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 expectingWell done if anyone bothered to read it
I had to spend 90 seconds scrolling to the top of this post to check it wasn’t Ian Thumwood.
And to be fair, can’t argue against any of this. Top post.
