Dummies Guide to Trashing a Football Club

[lambtiss]

If you intentionally set out to completely bankrupt a club it would go something like this .........

1) Spend millions on kids that have no PL experience. Tick

2) Let your most experienced central Midfielder leave,  for peanuts, and replace him with an 18 year old. Tick.

3) Give your goalkeeper a long expensive contract and then replace him with a 19 year old who plays in League 1. Tick

4) Realise that your main team issue is that you don't have a striker and then not sign one Tick.

5) Having made dreadful transfer decisions, blame the manager and sack him. Tick.

6) Appoint a new manager who hasn't managed in the premiership before and who has a mental disorder. Tick

7) Buy expensive strikers in the January window to suit  mental disorders style of play and then sack him. Tick.

The coup de grace, just in case the previous derelictions weren't actually enough, appoint the bag carrier for the original manager who has never actually managed and then tell him he is now the manager and has to keep us up. Tick.

9) Finally, sitting at the foot of the league, needing wins to survive pick a team without any strikers including the expensive strikers bought in January. Tick

So Sports Republic, mission accomplished, 

Fucking genius.

Fuckin wankers

[FarehamSaintJames]

I’m posting a reply out of sympathy.

Not sure I agree with them looking to bankrupt the club, but it’s gone backwards rather than forwards in there tenure.

[RedArmy]

It goes back further than that. 
 

Selling our best players to help strengthen our rivals and replacing them with cheap alternatives will eventually lead to the situation we are in. 

[sfc4prem]

3 hours ago, RedArmy said:

It goes back further than that. 
 

Selling our best players to help strengthen our rivals and replacing them with cheap alternatives will eventually lead to the situation we are in. 

Danny Ings?

[S-Clarke]

7 hours ago, RedArmy said:

It goes back further than that. 
 

Selling our best players to help strengthen our rivals and replacing them with cheap alternatives will eventually lead to the situation we are in. 

Ings was the sale that broke the camels back for me. The club even came out (I think it was Gareth Edwards at the time) to say how good the deal was for us, and we did well to get what we did, pat on the back for all etc etc. Good for you. Just a shame they reinvested it in an absolute moron called Adam Armstrong.

[RedArmy]

4 hours ago, sfc4prem said:

Danny Ings?

The start of the process was selling Lallana, Lambert, Shaw and Lovren in one season. Granted we got lucky for a couple of seasons and picked up some gems (who we also later sold) but season by season the replacements got worse and worse until we’re left with a squad that is flirting with relegation year after year until our luck finally ran out. 

[CB Fry]

55 minutes ago, RedArmy said:

The start of the process was selling Lallana, Lambert, Shaw and Lovren in one season. Granted we got lucky for a couple of seasons and picked up some gems (who we also later sold) but season by season the replacements got worse and worse until we’re left with a squad that is flirting with relegation year after year until our luck finally ran out. 

Jesus wept.

We finish 7th and 6th and then 8th after your supposed "start of the process".

That includes our highest finish and highest ever points in any Premier League season. I doubt we'll ever beat that.

Honestly you have to be some kind of prick just to write that off as "we got lucky for a couple of seasons."

 

[cambsaint]

You infer we wanted to sell those players. As i recall they mostly wanted to go to bigger clubs for more money.

Imo the biggest mistake was to disregard the fact that Ralph's tactics had been well ad truly worked out he and wasn't getting the best out of our players. We should have started looking for a better manager and appointed him during the break. Second obvious mistake was not to have approached Dyche when things were going bad earlier this season. 

I agree that the transfers were wrong, and we should have tried for at least one experienced striker.

Could we have got Antonio from West Ham at a reasonable price then?

[Micky]

The bottom line is we have made so many mistakes over the past 3 to 4 seasons that we deserve to be where we are.  We got so wrapped up in 'the Southampton way' we failed to see when it patently went wrong.   Not replacing proven players with the same, or better quality,  has eroded the squad to probably league one levels.  Danny Ings,  Oriel Romeo, Adam Armstrong, a prem standard goalkeeper,  the Welsh experiment followed by our current 'manager', how many levels of incompetence do you think you can survive. 

