Yes, good posts, klr.
On the one hand, they belittle the supporters and ridicule our financial clout. Then, when they've emptied the ground, having imposed a vast ticket price increase on the back of three relegation struggles in a row, they're reduced to pleading with supporters to buy tickets for just 5 games as attendances fall.
Even now that the team is pulverising the opposition, some will be asking themselves whether promotion will simply make going to QPR even more impossible, on the grounds that if they're charged these prices to see Sc**thorpe and Barnsley - worthy Clubs though they are - what will Briatore and his mates be asking for Man Utd or Arsenal?
And if they've lost £31 million trying to get out of this division - we're only just higher than Holloway managed in his first season - how much more of the Club's future earnings will be drained away.
And why? To achieve a short term rise in the share price? To get us into the Champions League?
Attendances are a bit of a double whammy here. Past 'ambitions' have reduced the size of the ground dramatically, a phenomenon which is true more or less right across the English game, with one notable exception - United - and a few less significant ones. This undoubtedly contributes to the 'full house' situation in the Premiership, as well as pushing up the prices.
If we are still in the early stages of the 'borrowing' cycle, we may be able to jump on the bandwagon and 'do a Fulham', as Paladini said he hoped we would, but it is difficult to say.
I kept an eye on certain Clubs which seemed to be coping quite well with being smaller in a big club league - Middlesbrough, Charlton, Bolton and Reading among them. Perhaps they are on the slide, now, certainly that is true in the short term. And Middlesbrough and Reading do have enormous debts. They can no doubt borrow more and more, but their demise may reflect a reluctance to do so when the 'ceiling' has been removed for the smaller Clubs, who can't aspire to what their predecessors like Ipswich, Burnley, Huddersfield, QPR and others did.
It is not all that long ago that losses and debt were hardly talked about. It was usually ignored, or explained away as 'investment', or 'making money available'. It was just as difficult to get past the PR about Gibson to find that he had lost £125 million of Middlesbrough's money, just as it was glossed over that Fayed had lost £100 mlllion plus of Fulham's, and Abramovich the best part of a billion of Chelsea's.
Alarmingly, but hardly surprisingly, the entrepreneurs were able to sell out to richer entrepreneurs. These people were even more of a liability, paying enormous sums to the outgoing shareholders, and dumping the entire cost on the Club.
Are things changing again?
We seem to be seeing a new generation of 'buyers', where Clubs like Leeds, Portsmouth and Notts County are being sold off to owners whose identity, resources, abilities and intentions are even more obscure than those of their predecessors.
Because they are so talented. And mean so well, no doubt
.
The reassuring thing about all this is that it is the Clubs to whom the credit goes for their success, because it is the Clubs' money, and their existing league status, which makes them as competitive as they are, however limited that is by the sheer pressure of rival Clubs all striving to accomplish the same thing.
And there remains a sinister link between losses and spending on players. It is the easy resort of the talentless, to buy more expensive players than the Club can afford, dump the cost on the Club, and hope to get up when the results improve and the share price goes up.
But it also seems reasonable to suppose a time when the Clubs have borrowed every penny that they can borrow. When the supporters have realised that they won't be in the Champions League at all. When the creditors realise this too, and are pressing for payment. And the money has all gone, already, on players and teams who are no longer around.
As long as it is all speculative, every Club is an imaginary winner, though few are in practice. For those Clubs enjoying purple patches, like us, it's fine. They must continue to win, and if that means spending, they must continue to spend. that's why the Premiership makes Clubs poorer, rather than richer. Desperation to get in it, and anxiety about dropping out of it creates a damaging market in players who are more and more expensive as their Clubs become less and less successful.
Just win, and that will do. If you don't the manager's reputation is nothing, the players are worthless, and the Club isn't either successful or profitable. The final cause for concern being that they aren't profitable even IF they are successful.
Interesting times. And let's hope that the Chinese aren't right about it being a curse to live in them.