Truly a genius header

I'm not that interested in sport, but things like this make you proud to be a human being.

Video at the BBC.

England v Australia

It seems that Australia's selectors enjoy the same inside joke as England's, to wit, choosing as many players as possible whose names are ordinary words (nouns, professions, verbs, adjectives etc). They've scored six each with their current squads (if you squint at it from a certain angle)

England
Jason Roy
Rory Burns
Joe Root
Joe Denly
Jos Buttler
Ben Stokes
Jonny Bairstow
Moeen Ali (Alley)
Chris Woakes
Stuart Broad
James Anderson

Australia
David Warner
Cameron Bancroft
Usman Khawaja
Steven Smith
Travis Head
Matthew Wade
Tim Paine (Pain)
Pat Cummins (Comings and goings)
James Pattinson
Nathan Lyon (Lion)
Peter Siddle

This is not normal!

I checked our telephone list at work for comparison, out of eighty people we score a mere dozen, which I think is a typical ratio.

England's women's football team has a lower ratio than the men's cricket team, with a respectable but unspectacular nine out of twenty-two. Let's see if they can improve that.

Economic Myths: Supply and demand - planning permission vs Premiership football players

The usual suspects keep insisting that if we abandoned all planning restrictions, then the value of land would fall. "It's simple supply and demand, innit?", they sneer.

Clearly not true, but I can't be bothered explaining how land prices arise in real-life for the umpteenth time, so let's use an analogy:

1. 'Demand' for footballers (as measured in £££) is mainly all the people who subscribe to Sky Sports, so Sky Sports is prepared to bid a lot of money for Premiership TV rights; it needs that content to get the subscriptions.

2. Premiership clubs can hold out for huge sums of money (or else they sell to the BBC or ITV or whoever).

3. Premiership clubs in turn need the best 200-300 football players they can afford (to stay in the Premiership). There can be - by definition - only 200-300 of such players, so the best 200-300 players can in turn hold out for huge sums of money i.e. all the club's receipts minus the actual costs of maintaining the stadium, selling tickets and so on.

4. It would be fatuous to say that Premiership player wages are so high because there is a lack of supply of footballers. Tens of thousand of people play football regularly with a reasonable degree of skill and proficiency. Premiership players aren't actually much better than the average, they just have to be in the top 200-300.

5. It is not the skills of the players (in absolute terms) which dictates their salaries (they are not ten or a hundred times better than First Division players in the 1970s or 1980s), is is the fact that Sky Sports can monetise what you used to be able to watch for 'free' on the BBC/ITV.

6. Thought experiment: all Premiership players are in the same aeroplane crash and die. So Premiership clubs quickly go out and recruit the best 200-300 players who are left. By definition, these players aren't quite as good as the recently deceased but they can still hold out for the same salaries.

In case people don't get the analogy:

* Contracts with a Premiership team = the best locations
* Contracts with a Championship team = the next best locations
* All the way down playing for your local pub team = zero location value (in £££)
* Premiership players = people who 'own' the best locations = rent collectors/landlords (If a landlord dies or sells, the next owner collects the same amount of rent.)
* Increasing supply of footballers/number of teams in lower divisions has no impact on wages further up the chain = liberalising planning laws increases value of the land now unburdened, but has no impact on value of more favourable locations (which were developed first).

So how did people manage in the days of black and white television?

From the BBC:

Sean Hargrave is a self-declared football obsessive, but when he sat down to watch the opening match of the 2018 World Cup he couldn't tell one team from the other.

He wasn't the only one struggling. Roars of frustration jumped from sitting rooms to social media as fans worldwide branded Russia v Saudi Arabia "a disgrace".

The problem? Sean, like 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, is colour-blind...

"Waistcoat sales up as Gareth Southgate sets trend at World Cup"

From The Guardian:

For years, football fans have been able to emulate the look of their idols with replica shirts, but this World Cup something different is happening: supporters are rushing to buy replicas of Gareth Southgate’s England waistcoat.

Marks & Spencer, which has been the official suit supplier to the England team since 2007, said demand for waistcoats has risen 35% thanks to what they say is “the Gareth Southgate effect”.

Ho hum.

1. That's a fairly meaningless statistic, have sales gone up from 100 a year to 135, or from 1 million to 1.35 million?

2. Will people actually wear them, or was it just impulse purchases?

3. Will people stop wearing them if England crash out before the final?

Now THIS would have livened up the cup final a bit...

