I have to say I think some posters are being a little harsh towards RR. He has taken the time to put together a comprehensive essay about how & why he thinks the current owners are using their model for running the business. If you take the emotion out of the fact it is a Football club and just look at the examples, it is clear how someone could justify the business sense. What I haven't seen from RR is that the owners are correct or that there are not alternatives.
If you are judging Wilks on his last game, he does not look a good acquisition. He did not look like he had his head in a good place to me. Nevertheless, the lad is on a 4 year contract and he has plenty of time to put things right. I keep saying this, but I will repeat it one more time. You should not judge a long term plan on short term outcomes. There will be lots of ups and downs. The thing is that you have to have a different plan if you are going to constructively criticise. I have provided lots of information over the 4 Talking Finance pieces. There is lots for anyone interested in being constructive to get their teeth into. The only thing that any new plan must do is keep the club solvent, so all new plans must be self financing. If you do not like my assumptions, then build your own. You say that you have experience of this sort of thing, then use it. I do not claim to be a financial guru, and that is why I have told everyone what the basis of my thought processes is, and why I have provided a full listing of my assumptions. The framework allows anyone else to change those assumptions and build their own Jerusalem. Why not just do it?
I have simply said what I think the plan might be. I have looked at all the evidence, I have assumed that the people who have put together the plan have had a logical thought process and I have tried to follow through that thought process. I have assumed that they know what they are doing, but It is at the end of the day it is my interpretation of their actions. I have tabled a question via Gally for the next supporter meeting, and hopefully my assumptions will be either confirmed or denied.
With respect, I think many people have suggested an alternative. By all means buy cheap and try to sell on at a profit, but augment this with some experience. Some of us simply do not accept your reasoning as to why they are not doing this, and fear that we have a regime that is gambling the club’s future on a risk/reward basis. With the risk loaded onto the club.
You seem to be blinkered about any modest variation from this extreme ideology. My point with Wilks was to say is there a different option. But you aren't willing to look at any different option. Where you save in one area, you can use that saving for other purposes. Save £1m (say) on Wilks and play Mottley Henry (seeing as pure youth is the mantra). Lets take another instance then. Centre Half. We could have kept Richard Jackson. We didn't have to sign say Mads Andersen. That would save another transfer fee. You could argue we may not get as much transfer fee if we sell in future. But, you could also argue, we may not have the cost of paying off a contract or getting rid for a nominal fee or nothing if it all goes wrong. There are plenty of failed transfers to look to and just a handful of sales that have gone for a bit of money, but still below market rate. So the philosophy is a high risk low reward one. And how much have we written off compared to the token "profit" we've generated? The ideology is also highly attritional on coaches, players and fans. So you have huge churn rates and retention of knowledge and "how we do it" is lost. Look at the Stendel sacking. We were alleged to be bedding a way of playing through all our set ups. We've now changed the first team style of play. Whats happening at youth level? Why would I use any experience on made up figures and assumptions that could be close to the truth or miles away from it? Get your hands on their detaled budgets (if they have any), a cashflow statement and hand we their written down business strategy (which I very much doubt exists) and I'll critique it and adapt it gladly. What I do know is that there are clubs who have signed players on free transfers, utilised loans, sold less of their core players and managed to generate more money from outgoing sales. Until we do even just a modicum of that better, and there are absolutely no signs of that in their 2 year tenure, then its futile to play fantasy football club owner with hugely skewed exaggerated biased data to support a fixed point of view.
The problem with our last promotion is not just the youth of our players, it is also the fact that we changed too many players all at once. I believe that the best way to try to establish in the Championship, especially if you do not have the cash to buy your way to success, is to the promoted with a stable squad. A squad that has been together for a number of seasons. You should aim to change as few players as possible at each transfer window. That takes time to arrange and there are going to be ups and downs until you can put it in place and establish it. However, I do not see any alternative if you want to keep the club solvent.
Please read Talking Finance 2, particularly the bit about wages and then tell me what entrepreneurial trick you have up your sleeve.
