Football, and indeed any professional sport, should be a combination of competition and entertainment. Football clubs should be funded entirely by fans. That should create a virtuous circle where winning and entertaining football creates more income from the fans so allowing better players to be acquired by the club. Football club owners should be forbidden from spending money on the team in excess of what can be raised in revenue. Ideally the owners would be the fans. There should be no place for clubs becoming the playthings of the wealthy or owned by governments. Not sure there is any route to get to this from where we are now....
My '2bn to buy ENIC out' fund currently totals : 0. *** So if there are 100,000 devoted Spurs supporters, you each only have to cough up 20 grand each to make it so. *** *** This may seem bad, but bear in mind that Billy and Spurlock have to wait for their next pay day before they contribute, so the target may be a lot lower after that.
The club (which is operating as a business) . The owners would not be taking a serious % of that for their own personal enrichment.
According to a remarkably tiresome part of our fanbase, "REVENUE = BAD" I give them fifteen minutes on SimCity before they're guillotined
I agree. It is the fans who effectively pay the TV fees and the sponsorship anyway because the sponsors are not altruistic...they would only do it if market research showed that they were getting additional business. But very few owners divert income into dividends in any case.
Of our hypothetical owners, 60% (G1) can be at new WHL, and 40% (G2) cannot., I assume we want the cost to G1 to be lower than currently so, but significantly higher than the cost G2 incur to watch games (unless you are equitably rotating attendance among the entire owner base) . I also assume that match days revenue will fall accordingly from current levels. Therefore to keep costs "zero sum" the difference would have to come from broadcast/sponsor revenue increases.
I think we would need to have a lot more owners than 100k though. ENIC won't sell below £3b and most fans can't afford anywhere near £30k. I also wonder about selling the Premium Seats at the stadium as ten year debentures....that could raise some spending money.
For debate : 2bn is close enough to the true value, and is a nice round number. Similarly for a 100K owner base. So we have the hypothetical. Now we can go thru the realities of what such ownership would mean.
If football league tables just become a rundown of clubs by wealth, then it’s just utterly pointless. Other sports effectively implement and manage the equivalent of FFP - salary caps, capped transfer budgets, squad limits etc. Football needs to step up. It will never be a level playing field. But equally, clubs can’t just steamroller the opposition with the size of their cheque book (probably not a very relevant analogy these days).
Not so. Even if the correlation was perfect, the issue would not be that, but the SPREAD of wealth., Using the PL rewards as an example (other variables normalised) , then the annual income spread between top and bottom would be 40m, and the separation 2m odd. So if your club on-pitch performs just a little bit better, you may be able to usurp those currently above you. Now you have a bit more money for the next season, which at worst may maintain you where you currently are. Obviously this is not the reality. Tthe spread between top and bottom, and Nth ./ (N+1)th is large. I suspect that if I got the histograms for the PL era that the values of these spreads have been monotonically increasing season by season.
The reality is that the status quo ends up being preserved. The rich get richer; the poor get poorer. And those in the middle stay there. Even now we see parameters. It’s always been the case to some extent - attendances was the crude measure in the past- but the gaps in wealth are widening. The logical conclusion is that the PL will be out of reach to two thirds of league clubs and only five or six clubs will ever win the title (we’re pretty close to the latter already). There will always be inequality, but the gaps need to be narrowed and competition, ambition and hope needs to be maintained.
