Premier League - 2023/24

I have no issues with the biggest clubs with the biggest gates having the ability to outspend other smaller clubs - that has always been the way. However with wealthy owners allowed to buy success, we have ended up with the current situation that you hate. Your logic now seems to be that we should allow even richer owners to spend even more to break up that dominance. Presumably you were, delighted with the Newcastle takeover as finally someone might outspend Citeh and we maybe we could have a different name dominating football for the next 5 years ? Maybe the next Haaland will be sold for £750m ? Whatever it costs to get the best.
If the cap was set at a reasonably modest excess over the football generated profits, we would soon find that the established top 4/6 would make a few bad decisions, suffer a drop in football revenues, and therefore spending power, and fall away. Look at Chelsea recently. We all know they will make their way back to the top 4 as they will simply spend until they achieve this. But they shouldn't be able to, irrespective of how wealthy their owner is. As watford fans we shouldn't need to pray that a billionaire bankrolls us to success, we should be praying that the level of accounting losses and overspending ("investment" !) in the prem is reduced so that when a smaller club gets a foothold as we did 10 years ago, they have a chance of staying there as long as they continue to make excellent footballing decisions as we did 2015-18 and under GT.
The odds will always be stacked in favour of the bigger clubs of which Everton will always be one, and that's fine. The current situation facing Everton is as a result of the ability of someone to just throw money at a club, an already big club, to buy success - that needs to stop otherwise football really will die on its arse, and most prem clubs will continue to run at a loss bankrolled by their owners,.... until they can't, or don't want to pay the bills....

 

TuT has pretty much summed this up already, but big clubs will always have more money, I don’t really know anybody who has a problem with that, that has always been the case. In the main the big clubs like Utd and Liverpool have won the most league titles, FA cups etc. Believe it or not we do all actually have a choice in which football club we support, and if anybody was that bothered by the fact that a team with a 70,000 capacity stadium with multiple decades of success behind them, had more money than a club from a provincial town with a 20,000 capacity stadium that has never won a single trophy, well, they could just go and support the more successful team if they want, nobody is stopping them.

But a billionaire owner trying to buy success with an unlimited pot of cash is something entirely different, it’s not sport, it’s financial doping. It takes the element of competition out of the equation with brute force, which is the entire point of sport and why we all watch it in the first place.

I don’t think it takes a genius to work out that in the vast majority of cases, the ‘protectionism’ argument comes from fans with very rich owners who want to overpower the competitive element of sport with money. For the rest of us (which is the overriding majority of football fans) it’s the last thing we want. You can kid yourself with that argument if you like, but ultimately it’s just whataboutery and nothing more.

 

But surely the horse has already bolted here? The rules were put in place to stop anyone else financially doping their way into the elite, but the point here is that those clubs were invested into and then (until very recently with all the Boehly nonsense) made those clubs self-sustainable, so ultimately a system which doesn't allow someone to buy a business and invest in it to try and compete with its larger competitors doesn't seem fair to me.

 

The horse has bolted for a few clubs, that doesn’t mean you should just let the rest of the clubs do the same. A rich owner can still buy a club and invest into it, and if they’re sensible and clever they can make that investment count in terms of pushing the club forward and gaining success, they just can’t go out and immediately buy up all the best players (like Saudi Arabia are trying to do, which of course we all love don’t we).

Would you find the Olympics more or less entertaining and meaningful, if a handful of the athletes were allowed to take whatever performance enhancing drugs they liked?

 

I don't think that's realistic when you look at the figures involved

Take a middling Premier League club like West Ham - they have a budget of about a third of the likes of Liverpool, City, United etc

No amount of sensible and clever investment would close the gap between them for the next decade or more (probably far more)

In the analogy of the Olympics, we are already in a situation where a third of the athletes have already benefitted from PEDs

 

And why is that a bad thing? PSR doesn’t cover costs which are incurred 'in the general interests of football' such as a club's infrastructure, and the cost of running their academy. Nothing to stop a club like Nottingham Forest heavily investing in their academy and building up feeder clubs, the benefits of that are twofold, as they add zero cost onto their balance sheet and are pure profit if sold, so it would help them to be able to spend a lot more on new players as well.

Sure it wouldn’t happen over night, but it’s more than doable. Unfortunately clubs like yours, and Forest just want to take short cuts and spend £100m on 27 new players only to barely avoid relegation.

We can all see why you don’t like the rules, but the bizarre thing is they’d have done you far more good, and you’d be in a much better position as a club right now if you’d just stuck to them, and taken a longer term, more holistic view about how to buy success. An Everton fan not liking PSR is very much like a Turkey voting for Xmas.

 

Feeder clubs, or associations between clubs should be banned outright. It's appalling.

Yes, I know that will sound hypocritical given Watford benefited from the relationship with Udinese and Granada in the early years of the Pozzo ownership. Martin Samuel wrote several pieces about how we were all that was wrong with football and, in a sense, he had a point. It's funny that as bigger clubs have developed partnership models of their own the criticism has died right down.

But it's now a mess. You have Nice and Manchester United owned by Ineos, which is a blatant conflict of interests. The French league in particular is suffering with fans becoming disillusioned. Boehly owns Strasbourg. In fact, half of the clubs in Ligue 1 are part of a multi-club ownership model. And PSG own a chunk of Braga in Portugal.

