Their abuse of the loan system a couple of seasons ago was embarrassing, as is their managerial merry go round.
The Pozzo family own already owned Udinese and Granada before the bought in at Watford, and this was exploited to its fullest with thirteen players from these clubs (eleven from Udinese, two from Granada) being loaned to Watford during the 2012-3 season - which led to the Football League having to change the rules on loans for the following season.
Yes, explain to me why it's abuse and why it's embarrassing ? Why is their managerial merry-go -round embarrassing ?
It's difficult to call a mangerial merry-go-round 'embarrassing' unless it clearly isn't working. I get that it undermines the spirit and integrity of the game but the bottom line is that every club is entitled to strive for higher ground. And if the hierarchy feels that the only way to get there is via a new manager, why not? Yes it's a massive risk, but if it pays off, the appointment of men like Flores and Ranieri appear to be strokes of genius. The same thing happens regularly in the corporate world and in most other industries. As long as the legalities are properly taken care of and the whole thing is done with dignity and avoiding a media circus, I don't see what's that wrong with headhunting a manger who is perceived to have the skills to take the club forward. The interesting thing about Watford and Leicester is that they've in a way shown that doing so from a position of power is far more advisable that chopping and changing from a position of peril. Villa and Sunderland look no better now than they did under Sherwood and Advocaat, whilst Newcastle - following their mini revival against us an Liverpool, have now lost two on the trot failing to score in both. Are they any better under Mclaren? I guess the explanation lies in the players. Flores and Ranieri took over teams with sky-high confidence and belief, whereas the latter took over groups of players who still play like they're scared of their own shadows.
Because having mainly loan players on your books is ludicrous, scouting and developing your own players is part of what makes a club successful. Watford could have been promoted and having a completely different set of players to those that got them up. And if you can't see what is embarrassing about this, then I can't explain it
If we are to have any success this season, we need 12 points in January, 12 points in February and another12 in March. April looks daunting, mousers away, manure at home, away to Stoke, home to West Brom and then away to the Chavs. I guess the bright side may be that we put the final relegation nail in the Chavs coffin......I wish.
To be fair on the manager bit (though of course it looks embarrassing) it doesn't tell the whole story. Saninho was only ever a stop gap when Zola resigned. They then got in Garcia who left for health reasons. The Mckinlay saga was totally cringeworthy - he said he had a contract the club said he didn't and it did put us in a poor light. Jokanoic then came in, toook us up buit alegedly held us to ransom with salary and contract demands which included a request for a five year contract . On the loan players, the main issue was the owners bought the club very close to the closing of the window and couldn't get the players on permanent contracts in time for the deadline so took them on loan instead. Clever exploitation of a system which is great if it's your club and rubbish if it's someone else - quite honestly the only way teams like ours are going to give it a go is to think outside the box and that's exactly what they ahve done. If it wasnlt successful I suspect nobody would much care. Pretty gutted yesterday - honestly thought we'd hold on for the point but these things happen. Thought it was a decent enough game actually - it's huge for us to play a side like Spurs and think we can get soemthing and it was a potential banana skin for you. It is testament to the attitude you're developing that you plugged on to get three points - you could be in for a very good season. Good luck till 6 February.
I'm with, Spurcat, I don't like the way the club is now getting praised for how it's run. Even when they were forced to sort out their loan players they just went and signed a bunch of them on the cheap. It was disrespectful to the other clubs they owned to make them feeder teams for Watford so that they could get the big money in the Premier League. That said, there are some good stories to come out of the club. Troy Deeney has really turned his life around. He had a well earned reputation as a thug and an idiot but now comes across as a mature, likeable chap on and off the pitch. Could've easily been another Nile Ranger/Ravel Morrison so fair play.
Missed the game but very pleased about the result of course. I've learnt much about Watford that I didn't know from this thread, thanks guys.
