It’s all well and good comparing us to other clubs that have fallen away. But modern english football is the most lucrative as an entity in world football. Blackburn are only similar to us because they’re former champions, other than that there’s no likeness at all.
What some fail to accept is the financial gain we got from our success outweighs any team with a similar history to us. The fact we have spectacularly failed to sustain even a level of mediocrity with the financial benefits we had, is still staggering.
Clubs like Blackburn fell away because they simply couldn’t compete financially anymore, same with Bolton, Stoke and Pompy. We didn’t have that issue, we could financially keep up, but what we did was completely mismanage those finances, make some amateur and shocking decisions that ultimately allowed the club to fold like a deckchair. We allowed millions of pounds worth of assets walk away for free…… assets that if sold for good prices could have helped keep us stable.
This isn’t a case of a small club running its course, this is a case of a club that’s so badly run, that it’s managed to tie itself in knots financially, despite raising astonishing levels of money from player sales, that to a level of elite clubs.
That’s what separates us from all of the other falls from grace, it’s the fact we had earned the means to be a successful and steady club, but human error has lead to an implosion like no other.