Rupert Lowe's legacy

Is there really any value in Jacksons Farm? It keeps being mentioned but what exactly is the point of it?

As far as I'm aware, it is an asset of the club which would now belong to Katherina Liebherr. If I remember correctly, it is 40 acres of farmland, which if given planning permission to build housing, would be a valuable asset. It stretches along the right hand side of Bubb Lane, Hedge End (B3342) towards the Winchester Road. The current building activity is pretty well right up adjacent to it, opposite the Crematorium, so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that planning permission might be granted for it in the future.

In amongst all the duck hunters errors, I suppose he was bound to get something right. On that basis credit Rupert ( and George Prost) for Morgan.

That is in amongst everything going on around the same time - Twitchy, Wigley, Gray, Woodward, Portvielt and the lack of investment for Strachan etc etc

Morgan Schneiderlin is the football equivalent of that watch Rodney found in Del Boy's garage.

The only difference being that when we bought Schneiderlin it was for his potential. Apart from that, spot on!

Cant believe this thread started today...........thought I was in a time warp ............

Time to move on ......

I was thinking on similar lines this morning.

It is a credit to you Duncan that you post such a thing as you were not always a fan of Lowes

Lowe was many things but if you look at the current owners model it is just what Lowe was intending to do for us.

Sadly having a posh English accent and also the name of Rupert never helped his cause.

People always post this ********; the model of producing your own talent where; some make it to the first team saving you a transfer fee, some are let go hopefully to another club for a modest fee and some are too good for us to keep and go for big bucks. Has been around before Lowe was awkwardly conceived and Southampton were doing it before he came. Lowe was not some sort of visionary for wanting this as a model for Southampton.

People may think he was good or even alright for us but any claim that the way we're run now was Lowes vision is ********.

You are not wrong with much of what you say and yes it has turned out beyond our wildest expectations. As has been pointed out I was never Lowe's biggest fan but he cared. In fact he cared enough to ring me up and call me a s**t which at the time I felt was a bit OTT. But it showed he had a bit of bottle and was prepared to defend himself so I have grudging respect for that. When talking in terms of how much damage he did the club, well we ended up ok but more by luck than judgement and technically one hero (MLT) potentially nearly did us more harm than anyone else by lending his name to the Pinnacle group which was damn near disastrous. Had we known at the time that Pinnacle using the oxygen of Matt's support were jeopardising the Liebherr takeover we would have all been pretty angry. We came damn close to losing Liebherr's interest and that does not bear thinking about.

Mate I think you are a ****. MLT was trying to find someone to buy the club and was duped by a bunch of what he was led to believe were good lads into being their figurehead. They failed on a number of occasions to stump up the cash to move forward even after the exclusivity period was up. Fry should have moved on from them days before he did, if anyone caused the potential loss of a billionaire was the proffesional paid a shed load of cash to get the best deal. No let's blame the best ex-footballer this club has ever had.

How do we know that ML was about to walk, was it because NC said so afterwards and was it because that was a stick to beat MLT.

You could have posted this in the MS thread, this is all a bit look at me, 'I had my run ins with RL but I'm big enough to praise him.' Afterall it was Georges Prost that found him and our years in the lower league that made him.

People always post this ********; the model of producing your own talent where; some make it to the first team saving you a transfer fee, some are let go hopefully to another club for a modest fee and some are too good for us to keep and go for big bucks. Has been around before Lowe was awkwardly conceived and Southampton were doing it before he came. Lowe was not some sort of visionary for wanting this as a model for Southampton.

 

People may think he was good or even alright for us but any claim that the way we're run now was Lowes vision is ********.

You could have posted this in the MS thread, this is all a bit look at me, 'I had my run ins with RL but I'm big enough to praise him.' Afterall it was Georges Prost that found him and our years in the lower league that made him.

I must have missed the bit where Georges Prost wandered into Staplewood off the street and decided to work for Southampton Football Club of his own volition.

