Daft Kerplunk

It’s an interesting question. We should be fine but we’ve run into trouble because Kat was desperate to sell and took the money of someone who was not fit for purpose in any way. Add this to what is essentially a club that despite all the PR, is run really badly. I know a few people who work for, or who have worked for and some of the things I’ve been told are laughable, baffling and incompetent. And this is from the very top, across football and commercial. The saving grace is the people at the lower levels give a shit and somehow make things work as best they can. In some ways, the football club is a reflection of the city it is in: has opportunities but does it’s best to avoid taking them and makes it harder/worse than it needs to be. But as long as we are in the Premier League with its TV money, it can survive as a shit show because it doesn’t really need to be well run.

That was incredibly embarrassing but the performance against a 10-man Arsenal was indicative of the bottling style that was at the heart of this pathetic team

Dog poo. Ah well, at least we still have the league. And net spend trophy to play for

Bundesliga sides are opposed to the plans because the German model means commercial investors cannot have more than a 49% stake in clubs, so fans hold a majority of their own voting rights.

They’ll all want back in to domestic football when 11 teams realise their chance of winning has significantly decreased 🤣 Shit idea really but leave ‘em to it.

Dortmund is also about as good a club as you can get to jump off to the big time. Proper football club. We had a brief moment in the sun as a jumping off club when Paul Mitchell was here and then Les fucked it up because he thought he was football’s Billy Beane after watching Moneyball.

Shades of Pellegrino?

But how do you get exposed to gambling? Is it hereditary and not influenced by availability of messaging? Of course a compulsive gambler will gamble regardless but how would you know where to go without marketing? Not a chance that millions are spent on advertising if it doesn’t work, the people that work this out are very intelligent.

You guys should definitely not tell all of the betting companies that sponsor football this secret this because they think it helps sure people know who they are so they use them/legitimise them and encourage them to bet more 🤣 they’ll be gutted to know that all the data that has helped them make the decision to spend millions on football sponsorship is inaccurate nonsense 😎 No personal judgment from me, it is what it is and it’s where money is available right now for clubs in the lower to middling level. But values don’t actually count in premier league football clubs when it comes to money. If crack was legal, they’d take money from that.

The values 100% go out of the window when it comes to money. Anyone who thinks otherwise is very naive.

The fight will be there from WBA but it would be nice if we can compete like we did yesterday and put a further dent in the reputation of Allardyce and make it harder for them to beat relegation

I think we as fans need to be prepared for a pretty hard summer. We will lose our best players who are close to the end of their contracts because we have to fill a serious hole in the finances and there is zero investment from Gao and no sale unless he recoups his money fully. This may become a reality if we get relegated next season because we might not have the quality of players needed to stay up. It’s going to be a rough ride. Buckle in.

What a day! Was significant because it confirmed we were on our way back to where we belonged. What football was all about.

Consistently producing is the only good way to assess. Dropping in players to the first team to improve academy stats is a fallacy. “Valery, Sims, Vokins, Slatterly and Hesketh will all make it with EPL or Championship clubs” Championship possibly, Premier League is very unlikely. Some of these players aren’t that young anymore.

Saints probably don’t mind a transfer being in the media if it helps drive up the price. The club absolutely needs the money so I’m expecting Ings plus others to leave with no effort to keep them because we can’t. There won’t be significant incomings either. Club’s finances are screwed and neither Gao or an inept commercial boss help.

Matt Hale is ex-Bristol City too. Who’d have thought it. The academy is in a mess.

Don’t be surprised about Reed though, I have heard through the football grapevine that he has been involved in discussions about an SFC takeover. At what level, not sure, but football consultancy and the higher level discussions is his gig now. If Simon Jordan is involved, I wouldn’t expect some of the current board to last very long as he’d surely be able to see right through them. He’d probably challenge Matt Crocker to get on with restructuring the academy and not be too focussed on first team and the pavilion.

When will the penny drop that the academy structure, and many of the senior staff members, is a busted flush? Needs huge attention but the rewards won’t show for 5-10 years

Uncomfortable comparison (football was dire under Branfoot but no contest on the fight - this team would be scared to leave a luxury spa with their wash bags if faced with some of the players on those teams - but at least now under the current regime, we are market ‘disrupters’ so the 9-0 defeats are just a clever commercial strategy for bouncing back and being different.

That’s as piss poor as you can get. From embarrassing stop the count T-shirts because we were top for a day or so, to stop the count so we don’t get relegated

Will be a tough match, they are desperate, we are not yet fully confident and are still on very patchy form. We only need 2 more wins and a draw so can see us thinking we are still fine and don’t need to grind out the result

As good a line up as we could have. Fingers crossed we get the 3 points

You also currently identify a chunk of players who joined our academy structure before the Liebherr’s were involved...showing how long ago it was that the academy was actually decent.

The success of the current academy is to be defined by those players coming through...which is how many at a regularly playing Premier League football? I also should clarified that by recruitment I meant within the academy. All the players ‘breaking through’ from our academy bar a couple have been rejected by Arsenal, Man City etc. or we’ve had to buy them. Many are just there to make up the numbers. It would be great to be proven wrong on the academy and there might be a few that come through unless we lose them to Chelsea but having watched plenty of football over the years, and like many others, you do develop a reasonable idea of what makes a top flight player and who probably won’t make it to be a first team regular in the top league.

If anything should help Ralph, it surely has to be the realisation by those overseeing the football aspects of the club (Semmens and Crocker) that the academy leadership and its recruitment, plus the coaching staff chosen for Ralph are just not up to the job. Ronald Koeman could see the younger players weren’t good enough but good ol’ Les was able to convince everyone else that he was wrong. Anyone watching these players coming through who has also watched the decent players of the past could see it too. They simply do not match the world-beating storytelling that goes on alongside the academy. The last players to make it through is the James Ward-Prowse group and how long ago was that? Now Ralph is coming to the realisation too that the whole academy myth is just that. We need new ownership, a good clear out at the FDSC (that’s Staplewood to most) and a leaner operation that lets action speak louder than nice presentations. It may all be too late to either save or keep Ralph.