Winning So You Can Say You Won

This post follows on from Hope Economics - Winning That Loses Money, where I explored why Australian men’s football clubs continue to spend heavily in competitions that offer little structural reward. Those pieces looked at hope, ambition and belief as drivers of behaviour.

Here, I want to contrast that system with a different model, using the Premier League as a reference point, to show how regulation can create a different but equally distorting, outcome.

Different rules. Different pressures.
The same question underneath. What actually changes when you win?

Financial Fair Play is often described as a mechanism to stop the richest club or owner from simply buying the league.

That is the neat version.

The reality is more uncomfortable.

What Financial Fair Play was meant to do

Financial Fair Play was introduced to stop clubs destroying themselves in pursuit of success. To prevent reckless spending, mounting debt and eventual collapse once a benefactor walked away.

It was designed as a safety rail.

At its core, it is about sustainability, not equality.

And on that narrow measure, it has largely worked.

What it actually does

Financial Fair Play does not cap wealth. It legitimises it.

Spending is tied to revenue. Revenue is tied to history, scale and global reach. If you already have those things, you are permitted to spend more. If you do not, your ambition is constrained by design.

Success becomes path dependent.

The clubs that were big remain big. The clubs trying to break in are told to grow organically, slowly, and within limits that rarely allow disruption.

The rich do not stop winning.
They simply win within a regulated framework built around their advantage.

Order without mobility

This creates a different distortion to the one we see in Australia.

In Australian men’s football, clubs often overspend chasing success that does not reliably change their position. While promotion and relegation exists in parts of the NPL system, its leverage is uneven. Movement is frequently mediated by licensing, infrastructure and financial criteria that can blunt consequence. Promotion often increases costs faster than it increases opportunity, while relegation is regularly softened by restructures, exemptions, or strategic intervention.

Movement exists. Consequence is diluted.

In Tasmania, that dilution is felt most acutely. Winning a league often delivers a trophy, a sense of pride and the right to say you were the best that year. What it rarely delivers is a materially different future. The cost base remains. The obligations remain. The pathway does not expand in proportion to the achievement.

Winning becomes an end in itself.

The shared failure

Both systems fail in the same place.

In Australia, winning does not consistently unlock opportunity.
In England, winning does not redistribute power.

In both cases, football people respond rationally to irrational structures. They spend emotionally, politically, or defensively because the system offers no clean, proportional reward for success.

Rules alone do not create fairness.

Structure does.

Until winning actually alters a club’s future, whether through promotion, relegation, or genuine economic leverage, football will keep producing distorted behaviour. Either clubs will spend chasing outcomes that do not exist, or they will be locked out of outcomes they can never reach.

Different leagues.
Different rules.
The same uncomfortable truth.