That's being 'economic with the truth' to put it mildly Tony ! The Olympic Stadium cost about £550 million most of which was financed by the good old tax peyers.
Look at the attached list and then tell me if £9.8 million was money well spent ? Yes, the Olympics were a great success but at a cost...
That's a lot of money n'est pas ?
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/datablog/2012/jul/26/london-2012-olympics-money
Bit testy this morning are we? I'm not having a go at anyone, just sticking up for one of our more senior members. Since when have you been an arbiter of how people here are allowed to reply to posts?
vic
why not start you own post where you can discuss what you like instead of hijcking this one!! As everyone seems to just want to have a go at us footy fans
Probably nothing but personally I prefer Doreen's post to football talk:-) Give her a break Angella. She probably just posted in the wrong place or was simply talking to someone further down the table.
Not a lot really - except insofar as where you live influences who you support in any major sporting event. Perhaps it ought to be moved to a "Why did you move to France" thread?
And what does this have to do with the world cup or football?
Allez Castres !!!
pile-poil, Véro, pile-poil !
Hi
ok you win ? i feel chastised
but can we now discuss the original question of football??
Who we think will win etc or is that too much to ask
I suspect that it may not be an easy tournament this year but the team is solid and they are on home ground which is psychologically a big advantage. Even if dear Scotland had got through this far I would have cheered them in the opening round but not expected them to go further, so would always have favoured Brazil.
No, it is not the game, it is the people pulling the strings and making it dirty. That is why politics absolutely does belong in the discussion.
hi brian
i am not disagreeing with you but do not believe you can just blame the beautiful game.
At the beginning it did say a discussion on football and not poltics
and on that note do you think Brazil will win? i shall watch out for Paulinho and of course Oscar and david luiz What do you think of julio Cesar being in goal having been on strike at QPR all year and barely playing any football
angie
Not all of us are like that Veronique.
We live in the country and we feel at home here, albeit it’s mainly beef farming.
Since moving here we have transformed this house and made a gite and the lady we bought from is s thankful because she knew that unless someone spent money, her family home would be lost.
My OH has also transformed a part of the field into a young orchard and keeps his chickens and has extended the potager. Quite different from his work as a consultant to government.
We do like to sit on the terrace in the evening with a glass or two, but it has been too cold for the past two weeks o so to do that.
We won’t be supporting either team in the forthcoming clash.
In a nutshell. I think a fair few of us here agree, as for the rest? Perhaps some of us simply burst our bubble so early in life that there is nothing around us except what is actually there? I prefer it that way. As for patriotism and football, I still support Brazil despite 75% of the family being Swiss!
There are enough of us who could take up the challenge on that last paragraph and do as you say. Justifiably.
As for the sport, well yes, it is not football's fault but that of the higher powers and governments in particular. Football has become big business with the sport as a profit making enterprise. We could debate all day about transfer fees and players' wages and achieve nothing but the role of the business people and politicians sully the whole ethos of sport and competition by not caring about people.
I'm just thinking generally here - what follows isn't necessarily about British people, it could apply to anyone going to another country.
I have always wondered why people retire abroad, cutting themselves off from their original context and also not giving themselves an easy way of becoming part of their new community ie work. They also often have a very idealised view of where they are going. (Rather like my friends who come & stay in the holidays who imagine it is like that all year round).
And it rather depends why you are living somewhere else (- around here there are a few GB people who have moved to France & subsequently often go off to Spain because things have got a bit too hot for them in GB).
The same goes for lots of people who move but have a lot of baggage and remain in a dissatisfied bubble, yearning for what they haven't got.It is also difficult if they are on the margin of a community because eg they don't work or speak the local language. They haven't really chosen a new & different way of life but are running away, taking their original assumptions and world-view with them.
And the ones who go off to the village café at 930 every day all year round and get stuck in to the rosé because they are in holiday mode even though nobody else is, so obviously everyone thinks they are raging alkies... These are all people who are more likely to cling to their original national identity because they haven't got anything else to put in its place, and are more likely to be intensely nationalistic as a way of compensating for being away from their 'home' (not that it is, any more).
It is very different for people who are part of a community through family or work or both, who tend to be assimilated much more easily, they aren't any more foreign than someone from elsewhere in France. So they are more likely not to cling to their original team etc etc .
wow What a political discussion!!!
