Another nail in the coffin today... They want to be careful of administration in a couple of years, falling through the leagues, still spending big money and not much infrastructure there.
When you look at Luton, Derby & Plymouth, it makes you wonder if ambition is overrated, or misunderstood. I often read how unambitious we are, it rolls off some peoples tongues as if its just a case of throwing more money at recruitment and wages, taking a gamble, pushing the boat out etc. Ambition is like moving up from a run of the mill 1.3 litre car to a 600hp super car. It’s dangerous in the hands of someone that’s not an experienced and competent driver. But here some of us are, egging on people we don’t really know, to plough money into our clubs to induce a bit of success, without much evidence they really know what they’re doing.
I think the squad to an extent got disillusioned at the back end of last season. They were playing ok stuff, but just couldn’t get a result - outclassed everywhere basically. I watched them at the Etihad and could see it. For me, they needed a fresh change to go again this season. Nothing against what Rob Edwards did, but sometimes you need it regardless to break that mentality. We tried it with John Hendrie - didn’t work, too similar. Dave Bassett changed that. He should have come that first year tbf. Sadly, I think they’ll go down this season. They still have parachute money, but I think that is tied up in the new stadium. They’ll just need to re-group in L1 and go again next season. If they slip into L2, I think they’ll have deep financial problems.
Money, Money, Money is all I see when you mention those 3 clubs mate. Brighton especially have done extremely well whilst in the Premier league with selling and buying players mind.
Yeah, tbf Brighton have done well with the buying and selling. Simon Jordan does speak highly of how they are run on TalkSport.
Yeah, I think Bournemouth & Brentford thumb their noses at us by playing in front of such small crowds every week. Neither seems to have faith in attracting bigger crowds, both happy to live off the gravy train. I get that gate receipts are only a small portion of turnover, but it hasn’t stopped the popular clubs from increasing capacity as they’ve moved to new stadiums.
£100m+ the owner put in and only went up when they recruited Franks, think it was 7 years in Championship.
Doesn’t it bother you that their owner spent over £100 million getting them into the Prem? That doesn’t sit right with me at all. I’ve probably bored everyone to death by bringing it up I know, but it’s a huge deal introducing that kind of money to a small third division club.
Brentford's wage bill was over 40million in the championship the season they got promoted apparently. It's mental. As I say, I think they've done extremely well whilst in the Premier league, buying & selling, as have Brighton. But they certainly spent plenty of money they didn't have
Frank is a very fortunate guy isn’t he? He’s been backed to the hilt all the time he’s been there. I’m not sure how he’d go on with our recruitment team.
i don’t like any team “buying” promotion. I wasn’t aware that Brentford did it in the same way that e.g. Cardiff, Brighton, Bournemouth did. Living beyond their means. I was under the impression Brentford did a better version of our attempted trading of players. They sold alot of players to rivals for huge fees and eventually found a winning young team? I realise it wasn’t quite as romantic as that but they did at least work their way up.
Let’s use Ollie Watkins as an example. Brentford paid £1.8million for him from Exeter in 2017. At the time their average gate was around 10k. You can pretty much guarantee that if Brentford had to pay so much money for a lower league player, they had to fight off other interest and also offer him the best deal. That’s just one example of how the money gave them the edge at the recruitment stage. They do get good money for their players, but without the owners they wouldn’t have been able to do it, or pay the wages they do.
This is from the Brentford forum. They have a sticky on how much their owner has spent. https://griffinpark.org/forums/thre...tthew-benham-put-into-the-club-so-far.122744/
Here’s a good vid about Luton, although I’m not sure you could describe Mads Andersen as our talisman for 4 years.
