Kenny Dalglish Won't Be Delivering the Module: English Premiership 2011-12

2002-2003 - £75 million
2009-2010 - £209 million

2011 - £222.3m, so turnover has trebled in the Rmoan era. Next figure should be even higher with a run to CL and FA Cup finals.

They're still posting ridic losses but I think there's a middle ground somewhere that puts money into the game and makes a club relatively more successful and sustainable.

That'd be restricted to spending on infrastructure, is my feeling. Inject capital to eg build a stadium and generate income, but not to take the place of income itself by eg using it to pay wages. I *think* FFP takes account of that.

but the sustainability brought by increased turnover won't happen unless you put something on the pitch to attract the extra customers and sponsors

The question is not really about those few cases where insanely rich and generous benefactors decide to waste their money on a club, it's what's to be done to stop the financial sickness of English (/British / European?) professional football.

Clubs don't seem capable of acting collectively and sensibly to control their spending, and giving them rules by which to live seems like a good idea, unless you've a better one. So rather than be sad about failing to releive a tiny number of "benefactors" of their cash, it might be better to be happy about the greater good.

Yes you can spend £500m by buying a new a stadium and training ground. Then, by having a 100,000 seater stadium you can distort the wage bill or whatever however you like. But it means that nothing like Pompy will happen if you do it like that - City's owner can fuck right off tomorrow and leave them with an amount of debt that would make Rangers look like a well run club.

Fuck ~Martin Samuel.

That's true enough, but there's no need to be signing Robinho on day one. What's the criteria for FFP? iirc it's something like a three-year rolling period, with losses permitted to a certain amount, so it does seem to allow for this to happen more slowly.

it might be better to be happy about the greater good.

I agree, but I also like rich fuckers messing with the status quo as long at they're not fucking up my club in the long term.

If City win of course it'll be thanks to a disproportionate and unsustainable investment, but isn't it good to have someone who isn't Utd/Chelsea possibly winning for the first time in a decade? Isn't having Aguero/Silva/Balotelli/Yaya play in the Premier League more fun than a "sustainable" City hovering around the drop zone? Wouldn't it be exciting to have half a dozen of these crazy bastards all picking a club each and seeing what happened?

Isn't there a way to do it that provides a safety net for the club to gently fall back to its "natural" state when Project Big Club becomes unsustainable?

iirc ik has it- you can loss-lead to cover a certain level of squad investment, but if you really want to be pumping big bucks into a club the idea is to funnel it into infrastructure and revenue generation, not wages/fees.

I don't think City are fun

I agree with Tim

pffft dortmund and montpellier spent less than a 10th than city to make teams just as awesome.

and yeah, if we're picking sides i'm with tim.

it's not one specific takeover that bothers me, just the sheer importance of the owners and how much money they've got.

well it IS kind of fun though, but kind of fun like when you put in cheat codes in sim city and then it gets dull after you've built everything

then all you can do is start natural disasters in the city to wreck everything and then build stuff again

(see how i used SimCity as the example here - I'm clever I am)

exactly

(also used this same example in the money thread)

fire - flood - riot - aliens - Venky's

the idea is to funnel it into infrastructure and revenue generation, not wages/fees.

I'm not trying to make a great case for the madness but I think there should be room for investment strategies that the fair play rules won't allow. Putting myself in the position of a super rich idiot I honestly would think "who the fuck are these people to tell me I can't spend my money?"

Isn't there a way to do it that provides a safety net for the club to gently fall back to its "natural" state when Project Big Club becomes unsustainable?

I can't think of one.

It ay be that the very best of the best tootle off to Russia or Brazil to play their football if FFP comes in, but the likeliest effect of FFP is that you'll get mostly the same players playing for the biggest clubs, just for less money.

It's very hard to tell whether there would have been an unbroken spell of Manchester United dominance for the last 20 years if FFP had been in place (obv Chelsea mightn't have been there if there'd been FFP all along). Might have been, but it seems to me you're as likely to end up with a Dutch / German situation (revolving cast of champs with one or two of the toppest names always there or thereabouts) as you are a Spanish / Scottish one (dupoply of boring gits).

This isn't all about the very top, either. It's very frustrating sitting in the lower leagues watching promotion places clogged up with clubs who are blatantly overspending in order to get to some promised land of huge money further up the divisions. Running your club within its means is actively disincentivised by our current system.

That was a massive xpost - please note that I have largely emotionally disengaged from this argument over the last year or two so I'm not 100% sure I know what I'm talking about anymore. Not that I was sure before, you understand.

