Having watched MOTD yesterday on catch-up it finally occurred to me why we are where we are and why we will always be bouncing from Div 1 to the Championship. I was particularly interested in the comments made about Bournemouth and Brentford and how they are expected to sell their best players in the close season. The final comment was that they won’t sell cheap. Each of those clubs have invested in real talent, improved it and sold it on for a profit always keeping enough talent to stay in the prem. We on the other hand invest in mediocrity and sell for mediocre profits. Generally this leads to big losses which the sales of our “stars” is supposed to bridge. It fails to do this and this leads to our owners bailing us out season on season. We are seen as a lower middle range club with a 12-14000 fan base and little to make us above average. In the prem we filled and expanded the ground but never had the money to stay there. Unless this model changes I see us struggling to maintain our place in the league. The players we have now are not a patch on the players we had a few seasons ago at Wembley.
Bournemouth made a loss of 55m last set of accounts, Brentford was much less but have external debt of 29m and 22m loans connected to the owner tied to the stadium. The whole thing is completely and utterly unsustainable. We simply haven't got the financial clout to take risks on investing silly money on players that may or may not achieve promotion. Build from solid foundations upwards, we need stability, a head coach calling more of the shots than those upstairs, sensible solid re recruitment combined with our exciting youngsters. Pace, energy, workrate and physicality get you promoted out of this league, not if you can play 500 sideways passes per game.
Investment isn't the right term for spending in football. There is no return on football spending, just for a tiny few uber rich people to crow of sporting success attained at eye watering levels of financial outlay. The world has turned from when we first considered a version of Moneyball as a way to overperform, and the amount of people now trying this at smaller lower level clubs is increasing but with much richer people happy to throw away their money. Personally, I don't want any part in this unsustainable circus. Play at the highest level possible while being solvent.
It appears the whole football pyramid is teetering on collapse with eye-watering amounts of debt from top to bottom. Even the Premier money league looks unsustainable and the huge wages paid to average players has to stop at some point. I agree that it's still possible to put a decent team together and be successful the problem is another team will offer wages they can't afford to nick your players hoping promotion will bail them out. Read somewhere that if Leeds would have failed this season the club would have been screwed...Don't really want that for us but we're on a rollercoaster that just won't stop.
Whilst I don't want anyone to go bust, there has to be a wake up call, fans constantly in the cycle of keeping up with the Jones and stamping there feet for signings, I'm not suggesting I don't want us to sign anyone,but I'd gladly see the back of a few more and not just sign players that won't fit what CH wants. Tbh I'm excited by our youth, it's not before time that we now have a crop of players from the academy pushing for the first team and rightly so.
Not sure it’s fair to say we have sold cheap with minimal profit in recent times, historically yes but not sure to label that at current regime. Where we have gone wrong and not stuck to the plan ‘sold’ to us was starting low and gradually increasing levels, so starting with freebies, £100k, £200k etc and selling with decent margins to enable us to then replace with £500k, £750k etc etc. We had the chance to do this when we had cash in the bank but since that has gone it is almost impossible to do as money is needed to run the club.
A lot of people have been saying this for well over a decade. It just gets worse and worse every passing season. Where does it stop? No one knows, but it's going to keep getting worse. I don't see any signs of it being reversed.
Agree with most of what you put unless we can find a HC willing to give us 5-10 years I think the foundation needs to start above him. The trouble we have is the guy above him no one has any faith in him.
& that’s exactly why the big boys at the top of the tree want(ed) a Super League cos they need more money.
While ever Sky and TNT and Amazon are prepared to chuck billions at the Prem then why should clubs worry about small debts of 50 million? Sky are proudly shouting about 250 live games on tv and I'm thinking what a fkin nightmare. I don't want 250 games on my tv, never have, never will.
Tried to explain to someone a lot younger that the FA Cup final was so special because it was so rare to have live football on TV. A whole day of quizes and documentaries about the clubs then the road to Wembley on the coaches...by 3pm kick off ya were wound up like a clockwork train..
Aerial cameras following the team coaches to Wembley. Seeing the players in their cup final suits. The road to Wembley. It all changed in the mid nineties. Last proper cup final was Liverpool v Man Utd in 1996.
People have been saying its unsustainable for 30 years and yet it still carries on meanwhile Barnsley FC are being left behind to sink lower and lower as we wait for the implosion that's probably never going to come. Ohh for a mad multi billionaire (an actual one this time) with much more money than sense to come along and do a Brentford or Bournemouth job on Barnsley FC.
The thing is, we're now in the realm of multi billionaires 'investing' in clubs. For the sole desire to throw decent chunks of their fortunes away. And there will be plenty of billionaires who rightly, have no desire to do that. The powers that be and the clubs themselves don't seem to want to correct this nonsense, so it will come down to fans. There will come a point where people tune out. Are priced out. Or they just find better things to do. And rather than a soft landing, it will bite hard. A correction will come. Some clubs will cease to exist. We just don't know when or what the initial catalyst will be.
And all the time we wait for this mythical reset and for the chickens to come home to roost for overspending clubs more and more clubs pass us by on the way up, Wrexham being the latest one and we sink lower and lower. Forgive me for being off message but I'd much rather Barnsley FC be in Brentford's or Bournemouth's position in the pyramid than the one they currently occupy.
Footballs been slowly but surely eroded away,watered down if you like all because of money abit like life really. I blame sky
Yeah, maybe they should drop all those relegation scraps between teams like those, Man Utd, Spurs, etc.
As the Premier League slowly gets taken over by US investors, I expect the Premier League relegation/promotion to stop at some point in the future and we'll have an NFL-like setup. Championship will be just about sustainable and we'll join most European countries in having lower leagues as semi-professional. Mindst, I've been saying this for years and it still hasn't happened. There have been just enough activists to keep football fair (for now).
