A pointless club is one who has no ambitions of ever achieving anything other than beating the big teams by sapping the entertainment out of the game. A Burnley.
What is a 'Pointless Club'?
- Thread starter Wonder Pigeon
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
Southampton springs to mind for me
Who’s gonna tell him? Burnley will be “a breath of fresh air” in the PL next season. They are no longer the Dyche Burnley of old.
Nah, everything they “win” has an asterisk. They’re the definition of pointless.
When a club have 0 point at the start of the league they are pointless.
No club is pointless and it's hard to criticise a club's apparent lack of ambition when they're also competing against other clubs and have a duty to run themselves sensibly. But Norwich being in the premier League is always pointless. If they get promoted just give them the money they would earn in the PL but give their place to a more interesting team (so not West Brom).
The correct answer: Lads, it's Spurs!
I’ll have you know Dyche is a high press master.
Lads, it’s Spurs.
Anybody saying that any club is pointless is a fecking idiot. Just go to any non-league club in the country and see the passion of their supporters and their dreams of getting into the league and the links the club has with the local community. Saying a club is pointless is just pure arrogance, ignorance and as soon as I read it I instantly think the person who wrote it is a total dick head and not a real football fan.
It's the calling card of the idiot on social media. It shows they miss the point.
Prior to the football boom, they didn't exist.
When there was a much flatter level between all clubs. Forest winning the European cup twice etc
All teams could hope.
When there was a much flatter level between all clubs. Forest winning the European cup twice etc
All teams could hope.
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No such thing as a pointless club
Everton whenever they’re against Liverpool
In their current form, without question. I'd add MK Dons to the list.
absolutely this, it's like saying clubs have no history as if history just equals numbers of trophies won.
Yeah because they cheated to get there. It's all meaningless. Give my nana unlimited money and a few million pound accountants to game the system and she'd make a success of it eventually.
It's this bit. I think a lot of the younger people getting into football have grown up thinking this is how it works. Everything is twisted, taken out of context and posted to make another club, or player look bad. Then you'll have usually sensible people getting so annoyed at it that they throw the same shit back and then it's literally a shit flinging match forever.
I hate it all.
Good post. All very true.
‘Pointless’ clubs like Spurs and Norwich it could be argued are a necessary mean. Spurs always bottling cup competitions means other teams win it instead. And if they won a League Cup 6 years ago then there wouldn’t be the same intrigue with them of when they’re gonna win one.
Basically in any sport or competition there has to be placeholders, in international football it’s often a Poland or Switzerland, if you’re not good on the day they might beat you, if you’re a top team you prove it by blowing them away.
Not every team is a champion team - if a completely new team won the league every year with a completely different top 4 it would be disorientating because there would be no sense of legacy or dynasty with teams or players, it would be hard to work out who the best actually are. So within that, we have someone like Crystal Palace who are 12th or so most years and are essentially PL filler who occasionally beat a top team to make things interesting. And in that way they’re not pointless, they have meaning.
Basically in any sport or competition there has to be placeholders, in international football it’s often a Poland or Switzerland, if you’re not good on the day they might beat you, if you’re a top team you prove it by blowing them away.
Not every team is a champion team - if a completely new team won the league every year with a completely different top 4 it would be disorientating because there would be no sense of legacy or dynasty with teams or players, it would be hard to work out who the best actually are. So within that, we have someone like Crystal Palace who are 12th or so most years and are essentially PL filler who occasionally beat a top team to make things interesting. And in that way they’re not pointless, they have meaning.
This is one of the most arrogant and woeful takes on football I have read in quite some time.
The vast, vast majority of matchgoing fans go to watch games at clubs that ultimately will win nothing. They make up the bulk of football fans everywhere.
The point of football is not to win, but to compete. The point about following football isnt that you have to win, but that you take part in the journey with the team, whereever that goes. If you only value winning trophies, then you just set yourself up for a miserable, petty existence. If Manchester United started to win ever single game, and every single trophy, football would become boring. There would be no joy left once you got used to it.
