FORMER PALACE OWNER ON KLD AND SAFC FANS The other morning, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus appeared on talkSPORT with former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan who bought the Eagles at a young age himself, just 31 in fact. HIS VERDICT ON KLD "He’s a confident and educated young man. You can tell his father was a billionaire. Look, I was 31 when I bought Palace which was very young and this is even younger and it’s a different dynamic of a club in a different part of the world that has had some success recently but not for some time. He’s going to be hampered by a couple of things because if the EFL have their way, they are going to try and get a salary cap or some form of salary cap in place to limit the amount of spending that can be done. So irrespective of how wealthy he is, he’s not just going to be able to splash the cash mentality and do what he wants. I think it’s right that he keeps his counsel about how he feels about the loss of the play-offs. Because ultimately, it’s a new thing for him and it’s better to be pragmatic about his opinion." JORDAN ON JOHNSON, DONALD AND METHVEN "Lee Johnson is a decent football manager and Sunderland has a lot of energy behind it with a lot of fans and they’ll be looking for him to do something the other guys didn’t. If these guys are who we believe them to be then they are a very different set of animals to the previous owners. Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven went in there and it was never a fit to me. They leveraged Sunderland’s own money which was taking the parachute payments and discounting them in order to acquire the club. That’s not quite the same as these guys coming in with an innate ability to be able to fund this club and push this football club further forward, notwithstanding what I’ve just said about potential salary caps. It is very important for him (Louis-Dreyfus) – without anyone telling him what he should do because we all need to learn and make our own mistakes – but when I first walked into Palace I was told we didn’t do things a certain way. Well, the way they were doing things had got them into serious trouble so I think we’ll have a go at doing it my way, so he has to be definite in his views. They’ve got to be educated and counselled and not just walk in there like a bull in a china shop." HIS THOUGHTS ON SAFC "Kyril is as good, to some extent, as the people he puts around him. Irrespective of whether he has come from a great deal of wealth and his father’s past, he doesn’t know English football and he doesn’t know the landscape or League One. You can’t do anything about not having experience so you buy some alongside you and get some proper people who can come in alongside you but what does that look like? It looks like it needs to get you out of League One. Okay, what does a successful team that gets out of League One look like? It might look like Sheffield United. Okay, what were the characteristics of their players? What do we need to do to be able to get this club out of League One? And he would do well to steer away from some of the agents who might be buzzing around who might be thinking, ‘Aye, aye… halcyon days again at Sunderland.’ And get some sensible people in alongside him." ON THE SUNDERLAND FANS "Their supporters… and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to them in any shape or form and this is not me attempting to be so, but their support is very odd. When we played them in a play-off semi-final in 2004 when Mick McCarthy was the manager, we beat them 3-2 at Selhurst Park so they were well in the game. We go up to the Stadium of Light thinking that it was going to be an absolute cauldron and that it was going to be full to the rafters - and it wasn’t. It was nowhere near full to the rafters. So I think Sunderland have built this 48,000-seater stadium and I think the idea that it gets filled on a regular basis and that there’s this huge enthusiasm that can be easily harnessed, I’m not so sure that’s quite how it is."
