EFL season over

[Mike_F]

I’ve bought next season’s ticket also not bothered about a refund if it allows the club to survive until we can once again attend

Likewise. I've already spent the money and it's not like a holiday where I want a refund so I can go somewhere else another time. There's only one Rovers and they're welcome to keep my money.

[silent majority]

  SM, I agree with a pay cap, but surely because of existing contracts that may or may not effect ourselves, a stepped progress towards the full implementation will have to be put into effect.
   Surely teams like Sunderland and Portsmouth would be way over the  suggested level, Rotherham I was told at the start of the season was £6.5 million player budget as was Oxfords and Coventry's and Peterborough even more although their biggest wage earner left in January.
   How are existing term contracts going to be altered to meet the required level, such as Marquis would take a big bite out of a the budget set as we hear it is and is contracted for a couple more seasons and so will more of the Portsmouth squad, along with the Sunderland squad, also their transfer value will have plummeted with only success on the field of play from now on helping to retain that.
 

selby,

They still have to work out the details and implement the regulation changes, but there will be a transitional period, obviously, but clubs won't have a free reign. Cutting back the sizes of the squad will have an impact as well.

[Chris Black come back]

All things being equal, the larger clubs in our league especially Sunderland and Ipswich could easily pay players way more than a 2.5m cap per season, without getting into financial trouble, due to their huge crowds. They would be foregoing a major advantage in this league by agreeing to the salary cap - BUT if there are no crowds for what 6-12-18 months? That foregone advantage is not well, foregone. Their overheads would be huge also compared to ours, beyond players salaries.

Don’t know enough what will happen to contracts etc they clubs are legally bound to pay, but for players that are above that 2.5m cap. Presume still have to be paid off in se form somehow, but those lads cannot play? In which case a huge dead weight financial loss to those clubs.

[RoversAlias]

Speaking selfishly, I won't be losing any sleep if unweighted PPG is used and Peterborough and Sunderland miss out on the Play Offs.

If anything I'll enjoy a better night's sleep than I have in a while!

[silent majority]

Speaking selfishly, I won't be losing any sleep if unweighted PPG is used and Peterborough and Sunderland miss out on the Play Offs.

If anything I'll enjoy a better night's sleep than I have in a while!

Weighted ppg is not an option so they’re not going anywhere .

[NewDonny]

Speaking selfishly, I won't be losing any sleep if unweighted PPG is used and Peterborough and Sunderland miss out on the Play Offs.

If anything I'll enjoy a better night's sleep than I have in a while!

Ditto!

[roversdude]

Such a shame

[BillyStubbsTears]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

[big fat yorkshire pudding]

The real issue sporting wise is clubs like Tranmere, on great form and unable to continue it.

[Pancho Regan]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

A bit of an exaggeration to call it 'shockingly bad' BST.

If no more football is to played to complete the season, I don't think any system of determining final positions can be perfect. You can't please everybody in a situation like this.
But for me, straightforward PPG is the simplest and least controversial way. 

[IDM]

Then the fairest solution is not to complete the season.

Permit the games and appearances to “count”‘for player and club stats etc, but void the table.

Unless any club has already secured a promotion or been relegated, then nothing, absolutely nothing, has yet been decided on the pitch.  Voiding the season is harsh on clubs who were most likely to go up, but at least it is the only model which is absolutely equal in its treatment of all clubs, and doesn’t include any result predictions which don’t or can’t include form changes, injuries etc.

Form changes etc are all part of what we love about the game - it needs to be unpredictable.

[DonnyBazR0ver]

'Form' my arse. It will be like starting again for all teams! Anyone who's ever played sport knows the last thing you want when in form, is a break.

It is what it is. Time to look forward not back.

It's just a shame we won't see some of the players again if time is called. DM"s team never quite realised it's full potential and we will never know how things would have truly panned out.

I'm sure there will be a few clubs in a much worse state than ours when this is brought to a close. Let's be thankful for that.

[Filo]

Just a thought, with the playing staff furloughed, how will that affect recruitment?

[NewDonny]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

A bit of an exaggeration to call it 'shockingly bad' BST.

If no more football is to played to complete the season, I don't think any system of determining final positions can be perfect. You can't please everybody in a situation like this.
But for me, straightforward PPG is the simplest and least controversial way.

Spot on!

[NewDonny]

The real issue sporting wise is clubs like Tranmere, on

All teams good or bad have periods of good and and poor form throughout a season. Tranmere for the most part have been awful.

[big fat yorkshire pudding]

The real issue sporting wise is clubs like Tranmere, on

All teams good or bad have periods of good and and poor form throughout a season. Tranmere for the most part have been awful.

Adapting to a new league. Our seasons would have ended very differently if the final 10 games were not done.  We'd not have been relegated from the championship for onr and perhaps had a league 2 title....

[silent majority]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

Not really, no.

