Gil wrote:

Le Samourai wrote:Tournaments - No.
Pre Tournament Friendlies- No.

All the rest is useless and should be done away with.

/thread

Only because you think so this does not have to be the end of it. Fortunately the people in the say disagree ^^

TBH I'd watch an international match every day, if I could.

My best memory of football is not Istanbul, it's not going to Anfield in March.

It's being in a packed 100K stadium in Tehran in 2005 in WC qualifiers between Iran and Japan.

Scrapping International football is like eating a big mac without chips, you want to delight yourself in other foods aswell instead of constantly chomping down on big macs (clubs) all year

BTW, if you'd have been in Germany during the World Cup 2006, the question wouldn't arise in the first place. Virtually everybody was on the streets here celebrating the event. Not even the CL or any other club match evokes even a tiny part of these emotions. By the way, even the Women World Cup matches (even the group matches!) had good double the TV audience here than any CL final in the last years.

I'd personally like to keep the World Cup and Euros, but everything else can go away. Friendlies are

As for entertainment, yes the quality isn't there, but I still find the WC and Euros pretty damn entertaining, typically they're more exciting IMO.

The Franchise wrote:This.

If guys stopped getting paid to play for their countries, International football dies because of the mass exodus of "early retirements".

I get people are patriotic or whatever, but I see no logical reason behind midseason friendly matches. It serves no purpose and only goes to disrupt the leagues. Whatever you think is being done in those 2 weeks like 3 months apart could easily be done and done better when the season is over, when training can be continous.

How do they get to paid to play in international football right now? The federations don't give them any salaries that I know of.

As for your second point, it depends on each culture. I can see how in some countries it might not be seen as a huge honor to play for the NT, but in others that are football-mad like Argentina players that would quit the NT over financial reasons (even personal ones) are often ostracized.

They aint doing it for free, thats for sure. I suppose getting money offically is deemed unpatriotic and "wrong" therefore it isnt out in the open, but I would be totally stunned if its all done for free.

Money is being made off these games, are we suggesting the players are seeing none of it? That would be even worse.

As for the second point. Are you saying honour is lost because the games arent being played midseason, but before tournaments? Come on man, I know you arent saying that.

I am yet to hear a legit reason why midseason friendlies serve any positive purpose.

Diego Armando Maradona wrote:I dont think there is nessessarilly less quality in international football, what you have is a situation where the top talents are by comparison more widely dispersed among teams as they cant be packed together with each other by money. To me, this makes it more interesting, to see whether they can replicate how they how they play for their club and adapt to their new environment, sometimes they dont, in fact quite often they dont, hense we get the impression there is less quality, when in fact it is simply more difficult for players to shine

Dont be so niave.

None of the teams train together even 1/4 the amount of time clubs do, of course the quality is lower.

The Franchise wrote:They aint doing it for free, thats for sure. I suppose getting money offically is deemed unpatriotic and "wrong" therefore it isnt out in the open, but I would be totally stunned if its all done for free.

The main money the German players get from the DFB is for getting far in a tournament or better winning it. There is a fee for being called up, too, but compared to the club money it is rather small. The German players consider it a great honour to be called up for the NT and those who aren't called up often voice their disappointment to be overlooked in interviews.

that doesnt mean the quality isnt there

Yeah we could do away with the international midseason friendlies, I would have no problems with that.

I'm sure footballers get money from ad companies that want to use their international football appeal - which is larger than their club appeal - so maybe that'd be an indirect way they get paid in. But I'm not sure they get paid on a per game basis. Either way, it's not impossible.

Well, the German players sure get a nice Mercedes car for free from Mercedes Benz as they are one of the main DFB sponsors, too

This whole conversation is making me nauseous.

There is nothing like international football.

rwo power wrote:

The Franchise wrote:They aint doing it for free, thats for sure. I suppose getting money offically is deemed unpatriotic and "wrong" therefore it isnt out in the open, but I would be totally stunned if its all done for free.

The main money the German players get from the DFB is for getting far in a tournament or better winning it. There is a fee for being called up, too, but compared to the club money it is rather small. The German players consider it a great honour to be called up for the NT and those who aren't called up often voice their disappointment to be overlooked in interviews.

I dont doubt any of this. In no way am I saying players arent estatic to be called up and bitterly hurt not to be. But as I also said, no chance they are doing it all for free while everyone else is making money.

List of injuries so far:

Shay Given
Lorenzo Insigne
Wayne Rooney
Kevin Trapp
Pogba
Benzema
Götze
Aguero
David Silva
Morata
Ivanovic
Matic
Coentrao
David Luiz
Schweinsteiger

And I may have missed some. This system is an absolute disgrace, endangering players so they can play pointless games to qualify for a bloated and oversized tournament.

This has to be scrapped. Either all international games as Jibers originally said or have the top 20 ranked teams or thereabouts qualify automatically and let the rest of the teams might over the scraps.

Won't happen though because more games=more money players be damned.

Just fyi, other nations, the very lesser ones still enjoy to see their respective countries play so let's not scrap it please.

Yeah, may the biggest sport in the world be the one where there's no international competition, lol.

Another leftist SJW wanting to kill national pride and nationalism

Injuries can happen in trainings too. They are part of the sport

I'm all for scrapping friendly matches. What in the *bleep* hell are the point of those?

But not comps.

It's nonosense a club can lose his player paid milions on milions for months because he gets injured for a friendly match with  ... the NT

@Cruijf

Kevin Trapp wasn't even called up for the NT and got injured during training in Paris on Thursday.

Wayne Rooney was originally injured in the match against Liverpool and already a doubt before the NT call-up. He didn't even play in the match against Estonia either.

BTW, Bastian Schweinsteiger suffered his injury during warm-up - so that could have happened in any ManUtd training session, too.

(There were only the ones I knew without looking up. Okay, Mario Götze and Morata were injuried in the matches, but for the others you might check exactly where and how they actually got injured, too, before just putting together such a list.)

Players get injured all the time. They could have gotten injured while running down the dog in a yard. A man can even pull a hammy while having sex.

Again, other nations play friendlies, nations that don't actually play all that much and would like to keep their side competitive for regional and international tournaments. Scrapping friendlies because a few, yes, a few clubs have to replace their multi million dollar player with another shouldn't isn't fair at all.

Maybe the great footballing nations of the world should schedule their stuff better.

Didn't know about those Rwo, thanks for mentioning it.

The ones that got injured during training or warmups or whatever still count though, because at the end of the day its all due to fatigue. They're playing every three days, travelling all over Europe, and are expecting to perform every single day. Injuries like these are bound to happen.

And abolishing competitions may be a bit extreme (though only from a sentimental point of view, the quality is so low compared to club football you don't lose much from that angle). But these pointless games on potato pitches against tiny countries do no one any good. Like I said, let small teams fight over the spots if it matters to them. But to have the best players in the world injure themselves against the likes of Luxembourg is just stupid.

Getting rid of international play would be awful.

Moving on.

I agree. Missing out on the riveting clashes between giants Hungary and Faroe Islands would destroy the game.