Good bull skills! A herd of 180 cows descend on a Guernsey football pitch as brave players try to shepherd them away

Rather ironically, they appear to be Jersey cows, who presumably swam across.

"Queen of the South keeper crisis after goalie hurt by cow"

Spotted by Paul F at the BBC:

A Scottish Championship club is facing a selection headache after its reserve goalkeeper* was hit by a runaway cow. First choice goalkeeper Alan Martin is out with a thigh injury with Jack Leighfield standing in.

Queen of the South's Sam Henderson, 19, hurt his shoulder in the incident on his father's farm. Henderson was on the bench for last weekend's draw with Morton and was expected to do the same against Dunfermline on Saturday. However, the accident has meant he is facing a race to be fit.

* I think that young Sam was the reserve reserve goalkeeper. The actual reserve goalkeeper is Jack Leighfield (who happily has not been injured, by a cow or otherwise), but hey. So what the club now needs is a reserve reserve reserve goalkeeper to tide them over.

Home-Owner-Ists 1: Economic reality 4.

From City AM:

New stamp duty rules are causing landlords to sell up in droves

An unforced own-goal right from the kick-off there. The extra 3% SDLT for non-owner occupiers might deter new landlords, but existing landlords are more likely to hang on to what they already own.

Last year the government introduced new rules meaning landlords could no longer claim relief on interest payments on their mortgages...

Another own goal in the third minute. They *can* claim relief, it will just be restricted to 20% (to be phased in over the next few years).

... at the time landlords warned it would put people off putting their homes up for rent, pushing up rental prices.

One apiece on the main point, everybody agreed it would force a few highly leveraged landlords to sell up; followed by a foul in the Homey's box and a penalty opportunity for Economic Reality.

Economic Reality's best striker is trotting up to the ball... the decider is, will more or fewer homes be up for rent and will rents go up or down?

Economic Reality says - when landlords sell up, it will be higher earning tenants who buy them, thus leaving a smaller pool of lower earning tenants, putting downward pressure on rents. This is quite the opposite of the Disappearing Homes Conundrum.

However, the figures also showed the supply of rental stock increased eight per cent in the year to March, from 169 properties per branch to 183. The figure was flat on February.

Back of the net! From the point of view of a BTL landlord, the interest acts like (privately collected) LVT so encourages them to make best use of what they own - get a tenant in or sell it; tax relief for interest ameliorates that, so reducing the value of the tax relief makes it a bit more like LVT again. An unexpected but welcome impact.

The number of tenants negotiating rent reductions also rose, with 3.6 per cent of agents saying they had witnessed tenants knocking down prices in March, compared with 2.2 per cent in February.

Some people are on the pitch. They think it's all over...

A quarter of agents said landlords had raised rents in March, down seven percentage points from March 2016.

It is now!

'We Are xxxx, Everybody Hates Us'

I do not follow German football myself, but I noticed this piece about RB Leipzig and it got me thinking. If you read the introduction it seems to be mostly about corporation ownership of a football team and how the ownership by Redbull is a danger to the existing German club system. But clearly it is also about the people/fans of Leipzig, a proud, former East German city.

The images of the yellow Dortmand fans do not suggest to me merely a management dispute about controlling interests in a company. Rather, it seems to suggest that Germany my not have digested the previous great unification in Europe: just as they push ahead with the new one. I'm not sure how well the East and West fits in 2017, and have not discussed the issue for years, assuming the two categories had no meaning anymore in Merkel's Germany.

Moving on, change the nation, and what do we have here? This all puts England's most hated football team into a perspective that I never gave any consideration to before. Millwall FC, somewhere, lost in South London. How did they ever rise to be understood by rival fans, and themselves, as the most hated team in English football? Mystery to me.

Sam Allardyce

Fun Online Polls: Antonio Conte & The Panama Papers

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Will opposing fans be able to subtly mispronounce new Chelsea manager Antonio Conte's surname to turn it into an insult?

Yes - 81%
Yes - 19%

Pretty much a foregone conclusion then.
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Many column inches and broadcast minutes have been and will be wasted on this whole Panama Papers episode.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

Have you learned anything new from The Panama Papers?

Yes - I didn't realise how concentrated wealth is or how involved the wealthy are in tax evasion.

No - they merely confirm what I already knew or strongly suspected.

