I'm fine with our spending being anchored against Ipswich or Luton or whatever. I accept its probably not especially common for a United supporter and your right about some of us. But not all.
The only reason Newcastle need to toe the line is because of spending obscene amounts of money too. I think they're spending is much the same as ours and its worth bearing in mind that were completely hopeless at both buying and selling players. Chelsea are a bit of an aberration i dont want to defend them.
I'm fine with sustainability rules. I think leeds are too good an example of letting owners spend beyond a clubs means. You could change the rules for them to put the full cost in escrow like
@adexkola has proposed a few times. But i think the idea that giving Saudi Arabia free reign to invest as much as they like helping the competitiveness of the league to be a completely mental viewpoint. I'd rather anchoring.
I was a proponent of establishing money to be used for the club in escrow or some other way for a long time.
The real difficulty with this is one faced by a completely unrelated entity: NASCAR.
NASCAR doesn’t have franchises. If you sink all your money into a 2 or 3 car team and they aren’t making g the cuts for races and losing sponsors…. Or things just drop off: then the team Itself has no value. You can try to sell off the equipment, warehouses, land and such, but the team. Itself is worth nothing.
Because of the way relegation works, football in Europe faces a similar issue. The very worst NFL brand is worth a massive (and stable) amount of money.
A PL team can fall from grace and spiral into being worth 1 pound plus any debt taken on in a heartbeat. And that can happen even with PSR.
Want to really change it? Go with something closer to the NBA model; where there is a luxury tax that goes up in tiers once you go above a certain spending cap. At one point the Golden State Warriors were paying 4 dollars to the league for every extra dollar they went over.
The extra money from the luxury tax would go to a pool distributed to every team that is not over the soft spending cap and having to contribute to the tax itself.
People will be like “well Saudi would just spend 5 billion a year on players … they are worth infinite money”
Well, just because they have that money, does t mean they want to spend it all on a team.
You can only field 11 players at a time regardless of what you spend.
I don’t actually think they want to bulldoze the league financially anyway, because they are trying to repair Bin Salman’s image by owning a tradition rich team, not reinforce it.
And every pound overspent will go to making the entire PL wealthier, and thus aid in fending of challenges to the league structures we love that WILL be manifesting themselves over the next decade.