A team like Leicester was "pointless". Then they did the unthinkable and won everything, made it to the Champions League. Their fans have that memory for the rest of their lives. Its something that they will talk about for decades. For the fans of Leicester it was their club and they all followed the journey all the way to the top, and they are following them to this day when they are struggling. Unwavering. As it should be.
"My" team in Norway got relegated to division 1 years ago. I still attend home games and I feel an absolute joy when they win a game, and bummed out when you lose. The point about "pointless" teams is that they are your team, win or lose, and you should never have to defend that position to social media hypebeasts that got the perspective of a gnat.
The point of football is not to win, but to compete. The point about following football isnt that you have to win, but that you take part in the journey with the team, whereever that goes. If you only value winning trophies, then you just set yourself up for a miserable, petty existence. If Manchester United started to win ever single game, and every single trophy, football would become boring. There would be no joy left once you got used to it.
A team like Leicester was "pointless". Then they did the unthinkable and won everything, made it to the Champions League. Their fans have that memory for the rest of their lives. Its something that they will talk about for decades. For the fans of Leicester it was their club and they all followed the journey all the way to the top, and they are following them to this day when they are struggling. Unwavering. As it should be.
"My" team in Norway got relegated to division 1 years ago. I still attend home games and I feel an absolute joy when they win a game, and bummed out when you lose. The point about "pointless" teams is that they are your team, win or lose, and you should never have to defend that position to social media hypebeasts that got the perspective of a gnat.
Manchester Asterisk City. Take away Money doping and being a front for a nation state and they are at best, mid table. They are a hedge fund, not a club, what with all their fake sponsors and under the table payments
Part of Spurs’s modern identity to the average fan is they have only won one League Cup in 23 years this century despite competing at the top end of the league for good sections of that time. They’ve managed to get themselves considered as a ‘Big 6’ club, winning 1 small trophy despite the fact the club with the next least amount of trophies in that ‘Big 6’ is Arsenal with 9.
What on earth has that got to do with whether any club should be considered pointless? Would you like me to recite your own clubs history back to you?
So what though? Winning cups isn't the be all and end all of football. City are a lot more successful than Spurs but are way, way more pointless.
My whole post was about teams not being pointless.
I agree with you, what I was trying to say was that every team has their own role and a point within the football system.
What choice do they have? Their revenue is almost exactly half of Bayern's. I'm sure they'd love to keep all the talents they lost over the years to the bigger clubs but it's impossible without some huge injection of external funds. The last time they tried to spend beyond their means and give huge wages to their star names to keep them at the club, they nearly went bankrupt in the early 2000s.
Without state ownership, every club below the traditional giants is a money-driven selling club. Each and every one of them.
Yeah but your reasoning for that was abysmal and essentially boiled historic clubs down to being just clubs that 'big' clubs beat to prove they are good.
Strange that you choose the two clubs with the highest home attendance at club grounds in England.
People tend to have a recency bias from when they started watching football, but looking through history and seeing how successful clubs like Huddersfield, Blackpool etc used to be would shock many, indeed Huddersfields record attendance is over 5,000 more than has ever been in Anfield, Bolton once had 69,912 at Burnden Park, Charlton over 75,000 at the Valley etc.
(Agree with the poster saying MK can do one though)
That’s what happens though, competition wise. Somebody has to finish 12th, same way in a large company not everyone can be CEO, somebody has to do an ordinary job. The ordinary job person is not pointless, if there are no ordinary jobs then the company collapses.
You are totally missing the point of what football is and why clubs are so important and in no way pointless. Honestly your (and others) responses in this thread are depressing to read.
Probably a Lob Wedge. I've not used one for years
Yeah I'm not particularly interested in what came before. They are two completely different entities now.
You should be interested because history is part of what makes football so special and is key to why clubs are so integrated into their local communities. If you don't respect the history of football then I don't see how you can be a real football fan.
I respect the history and lack of success of both clubs. I don't respect what they are today because it doesn't resemble who they were.
Any club that isn’t United
Completely agree. It's like tearing down Westminster Abbey, replacing it with a office block and then expecting people to respect that office block because of "history".
(Well take something less significant than Westminster Abbey if you like but you get the gist of it).