I think it's time we looked at that "8th Richest Club" quote that keeps doing the roundswhen I say spend money you and others automatically think it means act like the the Mansours.
to my knowledge no one has ever said that.
we are the 8th richest club in the world and we think like a mid table outfit.
Let's get started with the table, which isn't even based on wealth - it's based on revenue generated, which isn't the same thing by any stretch of the imagination - but let's look at it anyway
Barca - €840m
Los Ladrones - €757m
Man Utd - €711m
Bayern - €660m
PSG - €635m
The Sheikh Mansour Team - €610m
Saltypool - €604m
Spurs - €521m
Chelsea - €513
Juventus - €459m
At a first glance you can't help but notice the significant dropoff between 5th and 8th, let alone the big drops between 1st and 2nd, 3rd and 4th...you get the idea
Secondly, however, there's one thing that statistic conspicuously ignores: the depth of the owners' pockets. The fact that directly below us is a team where Uncle Roman can cut a blank cheque whenever and wherever he likes completely dismantles the "We're the 8th richest club!!!" Narrative, because while we made €521m in one season we don't have someone with a personal fortune of €10.6bn that he's been happy to throw around for over fifteen years
Same can be said if you look a couple of places above us, where The Sheikh Mansour Team have earnings of €610m...as if the Sheikh Mansour having €18.6bn to throw around isn't the real basis of wealth, and considering how much he's spent at least £80m fiddling various naming rights and sponsorship deals to keep ahead of FFP while also casually threatening UEFA by saying he'd spend £30m to hire the 50 most vicious lawyers he can find to spend the next decade suing UEFA, I think it's safe to say we don't have the luxury of not only having the spare cash to so blatantly fiddle the system it's obscene but also don't have the luxury of being able to threaten UEFA if we get caught, that ultimately proves how meaningless saying we're the 8th richest club is because the fact of the matter is that we're not
Then you need to consider teams who aren't on that list, and how this makes the list worthless. Here's a few examples
Taurine FC Leipzig - owner worth €16.9bn
Hoffenheim - owner worth €13.8bn
The fact that Sheikh Mansour also has a stake in *deep breath* Girona, NYC FC, Yokohama F Marinos, Montevideo City Torque, Melbourne City FC, Sichuan Jiuniu, Mumbai City and Lommel
The Taurine Empire also owning *another deep breath* Laurine FC Salzburg, New
Various Chinese Super League teams who think the phrase "silly money" isn;t aiming high enough and are instead going for "****ing ludicrous money" instead
So while on revenue we are richer than all but one team in the Mansour Empire and the entire Taurine FC Empire...yeah, we're not actually richer than any of them, because it's not like ENIC have the capital to own multiple clubs and use them to shuttle talent around from one to the other - which is especially true with the Salzburg-to-Leipzig conveyor belt that's been blatant for a good few years by this point, but there's certainly cases of this with the Mansour Group too - and that's the key difference that you honestly have to perform some remarkable mental gymnastics to ignore
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