Originally Posted by
Lewis
Yeah, some players will always gravitate towards London; but if Sunderland are paying you sixty grand a week then you can quite easily not live in Sunderland (did Gary Neville live in Central Manchester?). Didn't Joe Cole used to commute to France without any adverse effect on his probably shit performances?
It's nothing to do with the players. The rail links from Leeds to London are probably better than Norwich to London, and Swansea seem to be doing alright in the middle of a crap area (even Leicester to London isn't that easy). Northern clubs just got complacent and shit when football was changing in the nineties, because they had been dominant when only gate receipts mattered on the back of the industrial working classes, and then any attempt to reform them was met with 'We're Sheffield Wednesday...' Look at Southampton. They've had some decent backing in recent years, but they also had to effectively start again from scratch. Why haven't Leeds done that instead of just desperately trying to get back 'where they belong'? It's the same mentality that holds the cities back. Council leaders think they're running great cities because they sit in imposing buildings built by industries that died before they were born.