I disagree that you can blame football alone for all the wrongs in the world!
i will watch and support England and France through out the world cup and will not apologizes for doing so.
When this is complete i will then follow my second sport Athletics with the commonwealth games,
i expect you will now tell me how corrupt that is as well.
In all of your debate you miss the point of how many people love and follow sport with no gain or glory AND sport can also change lives of people for the better.
If you want a debate on sport destroying countries look no further than Golf and all the golf courses built destroying the environment or why not have a go at Mc donalds or Disney that would be a great debate
if your oh and kids and "adopted" family are of that nationality and if everything you do here (apart from sfn) is dne in french. if you no longer have any idea about what's going on in the uk, wh's playing for england etc, if all your references are now french isn't it normal...? although i will be supporting the england team too once the competition starts and i find out who the are! ;-)
That is Daily Mail type of rubbish Tony. Way back 20 years ago when I was working with street children I spent a great deal of time in pueblos jovenes in Spanish South America and favelas in Brazil and that myth of drug gangs is an old one that was about Medellin in Colombia and a handful of Mexican cities but never about Brazil. yes, they are illegal, squatter settlements but then the vast majority of the many millions who went to cities and built them were forced off the land by land grabbing and government led evictions so that small holdings could be put together to make large plantations. the then military government cleared who small towns by force. All that was left was for the people to go to cities, squat and provide the new industrial labour force and a very large part of the service sector in what we people who work in that world refer to as the informal sector. There is now up to fourth generation who have been in those settlements where they have structures such as well run councils and a kind of informal civil services, transport and support structures plus doctors, teachers and all that goes with them. People had built stone houses and several governments had promised to give them ownership deeds as 'repayment' for their losses and their contribution to the success of their country. They never quite got round to it. Brazil is neither a serious drug producing nor using country except as a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals that even you might use from time to time. So before you judge of the basis of very wrong information find out please.
As for the favelas, of course I support them. I stayed in them, lived on and off in a couple of Peruvian equivalents for nearly two decades as part of my livelihood. I have seen them go from the last resort and misery that people who had lost all hope flocked into to being cohesive and dynamic communities full of hope and enterprise that many well established European communities have lost. That some hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were spent within them and among them the oldest having been thrown off their land or out of home towns to be moved on several times until they arrived where they were to then be thrown off again is not at all acceptable. As for the youngest, well they perhaps have the hope and opportunity to find stability one again in the future. To evict people in 12 cities for the sakes of a football tournament in one of the physically largest countries in the world with a lot of space outside of cities makes it worse. But then the 'countryside' is owned by the richest of the rich who would not want that.
So dispel the dug myth please, even Medellin has cleared out the largest part of the drug cartels and that is not even in Brazil where cocaine is not produced, Bolivia has taken on that dubious honour. Cocaine consumption has become high in Brazil recently but among the very classes who are not affected by the World Cup, middle middle class upwards who can afford it. So yes, I support the favelistas and so do all of my Brazilian activist and academic acquaintances who have consistently kept me well and honestly informed for around 30 years.
I can’t agree that Brian is supporting the favelas.
Whilst there are campaigns against organised crime within them, this was not just a police operation.
It was organised clearances for the purpose of construction for the world Cup and people were left homeless.
And before anyone starts on the Highland Clearances, they were wrong too!
I am very lucky to be living in a most beautiful part of the world where we have been made extremely welcome and I realise that this is a privileged position, but to have my community destroyed and the roof taken from over my head would be appalling.
I am quite aware that football has a tremendous pull, but I have just heard how much the new owners of Manchester City have spent on the new training grounds, players and facilities and it makes the mind boggle. What they will have to pay in fines
is peanuts compared to that. What used to be a sport is now multi-billion pound business trading in the loyalty and long term connections of its fans, who seem to be totally ignored if people such as the Glazers can take hold of iconic British teams.
Before I came to live in France my favourite spectator sport was polo, which does need the sponsorship of rich individuals putting together teams. However, to be a social member of my club, Cirencester Park, cost less than the price of a couple of team shirts and even less when I reached 60. For that I could take my car to the side of the field and also take a friend with me and use the club facilities. The season ran from the end of April to the beginning of September and I could watch matches three or four times a week.
Compare that to the cost of a season ticket nowadays!