- Aug 20, 2013
- 6,165
- 15,644
Looking forward to "not selling to United" winning us the league.
Would you expect Valencia to win the league? Fiorentina? Schalke? Would you criticise them for not making the signings that'd let them?
Since we improved under Poch people's expectations of us around here and their idea of our stature in the game have gotten absolutely ridiculous. We are not a Man Utd failing to challenge, we're an Everton doing extremely well to be anywhere close.
This is not the 70s where a few good signings and a well-managed team sees you become champions. The competition is immense. And we are already competing significantly above where we should be with the resources we have. Yes we've got a proud history - but that frankly has little influence on where we stand now. We achieved very little between the mid-late 80s and 2015/16. In those 30 years the rest of the football world moved on and left us behind. We were left with mediocre commercial revenue, because nobody in China or the States is gonna follow a mid-table outfit. Ditto corporate revenue, also damaged by playing at a lovely but dilapidated stadium. Ditto therefore matchday revenue. That is an extremely large hole 30 years in the making - the idea that because we've had three good seasons we're now going to go out and buy the players to win the title is absolutely bonkers.
If we are going to win it, it's not going to be by having the money to challenge the likes of the Manchester clubs any time soon. It's going to be with exceptional youth players bolstering us, fantastic squad harmony, all the puzzle pieces falling together at the right time. Our goal has to be to make sure we're in a position for that to happen, while doing our best to consolidate the top 4 places, and being financially responsible so that we're not set back massively if/when we fail to do that one year (which is near-inevitable: 6 into 4 does not go).
No, it isn't Glory Glory, To Dare is To Do. Because in the Sky era, to Dare is to end up bankrupt in League One. The whole thing is set up with an established order it is deliberately very hard to challenge. We need to keep being clever to do that, not reckless. If that means in one particular window we evaluate the prices to be too high to be worthwhile, especially when it also means eating a loss on squad players who then couldn't even be registered, so be it. We take the rough with the smooth. And we trust that the very people who've got us to this position - the ONLY club in this money era to break into those positions for more than a fluke year - have not collectively lost their minds.