Not big enough now.
United are too big a club to be allowed to be relegated.
Yes, but they imploded financially because they spent more than they could afford. Utd arenāt going broke, they are just restricted temporarily in what more they can spend because of FFP.
Their growth was built on a model of spending money that was borrowed against future earnings with financial models that did not consider the potential of missing out on the CL. This was not a case where in people only realized in retrospect that it was a house of cards, their strategy was pretty well known even before it blew it up and the entire football world gave it a
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But they had got to that level by borrowing against their own future revenues, creating a financial timebomb for themselves. It was no surprise when they collapsed.
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And Spurs made a final. Knock out football/favourable draws can churn out some anomalies
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Years ago I read Peter Ridsdaleās book. Absolutely fascinating, both as a book and as a situation. To his credit, he attempted to put out an unvarnished version of what happened so there was some great hindsight, but at the same time despite the utter collapse he was unable to identify some of the fallacies that had governed that boardās thinking. There was sort of a layer of candour sitting atop a foundation of narcissistic self-deception.
The fallacy that was most powerful was the one that Leeds was just too big of a club not to be in the Premier League.
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Problem with relegation is you have to be quite poor to be caught up in it. If one of the promoted clubs had a decent season (Perhaps Leeds or Sheffield Utd who have yo-yoāed for a period) then one of the big sides having an awful season could be dragged in.
The seasons when Newcastle and Villa went down wouldnāt currently happen.
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He probably couldnāt because they were some of his own doing.
Oh absolutely - there is a reflective passage near the end where he actually itemizes what he understands as his errors, and some of them are genuine - but some of them are of the deflecting ātrusting the performance of other peopleā ilk.
Should be clear, it is a book worth reading, though the insights into the PL are quite dated now obviously.
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Did he look objectively at how much money he spent on goldfish?
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United arenāt too big to go down in theory, the 1ppg theyāre getting under Amorim would see them get fewer than the typically required 40 points to stay up over a full season, but the bigger factor this season is how poor the promoted clubs have been, so United arenāt seriously at risk.
It remains to be seen if the next batch of promoted clubs is equally poor - itās possibly a symptom of the growing financial divide between even small PL clubs and the Championship - and whether Amorim can sort things out a bit over the summer to haul them up to the dizzying heights of midtableā¦ assuming heās given the opportunity to attempt to do so.
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The Jimreaper at United is pushing that they are financially unstable.
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Even after all those sackings?
Itās the gulf between the Championship and the Premier League that is saving a lot of teams. Forest, United, Everton, West Ham, Wolves - they all should have had a squeakier time.
United are on 33 points, and with ten games to go that should put you firmly in a relegation fight. But when even the best of the three promoted teams can only muster 17 points over the same time, 40 points isnāt the benchmark. Youāre probably alright on 25.
The other issue with the promoted teams being so terrible, is that if you are a perennial struggler like Everton, you know you can probably bank 15 points just from the promoted sides alone, and youāre half way to safety from just six games against three clubs. Relegation was clearly not going to be an issue for 17 clubs in the league from a few weeks into the season.
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Forest? Last season, maybe. This season they are up for the European places with a good shout for the Champions League slot.
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It does perpetuate mediocrity, which will do a clubās fanbase no good in the long run. I always remember Coventry being like that. At one point, they had been in Division 1 longer than anyone other than Arsenal, Everton and us. During that time, they finished in the bottom half 25 out of 33 seasons, mostly in a relegation battle.
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Not really.
I looked it up the other day, and in the last 15 seasons, the highest point total required to avoid relegation was 41, just once. 8 points from 10 games after 33 from 28 isnāt that huge a requirement.
Co-verton?
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Thatās what I mean. They were in a relegation scrap last year, and they were very lucky the promoted teams were shit.
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Not to forget thoughā¦ Coventry brought us thisā¦!
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