The Club is rotten from top to bottom, relegation won't fix the problem it will only hasten our demise further. Think back to what it took to get this club back to the Premiere League after our last relegation, is there another Markus Liebherr waiting in the wings to pour millions into the club, I think not. 

We are down and we won't be back for many years I fear. 

[Spark]

5 hours ago, CB Fry said:

Jesus wept.

We finish 7th and 6th and then 8th after your supposed "start of the process".

That includes our highest finish and highest ever points in any Premier League season. I doubt we'll ever beat that.

Honestly you have to be some kind of prick just to write that off as "we got lucky for a couple of seasons."

 

Come on man, you knew what he meant. yes we did well while using paul mitchells list he made (and claiming it was the black box lmfao), and then koeman making up for him leaving with some great buys that were clearly the managers (Pelle, Tadic etc etc). But after koeman left we got puel and actively chose to downgrade the level of player we were buying in order to have a larger squad for europa.
The level of player we buy in never increased back to previous levels after that, just got worse.
We actually got hit double as bad because just after we sold everyone, prices rocketed (lost out on 30m the summer mane went because we sold him early in window before prices rocketed).
Plus academy not giving us anyone compounded the issues even more.

Edited 29 April, 2023 by Spark
slight change of wording

[CB Fry]

2 hours ago, Spark said:

Come on man, you knew what he meant.

Yes, I know exactly what he meant, and it is moronic.

There is a section on this forum that had a narrative in their head after the summer of 2014 and when that narrative did not actually happen (because we had our two best ever Premier League seasons) they just decide that it did happen anyway, things did all go to shit and finishing 7th and 6th was some accident or just "luck" that covered up what was really happening.

The same people would never describe our promotion to the PL as "we got lucky" and they'd never describe Puel's season where we lost a £75m centre back for a half a season as "we got unlucky".

Oh no no no luck had nothing to do with any of those other seasons,no sir, just the ones where we finished 7th and 6th which was all some massive fluke because it suits the agenda some people want to make.

 

Edited 29 April, 2023 by CB Fry

[rooney]

Come on Adam organise a Fans Forum so we can hear what SR have to say.

[Fitzhugh Fella]

9 hours ago, S-Clarke said:

Ings was the sale that broke the camels back for me. The club even came out (I think it was Gareth Edwards at the time) to say how good the deal was for us, and we did well to get what we did, pat on the back for all etc etc. Good for you. Just a shame they reinvested it in an absolute moron called Adam Armstrong.

I think it was Semmens who described the transfer of Ings as “a no brainer”.

[Whitey Grandad]

2 hours ago, Fitzhugh Fella said:

I think it was Semmens who described the transfer of Ings as “a no brainer”.

It’s the sort of thing that people with no brains do.

[S-Clarke]

3 hours ago, Fitzhugh Fella said:

I think it was Semmens who described the transfer of Ings as “a no brainer”.

He probably did say something, but I'm sure the financial guy popped his voice in as well.

Good success for those guys though, as they say it doesn't matter where we finish - just how we develop players, but ultimately that just means what they make profit wise.

[Spark]

13 hours ago, CB Fry said:

Yes, I know exactly what he meant, and it is moronic.

There is a section on this forum that had a narrative in their head after the summer of 2014 and when that narrative did not actually happen (because we had our two best ever Premier League seasons) they just decide that it did happen anyway, things did all go to shit and finishing 7th and 6th was some accident or just "luck" that covered up what was really happening.

The same people would never describe our promotion to the PL as "we got lucky" and they'd never describe Puel's season where we lost a £75m centre back for a half a season as "we got unlucky".

Oh no no no luck had nothing to do with any of those other seasons,no sir, just the ones where we finished 7th and 6th which was all some massive fluke because it suits the agenda some people want to make.

