They need to start afresh with the financial rules, and the first line should be a commitment that all clubs must be debt free within the next 10 years.
I cant believe how little is made of the fact that FFP was initally muted under the guise of stopping clubs going bust, debt management being a huge part to this. Instead it has become all about stopping money coming into the league for certain clubs.
While I dont like people using the Race card, you do have to question why every single modification to the rules has been to target us.
The rules regarding financial governance were originally intended to prevent unscrupulous owners coming in, landing a football club in mountains of debt chasing the dream, then buggering off leaving the club in danger of going out of business.
Seems to me a sports governing body has a legitimate interest in preventing this, so some sort of regulation regarding the maximum amount of debt allowable (say a certain percentage of turnover) would be justified and also easily verifiable.
This isn't what we got, we actually got a very complicated, overly intrusive, and anti competitive restriction on owner investment. We all have our suspicions regarding how we ended there and who was behind this change in emphasis. In simple terms, who would have been the most severely affected by an attack on debt, and who has been the most severely affected by the attack on owner investment?
My issue with the club is that we should have been far more aggressive against these rules from the start, both in the court of public opinion and the law courts. We have a good story to tell. We're standing up for ourselves against a cartel of powerful clubs who have clearly used their influence to shape these rules in such a way as to protect their own advantage and to prevent healthy competition.
Our fight against this is our own, admittedly we are acting in our own self interest, but these rules also will impact the ability of others to to follow in our footsteps. We're living the dream so why shouldn't supporters of Newcastle, Aston Villa, Everton, Wolves, etc, get the same opportunity?
So why haven't we challenged FFP under competition law? Not just the AP provisions, but the whole thing? Does a sports governing body get to dictate how much of his own money a businessman can invest in his own company in order to compete against rivals with access to superior resources? Can they demand commercially sensitive material? On what authority?
We need to go after these tossers and stop reacting to every new moving of the goalposts because this isn't going to stop until they starting feeling the pain.