Shove your fan zones, wine bars and your pubs. Shove your multi club model. Shove all your corporate bullshit. Shove it all up your ****ing arses, and give us a team that is competitive again, and a team to be proud of.
Too ****ing right. We're being taken for mugs by these charlatans. They've ****ed up every single thing they've touched. Their decision making around absolutely every aspect of running a football club is God awful. Now at best we can hope to yo yo between two leagues. At best.
Ralph and the previous regime were doing a very good job in hindsight. Give me that regime over the current circus anyday
Morons. Absolute morons. I don’t think we’ll be back to the PL for a while without some radical changes (like sacking Rasmus and appointing a DoF that actually knows football)
To be fair, my memory tells me that if you check the posts on here for the last 6-9 months of RH, you’ll not find your hindsight view to be in the majority. If I recall correctly we didn’t win a match from about February to October (ish)?
Yep, agreed. And rather perfectly, it tallies up with SR taking over as that run came about after SR came in and started sticking their oar in; coincidence? Ralph was burnt out, and yes it was the right decision to sack him when they die, but I belive if SR hadn't taken over, we'd have got more out of him (imo)
Wow, didn't realise it's been so long. I don't want to labour the topic but I'm in complete agreement, it's been bad decision followed by bad decision from SR. Dragan Solak must be wondering who the hell are these muppets surrounding him, perhaps he's just as much to blame himself behind the scenes? One thing is for sure, recruitment has been an absolute disaster with money wasted on injured players and players obviously not up to the standard required. Saying it's been a total balls up is an understatement! One thing that stands out for me is the team in the previous post compared with our current floundering squad, we haven't just gone one step backwards in quality but several stumbling steps backwards, tripped up and fallen on our collective asses!
Sorry, I'm late to the party, so not sure if this has already been said but no organisation should be allowed to own more than one football club. It's ridiculous and I don't think there are many other sports it would be allowed. Just focus on one club, you don't need to build a family They definitely shouldn't be allowed in the same confederation That's just my opinion
I think there’s more to it than “SR are a bunch of shi£e”…. That’s the lazy answer. We haven’t overnight become an embarrassment to what we once were and stood for. Under the Gao era, Saints made a point of being financially very prudent and banging the drum that the money bubble was going to burst and the league would collapse, blah, blah, blah. The coincidental reality was that Gao’s alledged financial assets were blocked from leaving China by the Chinese government due to the financial instability at the time. The simultaneous reality on the pitch was that we punched above our weight and there were teams much worse than us either financially or in terms of infrastructure, managerially or players wise and even things like Covid helped us..! Infrastructure wise, we were comparatively ahead of others and had a steady enough conveyor belt of talent that we could keep/invest whilst also being an attractive prospect for players from outside of the UK. Unfortunately for us, none of our owners have ever fully understood that whilst we may have “improved” as a club by 3 or 4% annually, other clubs in the league were aiming for 7-8% and this repeated over time has left us behind the times financially, managerially and most other clubs even down to the Championship now recruit or approach recruitment/infrastructure in the same way we did ten years ago. The Premier League were never going to let the league fail financially and we all know their attempts to make it financially “fair for all” are window dressing at best and they’ll do everything they can to attract the richest owners despite their questionable morals, it’s for the greater good of the top table. Just look at what the Forest owners did and the league allowed to happen with a minor slap on the wrist; as they push for Europe, does anyone think they’ve thought twice about what they’ve done to get there…? Although things are bad for us, the saving grace is that at the same time we’ve been doing all that, so have Man United and that will take a generation to sort from top to toe. SR have clearly been set up by Solak with the right intentions and although people bitch and moan about the multi club model, they’re simply copying what’s worked amongst numerous teams across numerous leagues. It’s speculating to accumulate, but having to do it within the rules that FIFA have set out. It’s actually quite a creative solution to the fact that Premier League B teams, or U18s or U21s or whatever iteration we are on are not challenging enough to develop young players/keep large squads of good older players interested-but let’s not let that truth get in the way of a perfectly good lie that multi club models are all bad and part of a conspiracy theory. The main problem we have is, that the people Solak have employed are Snake Oil salesmen at best. To succeed, we need a) mega money or b) an entirely new SR team, (where cowboys like Rasmus are escorted to a field out back somewhere and humanely put down) Neither are going to happen overnight or anytime soon. The most frustrating thing for me, is that despite his business success, Dragans ability to oversee a successful business model and communicate that effectively is woefully inadequate, as his ability to employ the right people in the right places to advise him. But, having said that, we’re up against every team in Europe who now want to be successful… as we know with Wilcox, we’re shopping for staff to enhance our infrastructure in the same places as the top teams in the world. On the up side, at least he’s been willing to invest in us financially, we could be United where close to anywhere between £1.5 - £3 billion will be needed to modernise the club and return them to former glory, we could be Everton who’s ownership has been pimped around more than the average lady of the night down by the docks or we could be a club like Reading who are struggling to exist as a club. Be under no illusion, we are having to eat a sh*t sandwich and keep chewing…. That’s our lot for the foreseeable future unless Solak suddenly starts crapping money.
Interesting post and I agree with a lot of it but to point one thing out it's not a 'lie' that multi club ownership models are bad, it's an opinion. I've always been against them (and I don't buy into the we're only here to benefit Goztepe nonsense, it's more likely the other way round) due to the fact that clubs are reliant to some degree on the primary club's (us) success to achieve their own goals. And that that imo strips some of clubs identity and autonomy away.
Astounding. No way was that just bad luck. Awful decision making by someone, which in all honesty is a true SR benchmark.
Thanks Libby… I’ll take that… it frustrates me as much as the next person when we see a player disappear into one of their squads… but I do get the need.
For all that's said about the multi club model and SR being useless, I wonder what Goztepe fans would say if asked their opinion. Given that they got promoted last season and are now sitting the in the European places, I think they might have a slightly different opinion... particularly on Rasmus, the man every Saints fan seems to think is the biggest problem.
