The way forward

I tend to agree with this and it's part of what is pissing me off so much at the minute. We are the equivalent of a 17 year old given the keys to a Veyron after 5 driving lessons. We have no idea what to do with it or how to get the most out of it, so we busy ourselves either wrapping it around trees or driving it to the corner shop and back because we're too nervous to go any further or faster.

Once things are back to normal, our stadium revenue should allow us a far quicker post-Covid financial recovery than any of our rivals save Chelsea and City who are funded illegally. The glaring problem is, with football like we're playing at the moment are we going to fill 60,000 seats? Some have argued that tourists will comfortably fill that allocation for at least a year until the novelty of the stadium wears off, but it'll be a long while yet until global tourism is back to pre-lockdown levels - I'd say possibly not until summer 2022. In the meantime, the club will be more reliant than ever on 'local' support to put bums on seats but as @remembercolinlee rightly asks, who in their right mind is shelling out £90-120 a go to watch this ****e?

 

I like most of this post but the issue is summed up by the three clubs you have quoted. To have a serious chance of winning the PL we have to be a lot better than all three of them. So they can't be the model we have to follow. Levy has already taken us from nowhere to being contenders. Let's try to improve further by trusting the guy who has brought us this far.

 

That's one analogy I guess .

I suppose even if you went by a bad case scenario and say we couldn't fill 10,000 seats due to the demand dropping, we'd still be bringing in a healthy number and more than old WHL. I'd like to think we'll still fill the stadium most weeks but a lot will depend on the football involved and how things are being run I guess. Obviously though, ticket prices is something the clubs needs to address and has been for a while, regardless of how we play.

 

More than half of the revenue comes from the premium seats. Fortunately there will still be plenty of people like me who can afford to pay £200 to £800 a match.
Hopefully Levy will set the other prices to fill the stadium.

 

Levy is also seeing us go from contenders to pretenders though at the moment.

For us to improve again we need to find and follow a successful model. The three clubs I've mentioned all have successful models, adopt that, tweak a few things and when we're ideally back to being contenders, then we can try figuring out how to go that one step further.

 

I agree with both points but the single biggest issue hovering over the stadium is the continuing lack of a sponsor. It represents a hole in our balance sheet that could and should be worth fee + wages for a world class player every other season. That is a massive problem.

And no mega-bucks sponsor is going near a stadium with swathes of thousands of empty seats.

 

Levy recently brought in a bloke called Todd Kline to try and secure a good naming rights deal, apparently he brokered a massive deal in America for their NFL teams. From the outset it's a good idea to bring someone like that in, which further strengthens the idea that from a business side of things Levy knows what he's doing.

What he's gotta do now is bring in a proper DoF who can manage the football side of things for us and let them sort out the cesspit we currently have.

 

I think the barrier to this happening is that it would require Levy to lose face. He’s not an idiot and can’t help surely but see that things aren’t going well on the pitch...though we could still in theory end up with two trophies this season which might make him feel vindicated in the Jose appointment.

But the appointment, and the signing of certain players, is Levy making big (and expensive) statements, and I don’t think he’ll like the idea of admitting he got them wrong. I’m not sure how realistic the idea of Levy canning Mourinho at the end of this season really is, and if he somehow wins us a trophy or two, then it’s even less likely to happen.

Plus if we think Levy isn’t the greatest at picking managers then how the hell do we expect him to nail the DoF appointment? I see the merits of that system by the way but it’s no guarantee of success anyway. Bringing a DoF in and allowing them to appoint a new manager is succession planning for Jose IMO, so you’d expect the DoF to come in maybe 6 months/1 year ahead of appointing the next manager to give him time to assess the squad and management structure before making an informed decision.

 

Is it bad that I am now praying we "fail to arrest the decline"?

Anyone want to join me in prayer?

 

Gotta be honest...after watching his team defend last week in the CL he'll love Sanchez and Dier

 

I'd rather we chuntered along to the end of the season in a way it's obvious what'll happen, yet the ubermensch keeps throwing players under the bus unaware that he's just handing Levy more rope

I mean there is the dream scenario where we somehow scrape the EL with an ungodly amount of dumb luck yet he gets sacked anyway, like van Galling was given the boot hours after an FA Cup win, but I don't want to be greedy...

 

I agree with most of what you're saying mate.

There's no doubt a DoF appointment and the work they'd need to do won't be a quick fix but for me it's all about putting the building blocks back in place that we seemingly knocked down over the last couple years. Poch lost his way and Jose hasn't really been able to find himself either, there's absolutely other factors at play involving players and at the top but I just want the club to start developing a strategy again. We all know it's far easier to fall off than it is to climb and as annoying as it is knowing we spurned a golden chance to do something special, we've got to try and get to that point again and then beyond.

For so many years we primarily looked at buying young players with the aim their talent and value would increase in time, then when the time came that they wanted out/ were pursued by bigger clubs, we'd sell at a very healthy profit to reinvest back into the side. We've lost a lot of players (both prospects and first teamers) for either well below their market value or for nothing at all in recent seasons whilst our buying policy has been scattered with has-beens, middle of the road players, a couple gems but a lot of failures too.

I want us to move forward under someone different than Levy from a footballing perspective, I think a fresh change really is needed now, he's had many years to improve us and whilst overall he's done a good job, he's had a lot of faults along the way and we're now in a position of decline due to a succession of said faults. It's why I want him sticking to what he does best on the business side but giving the footballing reigns/ responsibility to someone with a clearer idea and better understanding of scouting, transfers and a proper football structure - along with eventually a manager who can work within that structure too. As to who that DoF could be, hard to say, we know Campos is without a club but with Jose's future uncertain would Campos join a club where his good friend may be on the verge of being sacked?

