Horrendous owners really. Been sold up the river. We are so lucky that we got promoted. When we go down again, I think we could be in real trouble
Who would you prefer to own us? Gao and Ms Liebherr? When you demand new owners, you need to be careful what you wish for, Marcus/Cortese was a one off and the chances of a repeat are very remote. I am not a SR fan, but they are our only hope for the moment and we have no choice but to accept them in the hope that their aspirations wll bear fruit in the long run. The football fates are doing us no favours, the opinion that good luck and bad luck equals out in time isn't happening, at the moment it seems that the only luck we are getting, is all bad. You can't blame SR or RM for that, they are as much the victims as we are.
Well they have taken a solid mid table premier league club, destroyed our first team, destroyed our recruitment and destroyed our infrastructure. We got lucky with Leeds bottling the playoff final otherwise we would be in complete free fall. In many ways they are worse than Gao. He barely spent any money but with him at the helm we at least made some good footballing decisions. These guys are making consistently horrific decisions. Soon, Dragan will get bored of wasting so much money at such an unsustainable rate. Not sure what happens then.
We weren’t a solid mid table side at all, we were keeping our noses above water for the previous 2 years before SR joined, on a downward trajectory because of lack of investment. If Solak gets bored pumping money in then we will be sold, which is what you want
We were in decline but still a PL club. It would have been simple to keep us up. A better manager and a couple of better Jan signings and everything would be different. Instead Rasmus tried to reinvent football and nuked the club
We still are a Premier club, our workforce is substandard but that doesn't change our status, only relegation will do that and that's looking most likely.
How did Bill Foley end up buying Bournemouth? I am so envious of them having him as their owner. He owns the Vegas Golden Knights, who are a expansion team in the NHL. No one thought hockey would work in Nevada, but 3 or so years of coming into existence, they won the Stanley cup. He employs people that know what they are doing. He also owns the new football franchise Auckland FC. Bournemouth are in great hands, and unless anything changes, they will leave us behind!
Cowtownred, I know I should p.m you but I'm not techie enough. Did you know that Cavs won the national league, 7,000 attendance.
Yeah I saw that. Another extremely well run football club. I wonder how long until Tommy Wealdon Jr gets a chance back in the uk? Do Cavs have anyone Saints should be looking at, for our likely Championship season?
I sent you a PM. Look for the top corner of your screen, for the envelope symbol next to your profile picture. Click on the envelope to read the message.
This is it. Managerial appointments Player signings (where they've made their biggest mistakes) Player sales Dithering with decision making Not replacing key personnel Those who are ambivalent/like SR can they name one thing they've done well? Literally everything they've done has turned to ****, and all through arrogance. Through believing they can do it a different way. It's bizarre how little **** they get
I agree. What they did was the same as buying a nice car that looked good and worked, but was 5 years old and just done 100,000 miles. It may have continued looking good and working, or maybe things would start going wrong and a lot of money needing to be spent on it. Changing the driver didn't fix it (3 times in a season) and then we needed a new driver and a recon engine. Seems the doors need replacing now and we need a new driver again.
It’s not as deep or as in depth as that really. We started getting worse when Gao took over as we sold our best players and replaced them with inferior ones year after year as we had no money. SR came in and tried to rectify the whole thing in one window (the first summer where we signed about 15 players) and it didn’t work. They made some good signings and some bad signings, but the managerial appointments are what sent us down. They then did well last year to get us back up and get large fees for players. They are repeating their same mistake this season of trying to do too much too soon and spreading what money we did have too thin to try and cover all holes in the squad. The big **** up is not replacing Wilcox when they’ve known about a month before the window opened that he was going, so not having a football person there is what looks to have ****ed us last time in the PL. They then brought one in and we get promoted, now we don’t have one and it’s looking all ****y again. I think if they hand over the reigns like they appear to have done last year to a proper Director of Football then they can be a success because of the investment they seem to be happy to put in. It’s clear that they aren’t football people though so need some guidance from someone who is
I would prefer Gao to be honest. And if you’re only ever on the end of bad luck it’s not really bad luck is it, it’s being ****.
