gooner said:I wonder would Chelsea fans want to stay in Stamford Bridge if Abramovich was ready pull back majorly on the spending front to the point where it affected potential success in the future? Somehow, I think they might change their minds fairly quickly.
In the words of Ken Bates who campaigned against Abramovich in his efforts to move from Stamford Bridge and voted against him:
That's a sense of entitlement. Abramovich is telling Chelsea fans he's not going to be digging his hand in his pockets forever and is asking Chelsea fans to play their part in setting up the club for its future. They only reason they voted against the move is that Abramovich has continued to splash the cash consistently over the last 10 years and take it for granted he will continue to do so in the future. I guarantee you that will change if the flow of his money was to stop going into the club.
For your own information, Kroenke hasn't leveraged the club with any debt from his takeover and hasn't taken out any cash in the process from the club. The high ticket prices were there as well when the board were more Arsenal men like Dein and Fizsman before Kroenke arrived.
You were wrong on this and were wrong on saying big clubs make the tv deals which suit them when the Premiership one is divided on a more even basis. You need a two-thirds majority to get things through in a vote to change this where clubs can sell them on an individual basis. Interestingly you bring up financial fair play and we see the lesser clubs of the the the Championship, League 1 and League 2 vote to bring it in and the Premierships clubs want to do so as well. It's clubs like Chelsea and Man City which have driven up the wages to over 200,000 a week which have also done it to the lesser clubs as a domino effect. Look at Wigan with Dave Whelan as chairman, when they were in the Premiership he was a big proponent of introducing it as he said wages were spiralling out of control. Practically their whole turnover was going on it. FFP's aim is for clubs to build their success on a more sensible basis and it allows for clubs to have debts if it means it's for the infrastructure of the club like a new training ground or new stadium or on the academy. This is a good loophole they allow in all this. I'm a big fan of it.
Said it before but FFP is BS, all it does is ensure that the richest and historically biggest clubs stay at the top of the tree and ensure that there is no longer possibilities for the likes of Chelsea/City to happen again thus ensuring the power and the glory stays among an even smaller group of clubs.
Its a nice idea to try and restrain out of control wages etc but it doesn't really level the playing field. Arsenal should benefit because of their thriftiness but what about a club like West Brom, how will they benefit??? The only thing that will ever level the playing field is a salary cap system with more emphasis on developing home-grown players.
One only has to look at football Pre Premier league. Most clubs had to try and balance the books so whenever they bought players, they usually sold as well. Clubs like Everton, Norwich, Villa, Forest, Ipswich etc where up there challenging for titles in England whilst historically big clubs like Utd, Asrenal, Spurs, Leeds were not always winning things. The first club to really break out and spend way more than their income on players was Man Utd under Ferguson so despite all the plaudits, it could be said that Ferguson was the first manager to truly but his way to titles. Yes he later developed his youth brigade that brought the Beckham, Giggs, Scholes generation but there were a lot of big name signings when Utd first won the title.
Now in fairness to Arsenal, they won their titles in the 80s/90s having assembled teams at a fraction of what Utd were doing but as recent 2 time champions, Arseanl were in a strong position entering the PL era and indeed were big spenders in the mid 90s to retain their position at the top of the table. As many predicted, the Premier league screwed football but even before that the big clubs were already talking about a breakaway European league, guess which English clubs were involved???
Football has been skewed in favour of the big clubs with money for a long time making it almost impossible for any other club to break into that league without finding a sugar daddy. Sadly football will remain that way with FFP and will not change until they limit team budgets regardless of club size. The day we see West Brom having the same budget as the Utd's of this world is when football will be fair again.