The People's Forum: Totally agree re the cups

I find it really disrespectful to the fans, and generally disrespectful to what the game is for!

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Liverpool
Chelsea
Arsenal
City
United
Spurs
Newcastle

all dwarf us

we are in a chasing pack of villa palace brentford bournemouth

where villa and palace have moved ahead of us is they appear to have targeted ANY torphy as a profile raising exercise to attract players before their next big move.

I have never understood moyes attitude ot the cups. lets face it any cup would be great. as for europe any cup would be great. we simply arent going to win the league or challenge until we start winning stuff and attracting the talent and even then no guarantee.

the issue is also financial.

we've got a lovely shiny new stadium but its going to cost. season tickets will go up year on year- there are still 20,000 on the list. but we either become a tourist desitnation full of people in replica tops who talk about scousers but are not of this city- the lfc fans that come to ever home game and price the kids out for example.

so we need to be realistic. neilw is again correct mega sponsors need consistent ROI on their investment- you only get that from regular CL football. and we are clearly miles away from that in termos of squad size.

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.....or would/will see us when we are consistently around the Euro places. So not irrelevant or plucky, just another team that won stuff ages ago and doesnt anymore. Even with a few good seasons and Euro campaign the bigger clubs arent really worried about Villa, no-one will talk about them for the league, they wont even be the favourites for CL qualification next year, that would be us in their position, probably rightly so.

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The ceiling that the 3Bs (but also teams like Palace, Sunderland, Fulham) have, is that once a player has been coached well and is worth £80M, then his agent is going to ask the club to pay him like an £80M player would expect to be.

Those clubs can't afford to do that and therefore sell and re-invest.

I would argue that we do have the ability (assuming TFG back us) to pay those £80M players the going wage rate.

Granted, we couldn't 'compete' with City/Arsenal levels, but we can easily imagine our ceiling is higher than those 'smaller' clubs.

I also think 'the model' assumes that once you reach the CL, then you stay there - which granted is the tricky bit.

I suspect Bournemouth (if they get there) may well have a brilliant CL season - trips to the Bernabeu, San Siro, playing Barca at the Vitality etc, but they will be highly unlikely to finish next season, in the CL places again. That then precipitates a sell-off (if they haven't already sold their better players) and you fall back to earth - or worse.

In fairness, Newcastle, Tottenham (a few years back) and Villa nearly 'made it' - finished in a CL place in season one and repeated it in season 2. The first 2 fell away after a while - couldn't quite sustain it - and Villa may struggle next season as some PSR chickens come home to roost.

But I think it is plausible to imagine Everton (a club with a similar infrastructure to those 3 mentioned) working our way to a CL place and then managing to stay there. It takes some luck - and a very good manager and recruitment team - but it's by far from an impossible dream.

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We are expecting/hoping a manager can do for us, something that no other manager has ever done...for longer than 3 or 4 years, that is outperform spend. You cant look to one team, ever in the EPL era that has outperformed spend consistently and really kicked on.....yet that is the standard we are going to hold every manager we ever have to...do something that has never been done and keep doing it.

Another problem is the buy young model....I think financially we may have to do that...but that isnt to build a young team to win trophies, its to buy young players and sell them for a profit.