Other - please specify.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

(As ever, it's nothing that Land Value Tax wouldn't sort out; taxing land values instead of earned income would reduce inequality and be nigh impossible to avoid or evade.)

Fun Online Polls: Bouncy castles & Taunting the new Chelsea manager

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Should bouncy castles be banned?

Yes - 4%
No - 92%
Other, please specify - 4%

That seems pretty conclusive to me.

Top comment: Lord T "Amend the climate change act to include changing the climate to be less windy."
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The new Chelsea manager is called Antonio Conte.

This week's Fun Online Poll:

"Will opposing fans be able to subtly mispronounce new Chelsea manager' Antonio Conte's surname to turn it into an insult?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Feeble arguments against Brexit continued...

From the BBC:

British football could be radically changed if the UK votes to leave the European Union, according to experts and leading voices in the game.

Some fear so-called Brexit could lead to more than 400 players losing the right to play in the UK, while others say it may give home talent a chance.

Woah!

1. There are those who say there are too many foreign players in English football, so that could be seen as a good thing.

2. It appears the FA has haggled its own rules on who can and can't play here.

3. A lot of foreign players are from non-EU countries, we can assume that even if the government aligns rules for European and non-European players, there will still be plenty of them.

4. Who cares? Football is a game, there are rules, if the rules change (such as the UEFA 'Fair Play' rules) then it is still a game and people's enjoyment of it will not be affected one jot.

Shooting the messenger.

The Sunderland manager got hauled over the coals in a press conference for continuing to field a player who by all accounts was a kiddy fiddler, transcript in The Guardian.

Yes, I know that being a football manager is about PR as much as anything, but he'd have been well in his rights to tell the assembled journos to piss off.

I agree that an employer shouldn't employ somebody if that puts customers or the general public at risk. So if a teacher is under suspicion of kiddy fiddling, the head of the school would have little choice but to suspend him.

The manager or owner of a transport business would be advised to suspend a driver being investigated for reckless driving, even if the driver did it on his own time; a bank would be criticised for employing people who are under investigation for defrauding pensioners out of their life savings; a pub would be in the wrong if it employed people with criminal records for GBH as doormen etc.

But I see no link whatsoever between kiddy fiddling and playing football in full view of tens of thousands of people. No spectator was put at risk of anything.

"Lord Carter's plans for saving the NHS £5bn a year"

From the BBC:

Lord Patrick Carter, a Labour peer as it happens, is advising Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt on how hospital budgets can be better spent.

In June he said up to £5bn a year could be saved annually by 2020. In his first report then he argued that some of it could be delivered by smarter procurement of hospital supplies and some by better management of staff rosters.

Now he has attempted to put more flesh on the bone, outlining other areas which could contribute to that £5bn figure.

All sounds lovely, but that reminds me of another topic, the notion that organisations have to pay their more senior employees "competitive salaries".

Clearly, at lower and middle levels, you have to pay people roughly the same as the competition would pay them or as much as they could earn in similar level jobs in a different kind of business.

But I'm not sure that applies to the higher echelons.

When deciding the salary of all these NHS senior managers on six and seven figure salaries, the only real comparative is how much they - with their particular skills - could earn by doing something else, which in most cases would be four or five figures.

As to doctors, there is no particular need to pay as well as in other countries. Let's assume 3 million qualify worldwide as doctors each year; America wants to take on 1 million new doctors for $200,000 each. Is there any particular need for all other countries to offer $200,000?

Of course not; once those 1 million jobs are taken, the other 2 million will have to take whatever is left. As long as the lowest paying country is still paying enough to make seven years of medical school (or however many years it is) worthwhile, then that is enough. Many European countries recruit doctors and nurses from low-income countries - all they have to offer such people is enough to make sure that they end up slightly better off than they would have been working as a doctor in their own country.

Compare and contrast with footballers' salaries; the top teams have to attract the top players to remain top teams, so wages get bid up in the Premier League, the top football players can thus soak up all the super-profits which top clubs make (i.e. they collect rent). Does that affect wages in the Championship where the super-profits are much lower? No, not really. Why would it? Salaries in the Championship are based on those lower super-profits.

Furthermore, football teams in the same league are directly competing with each other - so Chelsea has to try and outbid Arsenal etc. But one hospital is not really competing against other hospitals in any meaningful sense, and they are certainly not competing across borders.

Just sayin', is all.