Thankyou for explaining your thinking.I now realise how little you understand of the WFC situation since the club nearly folded. It isn't surprising, since almost all of the meejah is devoted to the 'bigger' clubs. The fact is that WFC have currently got 3 players in on loan from other clubs, and have loaned 9 players to other clubs. Do you have a problem with that ? Is that ludicrous ? Compare with other clubs in the Prem. BTW, approx. 6 of last seasons players start most games for WFC in the Prem. I thought what made a football club 'successful' would be progress up the leagues, together with improvement in the financial situation , the ground etc, improving the style of play, buying/selling players successfully. Why having several head coaches over 3 years should be considered embarrassing, in view of the clubs progress mystifies me. Perhaps we should follow The THFC model of managerial choice. By the way, what progress in the league has been made by THFC since 1961 with THFC's selection of managers/head coaches ? I think I'd be embarrassed by the amount of league trophies win by THFC in the last 54 years. Do you think THFC are successful based on the results over the last 60 years ? How often do THFC get to play in the European Cup ? Compare with those clubs like yours. Arsenal ? I would probably be embarrassed by the ineptitude of having one E Adebayor on the clubs books and paying him £100K a week to do nothing. Scouting and developing players is what makes a club successful you say. Well maybe true for those in the Prem with large expensive academies, where they can poach, for peanuts, any youngster from a smaller club. So much so that it makes player development in the smaller clubs virtually pointless. WFC's most promising 14 year old has just joined Man City. How can that encourage smaller clubs to develop young talent ? All done for the England team apparently. Ha! A fig leaf. It's all designed to improve the finances of the bigger clubs. The fact is that WFC have developed over 50 players into careers in football over the last 10 years, with an academy system that was publicly stated by AJAX to be superior to theirs in terms of development of young players. The reality is that most of these players, whilst good enough to play professionally, are not good enough for the Prem League. Following your logic WFC should either have played all their youngsters and stayed at the bottom of the Prem, or should have scouted a raft of players from around the world to give us a fighting chance of doing well in the Prem. Oh, that's what we have done. You are probably not aware that the owners of WFC have the most sophisticated scouting system in the football world. Where do you think Sanchez (at Arsenal, didn't you know?)came from ? Who found Ighalo , who was mightily more impressive than one HK yesterday, and didn't rush around the pitch brandishing imaginary cards - but I guess that's what comes from mixing with the England team ? The evidence from yesterday is that WFC are well equipped to compete in the Prem at the same level as THFC and any result yesterday of 2-1, 1-1, 1-2 would have been reasonable. Perhaps you are embarrassed by that. I would like to think this reply would help you understand why I think your comments about 'embarrassing' are misinformed or maybe just stupid. But I'm not holding my breath.
I'm going to ignore the rest of this for a minute and focus on this. You think that Ighalo behaved better than Kane yesterday? Which part were you more proud of: his feigned head injury or his intentional whack to Tom Carroll's face? Maybe he could learn from his teammate Deeney, who cynically tripped Rose and then called for a booking for Rose when the ref didn't give it? Watford played well yesterday, especially after being reduced to 10 men, but player behaviour was not your strong point. Some very ****ty stuff worthy of an Allardyce or Pulis side, frankly. Not something I've noticed regularly and not something I'm happy to see creep in.
Shame you've descended into the name calling, as I thought this was just a debate. You are right, I don't know that much about Watford and when I saw you'd replied, I looked forward to learning more. And to a degree I did, so thanks for that bit. The loan situation I described as ludicrous was a few years back, not now. Like Leicester, I love what your team is doing this year, but it doesn;t change the fact that the managerial situation went into a little meltdown when Zola left and it doesn't change the fact that league loan rules were changed because your club abused the existing ones. If you want to discuss reasonably, please come back to the board.
As it was me who originally used the word "embarrassing", then I will respond to your post. Firstly, as someone who was once involved with promoting family football at a league club, I know full well of the brilliant work Watford did about 20 plus years ago in making football at Vicarage Road a safe place for families to visit. The respect your club gained throughout English football for promoting this inititiative was thoroughly justified and deserved. I mention this to establish that I have no long time gripe with Watford FC. When making my observation that your use of the loan system as "embarrassing", I did say "of a few years ago". As someone has already confirmed, you had an unhealthy amount of in loanees on your books at the same time. This may not have infringed the rules which existed at that time, but there is no way is that situation satisfactory in building a stable football club. Certainly the authorities took the same view as me because the rules were adjusted to avoid this scenario occurring again. As for your managerial merry go round, if you want to justify it by feeling the end justifies the means, then fair enough, but in my view if you have had managers there for a matter of months, then it is downright embarrassing however much success you are now achieving a few years down the line. As for the current success and apparent reputation of your academy, well as I now work for a PL academy, I will confirm your academy is viewed with respect in the game. This is not a patronising respect, a genuine respect, but not as far as I am aware, with any great envy as your comments seem to imply. I am not going to defend the track record of THFC since 1961 and neither will I attempt to defend the track record of our academy over the years as whilst we also have helped develop the progress of players into the professional game in the lower leagues, we have not a great record of producing ones for our own side. What I will emphasise though, is that since around 2005-ish, we have been able to make huge stride in addressing this issue and with much hard work behind the scenes by our youth staff, along with a world class training facility, has, over the past few years, began to bear fruit to the extent that Harry Kane is not the only " one of our own", and we have several home grown products of our youth system featuring regularly in our first team. I didn't intend to provoke any Watford fans with my comment after yesterday's game, although I will repeat that I was distinctly unimpressed yesterday and whilst I would prefer to remember your club as I did 20 years ago, I now find myself remembering the whingy and occasionally abusive nature both inside and outside the ground your guys were yesterday, along with some rather unsavoury stuff on the pitch.
