Here's my stone cold sober assessment, for what it's worth:
We'd have been a mid-table team, most of the time in the Premier League, with occasional excursions to the Championship. With or without the takeover, we're too big to be out of the top flight for long. We always have been. But I don't think we would have been competing for top four, somehow.
The whole financial structure of football has changed radically since the foundation of the Premier League and the advent of worldwide satellite football and the beaming of the PL to every major country on earth and a good few minor ones.
And that's not us, it's the way the cartel clubs wanted it (and everybody else went along with it, because, well, what are you going to do?) — Arsenal, United, Liverpool and of course Chelsea, who broke in before us, would have kept on winning it. A club the size of Ipswich (and a town the size of Ipswich) could be champions at the beginning of the sixties, and indeed challenged at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties (runners-up in ’81 and ’82). Watford were runners-up in ’83. That just isn't going to happen again. Leicester, I hear you say? The aberration that proves the rule. And the fact that a club that was champions seven years ago and F.A. Cup winners two years ago has just been relegated tells you everything about the way the power structure inevitably reasserts itself. Of course, it was not at all in the plan that we should be doing what we're doing, but that's another story. For the likes of Liverpool and United to go trophyless for this and that season… well, put it this way, we're fucking up everyone's plans.
Nah, nothing dramatic… We would have been mid-table, the occasional relegation and coming up again the following season or two seasons down the line. We would have been a selling club, obliged to sell off our best academy products to keep ourselves ticking over. Perhaps, just perhaps, the occasional League Cup. But even those are hoovered up by the big boys now (with us the first in line).
But we would have still been here. There would have been fewer of us, of course, because that's the way of the world. The supporters are the only semi-permanent thing about a club, beyond the club as an idea and a dream.