 

He just set his dates too early and youre making out it makes the whole main jist of his point invalid. Stop being a pedantic arse ffs. The sales caught up to us  , we had like 20 points less the next season after selling everyone, yet a poor league covered it up with league position.  Replacing mane with remond oh yeah we really kept at it the same way didnt we, didnt affect us at all.  Lmao what. You les reed in disguise or what?

[Forester]

11 minutes ago, Spark said:

He just set his dates too early and youre making out it makes the whole main jist of his point invalid. Stop being a pedantic arse ffs. The sales caught up to us  , we had like 20 points less the next season after selling everyone, yet a poor league covered it up with league position.  Replacing mane with remond oh yeah we really kept at it the same way didnt we, didnt affect us at all.  Lmao what. You les reed in disguise or what?

To be fair to CB you are all over the place my friend.  Your reference to 20 points down and Redmond is two years later when Puel replaced Koeman.    The original post was talking about Poch leaving and those five players listed going.  They were replaced by, amongst others, Pelle, Tadic, Mane, Bertrand and Cedric under Koeman.

[Killers Knee]

It all started with the departure of the visionary Cortese.  We caught the wave he created with Koeman, but it’s been a sinking ship since then.

[S-Clarke]

2 minutes ago, Killers Knee said:

It all started with the departure of the visionary Cortese.  We caught the wave he created with Koeman, but it’s been a sinking ship since then.

It was all well and good being visionary, but he was using someone else's money and had no means to fund the plans himself. He couldn't keep running to Kat to beg and borrow more of Markus wealth, thus his plan wasn't sustainable. 

I also know people who worked at the club when Cortese was around, he was absolutely HATED. People dreaded going into work, it was a dictatorship. The bloke was a loose cannon playing games with someone elses dosh and it was always going to end the way it did.

I notice he never turned up at AC Milan.

[trousers]

I wonder what Cortese could have achieved with the transfer kitties that Dragan sanctioned over the last two windows? Given he was very good at spending someone else's money...

[Turkish]

14 hours ago, Fitzhugh Fella said:

I think it was Semmens who described the transfer of Ings as “a no brainer”.

Sums him up doesn’t it really. Completely and utterly clueless when it comes to anything to do with football

[Turkish]

7 minutes ago, trousers said:

I wonder what Cortese could have achieved with the transfer kitties that Dragan sanctioned over the last two windows? Given he was very good at spending someone else's money...

Probably signed an unhinged Latin striker that headbutts his own teammates 

[Dusic]

11 minutes ago, Turkish said:

Sums him up doesn’t it really. Completely and utterly clueless when it comes to anything to do with football

Genuine question, once Ings made it absolutely clear that he wasn't going to sign a new contract and in a yesr would leave for free, surely it was a no brainer to accept an offer of upwards of £25m for him?

The issue is that we couldn't persuade him to re-sign with us and that he wasn't adequately replaced, the decision to sell him was kind of obvious.

 

Edited 29 April, 2023 by Dusic

[trousers]

13 minutes ago, Turkish said:

Probably signed an unhinged Latin striker that headbutts his own teammates 

Now, that could knock some sense into some of our players...

[Turkish]

1 hour ago, Killers Knee said:

It all started with the departure of the visionary Cortese.  We caught the wave he created with Koeman, but it’s been a sinking ship since then.

Visionary 🤣🤣🤣

He was an ego with someone else’s credit card. Anyone can tell people what they want to hear whilst throwing cash and their weight around. 

[Turkish]

Just now, trousers said:

Now, that could knock some sense into some of our players...

to Be fair it wouldn’t be a bad thing at the moment 

[Miltonaggro]

30 minutes ago, Turkish said:

Probably signed an unhinged Latin striker that headbutts his own teammates 

That said, Oswaldo would likely be our top scorer this season, even with missing 75% of the matches through suspension.

