£1.2 million p.a.

All of this. I’m struggling to think of a single thing that the club have done right this season. Best way to be sustainable is to not make mistake after mistake.

I’m not sure it’s even lack of ambition. We’ve paid compensation to release two head coaches. It’s just rank bad decision making by the board, who for all the talk about a sustainable model, don’t really spend money wisely.

 

A friend of mine is a football accountant, he was telling me Warnock wanted more than that figure several years ago. I doubt his prices have come down.

 

We're being told that this is the case, and I'd expect to hear these soundbites from player interviews, but I'm yet to see any tangible evidence of this in performances.

I have to question how great a motivator he is based on the persona I see in interviews and on the touchline so far.

 

If it costs the stated £6M to go down, then, assuming we always come straight back up, avoiding the inevitable relegation that seems to occur at least once every five years would pay for the manager to achieve that.

 

Clearly I don’t fully understand how we run our head coach recruitment but does the fact that he knows another coach wanted 1.2m perhaps suggest Poya maybe wasn’t the first choice candidate.

 

Yeah but our CEO has fulfilled his quota of having to interact with the fans and we have the alleged success of these here chicken flatbread things

 

If you get £7-8m for staying up, it has to be worth it. I'm guessing Poya isn't working for free, with his 0% win record.

 

You don’t get an extra £7-8m for staying up. On current operations we’re losing money that has to be subsidised by sales.

If we add an extra £1m or so to costs, we have to generate £1m in revenue each year to stand still, or cut £1m of other costs to offset it.

If we get relegated, we will lose £7m ish in revenue.

It’s a subtle but very important difference.

 

No matter how you look at it the clubs still million better off if we stay in the division and add the fact we would sell more season tickets etc. The fact we havent signed anyone in the window when its been clear for months what type of players are needed speaks volumes..... speculate to accumulate... no we will just roll over.

 

One thing that seems to be getting missed within all this is that we didn't have a binary choice between one 'candidate' allegedly wanting £1.2m (my guess would be Wilder, as to who this was, and he was never a viable option, for this reason) and Poya.

There would have been any number of other suitable candidates, many of whom would have arguably been better placed than Poya to make a fight of the relegation scrap, as dire as it looked at the time.

Only the BFC management know why we chose Poya from these, but it's one of several examples which justify the allegations about avoiding relegation being a secondary priority for the ownership. He clearly hasn't been appointed for his ability to quickly pick a team up off the floor and get the quick fixes implemented to turn results around.

The bigger concern for me is that I'm yet to see signs of the longer term vision around his appointment. His indifference to the lack of transfer activity is the biggest concern I have. Struber, Ismael and Stendel would not have stood for this, nor would many of those potential alternative candidates that I referred to above.

Sadly, I think the attribute that made him stand out from the crowd, other than cost, is his willingness to comply with being hung out to dry by his employers.

 

Of course the amount of gearing has to be part of a business decision, that’s an obvious position. My point which I think your missing isn’t to promote that we make annual losses, isn’t to sell ourselves down the river etc. Also retrospective decisions I’m sure are easier to evaluate now than whether future decisions will be successful. But are we learning as a club from these? I’m stating the obvious of course but that’s where we seem to be in this conversation. What I am challenging is what we could do differently and see what kind of ideas ‘could’ be explored. While I think 1.2m on a manager might be too much, I am a believer that applying some lateral thinking and exploring ‘what ifs’ can contribute more to business decisions than immediately accepting the status quo or not evaluating alternatives at all. It’s served me and the company well over the years. I posed an idea to explore the value of a director of football. I’m wondering what other ideas for the future exist.

one thing for sure as it stands, we all as fans need to set the expectation that we cannot compete consistently at this level across a number of facets. I think that’s what a lot are actually stating but we need to set our emotions and frustrations to match the reality.

 

I'll be honest. I don't believe Khaled at all.

I think he is lying about £1.2m for a manager and about 25k a week to loan a player. I think he is lying to justify our pathetic cheap option only approach.

He stated that clubs we approached wanted £25k a week to loan a player but was he being economical with the truth there? We could approach 500 clubs for players, 498 say they want £2k a week for their players but Manchester United and man city say they want £100k a week for us to loan Ronaldo and grealish. Khaled would be quite right in saying that clubs want £100k a week but it was also be complete ******** designed to give a false impression to the fans.

I do not believe a word he says and I do not believe that our only options were someone massively out of his depth like Poya or basically £25k a week for a manager. no middle ground at all? I do not believe that the only loan players available are also wanting £25k a week. We have loaned out a player. Are we getting £25k a week in for Kane? Or are we the only club in England loaning players out for less than £25k a week?

I also think it's highly coincidental that he stated £25k a week for players and £1.2m a year for managers also roughly translates to £25k a week. It's almost as though that's a figure he thinks will shock fans and so uses it regardless. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the west stand magically costs £100k a month to repair and a fanzone would be £300k a quarter to run

 

I don't expect us to compete with Fulham, West Brom, Bournemouth etc. in financial terms, but I would hope we could compete with Preston, Millwall, Luton, Blackpool, Hull, for example. As regards a Head Coach appointment, I would have preferred someone who has extensive experience of the requirements of the Championship. Devaney and Hassell have never been head coaches, but they both have extensive experience of playing in the Championship and must have a better idea of what is needed to succeed at this level than someone who has never had anything at all to do with English football. They would also have met the criterion of not breaking the bank.

 

I’m not so sure about this. They must’ve thought that he could turn results around otherwise they wouldn’t have paid the swedish fa to release him and wait till he’d fulfilled the latest fixtures with their u21s.

I think it was just a bad decision, and one that looks like the club are sticking by the decision to move away from a pressing game. It’s just been bad decision after bad decision by the board, probably since February 2021.

 

I think the reasons you give are more persuasive of the general argument that avoiding relegation wasn't seen as a priority. After delaying sacking Schopp, we then showed no urgency in making an appointment which would have given an incoming coach the benefit of an international break to work with his new squad. Instead, we found a coach who was actively involved in that international break and allowed him to see out his commitments within it.

They either thought he was a miracle worker who didn't need the luxury of time, or they were prioritising saving this season anywhere close as high as the majority of the fanbase were when making the appointment decision.

On the pressing game, Khaled stated in the Q&A that there's still a committment to the pressing game, but that it's a different type of press being done in different phases (or something like that). Like you, I think, the eyesight test I've seen so far tells me it's something that I wouldn't describe as a pressing game. However, it does fit beautifully into the description of a depressing game!