Jump to content

From 8-0 Sunderland to 0-9 Leicester - a journey of decline


manina-pub
 Share

Recommended Posts

Where did it all go wrong??

 

Well we had an owner who wasn't interested but was clever enough to know that in order to maximise return the club needed nurturing. So you sell high, buy low(ish) and keep things turning over. By luck or by good judgement this worked for a number of years. But it is nigh on impossible to keep this going, however much we tried to kid ourselves that it was fine and we were ahead of the game. And we are reaping what was sown. TBH I look at Leicester and where we were, the size of the respective clubs, the backgrounds etc, and think that we really shouldn't be too far apart (even if they did win the PL). Not that tonight was necessary to show the current gap between the 2 clubs, but it did. They are good. We are ****.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Recruitment is everything. If you bring in two or three players that go straight into the first team and improve the side, then you move forward. We buy players that don't get in the side or do, but are worse than what we had before. Multiply that by 5 years and you have 10-15 players that are worse than you had before. Which is exactly what we have. There isn't a player in this side that would get into the side of five or six years ago. The loss of quality at centre half is scary. We have gone from the likes of Fonte, Lovren, Alderweireld and VVD to Vestegaard, Yoshida, Bednerek, Stevens and Danso. It's now difficult to pinpoint who is to blame for this, but is probably the entire board, management, coaching and scouting teams.

 

Add to that, we have failed to develop any more genuine Premiership stars, having sold all of those we did develop. You can't expect to produce a Luke Shaw every other year and Premiership clubs like Chelsea, expanding their reach, seem to be taking the top youth talent that we we previously signing. We have lost ground and that will require new investment and massive improvements or our famed reputation for developing talent will start to become history.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have 2 STs in the Kingsland block 30, so over the past 4 seasons, give or take, that is £5800 for home league games only. I have bought additional tickets for home league games as well, so say £6k.

 

19/20 - P5 - W0, D1, L4

18/19 - P19 - W5, D8, L6

17/18 - P19 - W4, D7, L8

16/17 - P19 - W6, D6, L7

 

A total of P62 - W15, D22, L25 .... and 16/17 was when we finished 8th with Puel. And with the home games a quarter completed this season, I can't see us eclipsing the previous 3 seasons number of wins.

 

Basically I pay to be entertained and I think that I have been getting exceedingly poor value for money, and as such, I am likely to not renew (which I seem to say every season!!!!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What went wrong?

 

Shameful recruitment first and foremost. On both players and management.

 

We've sold a lot, generated a lot, but we have also spent that back out again in the main (at least the first year after Koeman). But the way the VVD money was wasted is nothing short of a criminal offence. Let's be honest.

 

Lemina, Boufal, Carrillo, Vesterguard, Hoj, Ings, Armstrong, Bedenerak, Gabbiadini, Pied, Hoedt, Elyounoussi, Gunn. Jury still out on Adams and Mousa. Redmond is ok, but he’s not a world beater.

 

But that's pretty much every signing (bug money, big wages) under the watch of Ross Wilson, and every one of those have offered us a fat zero in most cases. Given that they were replacements for Morgan, VVD, Tadic, Pelle, Mane etc – is it any surprise we’ve struggled? It's just a disaster and I don't know what we do to get out of this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think our problem was that we sold our best players at what at the the looked like good prices but at the suddenly rapidly inflating player cost meant that it was insufficient to hire equivalent replacement, and we seemed to be almost a season behind on how we did business as the big clubs tried to strong arm and we had to wait till next time to do business by which point the cost was much higher. Also everyone else caught on to doing what we were doing and replicated our information advantage (I am convinced Wenger’s early Arsenal success was based on his information advantage over the rest of the league on the relatively unknown at that time french league and able to bring in otherwise overlooked quality players.) And thirdly we believed our own hype that we had invented this great system that could function regardless of personel because it would always find the right people for all positions, instead of it being the exceptional talent of one individual who made us shine, Paul Mitchell. One other person in the system also believed that one person was responsible for success and not the system unfortunately they believed in the wrong person namely themselves and that was Less Reed.

 

So in summary we temporarily punched above our weight because we had the talents of Paul Mitchell and then everyone caught up. And yeah.....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Need 3 worse than us which at this precise time is looking difficult:

 

Watord ? Norwich ? plus 1 ?

 

Neither of those are worse than us. Sorry. Ps people were phoning the club asking for a refund and one guy even brought in his scarf to hand back.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Doing a Sunderland is a very possible reality, sack the manager, appoint someone worse, don't tackle the recruitment/backroom/board room issues we clearly have, go down, appoint another manager, struggle to get rid of overpaid underperforming players, go down again, sack another manager, rinse repeat.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Doing a Sunderland is a very possible reality, sack the manager, appoint someone worse, don't tackle the recruitment/backroom/board room issues we clearly have, go down, appoint another manager, struggle to get rid of overpaid underperforming players, go down again, sack another manager, rinse repeat.

 

We are tackling the backroom issues. We'll have to wait and see if we've tackled them well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are we? How? Genuine question.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Krueger, Reed and Wilson gone, replacements either here or in the pipeline but with a restructure. They reviewed all that over the summer, though we haven't had the results of it communicated in full. There's a mention in that Telegraph story today about ensuring there's one individual with ultimate power on transfers, which we apparently didn't have before.

 

New CFO as well, I believe, though that's a separate issue.

Edited by DuncanRG
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

View Terms of service (Terms of Use) and Privacy Policy (Privacy Policy) and Forum Guidelines ({Guidelines})