And I totally see what you'e saying Gerry but my view is that the general harm done by the madness is bad enough that it outweighs the specific harm of not allowing a tiny number of rich people to waste their money on a football club.

a billionaire buying a team and building a stadium for games that nobody will attend seems unlikely onimo. bundesliga manages. taking the sting out of wages and fees means the same players playing for less in front of crowds paying less, is the idea- or, it seems to me at least to be as likely as your posited empty grounds all the footballers and fans gone away scenario

xp 'These people' are the ones who run the competition you play in i.e. the other half of your business that you think you own totally. It's not at all unreasonable for the league to impose restrictions on its members, it happened forever (after a fashion) with the minimum wage etc., so as to keep itself in operation.

Your oligarchs are of course free to ignore the league part of its investment and play only friendlies, but they never seem to do that.

serious, a 100,000 seater where the cheapest 30,000 tickets are a tenner - you'd be sorted.

I'm not saying build the big stadium first or buy a World XI first, but that playing a long sustainable game of climbing 4 league places a season while slowly renovating an old stadium then rebuilding a stand etc etc isn't a very attractive proposition to someone who's maybe Roman level rich and doesn't like long games (I'm sure he was convinced he'd have Barca level dominance by now tbh) and involves spending a lot of money on things you don't even want (e.g. buying Championship level players you know you're going to have to unload to buy Europa qualifiers you're going to have to unload to buy top fourers then World XIs while repairing bits of stadium you know you're going to have to knock down).

I fully agree with Tim and others about the greater good of the game and I don't see too many of these rich nutters with a plan beyond throwing away money and sacking managers. I think there's room for general all-round steady stewardship without killing off any hope of a new Big Club but I accept that that's maybe worth killing off if it prevents dozens of clubs going out of business.

How long ago did Sheikhy M-Dawg buy City? Three years ago? How many seasons did it take Roman to win a title/CL?

Roman won the league in two years iirc, but then he bought a top four club.

eh well then let them fuck off, tbh? these bubbles of money from outside the game should either be diverted into longer term benefits or eschewed, all they contribute to in the short term are increases in the cost to the fan.

Profits capped too, imo, while we're at it.

Sheikh Mansour took over in 2008 after City finished 9th.

said finish saw sven sacked, stadium was in situ

Martin "Mr Creosote" Samuel needs to die of 7 simultaneous heart attacks the next time he eats a mint.

killing off any hope of a new Big Club

I see no reason to assume that, once FFP is in place, there will be stasis in terms of "big" clubs, by which I suppose you mean Champions League qualifying clubs. It seems more likely to me that these things would revolve slowly, and that would bring its own excitement.

A cap on profit-taking, for sure, and some greater redistribution of rewards between the Champions League and Europa League (ideally a remodelled version of at least the latter) would help a lot, too.

Mark Perryman has led fans' reaction to the England appointment. I knew he was some kind of lefty, but was still surprised to receive this just now:

--
After the Party: reflections on life since the CPGB
ed. Andy Croft

Eight former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain reflect on the twenty years since its demise. Combining personal and political history, analysis and autobiography, anecdote and argument, the contributors consider the consequences of the CP’s dissolution for British political and intellectual life.

Contributors: Dave Cope, Andy Croft, Alistair Findlay, Stuart Hill, Kate Hudson, Andy Permain, Mark Perryman and Lorna Reith.
--

i'd see no reason for there not to be more/quicker rotation of the 'big club' status, tbh, or at least the positions in the table that are held to be the signifier.

the consequences of the CP’s dissolution for British political and intellectual life.

i lolled

btw i suspect a major concern over FFP will be UEFA's willingness to enforce it and clamp down on clubs using loopholes to bend the rules

yeah iirc perryman is a noted weirdo and like so many of the "fans representatives" you get is just the first gobshite that put his hand up and became #1 on the lazy media speed dial

latest wolves rumour is the eagerly awaited return of young ferg btw

plus billy to hull which just seems utterly lol given what they sanctioned barmby for

the Allams are gonna be hilarious pantomime villains for a while, was gonna raise it on the non-Prem thread

young Ferg surely can't be more mediocre as a manager than he was as a player, plus we can borrow his dad's cast-offs oh wait

Yeah FFP means that Chelsea'd have to spend like Everton, like Newcastle, like Villa, like Spurs - just because you had 1 year's extra money doesn't make you a major difference. It means that if you are smart, you can break in against a team who could afford one or two more players than you as opposed to having to fight a team that spent £300m more than you last summer.

newcastle were really, really good in that 1st half

COME ON

legit banger from Luka from 25+ yards, 1-0 Spurs

fantastic

he scores so few but they are all beautiful

need some miyaichi in this grotty as fuck bolton xi

Anyone got a stream for that spurs game?

the Bolton game, man, don't be so self-effacing