Eto'o was a lot better than, I think, most people gave him credit for. I think there are a couple of things to consider, and that's whether a 'striker' is different from a 'centre forward'. For me, a striker is your traditional 'fox in the box', the type of player that finishes chances off but doesn't necessarily offer much more than that. A centre forward is more involved in the play, linking and creating as well as finishing chances and being interchangeable with the wide forwards around him. You could argue that even with Eto'o Guardiola wasn't playing with that traditional striker, but more of a fluid front three where Eto'o was a centre forward. It's semantics, though.Misko wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 7:04 am Over the last few days, 2 topics were discussed on the transfer thread. As they obviously are off-topic, I prefer ask the questions they raised in my mind here.
Guardiola playing without striker at Barcelona
I was very intrigued by this statement as he counted on a player who is probably one of the very best strikers I have ever seen: Eto'o. The man was an absolute beast, scoring from any position, any possible way and being properly unstoppable (pace, power, footwork). So wasn't Eto'o a striker by your standards? Does a striker have to be tall and sit in the box waiting for the ball?
TV deals
From what I know, the Premier League TV rights (not the coverage, of course) are more or less equally split between all the teams, right? I always found it a clever way to do it compared to the unequal system that prevails in France, or worse, the Spanish club by club deals. It gives some means to the smaller clubs to build better squads, infrastructures, and so on, making it a virtuous circle to improve the level of the league. Well, on the paper, it looks like that. So, I'd be curious to know what you think about it, as you obviously know better how it works and what consequences it has.
TV deals in the Premier League - it's a bit of both, and it's not perfectly equal. 50% of the TV deal is equally split between the clubs, then 25% is the 'merit' payment a club gets for finishing in a position within the league (I think, generally, this is estimated to be ~£2.5m per position) and 25% is distributed as a facilities fee - basically the more games a club has televised, the more money they get for the use of their facilities. This last bit ends up a bit more skewed - the last set of numbers I can find is for 2018 (https://talksport.com/football/365285/h ... 502281230/) where Burnley only had 7 games televised compared to Man United having 28 (West Ham had 17).
So, I think it's a bit more fairly distributed than the examples you present, but I don't agree with the televised games skew and think that a) it should just be evenly distributed except for the merit payments, and b) TV companies should be obligated to show each team an equal number of times, or at least as equal as possible.