- Feb 1, 2013
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Brighton are always lauded as the best run club but they have a chairman who has put in 400m of his own money.I'm sure if he sold it would be with a heavy heart. But the point I'm making is that we as fans should care. We are entering a period where the game is being more strictly regulated in terms of what teams can and can't spend, based on their profitability. Success in football in near perfectly correlated with spending. Our ability to spend in comparison with other clubs gives us a massive advantage, that was previously only afforded to sugar daddy clubs and a small handful of established European giants. This is because of Daniel Levy and the immense work he's put into the club. But it's not just down to hard work. All chairman work hard and want to be succesful I'm sure. Yet Levy is streets ahead of the competition. We are always being described as the best run club in the Prem. We are probably the best run club in Europe. Suddenly everyone is going to have to compete on terms that massively favour well run clubs, as opposed to simply having rich owners. Why on earth would our fans not be worried about losing Levy now? The chances of us replacing Levy with an equally adept owner are slim to say the least.
I get the frustration of fans who have seen the likes of City, Chelsea and even Leicester winning things, while we constantly flatter to deceive and always seem to miss out on the best players etc. But the conditions in which those clubs were able to surpass us have gone. Yes it would have been nice to have been bought by an Oligarch 20 years ago and seen big name players coming through door and won titles etc. But that didn't happen and now if we did get bought by some mega rich owner, it wouldn't make any real difference from a financial perspective. The reality is, whether it's an oil rich Sheik or a US sports investor, who has an MBA from Harvard, they are very unlikely to make the club more profitable than our little bald leader. I bet Newcastle, with their mega wealthy owners, wish they'd spent the last 20 years building the best training ground in Europe, the best stadium in Europe and developed their brand on a global scale. Arsenal and West Ham fans must now hate their stadiums more than ever, due the limited scope for income compared to ours.