Official Football Thread

Black Wizard said:
A friend of mine is at Wembley today - he's a Watford fan and has no expectations for the match.

If Manchester City win then Manchester United start UEFA Cup qualifying on July 25th and Watford go straight into the group stage. They might get a Norwegian or Irish team @Dr. Eddies Wingman @Niall Kielt - you guys rooting for City today?
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It was a lose-lose. Either the Smurfs got another trophy or United would have to play qualifiers for the EL. I didn't watch the game. I stayed outside and chopped firewood instead.
 
The UEFA Cup final is in Baku, Azerbaijan tonight. This has not been an easy place for fans of Arsenal and Chelsea to from England. The airport at Baku doesn't have a big enough capacity to cope with a significant quantity of large aeroplanes - great choice UEFA! The clubs didn't provide much help to their fans to get to Baku, despite Arsenal being sponsored by a fucking airline.
 
Black Wizard said:
The UEFA Cup final is in Baku, Azerbaijan tonight. This has not been an easy place for fans of Arsenal and Chelsea to from England. The airport at Baku doesn't have a big enough capacity to cope with a significant quantity of large aeroplanes - great choice UEFA! The clubs didn't provide much help to their fans to get to Baku, despite Arsenal being sponsored by a fucking airline.
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The crying about the location of the game has been painful to listen to. The world doesn't revolve around England.
 
phantomoftheicarus said:
But you have to consider it was physically difficult to get there, with no direct flights
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It's a European final make an effort!

When we played in the Europa League in 2011, PAOK took 500 mad fans to Dublin despite the IMF being in control of Greece, some of them drove from Thessaloniki! I heard it took them a week.

There's an attitude in english football that the Europa league and Thursday nights is beneath them, grow up.
 
Wasn't a great game last night, too many of the big players, especially for Spurs, didn't show up. Penalty was a disgraceful decision, the game is gone if that sort of stuff is going to be deciding games going forward,
 
srfc said:
It's a European final make an effort!

When we played in the Europa League in 2011, PAOK took 500 mad fans to Dublin despite the IMF being in control of Greece, some of them drove from Thessaloniki! I heard it took them a week.

There's an attitude in english football that the Europa league and Thursday nights is beneath them, grow up.
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Your final point is correct - English teams have a terrible attitude towards the UEFA Cup and the "Big Six" see it as a punishment, which is exactly what Fergie described it as. UEFA are partially to blame for this. They've biased the Champions League towards England, Spain, Italy, Germany and PSG at the expense of the UEFA Cup.

However, Baku was a ridiculous place to host a European final. It has no pedigree in football and purely saw it as an advert for tourism and an ego boost for politicians and leading businessmen, much like the F1 Grand Prix. The international airport is not capable of handling the capacity for major international airlines - hence the lack of direct flights from Western Europe. UEFA know exactly which countries will have teams in the European finals and should have forseen the difficulties involved in getting to Baku. Since Shaktar Donetsk won in 2009 there has been only one Eastern European team in the UEFA Cup final (Dnipro in 2015), the rest of the finalists have been Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese and French. I'm all for moving the final around appropriate UEFA countries, but Azerbaijan was too far, too soon. It will also be hosting group games and a quarter final in Euro 2020. Imagine trying to get to that quarter final with less than a week's notice.

And I'm sure that Greece to Ireland is a much more straightforward journey than England to Azerbaijan. The latter is about double the distance.
 
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