[CB Fry]

11 hours ago, Spark said:

He just set his dates too early and youre making out it makes the whole main jist of his point invalid. Stop being a pedantic arse ffs. The sales caught up to us  , we had like 20 points less the next season after selling everyone, yet a poor league covered it up with league position.  Replacing mane with remond oh yeah we really kept at it the same way didnt we, didnt affect us at all.  Lmao what. You les reed in disguise or what?

Thanks for delivering a perfect example of the mindset I was referring to.

He "just" got the dates wrong.....then proceed to do the old Nathan Redmond routine which is two seasons after the time I was talking about.

It's amazing how much of an inconvenience it is to some people that our best ever two seasons in the Premier League happened at all, that it's "pedantic" to even mention them.

Edited 30 April, 2023 by CB Fry

[whelk]

Whilst SR have been shit will give them credit for trying. Plenty of asset stripping owners who have deliberately ruined clubs for greed. These lot have just got in badly wrong.

 

[saint1977]

1 hour ago, whelk said:

Whilst SR have been shit will give them credit for trying. Plenty of asset stripping owners who have deliberately ruined clubs for greed. These lot have just got in badly wrong.

 

Agree with this, and we mustn’t forget the gross mismanagement went back to 2016 with first Les, and then Semmens which let an owner who failed even a flimsy FPPT into the PL. The important thing is what happens next - Wilcox needs to be hiring one of three groups of managers to repair some of the damage and inject forward momentum:

- Proven at the Champ level - Cooper, or Benitez (Warnock too old)

- A Kompany type name with some experience and great contacts book (Gerrard, Rooney, Vieira but not Lampard. PV it could be with Wilcox)

- Or a newly qualified coach with both playing gravitas to reconnect with the fans eg Lallana or Fonte

Any more ‘clever’ shit from Rasmus and the club will lose 10k active fans overnight. 

[S-Clarke]

1 hour ago, whelk said:

Whilst SR have been shit will give them credit for trying. Plenty of asset stripping owners who have deliberately ruined clubs for greed. These lot have just got in badly wrong.

 

This is one thing you can't deny, have said this before - they've put their money where their mouth is and have tried. We weren't perfect when they came in, let's not kid ourselves, we had lots of issues, failing people and were just keeping our head above water. Things needed to change and they have been an enabler for that financially.

The 100% problem has been the decisions they've made and probably the people who have made those decisions. The right intentions were there I'm sure, but the execution has been catastrophic. It's like they don't know about football.

[Spark]

On 30/04/2023 at 08:34, CB Fry said:

Thanks for delivering a perfect example of the mindset I was referring to.

He "just" got the dates wrong.....then proceed to do the old Nathan Redmond routine which is two seasons after the time I was talking about.

It's amazing how much of an inconvenience it is to some people that our best ever two seasons in the Premier League happened at all, that it's "pedantic" to even mention them.

Mindset? So that means you have the mindset that constantly selling is ok? Fucking deluded or what you doughnut. Going down and youre stil defending it all. Wake the fuk up . stop being a bootlicker. For the selling to work you have to constantly get recruitment right.

Yet we relied on 2 people and let them leave then wonderd why our buying wasnt any good after that.

You cant constantly be succesful with that method, its unsustainable. Even the best wil mess up the recruitment eventually, their recruitment staff being tempted elsewhere etcc. . It just doesnt work long term. 

Also, you cant predict how markets will change so it carries the same risk as the stock market or housing market. You might sell a player then prices jump...EXACTLY like happened with us with Mane! So we lost out on 30m and it meant we couldnt replace him to anywhere same standard without spending all of the money we received for him (pathetic 33m).

Then we blew the rest on shite for europa, again, because prices had jumped.

You have to be lucky AF for those tactics to work.

 

Edited 10 May, 2023 by Spark
.

[Ex Lion Tamer]

On 28/04/2023 at 14:07, lambtiss said:

If you intentionally set out to completely bankrupt a club it would go something like this .........

