Are we finally getting to the real issue here?
Just to make sure I have get this correct. Your wish is for us to be bought out by a person who will lavish their personal fortune on the club? That would be awesome. However finding such an individual/group might not be quite as easy as making the wish. There are also a fair few club owners who have lavished money (either via gits or loans) on clubs, putting them on unsustainable paths that then unravel rather badly when the money runs out.
This is what it is, an annoyance that personal fortune hasn’t been invested. Which ignores the whole idea of building a club, or a team culture, and the idea that most clubs that tried to get on the wave after Roman and Abu Dhabi are pretty much back where they started or worse off.
And the reason is, once you get on a negative spiral, it’s hard to get out of. You end of fighting against the tide with overpaid players that don’t want to be there, short term fixes to paper over cracks that contribute to a terrible team spirit and lack of culture, and everyone sees that it’s a club on the way down rather than on the way up.
Being seen to being on the way up is incredibly important. It’s why some of the best young talent in the world will commit to coming here, in the same way they will to Dortmund. But, if we decided to ‘go for it’ too soon, before we had the base of infrastructure that affords us the ability to respend to get back our position if things don’t go to plan, we risk losing the position we have, which is still more desirable than most clubs in the world. You’re forced to sell a Dele or an Eriksen for cheap, the replacements don’t have a similar ability or a potential, and the slide begins. Next summer, the wage budget gets trimmed more, the quality suffers.
Chelsea and City had owners so rich that they could afford to respend our of their own pockets if the first run didn’t work. Mike Ashley didn’t. Randy Lerner didn’t. Ellis Short didn’t. And Lewis and Levy either realised they couldn’t or had no inclination to do so. I assume they realised there was too much unpredictable in a sport that the sensible way to do it was to build your base of infrastructure to put the club in a position to be able to reinvest.
To be honest, the strategy is so blindingly obvious after so many years under their ownership I don’t know why it’s being argued. Is it moral? Maybe not. Is it something to be prouder of as a club and a fan base and the leaders that have made it happen to take a club from mediocrity to the top table without the equivalent of winning a lottery ticket? I’d say hell yes. It’s taken longer, we’ve needed patience, we’ve had to make some smart, long term moves and Poch came along at the perfect time, but we’re almost there. And I’m definitely proud.
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