Some people are difficult to satisfy. He brought us the most successful period in the history of the club, but also some of the most thrilling football. He made us a fortune in buying and then developing players, and yet some just remember the duds. One of the criticisms I hear consistently levelled at him was that he'd defend a 1-0 lead, and yet he had incredible stats for winning games we took the lead in! So it worked. Nervy to watch, but proof is in the stats. He knew what was needed and played according to his strengths. Re the Europa Cup 'failure', I never felt that as much as others on here obviously do. To me, that competition lost it's credibility when we had to start the season a month before everyone else. That alone puts us in a horrendous position against our relegation rivals. Basically its like asking a marathon runner to run 5 miles to the start of the race before it starts. The priority had to be staying up, whether we like it or not, finances dictated that. We didn't have a well balanced squad and had an horrendous season with injuries which led to our relegation. Was it the early start? Who knows.But surely it shows Bruce was absolutely correct to 'squad rotate' so early? And my memory has gone, but didn't he pick a team that should have been strong enough anyway? Wasn't there a sending off which contributed too?
The problem with Europe was we would have had loved the chance to have 4-5 amazing away days. If I remember rightly the squad was massive at this point, Bruce went down the buying young English talent route which filled Ehabs pockets in the long term. Problem was he bought that many players he had no idea what formation or how we where gonna play. Remember that game against Trencin at home Snodgrass was playing in a 352 he looked lost!
Youre taking my post to the extreme. yes we had some decent matches but 90% of the time the football was dreadful. if you enjoy everything coming from an Elmo cross not going to our man 100 times in a game then fair play, I don't.
You're better than that. I wonder how the likes of Burnley, Watford, Swansea, Huddersfield, Brighton etc etc are managing/managed to have a little bit of success? None of them had Steve Bruce. Must have paid off the officials. Brucey to Real Madrid, bet your house on it.
No he ****ing wasn't. He's a total bellend. See the Altidore/Hutton incident and the big pile of **** he spluttered out to defend Huttons play acting. See all the "well if it wasn't for Allam I wouldn't be here" he used to give us every. single. week... as if he's the most prized jewel in football. Then as soon as his budget takes a hit he's ****ed off within two weeks. "Little old hull" "point against Stoke is better than the Europa league" "I brought Bowen to Hull for £20k!" "We won't play John Terry against Chelsea if that's what he wants" There aren't many more dislikable, full of **** ****s in football.
I' hoping that can be done retrospectively, sadly I suspect it will be introduced for new buyers. Given the fruitcakes asset stripping policy at present only to load their already considerable pockets and the failure to invest parachute payments I would have thought they have already given enough evidence to the FA to show they are not fit or proper bastions/ owners of a football club.
"Sanctions for failure & for "conduct clearly damaging to ... football's standing & reputation." I vote for the death penalty
Sounds promising but based on experience I still worry that there'll be massive loopholes left open on the assumption that no one will attempt to circumvent it. And that their definition of honesty and integrity will be extremely vague and will allow owners in reality to do as they please.