1) Spend millions on kids that have no PL experience. Tick

2) Let your most experienced central Midfielder leave,  for peanuts, and replace him with an 18 year old. Tick.

3) Give your goalkeeper a long expensive contract and then replace him with a 19 year old who plays in League 1. Tick

4) Realise that your main team issue is that you don't have a striker and then not sign one Tick.

5) Having made dreadful transfer decisions, blame the manager and sack him. Tick.

6) Appoint a new manager who hasn't managed in the premiership before and who has a mental disorder. Tick

7) Buy expensive strikers in the January window to suit  mental disorders style of play and then sack him. Tick.

The coup de grace, just in case the previous derelictions weren't actually enough, appoint the bag carrier for the original manager who has never actually managed and then tell him he is now the manager and has to keep us up. Tick.

9) Finally, sitting at the foot of the league, needing wins to survive pick a team without any strikers including the expensive strikers bought in January. Tick

So Sports Republic, mission accomplished, 

Fucking genius.

Fuckin wankers

I thought your post was funny and summarises a lot of the mistakes that have been made, but if we're being fair, it wasn't SR who gave McCarthy the new contract or left Onuachu/Mara on the bench

[Miltonaggro]

This absolute gem, 'Raising a Winner', has yet to be translated into English. Here's the blurb:

‘Rasmus Ankersen's conclusion is crystal clear: Talent is greatly overrated! If you want to reach top class, you must train for at least 10,000 hours. Whether your name is Tiger Woods, Wolfgang Mozart or Caroline Wozniacki. The world's top performers have not had a special talent’

Hopefully it will come in handy in the Championship. Fuck me!

 

[Toussaint]

17 minutes ago, Miltonaggro said:

This absolute gem, 'Raising a Winner', has yet to be translated into English. Here's the blurb:

‘Rasmus Ankersen's conclusion is crystal clear: Talent is greatly overrated! If you want to reach top class, you must train for at least 10,000 hours. Whether your name is Tiger Woods, Wolfgang Mozart or Caroline Wozniacki. The world's top performers have not had a special talent’

Hopefully it will come in handy in the Championship. Fuck me!

 

What a creepy looking chap he is.  

[Whitey Grandad]

Mozart was a musical genius from a very early age. I doubt that it was down to the training he put in.

[Turkish]

17 minutes ago, Miltonaggro said:

This absolute gem, 'Raising a Winner', has yet to be translated into English. Here's the blurb:

‘Rasmus Ankersen's conclusion is crystal clear: Talent is greatly overrated! If you want to reach top class, you must train for at least 10,000 hours. Whether your name is Tiger Woods, Wolfgang Mozart or Caroline Wozniacki. The world's top performers have not had a special talent’

Hopefully it will come in handy in the Championship. Fuck me!

 

That isn’t Rasmus conclusion it’s a very old school of thought that to reach elite level at anything you need 10000 hours of proper practice. Pretty obvious really, Gary Player said the more I practice the luckier I get 50 odd years ago. 

[Whitey Grandad]

2 minutes ago, Turkish said:

That isn’t Rasmus conclusion it’s a very old school of thought that to reach elite level at anything you need 10000 hours of proper practice. Pretty obvious really, Gary Player said the more I practice the luckier I get 50 odd years ago. 

But it doesn’t mean that if you train for 10,000 hours you are going to be brilliant at what you do.

Some people will never learn.

[ooh it's a corner]

31 minutes ago, Miltonaggro said:

This absolute gem, 'Raising a Winner', has yet to be translated into English. Here's the blurb:

‘Rasmus Ankersen's conclusion is crystal clear: Talent is greatly overrated! If you want to reach top class, you must train for at least 10,000 hours. Whether your name is Tiger Woods, Wolfgang Mozart or Caroline Wozniacki. The world's top performers have not had a special talent’

Hopefully it will come in handy in the Championship. Fuck me!

 

 I agree entirely with this.