I have no idea how anyone can wish for the Gao times back. That was a grim time, absolutely no ambition or ability to do anything. Just drifting along in the dark and waiting for it to all go to ****
The previous regime was ****. And yet they're still better than SR. At least under Gao, he had the decency to put good people in charge of the club, and leave them to it. He wasnt interfering. He didn't have his own people. He didn't dictate. We had a decent directer of football. We had good men in good positions. Semmens and Steele were pricks, I've been very vocal on that, they said stupid things, but my god, they made the most of a bad situation. They kept the club going in difficult circumstances, and yes, between them and Ralph, we were surviving. It wasn't easy, but we were doing enough. No, we weren't thriving, but we were doing enough to keep our heads above water every year. About what I'd expect from the club. Yes, we might have fallen down the plug hole eventually, but I damn well know we'd have put up much more of a fight than we did. The way our relegation happened (and is happening) was unforgiveable and is entirely on SR. Instead, we have the SR circus come in and stick their oar in. If it ain't broke, break it etc etc. Undermine all the current staff, power struggles between old and new, end up dismantling the entire club structure, and we go down without a fight despite spending the most money we've ever spent in one season. I very much know who I'd rather have in charge, and it's not the current circus.
Really good post! That’s the thing; Gao had his hands tied because of a change in foreign investment by the Chinese Government. SR have had many more opportunities & money but have really ****ed it up & continue to do so. Lincs original cut & paste doesn’t bode well imo regardless.
They did put football people in charge, twice actually, and both times those people left pretty quickly to much bigger clubs. That at least suggests they have some idea about which football people to appoint. We have no idea why they haven’t appointed someone after Wilcox, maybe they are too ambitious in who they want and couldn’t find what they deem a suitable person. Or maybe Rasmus fancied doing the job it was widely reported everyone at SR thought he failed at last time so they just let him do it again for the lols. The most common criticism of owners in football is that they get too involved with the football side, which it looks like SR are doing right now with no football person in charge. I don’t think you’ll find a Saints fan who agrees that they should be running the footballing side like they are currently. Based on what they’ve done before I don’t think this is what they want either, so some form of compromise on getting someone in appears to be needed. As ever there is so much we will never know because we are just fans. For example the recruitment when we went down, was Joe Shields there saying something like “I worked with these kids at City and they are all mint and they can come in and do a job straight away” we did sign a mixture of kids and more experienced players that window and basically all the experienced players were ****, who signed off on them, presumably Shields/scouting team/Rasmus? We just don’t know. Ultimately they are in charge so they get the blame, and as I said previously Solak is the most important one who we need to stay in my view. Reminds me a bit of Everton where Moshiri was pumping money in and getting bad advice on which football person to let run the club, the fans turned on him eventually when really all he did was lose a **** ton of money due to poor advice being given. For me there is nothing more boring than being a club that finishes around mid table year after year in the PL. I’m not naive enough to think that SR (or any owner of a club like ours) wouldn’t snap your hand off for that if offered, but I think it’s boring and pointless. Unfortunately with football the way it is that is probably our ceiling, unless you can find a method to grow the club in a relatively short space of time. To me the only way to do that (outside of a Man City like takeover) is to invest in young players, let them play and grow and move up the league with them, sell them for big money, reinvest and rinse and repeat until you are competing further up the league regularly and some of them want to stay/you have a stronger squad overall due to investing the money from player sales. This is, imo, what SR are attempting to do. It’s exceptionally hard as recruiting young players is like 80% luck I’d say, and they tried too much too soon with a big shift towards it in season 1 when a more gradual approach was needed. But due to lack of investment over a number of season prior the attitude was we needed a big overhaul and with the relatively small pot of money to do that they went down the quantity route which is obviously risky. But I don’t mind the overall approach as, even though it is likely to fail, it is the only way I can see us growing into anything more than an also ran Well that went on much longer than I was expecting Well done if anyone bothered to read it
