Of course there is a wider process involved, but Webber is the one responsible for that process and picks the people carrying it out, who are now different from those who identified Pukki and Buendia. The buck stops with Webber, whose outcomes and those of his team, have produced many more failures than successes. Farke and Smith were sacked because their teams' results weren't good enough. The same criteria should apply to Webber and his team and a judgement made about when the results haven't been good enough. I'm not saying that time is now, but it's getting near.
The question of whether Webber's performance as Sporting Director is good enough or not is a matter for the Board of Directors. A lot is made of the fact that Zoe Ward is a Director; but she is one of six, and no one can tell me that the other five, Delia Smith, Michael Wynn-Jones, Tom Smith, Michael Foulger, Mark Attanasio, are incapable of reaching their own decision on Webber. I've absolutely no doubt that such an assessment is carried out every single year, and if the Board felt it necessary, between annual assesments too.
Before I accept your claim that Webber's recruitment team(s) have "produced many more failures than successes", I'd like to see that documented, together with the criteria for success and failure. Was Moritz Leitner a success or a failure? He played a crucial role in one Championship-winning season but ended the next season "surplus to requirements". And does the calculation of success or failure apply beyond the first team squad, given that our recruitment has a much broader remit than simply securing players for the league side?
I'd also like to know how our recruitment stacks up against that of other clubs operating within broadly the same parameters. Have you any idea of where we stand in the table of recruitment success and failure among such clubs?
What I think is needed is far greater realism about the constraints under which Webber has to operate, the most obvious of which is the financial straight-jacket of the self-funding model. Money may not guarantee success, but lack of it makes success much harder to achieve. Take our recruitment in the summer of 2020. In an attempt to avoid finishing back in the Championship, the club spent more than ever before, a huge sum by NCFC standards. To no avail. But before criticising the recruitment, people need to acknowledge the factors hampering the process. The fact is that we could not get the players we wanted, Skipp, Ajer, Billing among them. Why did we fail to secure the signatures of those players? Or similarly proven players of like quality? Not because we didn't try, we did try; and not because we weren't looking in the right places, we were.
A knowledgeable and experienced contributor to the PinkUn forum posted recently that a Premier League club wanting to strengthen its team has a pool of no more than 100 players from whom to pick. Given that competition for their signatures involves, not just the EPL, but all the top European leagues and further afield, what chance do we have of attracting them to Carrow Road? Can we compete on transfer fees? No! Can we compete on wages? No! Can we compete on expectation of top-level football? No! We have to fish in different pools and for a different sort of catch (Sara and Núñez the latest examples).
The big question for me, which I've posed several times and to which I'm still waiting to get any sort of answer, is why we went into that summer of 2020 with a new objective as a club -- to be Top 17 rather than just Top 26. That can only have been a decision of the Board. It had massive implications and carried substantial risk. Why did they make it?
