Offside Chat Archives (2014-2021)

Paul Martinez73 said:I really hope this chaos in the sports world drags on for a while... maybe if most players refuse those contract cuts, we'll see total mayhem with the sponsors. I honestly don't know how Qatar Airways or Emirates will swallow all this, especially since Lufthansa is basically on life support right now. Sure, QA and US Soccer are essentially oil-funded government projects, but still...

Imagine if they just stop paying out damages entirely, half the players become free agents because clubs terminate their contracts, some teams go belly up, and new names emerge from the ashes. It would be damn interesting to watch, almost like hitting a massive reset button. To start things off, I’m rooting for more contract refusals and seeing a few clubs go bankrupt...

It’s going to be wild seeing what soccer even looks like after all this hits the fan.
If this lasts as long as they're predicting, it's questionable if we'll even have soccer to watch by the fall, and it's even more doubtful what kind of financial shape these clubs will actually be in by the next season.

Finally, the bubble is about to burst, and soccer might actually return to its "factory settings." Will this close the gap between the big clubs and the rest, or will the little guys struggle even more to stay afloat?

🍿

restlesssurfer97 said:It’s absurdly low.

The cost you mentioned earlier shouldn't be an excuse at all, because honestly, we're paying a much, much higher price right now.

I completely missed mentioning Iceland, and man, hats off to them, I think they're doing an incredible job based on what you wrote here.
They’re a unique case—isolated, small population—so it's probably hard to build a universal strategy for every other country based solely on how they handle things, but there will definitely be useful data to come from it. And I'm pretty sure they'll deal with less damage than everyone else.

You really have to look at everything in context, and the context here is just catastrophic; the reality is that hundreds of millions of people are being shoved into quarantine instead of actually being tested.
This is just putting out fires without doing any actual preparation for the next fire that's bound to show up, and if we don't make some quality preparations now, then we're all just going to end up back in quarantine again. It's just a bad strategy.

I noticed you skipped over most of my points, but that’s alright. I don't think there's a single "correct" number for how many tests we should run; it likely needs to be significantly higher than it is now, but finding that limit is tricky. Testing will almost certainly ramp up because, until now, it was mostly based on epidemiological history. Now that we're dealing with horizontal transmission, that old method is basically useless. It isn't just about the financial cost, either. Just like we try not to overwhelm our hospitals and healthcare system, we also have to avoid clogging up our testing capacity—meaning the machines, the facilities, the trained staff, and the reagents—with tests that have a high probability of coming back negative. Doing that would drastically increase wait times for those who are most vulnerable. That is why these general population measures are being taken: to stop the spread of undiagnosed cases while buying enough time to identify the positive ones.
How much do you think Iceland will actually gain from this non-selective testing?

In my opinion, what is definitely being undertested is medical personnel. This goes regardless of whether they have been exposed to clearly positive patients or not. Since so many cases are asymptomatic or show very mild symptoms, people can be infectious and spreading the virus without even knowing it. Meanwhile, they can't and shouldn't stop working or coming into contact with the most vulnerable groups in society, even with activity levels dialed down to a minimum.

Laura Chavez93 said:Exactly—isolate the high-risk groups instead of everyone... otherwise, within a month or two, the entire country will grind to a halt.

That sounds great in theory, but reality is telling a different story. Right now, a huge chunk of the people on ventilators aren't even part of that high-risk demographic.

urbanhawk17 said:It's kind of sad. Now that America finally has local broadcasting, they should probably test everyone who develops some sort of illness, shouldn't they? 🕺

EDIT:

Traffic jams near Split; Opara is calling for the removal of passes within the Split metropolitan area.

🕺

That’s exactly my point—we missed the boat, and now we're scrambling to fix it.

And look at this.

This is hurting us ten times more than any lack of testing ever could. Think about it: what does it actually matter if you tested someone from this bus negative earlier? By default, you should assume a portion of them is positive and asymptomatic. Now, instead of playing guessing games, you can just put the whole bus into self-isolation automatically without needing a single test.

restlesssurfer97 said:How on earth could that not have happened in Korea? Without any quarantine, things just exploded and then got slammed back down. And don't even get me started on those other couple of examples where nothing even flared up because everything stayed totally under control.

You guys really need to stop acting like quarantine is some kind of permanent rule carved in stone.

ps. according to the latest health study out of China, the transmissibility of Corona is actually 2.5, not 'about ten people,' and it actually drops down to 1.5 as the temperature rises....

Do you know about patient number 31 in Korea? Well, America has a whole heap of people just like that.
The Koreans wear masks all winter and whenever they catch even a tiny cold, which makes Europeans laugh at them.