Is there really any value in Jacksons Farm? It keeps being mentioned but what exactly is the point of it?

Jackson's Farm is to potential finance what Matty Holland is to potential transfer targets

There is an article by Adam Leitch in the Echo about "Lowe's legacy" (MS) and about a meeting he had with Lowe and Wilde at the start of Morgan's career which is worth reading for those who think that signing Morgan was luck. It also gives Pardew a lot of credit for bringing him on.

Outcome bias. If MS had done his cruciate ligaments in his first season and never recovered what would we be saying about the decision to sign a French 18 year old for £1.2m when the club was broke and facing a struggle to stay up?

Outcome bias. If MS had done his cruciate ligaments in his first season and never recovered what would we be saying about the decision to sign a French 18 year old for £1.2m when the club was broke and facing a struggle to stay up?

Surely 'outcome bias' is only relevant if the outcome is something that had a low probability of occurring? If you buy a house and it increases in value, is that a good investment or are you just lucky because the house didn't burn down during that time?

I may be mistaken in how I remember things, but I always thought the biggest damage to the club was done in the period when Rupert wasn't in charge (think it was Wilde). We spent lots of money in the Championship trying to get back up and we failed - a bit like Leeds gambling on getting back in the CL a couple of years before. I also think a lot of his managerial appointments could be justified.

Surely his legacy (and of the others in the boardroom power struggles) was to **** up so the club went bust and we could be bought by the fantastic

owners we have now? Without Lowe and Wilde we wouldn't be were we are now.

Lowe showed his weakness when appointing Wigley. He should I have learned his lesson after Gray, but he didn't and ultimately that was the start of our downfall.

The flip side is that he not,only appointed Prost,but he was bold enough to back the youth development with £2m each year, which was a substantial amount of our budget. That money could have been invested in first team players, but Lowe saw the benefits and ultimately they had a major bearing on the future of the club.

I must have missed the bit where Georges Prost wandered into Staplewood off the street and decided to work for Southampton Football Club of his own volition.

The old yeah but who hired him argument. You don't know how GP came to be working for SFC, but lets assume RL did hire him then why in the terms of your argument should the credit stop with RL, why not with Guy Askham that got RL involved with SFC or the bloke that hired GA. If you follow it back it had to be God, because he invented man, pigs, cows and grass. It's a rubbish argument isn't it.

If you follow it back it had to be God, because he invented man, pigs, cows and grass. It's a rubbish argument isn't it.

Creationism? Yeah, it is.

Rupert Lowe started our decline in my opinion until ML bought the club. I recall that WGS wanted £6M to buy Saha, Malbranque and one other whose name escapes me fater the Cup Final.

Lowe's response was that" we buy a whole team with that kind of money". WGS left and the club lost millions. But all this is history now and not worth debating so thank goodness for ML and his inheritance. We march on.

The old yeah but who hired him argument. You don't know how GP came to be working for SFC, but lets assume RL did hire him then why in the terms of your argument should the credit stop with RL, why not with Guy Askham that got RL involved with SFC or the bloke that hired GA. If you follow it back it had to be God, because he invented man, pigs, cows and grass. It's a rubbish argument isn't it.

Yours is a rubbish argument, yes.

Mine, on the other hand, isn't. Happy to help.

Rupert Lowe started our decline in my opinion until ML bought the club. I recall that WGS wanted £6M to buy Saha, Malbranque and one other whose name escapes me fater the Cup Final.

For what it's worth, your recollection is wrong. Louis Saha alone cost Man Utd £12m in 2004. Fulham paid £4.5m for Malbranque in 2001 and he was their top scorer in 02/03. We'd have got neither for £6m, let alone both, let alone both plus one other.

Lowe had great long term vision. Making the club stronger and bigger by providing a stream of players from the academy and increased income by building SMS. His downfall was that the club wasnt strong enough to fund those developments and put sufficient resource into the first team to keep us up in the interim until the benefits came on stream.