Whether of course Levy would be willing to do such a thing, who knows? It's just what I feel right now could be pivotal for us to start moving forward again. The likely route though is that we just end up sacking Jose in the summer (unless there's a major turnaround in form) and hiring another manager in the hope they can do a Pochettino 2.0; rebuild us, improve us and then ultimately go that one step further that Poch couldn't manage.

 

I did say Nagelsmann, Rose or Potter would be my personal preferences, in that order too, should Jose be sacked now/ end of season. Rose is obviously off the menu now whereas Potter was more of the wildcard/ riskier option seeing as he hasn't got any elite level pedigree but Nagelsmann is the one that I think just about every top club are looking at whose managerial position may be a bit unsecure. He's the Erling Haaland of the managerial world at the moment. May be able to bring Sabitzer with him too

 

I agree. I think that if a DoF is appointed it’s a sure sign of change coming as I don’t think Jose is the type to work with one, he’s one of the old school of managers. My main worry is that the model doesn’t always work because it relies on the right DoF being picked (might not be Levy’s strong point) and on the club delivering on that DoF’s vision, which I think we could struggle with as well due to competition for players and Levy meddling in the football side of things post-appointment.

 

Didn't Jose work with Campos at one or two clubs in the past? If so, could very well have worked out so much better for us had we tried doing more to get Campos in when we appointed Jose.

Yeah there's no doubt picking the right person will be tough, we wouldn't know if it was right or not until about 12-18 months later either. I think looking at people who have maybe worked under the likes of Monchi/ Zorc/ Campos etc or at people from other clubs with proven modules could be a place to start.

That latter part of what you say would obviously be a potential issue. With a proper DoF I'd hope Levy would let them do their job with little/ no interference, when we hired Baldini I can't remember too much how they worked things out, he supposedly offered his resignation once it became apparent the majority of the 7 Bale replacements weren't good buys so maybe Levy did indeed hand the reigns over to him? Maybe he'll do so again one day, maybe lol.

 

Spot on. Especially the bit I've highlighted, which I haven't seen discussed nearly enough on our hallowed forum. It got me thinking...remember in the aftermath of the 'special relationship' (i.e. "bend over and hold still") we had with Real, how Levy's solemn promise in the wake of our 2 best players going there and us getting Comolli's Travelling Circus to replace them was that we would never sell a player to a rival? With the exception of Walker, who by most accounts Poch wanted gone anyway due to loud hissing noises, Levy more or less kept to that promise.

But was it worth it?

If the flipside of not acting like a stepping-stone club (which is what we were until very recently) is holding on to players through months if not years of injuries and growing disinterest, is it worth it? If ultimately you aren't willing to invest in the team without selling players first, which is still our central policy, is it really worth clinging on to the Eriksens and Alderweirelds of this world to a point where you are offered roughly 1/5th of their true value?

I know it's hindsight and all that, but frankly our transfer strategy seemed much more coherent when we were selling players as and when they wanted to leave, getting premium rates for them in the process. With the exception of the Bale money which as mentioned was Damian Comolli on a summer-long bender, here's our transfer cycle under ENIC...

SOLD Carrick
SIGNED Berbatov
SOLD Berbatov, Keane
SIGNED Modric, Palacios and Defoe
SOLD Modric
SIGNED Lloris, Dembele and Vertonghen
SOLD Bale
SIGNED erm...yeah...skip this one
SOLD Walker
SIGNED Sanchez and Aurier (ok they haven't quite worked out but we were excited about them at the time)

Since then, as you've said, we've seen multiple players long overstay their welcome. Was it worth it?

 

Why are people demanding we hire a DoF? Our track record with them leaves a lot to be desired

David Pleat - while he did stick to his brief of signing lower division talent, the issue was that for every Simon Davies who did succeed there was an Anthony Gardner or Gary Doherty who weren't up to standard but played anyway, although he did later recommend Dele

Frank Arnesen - fulfilled his brief to the letter by bringing through young English talent, even though Santini didn't want to play ball and froze out Carrick, and was instrumental in Martin Jol quickly rebuilding the team into what he wanted - and then got tapped up by Chelsea to take a demotion

Damien Comolli - undermined Jol at every turn, to the point of ignoring his requests and deciding he'd rather play Football Manager on Levy's dime, and having forced Jol out and got Ramos as he wanted he had a ****ing abysmal summer while Levy did the heavy lifting to bring in Modric

Franco Baldini - apparently didn't bother reading his brief, as he spunked away he Bale money within two weeks of being hired, presumably believing that any manager could integrate seven players into a team overnight with no issues in spite decades of evidence that n manager can sign a new team's worth of players and have them gel by January

Paul Mitchell - passed on Ousmane Dembele and Alexander Isek while recommending we go all out to sign Georges Kevin Nkoudou, but now he works for Monster Energy Dusseldorf the Reddit crowd think he's marvelous even though most of their team were signed when Mitchell was working for us

 

The Lunatic Fringe's obsession with us selling Harry Kane continues...

 

I mean that’s the obvious caveat and contradiction that has been highlighted - a DoF in theory gives us someone to handle the footballing side of things in a long-term manner and keep Levy away from day-to-day football work, but it requires Levy to pick the right man. Problem right there.