He Could Do A Job For Us, it's a long-running Saintsweb thing, like their version of Jim Magilton sacked
Nobody posting about the BBC story on Liverpool slapping a 100m euro tarrif on Barcelona to sop them moving for other players? If Les Reed hadn't gone I'd be flying over there to demand his head. In all seriousness, the way our club was run received so much praise but this contrast tells me everything. Liverpool gut our club of all its best talent season after season and the club says there's nothing we could do about because, hey, money and bigger clubs. Bigger club comes to Liverpool and takes their best midfielder Liverpool go, **** money, we're building a squad here so sign this, take coutinho, **** off and if you come sniffing around again it'll cost you 100m to get in the door. See ya. ...Why didnt we do that.
Apparently Drogba has retired.... (Hands up who, like me, thought he had retired about five years ago!?)
They're good now! They weren't good until they bought all our talent. Now they're good and they're insuring that they stay good with that clause. Very good move I thought but it really slapped me in the face after the number of top players they've tapped up and taken off the Saints.
The thing we don’t know is if after the first wave of players left whether we used that as a way to attract players. I don’t for one minute think we were the only suitors for the likes of Mane/VVD but the thing that may have separated us from the other clubs (I’m assuming the top clubs weren’t in for them originally) is that we told them we could be their shop window to move on. I’m pretty sure Mane even said this in his interview when he joined.
I suspect you are right and this is what has really got my goat during the Les years. Its an idiotic way to run any business unless you measure success in days and dollars. I'm not purely using hindsight either, I complained vociferously at the time that this 'selling club' policy was not going to end well. Here's to the start of a new era. And the introduction of a tarrif system.
What some seem to be forgetting is that we are suffering now because the club tried to move from being a selling club. Kreuger made the point that we wanted to change....we wanted a deeper squad that was tied down....that was when we handed out longer contracts. And why they tried to resist losing VVD initially and why we ended up stuck with unwanted players on tasty contracts. A case of good intentions but bad timing.
I still don't think it is too bad a way to run a club. Without that model we probably wouldn't have seen half the players who have played here in recent years, and as such the on field "success" we have also seen. Unless something drastic changes either at Saints or within football as a whole we are cannon fodder in this league so I don't mind young, promising players looking at us as a stepping stone to bigger things. The issue has obviously been identifying and recruiting those players in the last few seasons.
@ Fran, Respectfully, the story that we tried to move away from being a selling club is a huge fallacy. We were trying to hold onto one player because by that point we had nobody decent to sell bar VVDick. We became such a selling club that we were literally unable to hold onto anyone with talent until there was nobody left worth selling. Clyne, Lallana, Lambert, Shaw, Schneiderlin, Wanyama, Cork, Chambers, Mane, Pelle, Fonte had all been traded and suddenly our failures are down to the fact that we tried to hold onto VVD. It doesnt add up to me. I cant share Saintmagic's faith in the model. Those who said that it wasn't possible to keep selling and rebuilding have been proven right unequivocally. Our slide is on target to be far worse than our rise was great. One player a year might have worked well for us but that list above is sheer insanity and cost the architect his job as well as costing us all the players and all the success we enjoyed for a short time. Probably reaped more money for Kat in the sale but I dont think thats the success you were referring to.
