bellwhiff wrote:NorthLondonStag wrote:And in answer to Belly’s point as to what to do with the money, assuming it gets spent on wages is why we have got into that mess in the first place.
Businesses make money all the time and either invest in infrastructure or (fans hate this for lots of reasons) pay a dividend to the owners. They don’t up everyone’s wages to try and spend all the money.
Provided you’ve got responsible owners then paying a responsible dividend isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A business that pays dividends can attract long term capital investment on a sustainable basis and then maybe we can move towards self sustainable clubs rather than relying on rich benefactors or clubs going bust.
The hard bit in football is the responsible owners paying responsible dividends.
So the issue isn’t the spending of funds, it’s the oversight to stop overspending. That’s where the pressure point on clubs should be. All teams are different.
The financial fair play and sustainability rules - which sought to cap spending - have failed.
They’ve failed empirically because clubs still spent beyond their means and have gone bust and they’ve failed specifically because there’s too much complexity (around income and expenditure varying from year to year and season to season and what income properly means) and it’s too difficult to police. See for example some of the stuff around sale and leaseback of grounds.
The wage cap isn’t perfect (I never said it was) but it is simple and easy to administer and seems to achieve the broad aim of clubs becoming sustainable. So in my view it’s the best (not perfect) available solution to the underlying problem.
