When a wealthy man becomes involved with a football club the assumption is that there'll be money to spend. The question that should be asked is; whose?
I'm certain the Prince has spent, certainly on infrastructure and paying off previous management teams, which in itself would have been costly, but who wants to consider that? There's not a bottomless pit where money is concerned, so we need to appreciate how this merry-go-round actually works. Unless you have an owner like Abramhovic at Chelsea, who seems to throw money at Chelsea as if it's going out of fashion, a club like ours needs to grasp some of the realities that's ahead of us. The higher we go in the Football League, the more money will enter the accounts of SUFC. The big question is how do we make that breakthrough that will enable us to become a Premiership team?
My take is that we trust in Wilder to do right by this club. A good manager is as rare, maybe more so, than a good player, so we need Wilder to wheel and deal and gradually make us stronger, strong enough to compete with most of the better teams. Returning to the Prince, he'll continue to spend on infrastructure and transfer budgets, but he'll also know that this club will need to use the money that it generates from being in higher divisions to it's advantage, and in the process not solely depend on the Prince to subsidise everything. My understanding is that the Prince's ambition is for this club to achieve promotion to the Premiership, and once there he'll probably sell his interest in the club at a profit. Whether a new owner would be prepared to adopt a different approach to spending money on players, well we'll only know if, and when, we become a Premiership club.
