by Vision »
08 Mar 2019 15:19
Nameless Maneki Neko Nameless
We’ll have to disagree !
They clearly aren’t involved on a pure business basis. You don’t make billions by thinking a second tier football club is a money making exercise. The fact that they took the club on without the potential money making REP project indicates that at the very least this is a long term project. Dai isn’t newto football, he kind of understands the economics.
that didn't seem to stop him allowing Gourlay to run the club like some sort of clown academy and losing him a fortune
Or spotting what was happening and putting an end to it !
Bear in mind Strap is convinced this is all a tax dodge so maybe they needed a year of losses to,offset something else !
Point is though , the strategy started before Gourlay was appointed.
Dai financed the signing of Illori and the loan signings of Mutch, Grabban and Reece Oxford in January '17 to give us a final push to the play-offs which we made, finishing 3rd, then a hair's breadth away from the Premier League Money Making Machine.
So clearly rather than following the club's supposed remit (as stated when Stam took over) of following the Ajax style youth development we got carried away by being so tantalisingly close and decided to try to buy our way to the next level that summer. The fact that we generally bought appallingly didn't help. The appointment of a supposed Billy Big Bollocks in Gourlay indicated their mndset.
To play Devil's advocate slightly you could see why they went in that direction but they just got the personnel they got in terribly wrong.
Aluko typified this. Stam wanted Oliveira but we baulked at Norwich's asking price. Then he wanted Hemed and the same thing happened. In the end he settled for Aluko (also by this time the fans were demanding some form of signing as a statement of intent after the aforementioned deals fell through) who wasn't in any way what we needed to fill the huge gap that Kermogant's injury left from the season before. I feel it was an ego signing by the club (you can blame one of Stam, BT, Gourlay or all 3) who couldn't be seen to have failed to secure another "major deal"
On the face of we'd lost the spine of our side from the previous season Al-Habsi, Williams, Kermogant and the odds weren't looking good on keeping Moore either at the time so the arrivals of the likes of Mannone, Bacuna, Barrow etc make some sense. Unfortunately we decided to embark on this at just the time when Championship fees and wages went through the roof. As we all know the fees paid and the wages coughed up didn't give us anywhere approaching value for our our money even considering Barrow's decent season and the fact we subsequently appeared to have made a profit on Bacuna.
This summer we had a new manager and clearly the club wanted to back him up. He wanted experience/leadership as he felt, with some justification, that we lacked that in the squad. But again the personnel simply weren't up to the task.
I just think we're very keen to point the finger of blame , be that Stam or Gourlay in the main but it's rarely the sole fault of one individual. The club, like many before it and many to come, were seduced by the Premier League circus.
Hopefully we've learned our lesson from this and are beginning to move forward with integrating youth and actually trying to build something a little more sustainable if not quite the "brick by brick" of what now seems like a bygone age.