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“[Doctorow says]… ‘Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking point and walks away, or gets pushed.’ I don’t know if that’s true for football clubs the same way it is for tech platforms.”

Some of them have walked away, to be fair:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.C._United_of_Manchester?wprov=sfti1

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Great stuff Grace. Radcliffe always struck me as a bit of a chancer, so if I were a Utd fan I'd not have a huge amounts of confidence in it being significantly better. Better, maybe but only by degrees. But the thesis is sound: as a Chelsea fan were at stage two. We've become a 'finance club'. Of course Clearlake want to win on the pitch but they're finance people who see things through a financial lens. And whilst winning is a very good way to make money, my own worry is they'll see the massive chunk of prime real estate as being the easiest route, with Chelsea Pitch Owners and easier problem to solve than the on pitch related ones that are stacking up. How depressing.

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Football fans will walk away. It just takes longer and they come back quicker.

Newcastle lost 25% of their season ticket holders at the end of the Ashley era.

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