Andrew Gravillon

[brehme1989]

Brehme, apologies for me being such a sketchy historian.

In any event, I'll always support a Greek team in Europe, regardless of which team it is.

You mentioned the spiral of Greek football, it does not appear that players are coming through the ranks like they did in the past. What are the causes(s) of this?

Corruption.

League has been fixed since 1996-97
Who goes up, who goes down, who plays where... all these are dealt with from a set of crooks in the last 15 years even more so than the first wave of fixture manipulation and refereeing scandals and a crony federation.

Euro 2004 was won despite of that.
Panathinaikos and AEK to a lesser degree succeeded in Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s despite of this.

Add an economic crisis and the Platini rules that disabled the path of most Greek teams in Europe and you have created an even bigger monster.
Pressure to do something in a corrupt league and in Europe made teams look for an easy way out and they just hire a bunch of average mercenaries etc. Bosman rule side effects. Late 90s and early 2000s teams weren't as affected by this as they had a different mentality. So you cannot really produce players. Paok does to a degree from the competitive sides.

They tried to rectify this in the last 5 years but all we have now is a tug of war of who will control football rather than heal it.