Blue Jam wrote:You know what's worse than the prospect of huge fines, transfer bans, relegations or City disappearing altogether?
People. Everyone who is not a Blue.
Since the 114 leak, everywhere I go, people are forcing me to listen to their opinion, their 'take', they've read a newspaper article or head a podcast and think they have become some sort of expert.
If they are friends who are willing to actually talk about it -
I've found the best point I can bring the conversation around to that everyone eventually agrees on is that FFP is a corrupt mess. Asking how is it fair that Villa & Newcastle had to sell all their best players right after they qualify for Europe, but spuds can spend 400 mil after finishing 17th 2 seasons in a row. And asking how is any other team ever going to compete with the top 4 if their ability to spend is tied to past revenue - but the only way to grow your revenue is to spend big on top level players to win trophies. A real pull yourself up by your bootstraps situation. And pretty much the only place in the capitalist world where business owners can take as much money out of their business as they want, but are punished for investing money into it.
Usually after going through that for a few minutes they are left with a "yeah it doesn't make sense and needs to be changed - but City still shouldn't have cheated". And in my view, the best response here is why would the PL allow City to be bought by their current owners and take on our current sponsors if they are going to throw a fit about funds being intermingled a decade later? How could they not anticipate this happening when they signed off on it? How stupid must the PL be to have signed off on everything originally, yet now gin everything up so much that many people are calling for over half of the PL titles from the last decade to be invalidated? And why did it take them 2 seasons to come to a conclusion after they finished a trial? Can they not see how this much damages the league?
And then we are left with "yeah the rules are corrupt and the PL is incompetent, but City still shouldn't have done that". Which I respond with "well lets see if City broke any corrupt rules under and incompetent regulator after the appeals are over"
Same conversation about 4-5 times now and always seems to bring the initial hysteria down