It's a shame you feel like that, though I get why, but it is refreshing to read such a well presented post rather than the usual "you're just cheats and twats" type of stuff. In a perverse way you should probably take the moaning yesterday a compliment about your team as beating you or getting a draw woulld have been massive for us but I won't Labour that point
I think you guys should reserve your hatred for Arsenal and not Watford. You will be cheering for an unlikely Watford win against Man City on Saturday won't you? It is a shame if you think poorly of Watford without at least understanding a bit of our recent history. Through no fault of our fans we got taken over by a serial bankrupt- he only wanted to make millions out of owning us and did not care about the club -we came within a whisker of bankruptcy in June 2012. HIs dodgy deals were found illegal and as a result Watford were given a temporary transfer ban - I cannot say too much in case his lawyers out there - it would not be the first time a fan was sued by lawyers for an owner. However he used Watford money for deals the club were kept in the dark about. We were rescued by the Pozzo family. They are a true football family who have owned Udinese for over 30 years - they care about football and not short term money. They only took over about 6 weeks before the start of the 21012/3 season - too late to do proper recruitment and anyway we were under a transfer embargo. Is it so strange that they used their other clubs to loan players to us. Remember that there were no rules about foreign loan players then so it was perfectly legal. However it was against the spirit of UK loan rules so the league rightly changed the rules. Tell me - any one of you - that if Spurs had been in that financial situation you would not have been grateful for some loans to help you through. The loans were short term and by half way through the season our embargo was lifted and we went back to the normal levels of loans. Is any of this worse than having Russian or Abu Dhabi or Emirates billionaires bankrolling a club? The manager situation was embarrassing but the press made a lot of it. Zola resigned as he felt he could do no more when he missed promotion, Sannino took over but with a win record of 38% and 6 defeats in a row in the Championship he was sacked - how long did Sherwood last and what was his record? Watford appointed Garcia who had a heart scare after 4 weeks and resigned -who do you blame for that? The biggest mistake was appointing McKinley and then changing him after just 8 days - but how many clubs have a temporary manager for 8 days. Jokanovic took over and was a great success but his contract expired at the end of last season. The club and Jokanovic could not agree on a new contract - nobody knows the details but it is rumoured his demands on salary, bonuses and length of contract were too high. Hence Flores. If you ignore illness and a "temporary manager" we have had just three managers since Zola quit in 2013 - not quite as awful as many believe is it?
Looks like we've really stirred up a hornets nest with this one, eh?... EH? (sorry) No one's criticising the fans for what the owners have done, that'd be ridiculous. Regardless of the excuses, what the owners did was extremely poor. They used their other clubs players to prop up another. That's not fair to the fans of the other clubs or the players involved. You wouldn't be allowed to own 2 clubs in the same competition because of precisely this kind of conflict of interest and exploitation of relationships. Much like the loan rule, it's just not a problem that had been highlighted before as no one had ever done it quite so blatantly. As for the managers, I just prefer not to see a club with such poor manager retention be successful. Out of interest though, how was the manager able to try and hold you to ransom? Was his contract so short, or were the promotion bonuses not worked out before hand in the original contract? It just seems like a strange situation. I wasn't at the game so I can't speak about the fans, other than the booing of every decision that went against them. A bit like Everton, as someone else mentioned. The players were pretty bad too, Ighalo is very lucky the ref was so generous to him and the FA are so incompetent that they're happy not to ban someone just because they got booked at the time. Apart from that I think Watford are great, and yeah, if you fancy thrashing Arsenal that would be lovely