There is, under current regulations, no weight afforded to home or away games.

Plus, to quote the EFL;

There is no basis for concluding, home and away is the only factor. For example, it is equally valid to consider strength of opponents played to date and potentially others. All of which points to forecasting the outcome of the season as opposed to determining placings at the point of curtailment.

[roversdude]

Voiding the season seems a good option to be honest except that in my mind Bolton benefit then, what were they one game away from confirmed relegation?

[BillyStubbsTears]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

A bit of an exaggeration to call it 'shockingly bad' BST.

If no more football is to played to complete the season, I don't think any system of determining final positions can be perfect. You can't please everybody in a situation like this.
But for me, straightforward PPG is the simplest and least controversial way. 

OK.

I'll revise that.

Of all the realistic ways that you could use to find fair and reasonable final rankings, unweighted PPG is about the worst imaginable.

It is an utterly stupid way of doing it in ANY circumstances. In the current L1 scenario, with a fag paper separating half a dozen clubs, and it is idiotic.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

Not really, no.

There is, under current regulations, no weight afforded to home or away games.

Plus, to quote the EFL;

There is no basis for concluding, home and away is the only factor. For example, it is equally valid to consider strength of opponents played to date and potentially others. All of which points to forecasting the outcome of the season as opposed to determining placings at the point of curtailment.

Follow your logic then. Using unweighted PPG DOES apply weight to home and away records.

Wycombe have played 34 games. 18 at home and 16 away.

So, their current unweighted PPG comes from a skewed dataset. It comprises 53% of games played at home and 47% played away.

The whole point of weighting the PPG is precisely to make sure that the final figure is unweighted.

And that is before you drill into the much bigger question of the imbalances in quality of the teams that each side has played and still has to play.

For example, Rotherham still had 5 of the to 9 to play and only 3 of the bottom 9. Fleetwood, 2 points behind them, had 2 of the top 9 to play and 6 of the bottom 9.

So the EFL line appears to be: Because it looks too hard to come up with a good solution, we will use the worst one available.

I can see the logic though. They are presumably concerned with legal challenges against ANY approach. And the thinking is that the simpler the approach, the more they can hold their hands up and say "well we had to do SOMETHING."

In which case, fine. But don't try to spin this is being in any way genuinely fair.

[BillyStubbsTears]

I guess hindsight might be at play here, but perhaps someone should have foreseen the possibility of a scenario like this occurring at some point[1], and developed a more logical approach to determining final positions which all clubs could have signed up to beforehand.


[1] There was an inevitability about some financial, or natural disaster, or geo-political or health crisis leading to a situation like this sooner or later. It never dawned on me that it would happen, but then it ain't my job to do that horizon scanning.


PS: Or. Maybe in the big scheme of things, who goes up and who goes down really isn't that important...

[Chris Black come back]

There is no absolutely safe mechanism here. Whatever you do you are delivering an imperfect result. It does though within these parameters seem fairer to look at home form to date, look at away form to date and then extrapolate that across the remaining home and away games. Not perfect but less imperfect than just straight ppg.

Unless of course this advantages Peterborough, in which case it should be dismissed out of hand.

[Pancho Regan]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

A bit of an exaggeration to call it 'shockingly bad' BST.

If no more football is to played to complete the season, I don't think any system of determining final positions can be perfect. You can't please everybody in a situation like this.
But for me, straightforward PPG is the simplest and least controversial way. 

OK.

I'll revise that.

Of all the realistic ways that you could use to find fair and reasonable final rankings, unweighted PPG is about the worst imaginable.

It is an utterly stupid way of doing it in ANY circumstances. In the current L1 scenario, with a fag paper separating half a dozen clubs, and it is idiotic.

So you've revised your opinion from it being 'shockingly bad' to 'utterly stupid' and 'idiotic'.

I never imagined you would possess the grace and humility to perform such an enormous climb-down BST ....

 

[BillyStubbsTears]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

A bit of an exaggeration to call it 'shockingly bad' BST.

If no more football is to played to complete the season, I don't think any system of determining final positions can be perfect. You can't please everybody in a situation like this.
But for me, straightforward PPG is the simplest and least controversial way. 

OK.

I'll revise that.

Of all the realistic ways that you could use to find fair and reasonable final rankings, unweighted PPG is about the worst imaginable.

It is an utterly stupid way of doing it in ANY circumstances. In the current L1 scenario, with a fag paper separating half a dozen clubs, and it is idiotic.

So you've revised your opinion from it being 'shockingly bad' to 'utterly stupid' and 'idiotic'.

I never imagined you would possess the grace and humility to perform such an enormous climb-down BST ....

 

See my follow-up Pancho. I'm giving reasons for my opinion. What do you base your criticism of my opinion on?

[DonnyNoel]

I guess hindsight might be at play here, but perhaps someone should have foreseen the possibility of a scenario like this occurring at some point[1], and developed a more logical approach to determining final positions which all clubs could have signed up to beforehand.