Daily Mail on Top Form

From the Daily Mail

A former general secretary of the Cayman Islands Football Association.

The 58-year-old is an advisor to the CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb and is a former CIFA general secretary.

The U.S. Department of Justice lists his nationality as United Kingdom and he is understood to have studied at Imperial College in London in 1970s.

He and his wife own a £500,000 home near Turnpike Lane tube station in North London.

Changing the rules of football. Slightly.

From City AM:

England's leading football clubs have left their loss-making ways behind and entered a new era of profitability after mustering record-breaking pre-tax profits last season...

The profit was the result of a 29 per cent rise in revenues across the division to £3.3bn, driven by booming broadcast contracts and commercial growth, allied to the impact of cost-control measures such as the financial fair play (FFP) rules initiated by European body Uefa.

Clubs’ return to profitability heralds the end of the so-called prune juice effect, which repeatedly saw uplifts in television rights income largely swallowed up by instant wage inflation. Player salary costs rose just six per cent in 2013-14, while the Pre­mier League’s wages-to-turnover ratio – a key indicator of financial health among clubs – fell from a record high of 71 per cent in 2012-13 to 58 per cent*, its lowest level since last century.

It appears that the football clubs have finally worked out how to prevent any increase in revenues going straight into higher players' wages, so well done them!

* To cut a long story short, out of the £800 million extra revenues, they spent 'only' £100 million on higher salaries and an extra £200 million on other stuff, meaning that last year's overall pre-tax loss of £300 million turned into a very slim net profit of £200 million.

Random thoughts.

1. The worst night out ever. In five or ten years' time when your wife makes you accompany her to "50 Shades Of Grey - The Musical" for your wedding anniversary.

2. The ultimate anthem for office workers, by Bon Jovi:

I'll live when I'm alive
And sleep at my desk"

3. The Daily Mail on super tip-top form:

... this is one of the Chelsea fans caught up in claims of racist behaviour. Former public schoolboy Josh Parsons, 20, was named on Twitter as one of the men standing in the carriage where a group shoved a black man off a Paris train.

Mr Parsons is yet to speak about the incident and there was no answer at his £1.5million six-bedroom family home in Surrey yesterday, which he apparently shares with his grandmother.

The Rules Of Football: Ask a stupid question...

From City AM:

Sky and BT win Premier League rights: The billions keep pouring in, but do fans benefit from football’s boom?

Well no, fans are the ones paying for it all...

The clearest way that fans benefit from big Premier League TV money is through the quality of players that their teams are able to attract. Last summer’s spending by top flight English clubs eclipsed their supposed peers in rival leagues.

Premier League clubs spent £835m – more than all the Serie A clubs, Bundesliga clubs and Ligue 1 clubs combined. Hull City spent more than several Italian giants added together. Spanish top flight teams spent around half the amount of Premier League clubs.

Yes, but it's not 'quality' in an absolute sense, it is 'quality' in a relative sense. The overall skill level of players reached its zenith decades ago and football clubs are just in a bidding war to sign up the best players they can afford out of the top few hundred best players in the world. If the current top few hundred players were wiped out in some mega-Munich incident, then the wages of the surviving next best few hundred would quickly increase accordingly.

(Greater minds than mine showed that there is a fairly direct correlation between success on the field and paying high player wages, but this could be cause and effect.)

Or: all super-profits/rents accrue to the least elastic factor. And taxes are largely borne by the least elastic factor. In other words, if one country imposed a super-tax on player wages over (say) £100,000 a year, the best players from that country would go abroad (quantity reduced). But if all countries in the world imposed the same super-tax it would all cancel out. The total quantity and quality of players would be unchanged.

This should, in theory, mean better players and better teams. But football’s never quite that straightforward.

Doh! See previous paragraph.

Revealed: Hotels People Want to Stay In Charge More

From the Guardian

More than half the luxury hotels in the Caribbean have been accused of “excluding families from poorer backgrounds” after a Guardian study found that a few of them are charging as much as £4000 for a week, with Mustique's most expensive package coming in at £8000.

With the average price of a flight for a child at peak time costing £300, according to the study, parents faced with forking out for holidays over the summer period are having to count the increasing cost of going to the Caribbean.

Eleven hotels, most of whom have been highly rated by Johansens in the past 10 years, charged a premium at peak times. Turks and Caicos and Anguilla both charge £3000 plus VAT for their packages while St John’s prices range from £6000-8000 depending on the season.