By my maths, this means if Rasmus works a very solid 50 hours per week, then in about 4 years time, he will be an expert at running a football club.

Whilst he is slowly earning that experience and skillset, fuck knows what will happen to our football club, because by his own definition, he must be a rank amateur at the moment.

What a knob.

[Smirking_Saint]

On 29/04/2023 at 21:04, Killers Knee said:

It all started with the departure of the visionary Cortese.  We caught the wave he created with Koeman, but it’s been a sinking ship since then.

Such a visionary that he never worked in football again…

[Miltonaggro]

32 minutes ago, Turkish said:

That isn’t Rasmus conclusion it’s a very old school of thought that to reach elite level at anything you need 10000 hours of proper practice. Pretty obvious really, Gary Player said the more I practice the luckier I get 50 odd years ago. 

As did Gary Wilmot in the 80s 🙂

[Turkish]

19 minutes ago, Smirking_Saint said:

Such a visionary that he never worked in football again…

Quite. AC Milan courted him the whole time he was with us, 10 years on he's still not working there or anywhere else in football. Wonder why that is.

[Chez]

On 28/04/2023 at 22:47, RedArmy said:

The start of the process was selling Lallana, Lambert, Shaw and Lovren in one season. Granted we got lucky for a couple of seasons and picked up some gems (who we also later sold) but season by season the replacements got worse and worse until we’re left with a squad that is flirting with relegation year after year until our luck finally ran out. 

I'm with you here. I think that summer (and perhaps the 6 months running up to it when negotiations really took place) was pivotal. Offer Luke Shaw a £100k a week five year contract and maybe, just maybe, he stays and then Pochettino thinks we really mean business here and he stays, possibly along with Lallana and Lovren etc.

Perhaps I'm dreaming, but I think retaining Shaw on a monster contract would have been a major statement of intent. No idea how we would have actually financed that contract and perhaps the others, but for me there was a window of opportunity there to stake a claim at the top table - that probably will never happen again. 

 

[RedArmy]

26 minutes ago, Chez said:

I'm with you here. I think that summer (and perhaps the 6 months running up to it when negotiations really took place) was pivotal. Offer Luke Shaw a £100k a week five year contract and maybe, just maybe, he stays and then Pochettino thinks we really mean business here and he stays, possibly along with Lallana and Lovren etc.

Perhaps I'm dreaming, but I think retaining Shaw on a monster contract would have been a major statement of intent. No idea how we would have actually financed that contract and perhaps the others, but for me there was a window of opportunity there to stake a claim at the top table - that probably will never happen again. 

 

It’s the exact moment we stopped being a football club and became a business. 
 

No football club with aspirations to improve its stature sell’s its best players to the teams that it’s trying to leapfrog. 
 

We did get lucky with the 2 Koeman seasons, I’m not really sure what CB Fry is trying to argue. If there was no element of luck and it was based purely on a sound business model and the mythical black box then that business model would have stood the test of time and it did not. Without Koeman that could have gone catastrophically wrong. It was his knowledge of the Dutch league and Dutch players that helped us maintain our form, as soon as he left the black box was exposed for what it truly was…a fancy idea that was useless without any brains to back it up. 
 

 

[aintforever]

2 minutes ago, RedArmy said:

It’s the exact moment we stopped being a football club and became a business. 
 

No football club with aspirations to improve its stature sell’s its best players to the teams that it’s trying to leapfrog. 
 

We did get lucky with the 2 Koeman seasons, I’m not really sure what CB Fry is trying to argue. If there was no element of luck and it was based purely on a sound business model and the mythical black box then that business model would have stood the test of time and it did not. Without Koeman that could have gone catastrophically wrong. It was his knowledge of the Dutch league and Dutch players that helped us maintain our form, as soon as he left the black box was exposed for what it truly was…a fancy idea that was useless without any brains to back it up. 
 

 

So in short, if we had loads of money we could have kept our best players and been much better.

