"But you still want your cold nights in Stoke" 😆
What people want - what I want at any rate - is taking a long-term, financially sustainable approach towards building a team that is worthy of playing Barcelona on that level. We might fail in that approach; that's the definition of a sport. If there are no stakes there are no rewards. Financial independence, whether it comes through loaded owners or a fenced-off leage that absorbs most of the broadcasting money without redistributing it, removes those stakes.
Your job as a fucking club owner is not to make us financially independent by creating a robber's league that runs off with the majority of the profits and divide it between a small number of clubs. Your job is to act as a custodian and make sure the club does what it can to deserve its fans. Stand for something other than fucking profits. Have a pulse.
I hope we never play fucking Stoke again in my lifetime, horrid and unambitious as they are, hellbent on contributing nothing to the excitement and joy that football is capable of bringing. They're exactly one tiny step better than shitholes like Chelsea, but at least they have the capacity to change whenever they want. Chelsea will always be a fucking cancer by contrast; just like the Saudis at Man City; just like the Kroenkes, who are content with leaving the managerial equivalent of a toddler in charge of Arsenal and seeing us finish midtable while playing ambitionless football, and burdening us with one corporate asshole after another, whether it's Raul or Edu, people who move from club to club and bring nothing but the ugly side of football politics where transfer policies are dictated by relationships with agents while treating everything else as expendable, whether it's our scouting system, our academy coaches, or a bunch of ground-level employees whose combined annual wages don't match what the executives themselves take home every year.
We're worse off on the pitch than we've been in 25 years, but our value is 400 percent higher since Kroenke took over, despite having to deal with a global pandemic for the last 14 months. They've done exactly what they set out to do here.
