Yeah, that’s how superstitions work. People only talk about it if it “could” be true, not once it’s proven to not be true.

Remember all the people talking about 2012 being the end of the world back in 2011/12? How many people talked about it in 2013? Or Y2K in '99 being forgotten about shortly afterwards.

Why would football superstitions be any different?

What makes a team like Brighton or West Ham so much bigger than teams like Wolves, Palace or Forest?

The whole ″big x″ idea is silly and outdated. Just let it die.

FA Cup, by a million miles.

The EFL Cup is mocked every year for being unimportant.

Not much. Look at Juve, a bunch of their best players stayed.

I’ve no doubt the academy lads like Foden and Lewis would stay. Some of the older established players like De Bruyne have likely already decided where they’ll end their careers and that wouldn’t change it, so they’d probably stay too.

Any that wanted to leave would require a club to come in with an acceptable transfer fee and be able to offer similar wages, there aren’t really many options considering that. Maybe Haaland to Real, but I don’t think there would be too much movement.

Not much. Look at Juve, a bunch of their best players stayed.

I’ve no doubt the academy lads like Foden and Lewis would stay. Some of the older established players like De Bruyne have likely already decided where they’ll end their careers and that wouldn’t change it, so they’d probably stay too.

Any that wanted to leave would require a club to come in with an acceptable transfer fee and be able to offer similar wages, there aren’t really many options considering that. Maybe Haaland to Real, but I don’t think there would be too much movement.

You know the EFL has FFP rules too right?

How would it ″make clubs spend″?

That’s just silly, no it wouldn’t. How many clubs actually overspent to the point it caused them financial problems before FFP? I can think of Portsmouth and Leeds, that’s it. The vast majority of clubs don’t do that, with or without FFP. And even having FFP rules doesn’t preven financial issues, see Derby County.

Nah, force him to manage Stoke!

No, of course not. IMO FFP rules shouldn’t even exist, they’re terrible. So I don’t consider breaking rules that shouldn’t exist to be ″cheating″.

They don’t make the competition more fair or more competitive and they don’t even prevent teams from going bust (Derby County?). Nobody will convince me that FFP rules are for anything other than to preserve the status quo.

I’m sure people will say ″you’re a City fan, of course you don’t like FFP″, but nah, the rules just suck. I think La Liga’s salary cap is a much better idea than the EPL’s FFP. Granted that too has flaws, but it’d still be better to have something like that. If it were up to me there would just be a soft salary cap, and anything clubs pay over that they’re charged a 100% fee on which is distributed between the clubs under the cap (in full, none of it should be pocketed by the FA!). eg. there’s a 100m per year salary cap, Man City spend 200m, so they pay a 100m fee on top of that that’s shared between all the teams below the cap.

That would still allow teams to spend money they have (and if they have it, why shouldn’t they be able to spend it?) while actually making the league more competitive as lower spending teams would be financially rewarded for spending kess giving them more to invest in the future to improve. Could give a portion of it to lower league teams too, who often have financial issues, to help out the rest of the pyramid.

Deserves credit for being no better than Ole? Why?

Just wait, it’s gonna get worse. I recently learned that from 2025 (I think?) the Sept/Oct international breaks are being merged together to create a 3 week long international break covering the end of Sept/beginning of Oct.

Dude… you’re 6th. If that’s bad then 99.9% of clubs in the country are bad!

You do you though. People start like different teams fairly often, for various reasons.