The phrase "a setup that was" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing a situation or arrangement that existed in the past.
Example: "The event was a setup that was poorly planned, leading to many unforeseen issues."
Alternatives: "an arrangement that was" or "a configuration that was".
This was so much the standard view that when Shakespeare, never having known any democratic institutions at all — aside from a few local, limited Stratford ones — tried to imagine them in "Coriolanus" and his other Roman plays, he could only picture a setup that was divisive, factional, and pitifully easy to manipulate by a demagogue or two.
I'd quickly pay a bit more for a setup that was there waiting for me once I boarded.
Halo lacks artificially intelligent game bots, and was released before the launch of the Xbox Live online multiplayer service; therefore LAN parties are needed to reach the game's 16-player limit, a setup that was a first for a console game, but was often deemed impractical by critics.
In the experiment we strove to have a setup that was as equal as possible for all models and systems, both in terms of text pre-processing and in terms of the target model dimensionality when inducing the vector space models.
Miller makes sure to deliver a setup that's unequivocal, a resolution that's untroubled.
You fall in love with a golf course when you have a setup that's as wonderful as this.
They travel together only when two daughters are going to head to head, a setup that is easier logistically but tougher emotionally, at least for Mom.
Three months after its release, worldwide audiences gawped in real time as she was stretchered from her house to the Cedars-Sinai MedicandCenter, sectioned and placed under the conservatorship of her father – a setup that is still ongoing nearly a decade later.
A setup that is so flawed, rushed and ill-prepared is ripe for mistakes, trampling the rights and wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable people," said Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty's deputy Europe director.
On the outskirts of Stockton-on-Tees, upstairs in a church, there's a setup that's now uneasily familiar: crates of donated food for families who can't afford to eat, and a charity volunteer – filling the gap left by the state – there to feed them.
We don't pity Roy, we don't like him, and we struggle to believe in him; the lasting impression of "Matchstick Men" is that an unembarrassable actor and a director of proven largesse decided, almost as a challenge, to lavish their ceaseless gifts on a hero and a setup that were simply too small and musty for their purposes.
