stevoc
Full Member
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- Jun 11, 2011
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- 20,490
1, 90-00 Arsenal, Leeds, United, Blackburn.No what I was saying is that from the late 1980's through to the 1990's football had a seismic shift that began to concentrate the wealth into the hands of the established elite clubs. Three key events are important here:
1) Formation of the CL
2) The formation of the PL
3) The explosion in TV rights money
Hence, what happened is that teams that were most successful during this period essentially gave themselves a massive financial injection that took them away from the rest the the clubs in their leagues and cemented the top 4 leagues superiority over the rest of Europe.
Hence, owing to the amount of power the big clubs got from this shift, it required outside money to break into it once it was done.
Another point that you seem to lose is the arguement that the Billionaire clubs/money has made things more competitive as:
1) There have been more winners of the league since they came along than before it.
2) Of the three clubs to win the league pre-Billionaire spending, Blackburn essentially had to do a 90's equivalent of it to win the league.
3) Leagues where they have not had a Billionaire investor have seen their leagues become completely dominated by one, or two (in the case of Spain) clubs as those clubs have been able to complete cement their position.
As I initially said, it is hard to complain about Billionaire owners when clubs had no real chance of competing unless they went that route (feck me even Blackburn had to do it). Now is this perfect, no? However, what other options are there? FFP was a joke, as it was simply a cartel system, and a hard salary cap is never going to be agreed (this would actually be fair.)
00-10 United, Arsenal, Chelsea. Post Roman in this decade only United could compete with Chelsea.
10-20 United, City, Chelsea, Leicester and Liverpool. Bar Leicester which was a fluke and probably won't happen again only United at the start of the decade and Liverpool right at the end stopped City and Chelsea dominating.
Let's see how the next decade goes. Especially if the Saudis buy a team.
2, Blackburn spent no where near the type of money City and Chelsea do. A local businessman done good invested a 20-30 million and his hometown club were able to win the PL. That won't happen again with nation States Bank rolling teams.
3, That's largely to do with the CL. Germany has always been dominated by Bayern to some extent. Same with Barca and Real in Spain. Before Juve Inter won 5 in a row. France is being dominated because of a gulf state buy out.
Arsenal, Blackburn and Newcastle were able to compete fine without billionaire owners in the 90's before Roman came along.
Yes FFP was a joke and City and PSG treated it as such. They'd do the same with a salary cap enforced by UEFA. That's partly why 10 of the clubs wanted a super league with strict financial limits that teams had to agree to