It feels to me like the last two seasons have been a waste of time.

The playoff final was supposed to be the start of greater things to come.
Then person or persons unknown decided it would be great to let us fall apart and die, a season and a half of toil and misery with the inevitable end result.
Relegation is a blessing in disguise as we won't have to endure another year of being treated as "little old Barnsley" and getting knobbed week in week out by mediocre teams.
The problem is that we fans suffer.

 

It became a waste of time the moment Patrick decided to put profits ahead of a football team.

 

I think that's a bit unfair.... We took money for players who would have otherwise gone for nothing which made sense for us. It was the contracts that we got wrong! The contracts just weren't long enough and didn't fit the plan if we were looking to improve players then sell on we needed them on longer deals or we were always going to get cut price deals if they did well and moved on.

 

I don't think it's unfair at all. We had just gained promotion, were according to the ceo at the time in a good position financially and yet the decision was made not to offer contracts to our better players and instead to cash in on them when we were flirting with the play-offs and replace them with vastly inferior replacements. Fans have complained about this policy's Ince January 2017 so in all fairness there was plenty to right to reply. My post is nothing new

 

The price we got for them isn't the key issue
Whether we got £500 or £10m the money wasn't reinvested in players of equal quality.

 

For me as poor as Jan 17 was the summer of 17 was worse. As has been said it conceivable all those players would have left at the end of the season anyway. But the decision to recruit how we did the following summer was nothing short of suicidal.

 

Excellent post

 

Oh I agree but I believe the two are intrinsically linked as they were both part of the same plan

 

I agree... Looking back at it now it's quite bizarre the signings we made and thought we would be able to get them to compete in the championship. All those midfielders and 3 centre backs with little or no championship experience and that's before we signed Ugbo and the saga with Mcburnie!

 

The late Patrick Cryne must have had his reasons for doing what he did. We don't know the detail and
therefore it was and still remains pure speculation. Gauthier has just been on Look North.
Said that if we were relegated, it was written into their contracts that Jose and his backroom team would
be leaving. " We will appoint a new Manager. Players will go and new players will come in and we will try to
achieve success." Nuff said for me.

 

Jeez! Bang .....head....wall. You live in cloud cuckoo land.

 

My bad. The decision was a stroke of genius and we have now reached the holy land of division three.

 

As opposed to the cuckoo land in your head where players sign contracts to play for us at a fraction of what they can get elsewhere.

 

One certainly compounded the other. I've said before it was either arrogant to think we could recruit in such a way and survive. Or whoever made the decision knew we might well go down but decided to push on regardless.

 

"I tthink if the club had come to us in the summer, before the Championship started, a lot of us probably would have signed a contract. But they didn't." - Conor Hourihane

A claim that was never countered by Patrick despite having the opportunity to do so.

 

The reason we are in the football league is down to Patrick's generosity he put in what he could. Our downfall was not improving 6 key players contracts the summer we got promoted all of which had a year left. Who's shoulders this falls on I don't know but it was pretty ridiculous.

The new owners had the chance to invest in January and chose not to which speaks volumes to me. We signed 6 players which cost us next to nothing considering we sold McDonald. This has cost us our championship status it's as simple as that! Signing 3 players with experience who would had fit straight into the side would have kept us up.

I'm pretty amazed that it went so close having signed 16 young lads none of which had any experience at this level and chucked most of them into a starting 11 was never really going to work the writing was on the wall early on in the season for me loosing 5-0 pre season and then the opening 30 mins of the season been 3-0 down to Bristol.

Moving forward I really hope we can get a manager who understands the football league and wants to build something at Oakwell. Big question is are the owners going give the new manager the necessary funds or are they here for trying to turn a profit through the academy? In theory should be a silly question due to their incredible wealth but saying that we have to question the lack of funds that we're available in January. If there was ever a time we needed a helping hand that was it.

 

I didn't intend it to sound like meant profit for himself. I've said on here many times that I don't think that was the case. I meant short term business profit ahead of an actual football team. I also don't think it's hindsight to raise the issue now as a lot of us raised the issue as it was happening