Scroll back through social media in the days before the transfer window closed and you’ll be guaranteed to find plenty of “Wolves are buying the Premier League” comments.
The newly-promoted club splashed out nearly £70 million this summer, making them the eighth highest spenders in the top flight.
Big hitters like Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United all spent more than Wolves, but apparently it’s the Midlands club who are “buying the league”.
The comments bear many of the hallmarks of the barbs directed at Blackburn Rovers when they upset the established order during the 1990s by winning the Premier League.
Clubs like Blackburn and Wolverhampton have no right to be doing that according to some fans.
Why? Because they have “no history”, “should know their place” and are “tin pot clubs“.
All of which ignores the fact that both were founder members of the Football League and have as much right to chase success as any other club. Since when was ambition viewed as a bad thing?
Wolves’ heyday may have come in the 1950s when they won three titles, but quite why fans of other clubs think it’s acceptable to knock how they’ve set about their return to the top flight is a mystery.
The club’s owners, Fosun International, certainly haven’t been afraid to back manager Nuno Espirito Santo, as evidenced by their investment in numerous talented Portuguese players.
However, their actions have been no different to many of the clubs whose fans think it’s okay to give Wolves stick.
With foreign ownership now the norm rather than the exception in the Premier League, football is unrecognisable from when Wolves and 11 other clubs took part in the first competition back in 1888.
Suggestions that today’s top clubs are somehow operating in a more noble way than Wolves are as infactual as they are ridiculous.
Wolves’ owners are merely doing what Jack Walker did at Blackburn – levelling the playing field – and the reality is that fans of other clubs don’t like their cushy little empire threatening.
Wanderers have a long way to go before they will be able to challenge for Premier League titles or success in Europe, but the fact that their fans can dream of such feats should be celebrated rather than condemned by supporters elsewhere.
It smacks of jealousy and that is never a good thing.
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