Cheers for that.

[CB Fry]

2 hours ago, Spark said:

Mindset? So that means you have the mindset that constantly selling is ok? Fucking deluded or what you doughnut. Going down and youre stil defending it all. Wake the fuk up . stop being a bootlicker. For the selling to work you have to constantly get recruitment right.

Yet we relied on 2 people and let them leave then wonderd why our buying wasnt any good after that.

You cant constantly be succesful with that method, its unsustainable. Even the best wil mess up the recruitment eventually, their recruitment staff being tempted elsewhere etcc. . It just doesnt work long term. 

Also, you cant predict how markets will change so it carries the same risk as the stock market or housing market. You might sell a player then prices jump...EXACTLY like happened with us with Mane! So we lost out on 30m and it meant we couldnt replace him to anywhere same standard without spending all of the money we received for him (pathetic 33m).

Then we blew the rest on shite for europa, again, because prices had jumped.

You have to be lucky AF for those tactics to work.

 

You took your time with that reply.

You seem to be arguing a load of points that I haven't even mentioned but carry on frothing sweetheart.

Mane was a record transfer at the time - definitely was Liverpool's biggest ever fee - so obviously not "pathetic". Grow up.

The issue I have is people twatting on about Adam Lallana, about Nathan Redmond, and the fee we got for Mane. Wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

Wah wah wah of course the decline all started in the summer of 2014, nine bloody years ago....A "decline" that involved our two best ever Premier League finishes that we will likely never repeat. Of course that was a decline, of course it was. Jesus wept.

We've changed owners and managers multiple times since.

So our relegation this season has got fuck all to do with selling Rickie Lambert, fuck all to do with Koeman leaving, fuck all to do with Van Dyk, fuck all to do with Les Reed, fuck all to do with the Hockey guy, fuck all to do with Mark Hughes or Danny Ings even. Fuck all.

We spent £150m net this season, we're under new ownership and we made some disastrous decisions on managers and players.

You're twatting on about the "selling players" routine like some chump pundit on Talksport but we had a close season last summer where we didn't sell anyone and spent a fortune.

Just a load of cliche half thought through shite you can grab at but not the actual issue at all. Wah wah wah.

I know you are in a breed of people absolutely desperate to draw everything bad back to wah wah wah Cortese left us but grow up. Nine years ago is irrelevant. Irrelevant.

Grow up.

[CB Fry]

5 minutes ago, RedArmy said:

We did get lucky with the 2 Koeman seasons, I’m not really sure what CB Fry is trying to argue. If there was no element of luck and it was based purely on a sound business model

If it's all luck then you can suck up this season then. We're just unlucky to go down. 

Right?

[St Louis]

42 minutes ago, Chez said:

I'm with you here. I think that summer (and perhaps the 6 months running up to it when negotiations really took place) was pivotal. Offer Luke Shaw a £100k a week five year contract and maybe, just maybe, he stays and then Pochettino thinks we really mean business here and he stays, possibly along with Lallana and Lovren etc.

Perhaps I'm dreaming, but I think retaining Shaw on a monster contract would have been a major statement of intent. No idea how we would have actually financed that contract and perhaps the others, but for me there was a window of opportunity there to stake a claim at the top table - that probably will never happen again. 

 

I'm sorry, but footballers do not turn down Man Utd to stay and play for Southampton. It's just as simple as that, there is no way he was staying once Man Utd (and others) wanted him, and that's not Southampton's fault, its just modern football.

[RedArmy]

16 minutes ago, CB Fry said:

If it's all luck then you can suck up this season then. We're just unlucky to go down. 

Right?

If you count being run by cretins as unlucky then yes I’d agree with you. 

[CB Fry]

3 minutes ago, RedArmy said:

If you count being run by cretins as unlucky then yes I’d agree with you. 

And if you think a "sound business model" means we finish eighth or better every single season forever than God help you.

Edited 10 May, 2023 by CB Fry