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Notes -
The clubs don't work like the US where they can be uprooted at will. They're privately owned but considered semi-public goods or at least important cultural artifacts. Maybe it's irrational, but it's not considered acceptable that anyone can buy one, vastly overpay (which makes life harder for their competitors) and potentially run it into the ground by leaving it with the debt from the higher expenditures when they lose interest.
One way to preserve this would be to insist on a fan-owned status for all of them. But this would obviously piss off a lot of owners. You could also lock out foreign owners, but then you miss out on their capital (and piss off owners, again). Salary cap would piss off players.
So you get this. This is actually the compromise that comes of the system being more capitalist than the US.
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