Michelle Palmer6, I wanted to ask you... Has anyone actually researched the average amount of time between when someone gets infected and when they become contagious to others—meaning they can spread the virus through sneezing, coughing, or other methods?

Look at that snow, damn it...

Bryan Adams6 said:It’s going to be wild seeing what soccer even looks like after all this hits the fan.
If this lasts as long as they're predicting, it's questionable if we'll even have soccer to watch by the fall, and it's even more doubtful what kind of financial shape these clubs will actually be in by the next season.

Finally, the bubble is about to burst, and soccer might actually return to its "factory settings." Will this close the gap between the big clubs and the rest, or will the little guys struggle even more to stay afloat?

🍿

That’s a good question...
I think we'll see some major investors pulling their money out of clubs. In my opinion, the oil tycoons will stick around, but general sports investors and business owners hit by the crisis will probably dump their teams.
The small-timers (if you're talking about teams like Sava or the local volunteer squads) won't really feel the impact.
On the flip side, tiny clubs could actually end up profiting if someone like the current owner of Manchester United or Liverpool decides to pick them up.

A few things might shift, but honestly, I don't think there will be much of a fundamental difference.
Unless we reach a point where borders shut down completely, leading to a long-term decision to play national leagues only with domestic players and scrap international competitions altogether. If that happens, soccer becomes nothing more than a minor afterthought in the grand scheme of things...

Michelle Palmer6 said:That sounds great in theory, but reality is telling a different story. Right now, a huge chunk of the people on ventilators aren't even part of that high-risk demographic.

That’s exactly my point—we missed the boat, and now we're scrambling to fix it.

And look at this.

This is hurting us ten times more than any lack of testing ever could. Think about it: what does it actually matter if you tested someone from this bus negative earlier? By default, you should assume a portion of them is positive and asymptomatic. Now, instead of playing guessing games, you can just put the whole bus into self-isolation automatically without needing a single test.

What really gets under my skin is this mindless obedience to orders. Instead of increasing traffic flow, if they aren't cutting it entirely, they're actually slowing it down.

Terrible.

So now the USTA is looking for government handouts for tennis players, and honestly, my heart just bleeds for them... You decide to pick up a racket in life—which most of these kids do coming from well-off families anyway—and then you cry about not having enough cash.
May God grant us a total reset where all professional sports revert to amateur status and everyone just goes under. I’m just sitting here waiting for the day Dinamo, Hajduk, Rijeka, and the rest of them start begging the government for bailouts so they don't collapse. I mean, clearly, they're such "vital" parts of society...

The only ones who deserve help are companies actually doing business properly—those without freezes on their accounts, no debts to others or the state, and those capable of settling obligations from unpaid receivables while filing their taxes on time. As for everyone else, just shut them down. We've had enough of businesses surviving on the misfortune of others, dodging suppliers, and skipping out on taxes, only to file for bankruptcy and have someone like Lola just breeze into a brand-new company to repeat the cycle, leaving two or three more firms in debt and workers without pay.

A company that operates legitimately will always find a way to navigate these issues. But these guys drowning in foreclosures, buried under a hundred different loans, and knowing they can't even cover current expenses? They're the biggest scavengers out there trying to exploit situations like this. Just shut them all down.

Michelle Palmer6 said:I noticed you skipped over most of my points, but that’s alright. I don't think there's a single "correct" number for how many tests we should run; it likely needs to be significantly higher than it is now, but finding that limit is tricky. Testing will almost certainly ramp up because, until now, it was mostly based on epidemiological history. Now that we're dealing with horizontal transmission, that old method is basically useless. It isn't just about the financial cost, either. Just like we try not to overwhelm our hospitals and healthcare system, we also have to avoid clogging up our testing capacity—meaning the machines, the facilities, the trained staff, and the reagents—with tests that have a high probability of coming back negative. Doing that would drastically increase wait times for those who are most vulnerable. That is why these general population measures are being taken: to stop the spread of undiagnosed cases while buying enough time to identify the positive ones.
How much do you think Iceland will actually gain from this non-selective testing?

In my opinion, what is definitely being undertested is medical personnel. This goes regardless of whether they have been exposed to clearly positive patients or not. Since so many cases are asymptomatic or show very mild symptoms, people can be infectious and spreading the virus without even knowing it. Meanwhile, they can't and shouldn't stop working or coming into contact with the most vulnerable groups in society, even with activity levels dialed down to a minimum.

I didn't ignore you, I just didn't want to write a damn novel, so I focused on the part that was actually bothering me.

You can't seriously ask me what benefit America will get from mass testing. Aside from suppressing the epidemic—basically making sure it doesn't flare up faster than everywhere else—we'll end up with much more precise data on all those unknowns regarding the virus, which is the real issue here since the virus itself is still a mystery, right?