I just didn't understand his policy of signing large amounts of crap. I think we got relegated with 40 senior players on the books, which can't have looked good on the wage bill. How we ended up there instead of 25 decent players I don't know. Yahia, Nilsson, Jakobsson, Van Damme, Davenport, Bernard, McCann. How did we end up signing such dross? Even Crouch, who turned out well in the end, was only signed as a cheap bargain who Villa didn't want.

By the thread title I can only assume that Rupert's old Subaru estate is up on Autotrader.

It must have done 200k miles around the farm and probably smells of dogs - and failure.

I was thinking on similar lines this morning.

It is a credit to you Duncan that you post such a thing as you were not always a fan of Lowes

Lowe was many things but if you look at the current owners model it is just what Lowe was intending to do for us.

Sadly having a posh English accent and also the name of Rupert never helped his cause.

Lowe could and would never have raised the capital or supported the level of investment in the squad that was needed, nor built the infrastructure to the exceptional levels of today. He was happy being in charge and preventing being overthrown, and Saints existing on their new stadium revenues and Staplewood as it was.

In fact his own shareholder structure was the thing that for so long prevented anyone else being able to invest in the club.

Mate I think you are a ****. MLT was trying to find someone to buy the club and was duped by a bunch of what he was led to believe were good lads into being their figurehead. They failed on a number of occasions to stump up the cash to move forward even after the exclusivity period was up. Fry should have moved on from them days before he did, if anyone caused the potential loss of a billionaire was the proffesional paid a shed load of cash to get the best deal. No let's blame the best ex-footballer this club has ever had.

 

How do we know that ML was about to walk, was it because NC said so afterwards and was it because that was a stick to beat MLT.

 

You could have posted this in the MS thread, this is all a bit look at me, 'I had my run ins with RL but I'm big enough to praise him.' Afterall it was Georges Prost that found him and our years in the lower league that made him.

I'm not quite sure which bit of your "MLT was duped" argument disagrees with anything FF has posted here, and you're well out of order (or just a bit thick) for calling him names based on a completely realistic assessment of precisely what was happening. You seem to have assumed that this is some kind of attack on Le Tiss - it isn't - no-one is saying MLT had anything but the best intentions for the club, he just happened to be backing the wrong side and it is absolutely a fact that without his support Pinnacle might have been unraveled more quickly. However, however it happened, it has turned out about as well as we could have expected for the club (Markus aside).

Katharina is clearly over it, Matt Le Tiss is, why aren't you?

Morgan Schneiderlin is the football equivalent of that watch Rodney found in Del Boy's garage.

If Rodney had an experienced French antique dealer mate with him at the time telling him it could be worth millions.

Lowe could and would never have raised the capital or supported the level of investment in the squad that was needed, nor built the infrastructure to the exceptional levels of today. He was happy being in charge and preventing being overthrown, and Saints existing on their new stadium revenues and Staplewood as it was.

 

In fact his own shareholder structure was the thing that for so long prevented anyone else being able to invest in the club.

How do you mean? Lowe only had about 6 -7% of the shares and the entire old board had less than 30%, so it was relatively simple for anybody moderately rich to buy enough of a percentage in the club to outvote them, much as Wilde did. Lowe did a good job at giving the impression of being in a strong position with his utterances about how he would move aside if anybody invested £20 million into the club, but in reality a much lower amount could have seen him off.

How do you mean? Lowe only had about 6 -7% of the shares and the entire old board had less than 30%, so it was relatively simple for anybody moderately rich to buy enough of a percentage in the club to outvote them, much as Wilde did. Lowe did a good job at giving the impression of being in a strong position with his utterances about how he would move aside if anybody invested £20 million into the club, but in reality a much lower amount could have seen him off.

I'll leave it to someone with better recall than me to explain how the voting structure was biased and complicated in favour of the board being able to block any takeover attempts but I have vague recollection of people who knew saying it was unnecessarily complex to preserve the incumbents' status - this before Lowe started asking for silly money for his shares.

Simply doing the job he was paid to do.

