Loads of clubs were going into administration and/or bust before the rules. The rules as they are also mean loads of clubs have little chance of catching us. We don't like the rules because we have billionaire owners, if we supported someone like Sheff Weds we'd most likely think Villa are a massive part of the problem and the club and fans are wankers.
Sorry but that bold bit is massively over-simplifying things. I'm sure there are people who want to see us go out and spend £200-300m on whoever we like but I don't think that's anything like the majority of people or a position with much support on here.
For me there are 4 major problems with FFP:
1. It puts entirely too much emphasis on non-football income, which means means media exposure has much more impact than sporting excellence, I don't think that's good for the sport, winning trophies should be more important for the health of the club tan hosting Beyonce concerts.
2. It doesn't account for debt. Regardless of where that debt comes from I'd like to see an inclusion of a requirement to reduce debts before throwing huge sums of money around (my simplistic idea would be to include a percentage, say 10%, of debts as a negative in the calculation, so if you're a billion in debt you start the calculation with -£100m already baked in). If these rules really are about long-term sustainability then they need to address long-term debts.
3. It encourges 'pure profit' sales which has led to some clubs creating academy farms for the purpose of generating sales to prop up thge first team. For me that is disgraceful (and this is the bit where I feel we've let ourselves down recently with sales like Kellyman, and Iroegbunam).
4. By allowing a handful of clubs to offer ridiculous fees and wages they've created an inflationary effect which forces clubs to operate at the brink of the rules to stay in touch, again this isn't healthy for the sport and has the exact opposite effect to the stated aim of the regs.
As I've said my solution would be that team costs (wages, fees, etc but not anything related to the ground, academy) should be capped to the average prize money for the league in the previous season, so take the premier league prize money median. To keep things 'fairer' for the teams that are winning things/qualifying for Europe, you then top up with 50% of earnings from other competitions on top but with the other 50% split and divided evenly across the league.
In practice that would mean:
Premier league share (25/26): ~£160m
Other comp share: ~£15-20m
So everyone gets £175-200m
Then you can add on up to about £50-60m extra for teams that went to the latter stages of the champions league.
That still gives them about a 30% advantage over the smaller clubs but that's a significant improvement on the 3-400% advantage in the current system. It would also massively reduce the value of huge commercial deals and take away incentives to get everything sponsored and also reduce the push to massively drive matchday revenues, which would hopefully stop the exploitative ticket pricing. This would have to be something introduced slowly as many teams are spending well over those figures on wages alone (including us) but give teams 5 years of a sliding scale to get their finances sorted and we'd be in a much better place for the future of the sport as a competitive one.
