That isn't yet certain. Currently the situation is that we cancelled the contract of a player in order to spend £40m on another player who so far looks totally lost.
So my take on the Jzed take over is that while Mrs jzed was performing jzed had a good look round the stadium and found the cheese room and knowing his love of cheese as stated in song titles Chedder State of Mind , Brie in Paris and Red Leicester Forever it is obvious he will blow his fortune in N17 This could be Spurzy
Phillips Watch Alan Nixon at The 72 has mentioned that Ashley Phillips has a £2m escape clause in his contract, which activates this coming Friday Maybe wasn't the best idea for Blackburn to keep upping the asking price...
Beyonce's husband running the club Oh look, the definition of "awful state of affairs" just crystallised a little bit
For the moment let's assume that your 80% failure rate is right and that that is sufficiently far from the norm to be statistically significant. That means we have been doing worse on transfers than if we signed players at random. How can this arise....either we are systematically choosing the wrong players or paying too much for them. Most of the failed signings are actually due to the club backing the coach. So either our coaches have a negative edge in selecting players (which is pretty unlikely) or we have systematically overpaid to get the players the coach wants. And what's everyone's solution to this....to do it more by upping bids to sign wanted players early.
You are thinking of success as a basis of price. Whilst there is an element of this i think it's more of a case of has the players added value to the club/done well. It's arguable that 80% of those signings have been failures at 50% of the transfer price. For two of those managers and their signings, were they sufficiently backed with signings they wanted or with players without sufficient quality (mourinho/santo) The managers have been an issue but when the man at the top consistently gets the wrong manager then it does beg the question of when he is going to hold himself accountable.
It’s a collective of errors. We’ve picked the wrong managers. We’ve then picked the wrong players for the wrong managers. We’ve then overpaid a lot on those wrong players. There are also players we’ve brought who the managers never asked for. There are players who the manager’s asked for and it’s gone wrong. Whilst we’ve also failed to bring in players the managers have specifically asked for and this dates back years too, not just the recent few years of carnage. A lot of it comes down to the club losing its identity and having no footballing plan. Hiring Ange and signing players like Maddison and Solomon is beginning to feel like we’re going back to our old roots which is a positive but the man at the top is yet again failing to give his manager the best possible chance of succeeding. And so then if results don’t go Ange’s way… we all know how it ends. Then rinse and repeat.
I think this summary totally misses the point but ironically is close to being correct. Just add the word "halfheartedly" to the end of it and you've arrived at a huge chunk of the problem. Ndombele, Lo Celso, Sessegnon, Royal, Porro, Reguilon...these are all players who were supposedly signed for managers who wouldn't be in the dugout within months of their signing. Perhaps Reguilon is the exception to that rule but I'd put him in the same category as he is, like the rest of them, a player who was getting regular game time under the manager who signed him before disappearing off the radar entirely. I do still sometimes wonder how the 'Three Stooges' of 19/20's £130m splurge would have turned out with a full season under Poch. They got 3 months before he was replaced by someone who wouldn't know what to do with a young lwb and lazy cm. And that's my biggest problem with Levy, above and beyond everything else. Contrary to the title of the Amazon documentary, it's never All or Nothing with him. It's always dozens of half baked pies...back the manager a bit...give him some time to implement his ideas...sign some of his targets. He just seems totally unwilling to commit to a project with 100% buy in, and as a result our "strategy" is totally reactionary and frankly looks like we're making it up as we go along... because we are. Again, this doesn't mean spend a billion to solve the problem! Man United have done just that and it got them nowhere. Spend within our means but spend it on whom the manager wants and give them time to justify themselves in that decision! What else are we paying these people £8m a year to do?! We have coaches, we have physios, we have scouts, we have sports psychologists, what we need is a leader with a unifying vision who can tie it all together. And if that man isn't given the time or the tools to at least make a proper go of it, why hire him in the first place? Just appoint our manager from the fanbase by ballot and conduct transfer dealings via lucky dip.
No, the word "halfheartedly" does not belong in there Poch wanted Ndombele, and we went out of our way to make that happen - in fact went way too far, given Pini Zahavi had our trousers down for the entirety of negotiations considering the fee and the wages we signed off on from Day One Soldado is a player that Villas-Boas wanted over Baldini's suggestion of Benteke, and again we were anything but halfhearted in bringing him in because we paid big and also signed off on a huge wage Sessegnon is another player Poch wanted, and much like Ndombele when he wasn't available in 2018 he was content to sit on his hands for a year and go back a year later, although in that case at least we had negotiation room which we would not have had in the summer of 2018 Conversely, Berbatov is an example of a manager wanting a player and that being the right call, as Martin Jol was adamant he was the player we needed while Comolli disagreed, with Jol putting his neck on the block to vouch for him This idea of Levy supporting managers to a point is blatant goalpost-moving, given the conversation 3-5 years ago was he never backs managers at all...and when he does back them, he doesn't back them enough - yet at no point is there and definition of what "enough" is, which sounds uncannily like the wooly arguments the Grauniad made about Jeremy Corbyn
Adarabioyo Watch Santi Aouna says Monaco and Fulham are close to agreeing terms, and hope to finalise a deal by the end of next week I am sure that Monaco fans are being insufferable about their not signing a CB in spite the Ligue 1 season starting less than two weeks from now...
The excuses and reasons being given for not getting in our primary targets is quite laughable usual suspects are at it too You lads not supporting the team then? More supporters of Levy and his brain unbelievable Our defence cost us top 4 when we look at it objectively and we haven’t addressed that issue and we don’t seem too bothered to address it. I refuse to see my club through Levy’s eyes Its a shame he’s not getting sent down too one way of getting rid of him and how many last chances are the ‘it’s his last chance’ brigade going to give him?
On your last point, there is no way other than luck to get a successful manager* so no-one should be held to account for failing. It's a perfectly reasonable strategy to change managers often in the hope of finding one of the good ones. The mistake I think Levy did make was to sack Pochettino who might well be one of the few managers who make a difference. We should tell over the next few seasons because Chelsea has the best squad now so should win the League at least once. * If you doubt this try to find some PL teams who have had two outperforming managers in a row.
I’m giving Levy to the end of this week to sort out the CBs and if all fails, I’ll throw my toys out of the pram!
Because the manager's main jobs are to be a coach and decide playing tactics. We should buy the best players we can and the manager should improve them just like in any other organisation. If he thinks he needs specific individuals to make his system work then he isn't a manager or a coach and shouldn't have been appointed.
The football landscape has changed since Levy first took the reigns, but Levy still operates like he did 15 years ago, he has taken the football club as far as he can, most of the fans now know it, Harry Kane knows it and the media knows it too. Levy hides behind the propaganda of being self sustainable and financially responsible, some of the fans lap it up, but the truth is he is a running a London entertainment business of which the football operation is only a part concern, and success for the football team is not imperative for ENIC to continue to grow their investment. For years, Levy was a master illusionist, an expert at pulling the wool over the fan`s eyes, these days most of the fans can see straight through his bull.