In Spain the Girona fairytale looked intriguing until you realise they're almost half-owned by Man City.

In fact Man City's City Group own or part-own 13 clubs around the world.

They also own a big chunk of the Co-Op Live venue in Manchester, which has had its opening delayed repeatedly and a gig was cancelled at the last minute when an air-con unit fell from the ceiling.

 

I can only promise you I was a vocal critic of FFP/PSR long before Captain Crazy rode in and started burning dodgy oligarch dollars - you'd have to take my word for it that even when Everton didn't have a pot to urinate in, I hated it.

I would guess that you'd feel very different about what you've just said if Chelsea did a deal with the Pozzos that made you their feeder club.

We'd undoubtedly be in a better position if we had followed the rules, in fact back before we had money we were a consistent top 7ish club and abiding by those rules kept us nicely in our spot just outside the top 5 or 6 clubs.

The interesting thing is that the new spending cap proposals suggest that more people are coming round to my way of thinking

 

How does that last part tally with the fact Utd, City and Villa voted against them, and Chelsea abstained? You say the current rules are protectionist, and yet City, the club with the most to ‘protect’ voted against the latest rules?

 

To what extent will this new cap actually curb spending ? Are there any worked examples based on last year numbers ? Lots of contradictory posts suggesting it would have been c£500m spend on wages based on 21/22 tv revenues but excludes transfer fees ?

 

Well, I'm genuinely unsure why Villa had an issue with them, but Chelsea, United and City are surely obvious?

They are already in the club, why would they vote to let anyone else in?

Liverpool, I assume, voted for them because the new rules are based on figures that City can't fudge and you could assume Arsenal feel the same

 

Devil will be in the detail, which we haven't seen any of yet

 

But I’m talking about the new rules, City don’t want them, but you’re saying the current PSR rules are protectionist. Why are City voting against these new proposals if they’re the magic antidote to your issue with the current rules?

 

Of course City don't want them?!

Why would City vote to allow everyone spend the same amount as them?

 

Sooo that’s protectionism, is it not? Which is your argument for what the current rules are.

 

Yes

But the point here is that everyone will vote for the rules which they think benefit them the most

City, for example, are currently judged on being allowed to spend their revenue. There's 115 open charges against City which might suggest that the figures they've used to report on this revenue might not be necessarily above board. But by the same token, they're theirs to work from.

The new rules take that away from City and base their allowable expenditure on a figure over which they have no influence. If you're City, that's not a good thing as it limits what you can spend to a figure that isn't in your control.

If you're Liverpool, for example, you might look at the new rules and think that while it evens the playing field a bit and allows Newcastle to join the party, it also stops City from cheating.

PSR/FFP is absolutely protectionist in terms of the formula it uses, but that isn't to say we don't need financial regulation of some sort.

 

Presumably the easiest 3 points of the season for out friends up the road tonight ? Everton on the beach.

 

Au contraire, I’d say there is zero chance of three points tonight.

 

You’re telling me it’s not Friday today ? Ah yes. Was convinced it was. I’m 61 you know. Lovely bit of fish.

 

Have the visitors been? Where did I put my trousers?

 

Actually…..I’m not even 61, I’m 60 til next Wednesday. I’m starting to worry myself !

 

Happy birthday, you old ****.

 

My birthday isn’t till December ? I thought I just told you ?

Thanks. If I make it. No guarantee of course at this age.

 

Title race basically over now, no chance of Spurs putting up a fight against a city after losing the 5th CL place and this result.

 

This.

 

Deja vu all over again.

 

Looks like it’s going to be a three-horse race between the 17th-19th teams for 17th place - wasn’t looking like that not so long ago when it seemed Burnley wouldn’t even make 3rd from bottom. But Luton’s form has been just terrible since they got those surprise 8 goals and 4 points against Brighton and Newcastle (5 points out of a possible 39) and Burnley have picked up a fair bit with just one defeat in 8 games, probably due to the pressure being off. I really thought Forest would be clear by now even with their points deduction because they have a more than capable manager who seemed to be getting more out of them than Cooper did (at least against the better sides). But the table doesn’t lie - they’ve amassed 30 points from 35 games, so they’re just a poor side by any standard.

Forest really have to aim for maximum points from their last three games, which won’t be easy as both their fixtures against the bottom two are away and they play Chelsea in their only remaining home game, while Luton play Everton and Fulham at home which are quite winnable (well, compared to most other fixtures for them) and they go to West Ham, who can’t be trusted to do Forest a favour. The plus side is that if Forest win their next two, Burnley will very likely be relegated by the time they play them, because they have two tough games in Newcastle (h) and Spurs (a).

 

I think Forest will draw at SU and Luton will beat Everton. You heard it here first.

 

Is there a chance Everton's points deduction can be increased? In a way, I'm hoping that's the case as there may be something on for them tonight after all

 

Agree. Don’t think Luton will win though - reckon pressure off Everton canter to 3-0 win.

 

Interesting article in the Guardian relating to this - one of the first things that came up when I googled Nuno to make sure I'd got the name of the Forest manager right:

Nuno has three games to save Forest – victory is essential at Bramall Lane | Nottingham Forest | The Guardian

Of course, just because victory is a must doesn't mean it'll happen!