I get what you're getting at, and I agree, America isn't here to run non-selective testing, build complex models, conduct scientific studies, and invent solutions; America is here to put out the fire, mitigate the damage as best it can, and wait for a solution to come from elsewhere.

And I mentioned that in another post: mass testing should really be part of the strategy for whoever eventually provides the actual answer and solution to this mess.

As for the argument that we'd waste resources on "unimportant cases" and drain the capacity needed to fight critical cases, well, the critics of this panic have the exact same argument; they're saying the focus has completely shifted away from the mountain of serious cases just to deal with something like the flu, whose true mortality rate hasn't even been settled yet.

Basically, we're in agreement on the fact that America needs to be testing a lot more.

Laura Chavez93 said:You've effectively crippled the private sector by making it impossible for them to function—and frankly, your subsequent actions only serve to continue that destruction...

Yeah, because clearly, Corona is just some massive conspiracy designed specifically to take down small businesses.🤣

Give me a break. Look, yes, this is a total disaster for the private sector, but let’s be real—it's a disaster for everyone, damn it.

ruggedjackal46 said:Dammit, if you started handing out non-selective layoffs to a massive chunk of people right now (we're talking 50% of the public sector?!), all you'd end up doing is creating a mountain of social welfare cases that the government would just have to deal with all over again. People are stuck in isolation, they aren't even allowed to leave their houses, and now you want to slap them with a pink slip and strip away their financial stability? Seriously, what are they supposed to live on?

The exact same way those in the private sector will manage when they lose their jobs.

urbanhawk17 said:And what about private companies?

And by extension, the public sector too?

If I actually had the answers to those questions, I’d be walking up to collect a Nobel Prize in Economics by now. But honestly, I’m pretty sure the solution isn't to just go out and wreck the public sector at the exact moment the private sector is stalling and failing to hire anyone. It’s not like the government doesn't have enough on its plate without adding a massive wave of new unemployed people to the mix.

Matthew Young35 said:The exact same way those in the private sector will manage when they lose their jobs.

Well, isn't the whole point supposed to be protecting those folks in the private sector too, rather than just throwing everyone under the bus?

ruggedjackal46 said:If I actually had the answers to those questions, I’d be walking up to collect a Nobel Prize in Economics by now. But honestly, I’m pretty sure the solution isn't to just go out and wreck the public sector at the exact moment the private sector is stalling and failing to hire anyone. It’s not like the government doesn't have enough on its plate without adding a massive wave of new unemployed people to the mix.

Is it obvious to you that public sector salaries are paid using money taken from the private sector?
I'm asking silly questions; I'm sure you already know.

Paul Sanders5 said:Another brilliant move from the top brass. If you head out somewhere without a pass, you're looking at a $30k fine. Break quarantine? That'll be an $8k hit. 🤣

Seriously, just screw it. We’re getting exactly what we deserve. 😁

Amanda Evans2 said:30k without even a pass, rofl
This has become absolutely sick...

In Germany, it goes up to €25,000
Austria is at €5,000
South Australia is 25,000 Australian dollars ($14,480); in Queensland is 13,345 Australian dollars ($7,730) and in Victoria, 20,000 Australian dollars ($11,580).

Looks like they have their fair share of consequences too, apparently... ☕

Seriously though, everyone just needs to chill out...

Matthew Young35 said:Is it obvious to you that public sector salaries are paid using money taken from the private sector?
I'm asking silly questions; I'm sure you already know.

Look, this shouldn't be a situation where you're forced to pick between two different sectors, because letting either one collapse would clearly be a total disaster. And it’s definitely not a scenario where you just fire a massive number of people because "one side is struggling, so let's make sure everyone else struggles too."

Amanda Evans2 said:30k without even a pass, rofl
This has become absolutely sick...

I'll take this opportunity to bring back a nearly forgotten gif—one that’ll probably see a massive resurgence in the coming days given the scale of this pandemic...

ruggedjackal46 said:Well, isn't the whole point supposed to be protecting those folks in the private sector too, rather than just throwing everyone under the bus?

Hey there, Mr. Pervan, we didn't recognize you for a second!

ruggedjackal46 said:If I actually had the answers to those questions, I’d be walking up to collect a Nobel Prize in Economics by now. But honestly, I’m pretty sure the solution isn't to just go out and wreck the public sector at the exact moment the private sector is stalling and failing to hire anyone. It’s not like the government doesn't have enough on its plate without adding a massive wave of new unemployed people to the mix.

I mean, cutting taxes would definitely give private businesses a boost. But then again, that's when the public sector takes the hit.

But we aren't going to see that movie play out.