It’s clearly not terrible if it’s worked in a decent standard league though is it? The championship is not a good quality league, there is just a lot of games and money in the league. Last season was an enigma, the championship is so competitive because everyone is as **** as each other
Well when he finally gets sacked Hopefully before he takes us down He can go back to 2nd bundesliga and use his **** system there
We effectively owe Acun Medya, so for as long as Acun owns the club, we're fine and it's a case of restructuring the debt accordingly without doing a Mel Morris. If we start to see players being swapped between us and Maribor or Fenerbache for random prices, that's when I'd start to worry. That's not the same as us buying players from there, so deals like Tufan who was a player who they actively wanted rid of aren't what I mean. We sold Philogene, Greaves, Tufan, Allsop, Estupinan, Ingram and Lokilo for a combined £34.5m this summer. Three of those were high earners. We spent just over £24m on Millar, Belloumi, Kamara, Giles, Hughes, Palmer, Burstow, Racciopi and Mehlem, plus whatever loan fees we paid for Zambrano, Puerta, Rushworth, Burns and Bedia. Probably not unreasonable to assume that Millar, Belloumi and Giles will have wanted a decent wedge to come here and I doubt Hughes will be on less than £10k a week given the competition to sign him. So in terms of money made, I'd say we were in the black in that regard, but as we know, wages eat up a lot of the expenditure and without knowing the exact figures it's hard to know exactly how we're doing going forward. The new sponsorship deals will also have lightened the load and increased attendances will also have helped. This is why I said that we shouldn't go mental in January, regardless of the position we are in. We could do to loan in a winger to help cover the losses of Millar and Belloumi, but I honestly don't see the point in going all in when our season isn't looking like being anything other than transitional. Even with those two key players out, we have enough quality in depth to not go down, it's about setting them up in the right way. What I'd like to see is this current group kept together and resist any bids for Hughes, make the loans of Puerta and Zambrano permanent and a couple of incomings that pad out the squad and see us through to Summer. We can't have an overhaul every year just because we don't get promoted and have Lewie Coyle, Alfie Jones and Regan Slater as the only remnants year on year.
The other bits are still concerning. I’d love to know more about what Acuns funding looks like after this season? If there was a two-year plan, what comes next?
I think itd niave though To think we are not at risk of relegation with the clown in charge Birmingham last season should be a warning
I agree with some of this, I can't say I've seen any team bar Leeds that have looked like genuine promotion contenders and even then I'm being generous. Compared to two seasons ago when it was quite clear who was a cut above and who wasn't. If anybody can beat anybody, then it's not a strong league. However, I will say that there are certain styles that don't suit English football and I'm inclined to say that Walter's style is one of them. I look at what got us promoted before and it wasn't flair or intricate passing, it was doing the basics better than other clubs did with players that were better than what the opposition had. We have a vastly superior squad to Oxford United, yet they beat us, why? Because they knew how to counter our system and choke us out.
I'm not saying we're immune, just that with the squad we have we shouldn't be in danger if we have a competent manager in place who can get the best out of what we have. At the moment we don't have that, which is of great concern. I mean a few seasons ago Chelsea finished like 12th, with the squad they had it was a massive underperformance. Teams like Birmingham, Sunderland and Derby know this and we did well to bounce back first time.
The league with higher average attendance than any other 2nd tier one in the world? He will miss the febrile atmosphere of the MKM if he goes back to the German 2nd division with Hamburg.
Our fans wouldn’t want that, people standing up even in the non safe standing areas, waving flags, making a lot of noise to interrupt those sat down concentrating on eating rather than the game.
Burnsy talking about how Tan had said that Acun had two seasons of funding and he highlighted how this season would be the second. The rumours involving Tan and potential missing money. If those turn out to be true that has an impact on the club financially.
Burnsy doesn't know what he's talking about. Again, that was before player sales. And they weren't saying two seasons and nothing further. As PLT said, there's far better people to listen to. Fletch saying he read our loss for last season on the balance sheet said it all. The missing cash is irrelevant to the p&l unless we have to write it off.
The quality of our squad possibly is too good to go down. However, as others have said, that counts for nothing if you’re playing a style of football which inevitably leads to teams exploiting the weak spots in a system, which results in us rarely winning. We are a team that rarely wins because we rarely score. Add another worry; we’ve recently lost 3 of our best players for the season. Another: We ain’t ever gonna score enough goals with the low quality of striker we have and the inconsistent finishing of everyone else. Another potential worry: A couple of injuries to defenders and we’re ****ed due to a lack of quality backup. The too good to go down trope is empty words in November. It becomes much more worrying in March when you’re hovering above the bottom 3 with 10 games to go. Which is where I fear we’ll be if we don’t get a pragmatic, experienced manager in to steady the ship.
I don’t think the reason we’re not scoring is due to the system. A common complaint is that we’re too open and attacking so imagine how much worse it will be if we change to a more conservative system.
Pragmatic experienced is so old hat, we need former player with Premier league experience, international capped, and coaching badges loads of badges. Wayne Rooney will be available soon, among many others.
As far as I’m aware, no one has publicly discussed anything beyond that, so absolutely no one knows with any certainty what Acun’s long term plan is. Acun seems completely disinterested at the moment, and relegation is only going to compound that. He won’t want to pump money into the club indefinitely, so when does he turn off the tap? If we languish at the bottom of the table I can see the MKM getting emptier and emptier as the season goes on, with the goodwill Acun has with the fans turning into hostility. Attendances will definitely decline if we’re relegated, we’ll have players on long contracts and Championship wages. Acun himself has said he’ll go when the fans don’t like him anymore. That could be this season based on how things are going. It feels like we were promised transparency and all we’re getting from Acun and the club at the moment is silence. For me, the long term health of the club is more important than whether I think Walter’s style is the future or not, and I don’t know if I get that impression from Acun and the way he’s running things.
