Yeah, will be interesting to see what happens there for sure, there's never been such a strong/ valuable/high-wage squad come down, but a lot have gone for nothing, which can't do anything but hurt. They're in for a big reset, but hard to say how much money they're going to have.
They were warned at the end of 21/22 by UEFA about debt, and FFP potential breach, coming down won't help that. This last year they were being monitored by UEFA too, and something may come of that also.
The owner wrote off like £194m of debt in December, so will probably be reluctant to shovel more money in, and think they were looking for investment, but might struggle with getting that now they've gone down.
Don't they also have an absolutely massive loan, which was secured against prem TV money? I think that's been restructured, but I'm not sure the lenders will be up for them taking on more debt and increasing risk of a FFP penalty putting them in League 1, as that could effectively bankrupt them.
Their team wasn't good enough to stay up, and losing literally a full team of their best players is going to leave an awful side behind for prem standards, possibly even an average champo side. They might need 11 players of top 2 championship level players to go back up, whilst competing with Leeds and Southampton who won't have as much work to do. They actually might have to spend ~60m to assemble a side with 11 plays good enough to go up, which will be hard for them to do I think.
The more I think about it the more I think they're going to be in a worse position than people realise, and I think if we have a squad as good as last year we'll finish above them.
That would do for starters !
