And that's thanks to the rules. Imagine what our finances would be like now without the pressure to get the losses down? There's good and bad points with them but they're designed to keep clubs solvent which is why a majority signed up for them. Clubs running losses of £100m+ every year is not sustainable. We'll be a profitable football club at BMD or can run at a slight loss within the rules.
Take the likely fine and move forward.
To a point yes. But if we go down because we sold James Digne Kean Allan Richarlison Gordon (didn’t replace Siggurdson) and replaced them with cheaper players then the financial damage to the club will be far greater than if Moshiri had just continued to bankroll losses for a longer period.
The regulations eventually bring all clubs in line with their revenue bracket. But football isn’t supposed to be played that way, otherwise we may as well just order the teams by their revenue at the start of every season and not bother with the football.
The losses that Chelsea and City incurred to break into the top 4 and regular champions league revenue would now not be allowed. Were those two clubs damaged by running year on year losses for a period as they tried to establish themselves?
Without these regulations we might have been able to keep James, we might have been able to give Benitez more than 1.5 mill to spend in the summer window, we could have done better than Dele Alli and Van Der Beek for Lampard in January, we could have got another striker in the summer or in January. The club might not have been in two successive relegation battles.
Now before the usual people start shrieking about how we’ve wasted 500 million and deserve everything we get and should never be allowed to spend any money again, then the two aren’t mutually exclusive (for the millionth time)
Just because we dug ourselves into a hole doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever be allowed to climb out of it again. Liverpool wasted cash hand over fist before Klopp arrived, United between Ferguson and Van Gaal spent awfully, how many bad signings did Newcastle and Villa make as they were being relegated, or even Leeds all the way back in the day.
You won’t find any of these fans going ‘thank goodness for the regulations, it’s saved us from ourselves’. No they just want to look forward and get on with improving the club.
To put it simply, after a failed attempt to make the champions league under Koeman and Silva, instead of Everton gearing up for another tilt at it under Ancelotti with an open chequebook from Moshiri , we’ve now been in two relegation battles after being forced to sell all our best players because of these regulations
So now instead of the extremely unlikely event of Moshiri calling in his losses at the club and not being able to find someone who would buy us leading to our administration, we’ve now got the far more likely scenario of relegation at some point, and lower table mediocrity as the alternative. So which of these is more damaging to the club?
The regulations are nothing more than a protectionist racket to keep the big clubs at the top and all the other clubs in a never ending battle with profit and loss being forced to sell their best players periodically. It will happen to Leicester now, it will happen to Villa after that, and if Newcastle don’t make the CL then they’ll be forced to comply to.
Dave