Surely 'outcome bias' is only relevant if the outcome is something that had a low probability of occurring? If you buy a house and it increases in value, is that a good investment or are you just lucky because the house didn't burn down during that time?

 

I may be mistaken in how I remember things, but I always thought the biggest damage to the club was done in the period when Rupert wasn't in charge (think it was Wilde). We spent lots of money in the Championship trying to get back up and we failed - a bit like Leeds gambling on getting back in the CL a couple of years before. I also think a lot of his managerial appointments could be justified.

Probability isn't particularly relevant. There's a clear distinction to be made between good decisions and good outcomes. Signing MS was a poor decision imo (due to the circumstances in which the club found itself) which had a very good outcome. I think there's a tendency to view the quality of decisions at least partly by their outcomes i.e.with the benefit of hindsight. Anyway, I dont want to sound like the house pedant. That's someone elses job on here. None of this is any reflection on MS at 18. His quality was evident even then.

Probability isn't particularly relevant. There's a clear distinction to be made between good decisions and good outcomes. Signing MS was a poor decision imo (due to the circumstances in which the club found itself) which had a very good outcome. I think there's a tendency to view the quality of decisions at least partly by their outcomes i.e.with the benefit of hindsight. Anyway, I dont want to sound like the house pedant. That's someone elses job on here. None of this is any reflection on MS at 18. His quality was evident even then.

Fair enough, I see your point, and I actually agree with it! The example of him getting injured (rather than just not turning out to be very good) made me think you were making a different argument. By the same token, you could probably say that a lot of Lowe's managerial appointments made sense at the time and only looked bad in hindsight. For example, I thought (for my sins) that Redknapp was exactly the right man to get us out of trouble...

Fair enough, I see your point, and I actually agree with it! The example of him getting injured (rather than just not turning out to be very good) made me think you were making a different argument. By the same token, you could probably say that a lot of Lowe's managerial appointments made sense at the time and only looked bad in hindsight. For example, I thought (for my sins) that Redknapp was exactly the right man to get us out of trouble...

I think many people thought that Redknapp was the man for the job. Clearly in hindsight it was a mistake. Wigley and Gray were both highly rated coaches and other clubs had used coaches and directors of football to good effect. The Dutch model also made sense on paper although once again it didn't work out in theory. For the failures there were also some good and high profile appointments Strachan, Hoddle, Jones etc - so it is not as though everything he and his Board did was a f**k up.

Lowe bankrupted the club because he never had a clue.

To keep a Premiership club in the Premiership with crowds of 15k would entail some level of competence wouldn't it? Or was it just luck? You also need to look at what Wilde and others did to the finances when Lowe left.

I find it quite funny seeing some people demonise Lowe as some kind of evil malevolent entity who existed solely to f**k up our club. It's easy to forget that he lost a fair amount of money too when the club went into administration, yes he was paid handsomely I'm sure to run the show but he put his own money on the line to get involved.

He was of course a victim through his own decisions so hopefully I havn't come across as too sympathetic. We all suffered through Lowe's errors, yet at the end of it he was just a businessman trying to keep a self sustaining tight ship. Sadly, that notion was incompatible with running a Premier League club. He didn't have enough clout to push us on, or even to remain competitive. This led to him trying creative approaches with coaching, which ultimately led to further complication and failure.

He wasn't all bad and did at least give us St Mary's and a strong academy, but he just was not the right fit. There is only one way to make a small fortune out of football, start with a large one... Rupert Lowe is one of many to learn this the hard way.

How can you run a football club where everyone hates your guts.

To keep a Premiership club in the Premiership with crowds of 15k would entail some level of competence wouldn't it? Or was it just luck? You also need to look at what Wilde and others did to the finances when Lowe left.

