do you always make things up as you go along?
It is pointing out that all the argument was top 4 being better than cups and the irony was fourth didn't matter in the end, something well explained in the OP, so where does it say people were happy to lose any game at all?
But fourth
DOES matter in the end, because it shows the team is challenging for the kind of trophy that lures in the kind of player that can help a team win other things. How many times have people said something to the effect of, "He won't come here; we can't offer CL football"? It also gives the team more money, which then can go towards paying for that player.
Each place in the table was worth £755,062 in prize money, with that amount going to the bottom club (Wolves) and 20 times that amount (£15,101,240) going to City.This means Liverpool received £9,815,806 for finishing eighth. The fourth place club received £12,836,054. That's a difference of £3 million pounds. Now granted, that doesn't sound like much I suppose, but the £100,000 we got from winning the Carling Cup isn't much of a drop in the bucket, either.
(The irony is, when all is said and done, we probably ended up with more money than Tottenham, if one adds up only incoming revenue and cup prize money. But they have the lure of CL to offer. We have the Carling Cup.)
There was something in the TAW podcast earlier that mentioned the CL revenue going up. I dug around and there were some articles claiming rises of perhaps 20% in TV revenue. The gap between clubs in the CL and outside it is growing constantly. No parachute payments for dropping out of this 'super-league'.
Right now,
helmboy_nige, a quick estimation shows that Chelsea made at least £21 million for their run in the CL, which doesn't include the wins/draws in group play (I got too lazy to go back and see what their record was). That's pretty much a Juan Mata right there. Or a Van Der Vaart. But don't let the numbers fool you. Because fourth didn't make it into CL next year, fourth doesn't matter.