Match Week #2 in the Premier League!

NFL Sunday Ticket is now on YouTube and YouTube TV. Which means that it just got easier to be an NFL fan, even if you live far away. Like maybe you like the Bears, but you're hibernating in Panthers territory. But with NFL Sunday Ticket, your out-of-market team is never more than a short distance away.

Specifically the distance from you to your remote control. NFL Sunday Ticket, now on YouTube and YouTube TV. Go to youtube.com slash presale to get $50 off. Match week two in the Premier League.

There's a ton going on. There is a match today. Nottingham, Forest Hills, Sheffield United. But quickly before he signs with Chelsea, like half the free world, let's bring in Tom Rennie from Sirius XM and talk sport. Is there any truth to the rumors, sir, that you're headed to Stamford Bridge? Well, I think the crucial element of me signing for Chelsea would be Liverpool need to show interest first. I think that's how it works.

So if we can get someone at Liverpool interested in this whole package, I'll be at Chelsea before the West Ham game on Sunday. I know I don't understand financial fair play. Apparently everything they're doing is within the bounds of the rules of that, apparently, but they sign somebody every day. Yeah, I mean, look, what what Chelsea are doing is really, really interesting. It's interesting because Todd Boley has come in as a businessman, and his entire group have come in knowing business and not the sport and they have seen a loophole that maybe people within the sport didn't see before, which was the concept of long term amortization of contracts. It was spreading this money over such a huge amount of time that people, people never really considered spreading a transfer fee over like five years, seven years, eight years, because most clubs won't accept it. But what we see now in a transfer market, which has been enormously inflated by sovereign wealth funds and, and hedge funds and all of the different investment groups now that own football clubs, they've gone well, actually, we can spread this out so massively, the transfer fees can be so huge, those lower teams, they couldn't afford it. They price lower teams out of transfers, be they spread this transfer out over X amount of years and say they cover that loss by qualifying for the Champions League, or they cover it by essentially farming players. So if you buy someone for 20 million pounds, you have no intention of ever playing just by dint of being at Chelsea in three years time after three successful loans, that player is now worth 40 million pounds, you cover any losses, and you make money off of it. So it's such an incredible and difficult to follow business model at times, but Todd Boley has seen that and taken it to this nth degree now.

And where it takes transfers in future, I don't know. I know they have a good side. I watched them play against Rexham and I realized it was just Rexham and it was just a fraction really of both sides. But they were just here in North Carolina, watched them in over in Chapel Hill at Keenan Stadium.

And they played a few of their first team players. And I think they might be in a little bit of a sneaky spot at your side at West Ham. I kind of like West Ham. Maybe not to win, but I think West Ham can get a result there. Are you optimistic?

No, no. You're a West Ham fan, I understand. I've never been optimistic and I refuse to be optimistic.

It isn't really my style. The surprising thing to me at the moment with West Ham is that the Athletic did a poll recently, their Hopo Meter poll, which they do every year by speaking to fans and assessing their hopes for the season. West Ham were at 8% hope and 92% no hope, which I'm not even that low. There's a negativity at the moment because the whole winning the conference league thing, it was such an incredible high for all of us. People could disparage that competition if they're dumb enough to do so. But the Champions League, the European Cup has been taken away from a lot of us because of the finances of the game. So there should be more competitions to win because it's great to win. It was a wonderful feeling and it was fantastic.

But I think with that all happening, we all reach such a peak, certainly a generational peak for me. I'm in my mid 30s and we'd never won anything. You know, we've been relegated twice in my lifetime and didn't even win the second division when we went down there. So to actually win a European competition against a great side like Fiorentina, incredible thing.

And now, since then, Soldek and Rice, at that point when the poll was done, no one had come in to replace him. So you can see why there's a kind of depression around West Ham right now. The start of the season is really tough. David Moyes been around for a long time and he's incredibly dour.

And so it did feel like it needed a freshen up. It looks like that might now be happening. But I think the first 10, 12 weeks of the season might be quite tough for us, actually. And I don't have much hope for a result at the weekend, to be honest.

Tom Rennie from Grumpy Pundits, Sirius XM. He'll have the Newcastle City match coming up this weekend and that's going to be outstanding at the Etihad. And of course, he is a Sam supporter and I should have congratulated you on your conference league title. I mean, look, the NBA has just started, or this year, they will start something called an NBA Cup, an in-season tournament. And NBA fans are looking down their noses at it and they say, well, it'll never be the FA or the EFL Cup, the Carabao Cup, because you're playing teams in those competitions that you don't normally see. And I pointed out that when you get to the quarterfinals, even the round of 16, you're probably playing teams you see all the time.

But it's just going to take time. So what does an FA Cup or even the Carabao Cup, which is obviously a smaller version of it, what does that mean to football fans in the UK? Well, I think firstly, the FA Cup means a lot to supporters and the great tragedy of the FA Cup at this moment in time is that it's being squeezed out of the calendar by European football and by the Premier League and the desire to be high in the Premier League because you get more money out of doing that than winning the FA Cup.

The great tragedy of it is that that's the way football was gone. I had this long-standing theory they should do the entire FA Cup in January. And the great thing about the FA Cup, for those that don't know it, is that it's not just professional teams. Amateur teams are in this competition. It runs almost eight months before you actually get to the final. And the great tragedy of it, teams are winning it these days that don't really care, like Man City win it, Arsenal win it, Chelsea win it, Liverpool win it.

I mean, that's fantastic for them. But, you know, I went to the FA Cup final back in 2006, still gives me nightmares because it was the year where Steven Gerrard scored that incredible goal in the 90th minute, West Ham were going to win it and didn't. And I went out for a couple of days in Cardiff afterwards, where the final was at the time, and Liverpool won the Champions League the year previous.

