All joshing and partisanship aside, I always thought of the furlough scheme as a form of protection for workers. It's a scheme that aims to encourage employers to not throw their employees on the trash heap due to financial pressures from the virus.
My issues with the richest clubs using these scheme is simply that football clubs exploit a special status as cultural/community fixtures when it suits them, but will then turn around and behaviour like stone cold bastard capitalists when money is waved beneath their noses.
From my limited knowledge of these companies I consider them fecking horrible cynical businesses. I would hope that they use the scheme instead of dumping their workforce. If you want to lump Liverpool and Spurs in with these shitty companies then that is fine by me but they should then be cut lose entirely from their cultural and community moorings and have to make do without fan good will.
Every single club in the world is a business. Every single club is run as a business. I'd love it to be otherwise but it is the reality.
It doesn't mean that they don't still have close links to their community. I don't know what the other clubs do but Spurs does a lot of work in Tottenham. I am 100% sure that every other club is exactly the same. I'm sure that the Manchester clubs, Liverpool clubs, Villa, Newcastle, Leeds, West Ham etc etc all do great stuff in their communities.
The problem is that 'the richest clubs' are actually, by business standards, just not all that rich. Everton's turnover is £188 million. Arsenal's is £400 million. Man Utd's is £630 million (all rough figures). And they currently have literally no source of income whatsoever.
This is an unprecedented time and, for me, the kicker is not that things have shut down but that we don't know when things will go back to normal again.
If you told me that next season will start as normal, I would be furious at the decision made. If it comes out that the directors haven't taken a very large cut, I'll also be very mad.
But as it is right now, we don't know when football will start again. We don't know what will happen to TV money. We don't know what will happen with European competition. We don't know what will happen with stadium attendances. We don't know if the entire basis upon which our football clubs' financial stability is built on will go back to normal and when.
In an ideal world for me, we'd all earn roughly the same (or at the very least not have such major discrepancies) and all clubs would have similar wage and transfer budgets. We don't live in that world though. In this volatile situation, the priority should be to make sure as few people as possible lose their jobs and as few clubs as possible fall into financial difficulty.