I’m not sure the evidence to date actually supports your argument. Moore, for example, had plenty of time left on his contract but was sold as soon as an offer acceptable to the club’s owners was received. Any thoughts of ‘layering’ seems difficult to determine given no suitable replacement was in place. It may well prove to be the case that this was a one-off, but it certainly doesn’t provide the evidence to support an argument that the club is following some grand strategy (other than making a fast buck).
But my previous point suggested we didn’t have to sell and make wholesale changes, instead just add to the promoted side in a couple of key areas. Barring Davies the reality is all the sales made were still under contract and if the club felt it needed to sell then why not sell for a decent championship fee or not at all, the way every other club seems to do business in this league with their better players if self-sustainability is our only way? Make better money on those assets to then buy better replacements? That was the whole ideology behind the owners plan no? You’ve just suggested the same yourself as was intimated by our owners who’ve simply gone against the strategy they fed to us all. I hope you can see that their behaviour with their ‘plan’ since returning to the championship is highly dubious or totally naive at best.
If I was to try and answer your point, I would simply be repeating all the things that I have already written in Talking Finance 1-4. If you want an answer, it will be apparent if you read or re-read all of that stuff. My basic assumption is that our owners know what they are doing, that they know all the facts and that they have thought long and hard about how they can plot an appropriate course. Most of the criticism is based upon poor results. It is the reaction to a long term plan based upon short term outcomes. Most critics say that if you added 3 more experienced players, you would get a better short term outcome. They do not know that for certain. At the moment, the only team beneath us is Stoke City, and they have loads of experience. Blending together a winning team is not an exact science. No-one can know what the outcome of any change might be, especially as the players who would be involved in the changes are totally unknown. The plan has its uncertainties too, and you are right to point those out, but at least the plan provides a direction of travel and a reference point for decision making. The future is unknown and unknowable. All any plan can do is take account of what is already established public knowledge and try to successfully formulate a course through that established knowledge. Many will say they are wrong, but unfortunately that is the fate that the person who is doing the driving will always face. Someone in the back seat always knows a better way. That is the way things are, and will always be.
A lot of assumptions from you too. I agree no one knows all the facts and thought procedures but I think people tend to know when things dont add up. If they see us as needing to yo yo to eventually cement a place in the championship then come out and say that. Don't spout best transfer window ever and all the money will be reinvested etc etc.
If the plan says you do not sell, but you do, clearly the board felt they had no alternative. I have suggested why they may have had no alternative, and that question to is on Gally's list.
The best transfer widow ever statement was a mistake. It was silly. It was as if he had been goaded into saying it. He will have learned from it.
I have already given a possible explanation for the Moore transfer, but it was speculation. I have tabled a question for Gally's next Supporters Liaison meeting.
Ok... lets make the opposite assumption. That our owners don't know what they are doing, and other than a statistical method for recruitment that they have radicalised, they are working on documents, processes and systems that they inherited and have added to very minimally. There is no evidence to prove they have thought about what they are doing to any degree. We have no evidence that they have pushed into overseas markets for either streaming, potential reciprocations, commercial and sponsorship avenues or any true pushes to generate awareness on our existence and why it may be worth taking note. This was one of the areas Conway said they would focus on. If we look at Nice for reference, they inherited the Academy with around 10 months of build time left (despite them claiming they were the ones responsible for this state of the art set up). They inherited a brand new stadium owned by the local authority. Their one season of success had Sneijder and Balotelli in the team, and the following 2 seasons they finished 7th and 8th respectively. If we use logic to assess the basic assumption that our owners know what they are doing and have actual plans for marketing communications, technology, recruitment, operations, commercial and every aspect of the club and feeding those into a robust strategic plan... I would argue strongly based on their numerous contradictions of incongruent action and comment, that a plan doesn't exist. There may be ideas. Wants. Hopes. But largely we have an ideology. if you take away the assumption that the owners should be trusted, are strategic, know what they are doing, have a robust challenged plan... what do you have left?
But as I stated, sell for appropriate championship fees and not bang average ones in order to sustain this magical ‘plan’. What they’ve done to our promotion team is totally non-sensical and goes against their ideology totally. This suggests as DWLC suggests, they don’t really have a sensible plan at all and now seem, not to be too flippant, to be winging it, just very badly now in the championship.