The last few years have really underlined one thing for me.
Lerner gave up at just the worst possible time. There seems to have been a real explosion in interest in the league just when we became a club that was happy to stay up. We are still paying the price for those years. No way were Spurs, for example, a global brand in 2010 the way they are now. We would never have accepted they were a bigger club than us.
Now we are back among the elite but still playing catch up on sponsorship, revenue, eyes on us etc.
It was Doug who really missed the wave of Premier League wealth, back in the late-1990's: that was the time to invest hard on decent stadium and proper players (I don't mean the end-of-career Frenchman who ripped off his shirt when he scored the first of his few goals). However, I suppose that had he done so he'd have taken even more out than he did.