Meanwhile the owners of the top club in the country... City’s Abu Dhabi owners, brushing aside concerns of the emirate’s human rights record, where Israeli citizens are barred from entering the country and homosexuals face up to 14 years in jail if they are found guilty of “unnatural sex with another person”. Fit and proper?? Plenty of cash. That's fine
Interesting article. Henry Norris, the former Arsenal chairman, is perhaps best known as the man who hired the legendary Herbert Chapman and paved the way for the club’s unprecedented golden era in the 1930s. Spurs fans may know him better as the man who successfully uprooted Arsenal from south London to Highbury: the original franchise owner. For all his achievements, Norris was also a bully and a crook, who used the club’s expense account to pay for his own chauffeur, and who met his professional end when it was found he had personally pocketed the revenue - all of £125 - from selling the team bus. There was Robert Maxwell, the notorious newspaper magnate and former Oxford United owner whose many infelicities - among them a penchant for cosying up to brutal dictators and a shameless raid on his own company’s pension fund - only became fully apparent after his untimely death in 1991. And then there was Bob Lord, the former Burnley chairman who led the club to a sparkling run of success in the 1950s and 1960s but who also deserves to be known as the man who barred television cameras from Turf Moor, on the grounds that it would keep money out of the hands of “the Jews who run television”. So for all that follows, let’s not pretend that the business of owning a football club is a calling that has ever attracted our very finest. But in an age when football clubs are often owned not by individuals but by countries, administered not by a board sitting around a table but by a tangled web of investment funds and holding companies parcelling and funnelling vast sums of money around the world through a million invisible voids, the question of who gets to own them - and why they want to - takes on an ever more pressing relevance. Two stories this week, neither of which will have created more than a ripple in the news, illustrate that very point. Down in the seventh tier of English football, Dulwich Hamlet, a much-admired south London club that attracts crowds of 2,500, is effectively being held to ransom by a property developer that wants to build houses on the site. Meadow Residential have cut off the club’s funding after the local council rejected planning permission, and are prepared to strangle Dulwich in order to force a rethink. As my colleague Jack Pitt-Brooke has been reporting, spectators are now resorting to PayPal to fund the players’ wages. At the opposite end of the footballing pyramid, the parent company of Manchester City have just appointed Sir Howard Bernstein, the veteran former chief executive of Manchester council, as a development adviser. Nothing particularly untoward about that, you would imagine, and certainly no suggestion of any foul play. Bernstein has played a key role in the city’s post-industrial regeneration, is a lifelong City fan into the bargain, and in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, explained his strategy for growth. “Successful cities,” he said, “are really about how you attract people who have got money”. Over the years, Bernstein has followed this principle to the letter. Three years ago, he helped broker a £1 billion property deal with City’s Abu Dhabi owners, brushing aside concerns of the emirate’s human rights record, where Israeli citizens are barred from entering the country and homosexuals face up to 14 years in jail if they are found guilty of “unnatural sex with another person”. Now, having already signed up as a consultant with Deloitte, who advised on the deal, Sir Howard has decided to join the Abu Dhabi payroll. And before City fans cry vendetta, you could tell dozens more tales just like this: at Blackpool, where owners Owen and Karl Oyston have just been ordered by a high court judge to pay £31 million to minority shareholder Valeri Belokon after “illegitimately stripping” the club for years. At Leyton Orient, a club run into the ground and out of the Football League by former owner Francesco Becchetti. At Sheffield United, part-owned by Prince Abdullah, a member of the Saudi royal family that presides over one of the world’s most repressive, illiberal regimes. The point is this. The sort of person who wants to own a football club these days is, at times, exactly the sort of person you do not want owning a football club. Attempts at regulating ownership, whether through Financial Fair Play rules or ‘fit and proper person’ tests, have proven painfully inadequate. Football clubs, with their captive market, global branding, relatively small entry stakes and - in many cases - prime urban land - could scarcely be better designed to attract the Maxwells and the Lords of this world. None of which should be particularly novel or surprising to anyone. But what continues to surprise is the lengths to which some fans will go to defend their owners from scrutiny. The speed with which they will close ranks in order to ward off any sort of introspection or moral reckoning. This is as true of City fans with Abu Dhabi as it is of Chelsea fans with Roman Abramovich and Stoke fans with online gambling company Bet365. The bitter irony is that, in the vast majority of cases, the owners of your football club don’t care about you. They’re not in this for your happiness. They’re in this for their own happiness, their own prestige, and usually their own profit. Occasionally, happily, your aims and theirs may coincide: superstar signings, a swanky new stadium, wins, points, titles, trophies, scintillating football. But don’t for a moment think they’re doing any of this for your benefit. Football has a habit of getting its priorities askew. You may not approve of Jose Mourinho’s style of football, or Paul Merson’s television manner, or Jonjo Shelvey’s tackling style. But none of them are running sweatshops, or abusing migrant workers, or throwing journalists into jail (although in Mourinho’s case, if wishing made it so). Football loves a cartoon villain. Meanwhile, some of the real villains are hiding in plain sight.