[1] There was an inevitability about some financial, or natural disaster, or geo-political or health crisis leading to a situation like this sooner or later. It never dawned on me that it would happen, but then it ain't my job to do that horizon scanning.


PS: Or. Maybe in the big scheme of things, who goes up and who goes down really isn't that important...

I think the number of factors that could be involved in this are fascinating but almost make it difficult to use anything other than PPG. If you consider the way we try and predict individual fixtures and the level of detail we go into I'm not sure how you could cram it all in to an algorithm. On top of the obvious home and away weighting there's:

Some teams actually do better against teams above them than teams below them
Some teams fair better/worse against physical sides
As above but with flair sides
Some teams have grounds where they have an unusually high/low success rates
Short term form
Historical slumps/surges

I think its more complex than D/L in cricket as that is only used to complete a game. We're trying to simulate 10 games and even then we can't factor in the knock on effect of each result on the next hypothetical result too.

[silent majority]

Regardless of who gains or loses, unweighted PPG is a shockingly bad way of determining final positions.

Not really, no.

There is, under current regulations, no weight afforded to home or away games.

Plus, to quote the EFL;

There is no basis for concluding, home and away is the only factor. For example, it is equally valid to consider strength of opponents played to date and potentially others. All of which points to forecasting the outcome of the season as opposed to determining placings at the point of curtailment.

Follow your logic then. Using unweighted PPG DOES apply weight to home and away records.

Wycombe have played 34 games. 18 at home and 16 away.

So, their current unweighted PPG comes from a skewed dataset. It comprises 53% of games played at home and 47% played away.

The whole point of weighting the PPG is precisely to make sure that the final figure is unweighted.

And that is before you drill into the much bigger question of the imbalances in quality of the teams that each side has played and still has to play.

For example, Rotherham still had 5 of the to 9 to play and only 3 of the bottom 9. Fleetwood, 2 points behind them, had 2 of the top 9 to play and 6 of the bottom 9.

So the EFL line appears to be: Because it looks too hard to come up with a good solution, we will use the worst one available.

I can see the logic though. They are presumably concerned with legal challenges against ANY approach. And the thinking is that the simpler the approach, the more they can hold their hands up and say "well we had to do SOMETHING."

In which case, fine. But don't try to spin this is being in any way genuinely fair.

I wasn't applying my logic, nor did I say that it was unfair or otherwise.

What I've given you is the criteria that the EFL used for determining the end of a season, if that's what the clubs choose, when sporting integrity can't provide the answer.

The EFL, if they go down this route, will have to make changes to their own regulations to allow this to conclude.

Its forecasting which ever way you look at it, just applying your version of a forecast doesn't make it fairer or otherwise, its still a false conclusion to a sporting contest.

[RoversAlias]

We've all got our opinions on what the best solution is, but the truth is it is a very difficult decision to come to and I'm glad the EFL are standing up and saying "it will be done this way" instead of the arguing at professional level being allowed to rumble on.

I'm all for PPG, I think voiding nearly 40 games worth of a season to be the asinine and dreadful choice we should avoid.

I'd be interested to see every team's Home vs Away record to see how much of a difference playing at home really makes. In 2012/13 our home record was naff but we won the league off the strength of being brilliant away. What would weighted PPG after 38 games have done to us that year?

The fact is there is literally no perfect solution unless coronavirus is magically eradicated overnight.

[selby]

  The differing opinions on this thread shows how difficult it is to get a consensus of opinion without set out rules and laws.
  For the good of the game the EFL have got to get organised and appoint strong independent from the clubs leadership, and be strong enough to be willing to impose those rules and laws.
  There are people in the game who have done nothing but skim off money for years in charge of clubs as managers who have done deals with agents and players even going on the after dinner speaking circuit bragging about it.
  The higher up the league's you go the more spivs are attached to the game, and the greed is there for all to see and the game set up to feed the few, with the majority feeding off any scraps thrown on the floor for them.
 I cannot understand a governing body of the game, or even the government letting millions of pounds go into the pocket of agents and spivs and at the same time see the smaller clubs struggle for funds.
  It is time to put taxes on the deals and the individuals involved as a fund to the smaller clubs, and if the game itself is unwilling to sort it out the government should step in.

[EasyforDennis]

I agree. It would get rid of bigger clubs like Coventry and Rotherham, also potentially Portsmouth through play offs. Bolton who are a big club and must soon turn a corner, also go. The clubs that come down from Championship are the smallest clubs in there. So long as Sunderland continue to massively underperform, then it is a fairly even league next season on this basis.

. Rotherham a big club????

[Filo]

It’s also time for agents earnings to be capped, or as they are working for the player, the player should pay the agent fees. If the games financial structures are to change, it should be the whole game, agents included