid millions for kicking a football around when they could easily live on (and I'm being generous here) 1 million a year and the rest could go towards something useful. Like NHS debts, or feeding homeless, or paying those poor bastards like teachers who actually do something to improve others.

Got no problem with those who do entertainment for a living, do have a problem with people sucking up funds they don't need. And I don't mind it costing millions to run a club, that's fine, but really, players don't need to get so much frigging money. NO ONE needs that much frigging money, unless it's to be poured straight back into a business.

I apologise if I missed the point or if that makes no sense but I'm drugged up atm (tonsillitis) so everything is in a bit of a haze

Not only football. Look around. It's an overall thing.

In year 1971 in USA, pays ratio of a worker and his manager/director was 1:7. Today it is 1:1500 (up to 1:4000 in extreme cases). There you had (have?) the case that 2% of people own 56% of the national treasure. The trick is: it's like just the same crap everywhere.

The result is that the middle class (not wealth, not poor) disappears. And that class is the most important one, for it produces and doesn't depend on anybody. As it fades, people from it mainly get sorted in the poor class. Simultaneously, you have sharpening of the contrasts between wealth and poor.

I won't enter long rants as well. I just think the football thing is even insignificant in comparison to everything else.

p.s.
Does kaka mean shit?

yea, kaka means shit.

The problem with these crazy salary differences is you can't just legislate them away. Salaries are completely dependent on what the market can support. A football player makes $30million / year because his football teams makes $500million / year. they make that because of what they charge for admission and all that. If less people show, they'll make less and pay their players less. With a corporation you typically have stock holders and stuff that control where the money goes... if the CEO is making $300million and enough stock holders bitch about it, that CEO's stock is going down. He doesn't own the company, they do.

On the other hand, I agree, these salaries are quite often ridiculous. In the case of government handing out baillout money, that's my money, not the government's. If I just helped save a company from completely dying, I should have a say in how it's run...including cutting executive salaries and other waste. But there's a long debate in all this.

Even though oil billions get teams together that play almost perfect football, that doesn't make the game more entertaining. What makes the game entertaining is the suspense. Champion's League football may be the greatest football on the planet, but its lack of any surprises makes that I'd rather watch UEFA Cup. Besides, even in the real world/economy there are limits to capitalism. If one company becomes a monopolist, antitrust regulators step in and break it down for the sake of the market (and ultimately the consumers).
I pity the suckers who become fans of Chavski or Man City because they are, at some point, the richest, and hope that the bought success of their clubs will somehow rub off on them.

Apart from Zenit winning the UEFA cup I don't think any of those 'bought' teams ever won a big trophy (ie European trophy). And Zenit wasn't quite as artificial as Man City or Chelsea.

There is a certain 'je ne sais quoi' that you can't buy...no matter how good your players are. Call it 'gelling'. Teams like Milan, Real, Barca...they have had a lot of players come and go, sure, but they always have a base structure of a few important players that gives continuity. Like Maldini and Raul etc.

As for the moral aspect. Myeah, I've debated this a lot before already. I still argue for maximum salaries and/or severance fees, in any sort of field. Not some commie limit but still astronomical, that you don't discourage people from working hard or taking risks. But also that you don't have them suck away unreasonable amounts of money from the economy on a whole. When a company announces it's laying off 50 workers because of the 'economic crisis' and then hands out a 20 million $ severance fee to its (failed) managers...yeah. That's just silly.

I still see a difference between entertainers and managers, tho. Entertainers (usually) have an exceptional talent, whereas managers...I haven't met many that are exceptional by any standard. Most of them are self-important pricks who attended so many seminars they can't even think or speak straight anymore.

kaka is shit in estonian language.

In Dutch too. In many languages. Beats me why anyone would want it as a nickname.

Heh, in Serbian too, although people most likely won't understand you from the first try if you fail to accent it right.

I just asked from curiosity. The German variant is more like (f.) Kacke.

In estonian its pronounced just like written, kaka. All letters are short and clear.

Well, if any language is known by every letter representing exactly one phoneme, that is Serbian. Yet, the way you articulate these phonemes matters. For example

Káka would be the right one.

Other accents on that ʌ: Käka, Kàka, Kâka would sound unnatural.

By playing with accents, you can have average native speakers incapable of following you on longer term. Those accents are not usually written in the text, but only in the dictionaries, so that one can know how to articulate the phonemes. Very small number of native speakers even know about the accents more than they exist, and there are even different dialects, where these accents (of course) differ from the core language.

Kaka is a word in english too. I guess some things are universal.

Indeed, the word strategy is a good example, its strateegia in estonian and almost the same in finnish but their written language is quite difficult to do right.

Ancient Greek and Latin have spread many word roots that are just being adapted to the most of European languages. I couldn't say the same for Asian/Middle East languages.

不要擔心，這僅僅是一個自動翻譯工作
心配しないでください、これだけで自動翻訳の仕事です
걱정하지 마세요,이 그냥 자동 번역기 작품입니다
لا تقلق ، هذا مجرد عمل المترجم الآلي
אל תדאג, זה פשוט עובד אוטומטית מתרגם

This up ^^ "don't worry, this is just an automatic translator work", passed through google translate

Any luck with this one yet, by the way:
http://forums.clankiller.com/viewtopic.php?t=3025

no luck yet. I had a Pakistani friend of mine listen to it, but she has no idea either. She thought it might be Pashtun, but it's a language she doesn't really know so it's a guess. It's not Arabic and not Urdu, though.