As others have more elequently said, it's basically a stock market now, if you can take a young player for 250k, give him enough hype and a bit of game time in competitions that don't matter to you and then sell him on for even 5-10x that, it can fund a new player purchase against FFP for 100x the original investment if you amortize it over enough years. Which is probably an unintended side effect of FFP but also inevitable that the big clubs would find these kinds of loopholes, something about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

It is a shame and a scandal that so many young players will find their careers ruined as a result while the original clubs who put so much money into developing them get a pittance. You wish they were getting better advice, but equally for these kids is there anything over the last 10-15 years with City to suggest that staying here would be a better path to a career in the top 2 divisions?