Sean Thornton
I say a little prayer….
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- Apr 14, 2015
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We wanted the money more than we wanted a half-hearted player with potential. I said on more than one occasion that Adams had everything he needed to play at a higher level if he wanted it enough. But this is a similar concept to the old Pratchett boot idea.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Except instead of immediate outlay we're talking about opportunity cost. We could have held on to Adams and had £5m or a player of that quality in the team, or we could have had nothing if he'd been a De Girolamo or a Slew. The need to generate some money to pay for a few cheaper players that would do the immediate job outweighed the opportunity cost of holding on to Adams. Fortunately, Wilder's recruitment was good enough that this paid off massively for us.
Sure, it sucks to be a team lower down the ladder since you miss out on quality players and money, but that's how it works. Wherever you look those at the bottom are getting screwed, but this is an inevitable problem of a sport that revolves so heavily around money.
What you state in the last paragraph will only get worse as the established PL clubs eke out every advantage for themselves, aided by the compliant football authorities in this country who bang on about grass roots football investments while ensuring the real money goes to the few who protect their "brand".