A good read. I don’t subscribe but I can easily get lost in a copy of The Blizzard.
FWIW I’ve always subscribed to the idea that if Ronaldo and Messi et al were afforded the kind of minimal protection given to the likes of say Duncan McKenzie, Stan Bowles or Tony Currie they would likely appear to be little better than all three. It’s hardly controversial to suggest they are singled out for special treatment by both players and officials.
Norwich fans wish to see the end of Delia because she cannot afford to run a championship side.
She’s had four huge slices of luck in gaining promotion and each time failed because of her inability to provide the funding to mount a decent challenge in the premiership.
The sell funding model have proven to be a joke which has ended in the club having a debt of around £60 million.
Delia also told us nobody was interested in buying the club. However, at the AGM the Finance Director informed us there have been several offers which they filtered and presented the viable ones to the Board for consideration.
No wonder we want rid of her.
Depends what you mean by “afford” and a “decent challenge” I guess. Wanting to spend money you’ve not got is a recipe for the downwards spiral we’ve seen so many times. Wanting someone else to come in with supposedly more money and disrespecting the sensible housekeeping approach is not uncommon but it is the exact recipe for that downwards spiral.
The assumption/bias is that the club failed at EPL level because of a lack of investment. Forest invested how much? How much have Everton burnt through? It’s just not as simple as how much you spend/invest. Farke was a poor appointment. A man with no record of note at a comparable level and little more to his tactical approach than a belief in tidy neat players. A man who knew nothing of the club he was joining until your Chief Exec explained. A man who repeated exactly the same mistakes in the EPL. If that was some Bielsa like commitment to principles above all else then fair enough but it wasn’t. He has zero idea how to coach a defence and little interest in appointing anyone to do that. Sweet but naive. Hardly the credentials for success.
Once my club acquired its current owners much was revealed about the never ending parade of potential investors we’d had and lost/rejected over the years. There were rumours for most of the past decade. Supporters Trust leaks supported some of those rumours. Then we learned the truth.
On average, as a non-league club, whose only asset of note was our players, we received at least half a dozen expressions of interest per month. An astonishing number but apparently the norm. Higher up the leagues the figure is apparently much higher. The board were always presented with something i.e. maybe one of the half dozen. In reality, asking for further particulars, proof of finding and doing some due diligence (difficult at the best of times) revealed that the only credible investment offer we’d received in a decade was the one from our current owners.
Fans love seeing c*** up or conspiracy. The reality is often much more mundane. People doing their jobs quietly in difficult circumstances fans simply never get to learn about.
I’m not for a moment saying Delia and co. are especially inspiring. They do however most likely know exactly what they’re doing.
Prior to Delia we were a top division side who’d qualified for Europe on a few occasions. Since Delia we have been in League 1 and are currently clinging on to 13th in the Championship after embarrassing ourselves in the Premiership.
To cap it all the club blamed the fans failure to provide a good atmosphere for last season’s dismal performance.
Time for change by accepting one of the viable offers.
I doubt any of that has anything to do with Delia. Things have moved on. Bournemouth have succeeded with a stadium barely bigger than my own club and a hinterland smaller than your own. Their investments largely haven’t been on the pitch but elsewhere in coaching, scouting and structure and processes.
As a club your appointments have simply got poorer over the years. Your last noticeably competent managerial appointment was O’Neill. Hardly something to be pinned on Delia. There’s not a one of your managers I’d have accepted as a Wrexham manager to be honest and I doubt anyone here would look at that sorry list and think “I wish we had them”. What you actually need is a manager who will rip up what you have top to bottom. The lack of that might be pinned on the current owners but they can hardly be blamed for previous decades.
It’s the owners not the manager who sets to agenda.
Without the necessary investment it is impossible to succeed in the championship let alone the premiership. It may have escaped your notice but many owners of championship sides are now billionaires. Football is fast becoming a billionaire’s hobby.
Regarding our players I doubt very much whether Wrexham would have interested them.
I would also point out that Delia has owned the club for twenty six years which should have been ample time to improve matters.
My knowledge of football is no greater than anyone here but I do have well-informed contacts within several clubs and as a fan who saw his club hours away from having to start again as a phoenix club I do have the unfortunate advantage of knowing more about football finance than than I ever really wanted to. It remains incredibly depressing how few fans really know their way round that stuff. There is, for example, no such thing as “investment” in football. There are only loans which have to be repaid and loans which can only be raised by leveraging the assets of the club. Both are effectively club not owner debt.
So yes, obviously as a fan of a club owned by one billionaire and a millionaire I am painfully aware that the game is run by same. Equally though success is about structure and process not just the money. There are so many billionaire owners nowadays right down to non-league that money simply makes you competitive. It’s process and structure which wins you things.
