yet the clubs that need ousting would have been in it too.
Whole thing needs ripping up and starting over at this rate. But it will just get worse now that Saudi Arabia have been welcomed into the premier league.
Yes, it was undoubtedly a stupid idea and I'm sure the motives were different for each club sucked into it. I think for FSG the prospect of assured and forecastable income would have played a big part as the current alternative is spending a few seasons outside the CL, making the gulf to the state owned clubs unbridgeable (does anyone realistically expect Arsenal, for example, to be contending with Man City at any point in the next decade?!). It felt the ESL proposal was pretty much the "ripping up and starting over" proposal.
I think the ESL was a terrible idea and it still stings that we as a club were involved. With FFP evidently entirely toothless I'm not sure what other options are left for retaining a playing field based on merit and not endless wealth.
When people talk up how Man City are well ran it always conveniently overlooks the many bad transfers they have made or that they let so many valuable assets drift to the point of worthlessness (Aguero, David Silva and Fernandinho, for example). No club run with a sustainable model could have sucked up those losses without having had a penalty in terms of not signing somebody or having to sell someone they'd rather not in order to balance the books. Man City just replaced, indirectly, the three that left on free transfers with £200m+ of new signings (Haaland, Grealish and Phillips).