Cardiff 2-0 Brizzle City Next up: Birmingham v. Watford Palace v. Boro I'd fancy Watford to win; CP v Boro as a draw
4 points against two teams who are using a very distasteful loan loophole (with Wilfred Zaha and Jack Butland). I'm reasonably happy with that.
The loophole we're using is our owners spending their money in a weird way. The loophole those clubs are using is gambling with someone else's money twice, while taking no risk themselves. The simplest way of explaining this is to ask what happens if Wilfred Zaha suffers a bad leg break towards the end of April, and Palace go up? Palace are up £100m in Premier League money, plus the £10m United paid for him, while another club are down £10m and obliged to pay someone tens of thousands of pounds a week to not play football.
I think we can rule out Boro now from those pushing for automatics. I can see it going to the wire between us, Leicester, Palace and Watford for the other automatic spot.
I find it utterly ridiculous that a Watford fan can complain about other clubs using a loan loophole.
Sorry for being pedantic, but our ownership structure isn't a loophole. Loaning players from Udinese is, but not that. We're using a gaping chasm in EU law which UEFA have already tried and failed to deal with at least twice in the past. Unless or until we start qualifying for the same European tournaments as Udinese, our ownership structure is untouchable. It would be like banning an organisation from owning one chain of supermarkets which only operates in the UK, and another which only operates in France, or banning the two from having business interactions with one another. Why make the distinction? What we're doing with loans could be stopped at any time. What we're doing with club ownership is something that any other club in England can confidently mimic, because stopping the practise would take a major rewrite to European law.
Palace and Birmingham are loaning players which another club has agreed to based on the merits of the deal. You're getting them from a very dodgy joint-ownership deal. There's no way you should be allowed to own more than one football club for this very reason.