Exactly! If you spend money in the Premier League, you have more chance of staying up but the future of the club is at stake if you go down. As much as it would have been nice to invest, I always felt we were at least in a stable position when we were relegated because we hadn't blown the budget. Then the fans turned on Lowe, Wilde came in and spent loads of money in a bid to get promotion and we failed. We gambled and lost. Once the real damage to the club had been done, Rupert came back in and tried to find success through an alternative business model. He wasn't successful, but ultimately did lay the foundations for a business model that is. But because he was at the helm for the two relegations people hold him responsible for the demise.

How can you run a football club where everyone hates your guts.

A question you could ask of many football club fans.

Duncan, if you are still reading this thread - there is a good book to be written about Lowe's time at the club. Do you think he would be interested in telling his side of the story?

Duncan, if you are still reading this thread - there is a good book to be written about Lowe's time at the club. Do you think he would be interested in telling his side of the story?

I would certainly be very interested in that!!

I'm not quite sure which bit of your "MLT was duped" argument disagrees with anything FF has posted here, and you're well out of order (or just a bit thick) for calling him names based on a completely realistic assessment of precisely what was happening. You seem to have assumed that this is some kind of attack on Le Tiss - it isn't - no-one is saying MLT had anything but the best intentions for the club, he just happened to be backing the wrong side and it is absolutely a fact that without his support Pinnacle might have been unraveled more quickly. However, however it happened, it has turned out about as well as we could have expected for the club (Markus aside).

 

Katharina is clearly over it, Matt Le Tiss is, why aren't you?

My calling him a **** was tongue in cheek as it referred to his post, maybe I should have typed s**t. I think FF take on it was different to mine, maybe you are being a bit naive FF is a writer and considers his words carefully. It's not the first time he has dropped these little bombs and then scarpered. Do we really know that ML was walking away and why wouldn't it have been Fry's fault?

I'm completely over it but will defend MLT becasue imho it wasn't his fault in anyway.

Exactly! If you spend money in the Premier League, you have more chance of staying up but the future of the club is at stake if you go down. As much as it would have been nice to invest, I always felt we were at least in a stable position when we were relegated because we hadn't blown the budget. Then the fans turned on Lowe, Wilde came in and spent loads of money in a bid to get promotion and we failed. We gambled and lost. Once the real damage to the club had been done, Rupert came back in and tried to find success through an alternative business model. He wasn't successful, but ultimately did lay the foundations for a business model that is. But because he was at the helm for the two relegations people hold him responsible for the demise.

The real damage to the club was done by getting relegated in 2004/5 and then not going straight back up again. That's why fans turned on Lowe - he offered no hope. If he'd stayed then we would have had a period of managed decline, sinking slowly down the Championship and then ultimately out of it, and then sinking slowly down League 1, and ultimately out of it. He simply would not have deviated from his system. Wilde took a gamble and lost - really, the resulting financial strife of 2007-2009 hastened the descent down the Football League that would probably have happened under Lowe. We've been fortunate ever since.

The real damage to the club was done by getting relegated in 2004/5 and then not going straight back up again. That's why fans turned on Lowe - he offered no hope. If he'd stayed then we would have had a period of managed decline, sinking slowly down the Championship and then ultimately out of it, and then sinking slowly down League 1, and ultimately out of it. He simply would not have deviated from his system. Wilde took a gamble and lost - really, the resulting financial strife of 2007-2009 hastened the descent down the Football League that would probably have happened under Lowe. We've been fortunate ever since.

I disagree in that Lowe did deviate from his system when employing bagpus. He then gambled big by giving him the money to spend and wages on new players, without red**** having to sell before bringing them in.

Ultimately that gamble failed and tied his hands the following season as he desperately had to sell players to try and balance the books. He did a very good job of squeezing money out of Liverpool when the reality was we were in desperate trouble. By and large the summer was wasted getting players out rather than getting the right ones in, but saggychops still should have done better with the players we had left.

Pretty much every side that goes down struggles. Lowe would have ensured we at least could balance the books, however Wilde's gamble nearly killed us.

I'd be interested to know how many sides have bounced straight back up again. I see Fulham as a similar club to us in terms of size and they have struggled. Not easy.

