Eubank almost killing Michael Watson in the early 90s is one...
You realise ENIC is a company. It's not a one man band. It'll exist long after he's gone and it's technically not Lewis himself that owns their shares in THFC, it's ENIC the company.
The whole point of ENIC is to make money. They invest in other businesses, grow that business and make that business make more money to make ENIC more money. That is what they do.
THFC were a cheap a purchase in 2000 for a club with the badge prestige of Spurs. We were dog shit, yes, but still regarded as a pretty bug club. Example is Les Ferdinand and Ginola leaving Newcastle citing Spurs as a bigger club. Newcastle were better than us by quite a way for the 5-6 years prior.
So ENIC come in, before the dawn of the wealthy owner.
From day 1 the ENIC plan is:
Build/improve the stadium. More bums on sears = more money.
Build up the academy. More youth players = less expenditure on players and sales generate money.
Improve the training ground. This helps whatever coach is there to improve the players. Not against this obviously but it's another sign of the plan.
At no point have ENIC ever had the intention of ploughing any liquid cash into the first team to inprove results and push on. That's a heavy gamble with money. It may work. It may not. It may lead to expectation to carry on doing it to maintain it.
It's far better for ENIC that we're doing ok every year getting a PL TV cheque, PL level sponsorship deals and a bit of European football. Don't start winning stuff as then you have to be seen to be ready to push on.
When have we ever been seen to push on?
We're also in a catch 22 now whereby we once bought talent on the cheap and sold it on but fan expectation has changed and it's not accepted as good business. Furthermore, the idea you can buy a Bale for £5m, sell for £80m profit and plough it is to the team again proved to be a bit of a disaster. It didn't move us on because we wasted most of it.
Last point - There is at least some belief certain people contributed to the occurrence of Black Wednesday. These market crashes don't happen by chance or accident. We'll never know if Lewis and his crooked mates were pulling strings at the time to make sure it happened, but the fact he knew it was coming and banked a lot on it suggests he did.