There’s a lot to respond to there, but I’ll do my best. On the first section, it’s not about debt limitation, namely that the auditors would have looked at their outgoings and seen clearly that they were living beyond the money that came into the football club from elsewhere. That’s when the red flags are going up. They may be able to service that debt perfectly well but it doesn’t detract from the fact that it shouldn’t have happened. I also agree 100% that whilst it does benefit and hinder clubs in different ways, it does help the biggest clubs on occasion perhaps unfairly. However the mandate for all clubs to spend within their means is a brilliant concept. Of course the fans of the likes of Leeds and Portsmouth loved the good times and that, but the most important thing is that they’ve still got their club. The fact that an arbitrary figure can come in and reduce a community asset to rubble and fuck off isn't something that should ever be allowed to happen again. And you mention how even the teams at the bottom can compete financially with a lot of big hitters in Europe. Maybe in the boardroom, but not on the pitch, they’re light years behind. You only have to look how many British teams have won the UEFA Cup/Europa League in the last 30 years who weren’t in the top six or so. The top of our league is ridiculously strong, the rest not so much.
Re the Southampton point; we gave them a lot of money over a period. This was down to their scouting system and the way they’ve developed players which made them attractive. Yes, they’ve lost a lot of players but that’s the nature of football. What it did do is give Southampton a transfer budget like they’ve never had in their lives. They can buy anybody they want. Of course the money still has to be spent wisely but they’re certainly not hard done by. They could have maybe taken that squad a step further to the Leeds of c2000 where they’d made the jump to the CL. But they chose not to, that was their decision. It’s a time of mad numbers being thrown about, for both players and clubs. And tapping up? Every single transfer deal in the world has it. Every single one. If you don’t think that’s the case, you’re way off there, mate.
Clubs can kick the door in at UEFA, Chelsea are a prime example of this. Desperate to get in the G8, couldn’t get near it. Won the CL, different story. If you win the CL this year which I’ve already said on here that you will, the narrative will change again. I might be wrong but I don’t reckon so. Once you’ve won, you’re in the gang. I appreciate that’s a rather facile way of putting it but that seems to be how it plays out rightly or wrongly.
One final thing; not one owner gives two fucks about anything other than the bottom line. They wouldn’t be arsed if they had 40/50k different fans there every week. Community gestures and the like are pure PR frosting. Of course there are fundamentally decent people at all clubs who do great work but the actual people at the top are far more removed than you think. My pal has met and interviewed John Henry on a number of occasions and he’s everything you say he is. I know on here that a vast majority of this forum would die on a hill defending the owners but I can assure you that it’s not the case with us. They mean nothing to us, nothing. We were here before them and we’ll be here long afterwards. Nobody is under any illusions about American investors, we wrote the book on them. And the book on how to get rid of them. The only thing I’m interested in is Klopp and his squad. I’m long past seeing elite level football clubs as paragons of moral virtue, they couldn’t be further from it.
