You have argued about this club your whole life. On nothing.
Whether the coach can coach. Whether the signing was any good. Whether the people running it have the faintest idea. Twenty-five years of this, and not one of those arguments has ever been settled.
Every game. The house. The gate.
Your club finished where the money said it would.
Here is the thing nobody tells a supporter, and the engine says it out loud rather than pretending it is not true.
The wage bill explains almost everything about where a team finishes. What is left over, once the payroll has had its say, is the manager, and it is a much smaller number than any of us want it to be. Which means most managers sit in an undifferentiated middle where the money already explains them, and only the genuine overperformers and the clear failures move at all.
So before you spend another year screaming at a man for finishing fourteenth at a club with the fourteenth wage bill: that is not a defence of him. It is just the truth, and nobody has ever given it to you.
It will tell you when your manager is the problem. It will also tell you when he never was. Most things in this business only do the first, because the first is what you want to hear.
Every argument you have ever had. Answered.
Fans have marched about some of these. Held up banners about them. Nobody has ever been able to prove a word of it.
Put your money behind your club. Not on it.
You and the man from the other side of the city have been going at it about this fixture since August. Both of you put something behind it. Whoever wins, the winning club takes all of it.
Neither of you gets anything back. That was never the point. The point is that one of you has to watch his money walk into the other man's club, and the players are better off either way.
The oldest argument between two supporters, finally pointed at something that matters.
The games, the broadcast, the house, and the store are free. The reads are what you pay for, and they are the only thing here that nobody else will sell you at any price.