It strikes me that the problem at Norwich is less lack of “investment” and more that during your owners tenure they’ve made football decisions best left to others and not put the structures in place. The appointment of Webber (incidentally from my neck of the woods) is a fine example of something which ought to have worked but in reality exposed that his forte is player identification rather than structure. Rather than criticising your women’s team he ought to have been the person constructing the structure to address that. Rather than identifying first team players he ought to have been expanding your youth and scouting networks. Your owners felt they ought to have one of those Sporting Directors rather than having a vision of what the role ought to be. I stand by my perspective that the issue with your owners is not so much lack of investment as lack of vision and the ability to appoint the right people. That’s really the issue over the twenty six years.
Important to note that Farke got you out of the Championship how many times without this investment? Not sure your point stands up in that respect.
I’m not sure what your reference to our players is about. I talked about your long list of managers that few other clubs including my own would touch and that I doubt most here would rate. I’ve made no reference to players I can recall.
Stark point to end on though in that respect. Covid suppressed Championship and below level wages by an average of seventy five percent. Clubs like mine can thus cherry pick some Championship players and fend off bids from same for ours because our money can match those wages. We appear to have already fought off a seven figure bid from Coventry for Tom O’`Connor and appear likely to snatch one of the Championships bright young things this month. Much as that cheers me in all the obvious ways it hardly augers well for the future of the game.
I’ve made some small edits here. Let’s keep the discussion civil and away from anything personal. Thanks.
The reason Farke didn’t succeed in the premiership was due to a lack of investment on the part of the owners. Webber was constrained by the fact we had to find a Maddison every season to subsidise our owners inability to fund the club.
This resulted in quite a lot of money being spent on several hopeful Maddison’s rather than two or three experienced players.
As a consequence we now have a number of players who don’t appear good enough for promotion and a £60 million hole in the finances.
I think you need to make your mind up here.
On the one hand you’re critiquing the Delia regime for lack of investment but simultaneously describing the investment in players as being the wrong investment and also saying that Farke failed in the EPL because of a lack of investment.
Not all of those statements can be true but equally you appear to be genuinely making the case that the only reason Farke failed at EPL level was for the lack of investment.
Our positions will obviously never coincide but you do need to decide which argument you’re actually trying to make here.
I remain on the page which says you could have given Farke £200m and he’d have still not have built you a defence or found a defensive mid. He was not up to the job and any team he builds at Leeds will run into exactly these issues regardless of any success this season.
Of far more interest to me has been the sacking of Ferguson at Forest Green and the subsequent appointment of the first female manger in the EFL.
Thoughts?
Not at all. The investment were loans against forthcoming parachute payments so there is no investment from Delia.
@mikehughescq Following your words above about investment, and structure and process, you reminded me that you strongly hinted, Mike, on last season’s forum that you knew something of what was going on at Saints during our Nathan Jones episode. I’d be interested to hear more.
Plus where do you think Saints are now with the Russell Martin appointment but, at the time of writing, still a conspicuous absence of Championship hardened men. Thanks.
On both points, part of me says, we are where we are. But part of me wants to understand why we are where we are.
To be applauded. But football is a neanderthal world, and I fear she may fall victim to the prevailing stupidity and viciousness.
I’m looking forward to seeing FGR’s wooden stadium.
Forgive me for not wanting to read back on that thread. My recall was that you had a perfect storm of
Martin is a source of intrigue to me. His teams play great possession football but his results as a manager doing that have never bettered mid table. I’ve a sense the club owners are content with Championship football if it’s good on the eye but you’re one poor appointment or season away from league one.
Okay but it was investment and, frankly, if you gave me the choice of investing my own money or money someone was giving me then it’s pretty obvious which to choose. My point stands though. She could have emptied her bank account and Farke would have still taken you down.
Fascinating character. You have to look at all FGR do through the prism of Dale Vince and his so called green agenda. He didn’t care whether Ferguson succeeded any more than he cares about his new appointment. All that matters is profile. I really hope she’s successful but the odds are against it.
It was more gambling than investment. As I said Webber was constrained by having to find an annual Maddison therefore he could not buy proven premiership quality. You can’t form a creditable defence with inexperienced youngsters although he did a very good job with Aarons and Godfrey.
Farke is an excellent man manager and his coaching is appreciated by Pep.
Given correct investment he will succeed at Leeds. His track record in Germany is not bad at all.
All player purchases are gambles. The only investment stream re: players is the deliberate hoovering up of youngsters sent out on perpetual loan to be sold for often significant profit. The failure to put in place the latter is a criticism of Webber but not Smith. The failure to buy the defensive player you clearly needed falls on all but Delia and co.
I do appreciate that fans need a scapegoat and Delia is the obvious one here for every perceived ill but standing outside of that, as most of us do, you have a well run club operating more within its limitations than most and the investment you crave is unlikely to appear over the horizon any time soon from other than from the USA and their interest in streaming rights.
Our fans hit a point where the failure to get out of the NL could no longer be pinned on Hamilton/Guterman and could thus only be our Supporters Trust. Cue accusations of incompetence; failure to invest; managed decline; turning away great investment offers etc. Sound familiar?
When the club was sold, and that process isn’t entirely concluded yet either, the truth came out and a lot of previously credible fans were embarrassed. Fans rarely understand the complexity of running a football club.
Thank you for replying. Your last sentence especially, struck a chord.