When I was playing for Nacional in Montevideo, the players who lived outside the city would be given money by the club to get there and back on the bus.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People have to pay a lot of money to play soccer here.
And historically the owners have used loyalty to a team or a city to hold players as opposed to always paying their worth.
The only football players in my time were fellows who really loved to play football. They were not in it for the money. There wasn't much money there. They would have played football for nothing.
We spent a lot of money on some players.
It is not about money. It is about how you treat the player.
Some of the money from the senior players goes to helping out the younger kids. It is from the players' pool, the fines for being late and so on. Some will go to something like the tsunami appeal and some to helping out young players.
The source of wealth is from individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who have happened upon football as a means of serving some hidden agenda.
Football spectators appreciate a bit of loyalty, and we're seeing that less and less. There are echelons of football, as in society, where some players are clearly mercenaries. I regret in a way that somehow the local identification, the local bonding between the community and its football team has been commercialised to such an extent.
Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.
I don't want to spend money the club doesn't have; I don't want to hold a player that doesn't want to stay.