I'd be interested to know how many sides have bounced straight back up again. I see Fulham as a similar club to us in terms of size and they have struggled. Not easy.

Do you? I don't. Using what criteria do you think they are similar?

The real damage to the club was done by getting relegated in 2004/5 and then not going straight back up again. That's why fans turned on Lowe - he offered no hope. If he'd stayed then we would have had a period of managed decline, sinking slowly down the Championship and then ultimately out of it, and then sinking slowly down League 1, and ultimately out of it. He simply would not have deviated from his system.

The system that took us to eighth and into Europe? That system?

Sorry, your scenario is just driven by "Lowe is the bogeyman" prejudice. Nothing in his behaviours or results suggest the doom scenario you've painted there.

If he had stayed at worst he would have run us, as ever, within our means. It may have meant a trip to L1 like Norwich, Forest, Leicester, Leeds but equally could have meant a return to the Premier League like the likes of Watford, Blackpool, Burnley managed with smaller budgets than Whiskey George had.

With a decent hit rate of perfectly competent managerial appointments - Strachan, Hoddle, Jones and (at the time a proven Championship pedigree) Burley, I would suggest that the balance of probability, we would have stabilised into mid table financially stable Championship mediocrity like, say, Derby County with a bit of play off/relegation flirting thrown in. Not quite the dreamland of today but more likely than your silly scenario.

My calling him a **** was tongue in cheek as it referred to his post, maybe I should have typed s**t. I think FF take on it was different to mine, maybe you are being a bit naive FF is a writer and considers his words carefully. It's not the first time he has dropped these little bombs and then scarpered. Do we really know that ML was walking away and why wouldn't it have been Fry's fault?

 

I'm completely over it but will defend MLT becasue imho it wasn't his fault in anyway.

I have not scarpered.

Matt did not do anything like enough diligence on Pinnacle, even when I told him the weekend before the deal collapsed that they were bogus he refused to believe me.

I am Matt's biggest fan but imo he was too ready to believe.

Duncan, if you are still reading this thread - there is a good book to be written about Lowe's time at the club. Do you think he would be interested in telling his side of the story?

Yes, I have tried to persuade David Bull to do it and he is keen writing it around Jason Dodd's biography but Jason remains to be convinced even though the club are content to let us do it subject to legal etc etc.

And yes I have been thinking about trying to interview Rupert Lowe, I hold no grudges as I believe he was doing what was he though was right. As you know I started to lose faith in him when he appointed Wrigley and it went rapidly down hill from there.

I have not scarpered.

Matt did not do anything like enough diligence on Pinnacle, even when I told him the weekend before the deal collapsed that they were bogus he refused to believe me.

I am Matt's biggest fan but imo he was too ready to believe.

Is he still mates with Lynam? I get the impression that he still refuses to accept (at least, that the deal wasn't bogus to start with) and that he's pretty loyal to his mates.

The system that took us to eighth and into Europe? That system?

 

Sorry, your scenario is just driven by "Lowe is the bogeyman" prejudice. Nothing in his behaviours or results suggest the doom scenario you've painted there.

 

If he had stayed at worst he would have run us, as ever, within our means. It may have meant a trip to L1 like Norwich, Forest, Leicester, Leeds but equally could have meant a return to the Premier League like the likes of Watford, Blackpool, Burnley managed with smaller budgets than Whiskey George had.

 

With a decent hit rate of perfectly competent managerial appointments - Strachan, Hoddle, Jones and (at the time a proven Championship pedigree) Burley, I would suggest that the balance of probability, we would have stabilised into mid table financially stable Championship mediocrity like, say, Derby County with a bit of play off/relegation flirting thrown in. Not quite the dreamland of today but more likely than your silly scenario.

But he didn't run us within our means whilst he was here or we wouldn't have been insolvent.

But he didn't run us within our means whilst he was here or we wouldn't have been insolvent.

That was a pretty long coma you were in around 2006 and 2007. Must have been tough for your family.