And when you get past the first day of it being a bit antagonistic, those that are still in the city, it was quite fun. Like I was having a few drinks with some Liverpool fans, and they were saying to me, without trying to annoy me, great to win the FA Cup. Wasn't as good as last year, though, because they won the Champions League the previous year.

And I was a bit like, this would have been the greatest thing ever to happen to me, and you just don't really care about it because you had something that is ostensibly bigger, right? So I think the FA Cup needs tweaks and it needs to be improved and it needs to be something that rolls with the times in which it exists. But I do still think for most football fans, it has a great gravitas to it.

And I hope that that starts getting reflected from the winners of it. And I think the only way to do that is to have like Aston Villa or Everton or West Ham or, you know, when Portsmouth won it, when Wigan won it, it was an amazing, tremendous thing. When Liverpool won it, it was like, yeah, but what else did we win?

So I'd like to get rid of that. With the League Cup, which is the Carabao Cup now, which was a secondary cup created in the late 60s, 68 I think was the first one. Around that sort of time anyway, it was because the clubs wanted more games. The European Cup then was like eight teams. There was no secondary cup competition in Europe and they wanted more games, something else to win. And so that has a final in February with the FA Cup having a final in May at the end of the season.

That's now become, I think, a burden for a lot of teams that are in European competition. And what should happen in my view is that if you qualify for European football, and with the coefficient now in Europe, the top five are likely to be in the Champions League, plus two in the Europa League and the Conference League. So you're going to have eight teams in England being in European competition, the top half of the Premier League basically. So I think get rid of them from the Carabao Cup or the League Cup. And then people will say, oh, but then Liverpool aren't in it.

And like Man United aren't in it. And so will it attract a sponsor? Well, currently the sponsor is a Thai energy drink that no one has ever drunk in the UK ever. So you already can't attract a good sponsor.

So imagine how amazing it would be. Wembley Stadium in February, Aston Miller against Leeds United, Southampton against Cardiff City, Wolverhampton Wanderers against Crystal Palace. You know, you get to win something. And in my experience, winning the Conference League, you might get some smug Arsenal fan saying, oh, well, we don't go into that competition because we're at the big boy table. Yeah, you're the infant at the big boy table. Okay, so waste of time.

Or wherever you discover your favorite podcasts. You get to win something. And this whole thing is about going to a game with your mom or your dad or your friends and you win the tournament. And it's great. And the fact Liverpool weren't in the Conference League has not affected my enjoyment of it. And it won't affect Aston Villa's enjoyment of it if they were to win the Carabao Cup if they weren't in Europe. So, you know, that's the issue. It needs radical change and radical change doesn't happen.

Speaking of radical change, I mean, I sort of this sort of is because nobody's ever done it. Is City inevitably going to win a fourth straight Premier League title? I hope not. I hope not. I don't care about Man City in terms of like whether they win it or they don't. Right. If their fans win it, terrific.

I hope they have a good time with it. I hate the fact that teams win it year in, year out. There was a great video that Celtic posted. You know, Celtic win the league every year in Scotland because the Scottish league is a total joke. And they posted this drone footage around Glasgow of Celtic fans celebrating winning the title for the 500th time in 500 years or something like that. And the caption on it was and they say we don't care about winning it. And it's like, no, we don't say that. I'm sure you enjoy it. We're just saying you shouldn't get to enjoy it every year.

And if you do, something is wrong. Aberdeen should get to enjoy it. Dundee should get to enjoy it. You know, hearts should get to enjoy it.

The old jam tarts. Right. And this is where we're getting with with English football at the moment that Abramovich brought in this incredible money at Chelsea and changed the game. It wasn't just then teams that were good in 1962 who were in the Champions League when it expanded, who were hoarding the money. Suddenly they were getting usurped by this private investor. And it's grown and grown and grown and grown now into this Saturday's game.

It's Abu Dhabi against Saudi Arabia at the top of the Premier League. That's a shame. And it needs better financial regulation to stop them running away with our sport. At the moment, financial fair play and sustainability rules, they're easily skirted, as we've discussed already. So someone's got to stop them.

It's a shame it's the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that's got to do it. But unfortunately, that's where we've landed ourselves. And there needs to be a way to stop Man City because people say, oh, but look at their net spend. It's lower than this team or that team on the other team. Yes, but look at their net spend over 10 years.

Look at the wages. Look at the people they're able to attract. Look at the fact they never lose their best players, whereas everyone else does. They've got themselves into a position where they've given the best manager of his generation the perfect conditions to succeed and unlimited money. And also no risk in transfers as well. Man United, for all their spend, there's a risk in signing Jadon Sancho for 85 million pounds. Man City can sign Jack Greer. They should basically give him nothing to do for a year for 100 million pounds because there's no risk to them financially. So someone's got to stop them. I hope somebody stops them. And I hope in some way we stop the sovereign wealth funds and hedge funds from America stealing the game that we all kind of own. And if not, we need to create more competitions for the other clubs to win because there's more people who support not the Champions League clubs than support the Champions League clubs.

And that's true across Europe, as it is in England. Look, there are a ton of things that I would love to talk to Thomas Jay at Thomas Jay Rennie on X about. But you have a show to do. So I hope we can do this again because I do want to talk about the Saudi pro league and some other things as well with you. But this has been an absolute honor. I appreciate your time, sir. Great to come on. And also you can download the Week in the Tackle podcast available most weeks when Brian Dunsare turns up for work. So that's another thing we can do a little plug for as well while we're here.