• The first stage of the forum upgrades has now been completed but they remain in a degraded state and are still being worked on.
    Please read this thread for more details.
    New user registrations are currently disabled.

Significant investment by FPP has been made

Status
Not open for further replies.

The Sheepfolds End said:
It was absolutely clear what Donald meant when he was talking about budget in the podcast when it was discussed. And it was absolutely to do with transfers and recruitment. Go back and listen to the podcast again, listen to the context and then maybe reassess.

And whilst the 100 point thing is being used as a stick to beat Donald with, he did indeed open himself up to that. Why would he do that to the manager? Why would he say it? Especially when we were clearly having to cut the wage bill and reduce the quality and depth of the squad to make us financially viable? It was a moment of absolute madness that made life incredibly difficult for the manager and raised expectation. It was as daft as Moyes and the ‘relegation battle’ comment.
Click to expand...

To me, the "daft thing" to do is to analyse every word out of everyone at the club's mouths with a fine toothcomb looking for either something to go overboard with excitement about or something to go overboard with rage about.

It seems that some folks on here only have 2 settings - ABSOLUTELY OVERJOYED and ABSOLUTELY INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE. Three if you include "worn out to the point of apathy and depression after too many years of leaping randomly between those original two settings".
 
partridge amongst the pig said:
The output on the pitch would suggest they're not doing a great job with this plan of theirs mind.
Click to expand...
Was it only me that was at the play off final last season where we were 30 minutes away from being promoted? Things didn't go our way but people are talking like we're in the relegation zone. We're 3 points off the play off places and 8 points from 1st in the league with 32 games left and 96 points to play for.
 
fyl2u said:
"There’s a large scouting network now being put in place by Tony Coton, including substantial numbers of scouts in this country, Scandanavia and elsewhere."

That's one less thing for the whingers to bawl about.


That's exactly what they're doing according to CM in that interview in the Echo.
Click to expand...

To be fair the ‘one things less for the whingers to bawl about’ comment is condescending and a sweeping generalisation.
I’m delighted that we’ve got these blokes on board and hope it’s the start of something special.
I’ve also got serious reservations that the team/person tasked with setting up the scouting network is up to the task regardless of Methven’s supporting statement.
Let’s be honest Hill, Reid and Coton were his and Donald’s choice and given Ross’s failure they’d be unlikely to come out and be overly critical of them at this stage.
Hopefully the FPP people have someone from outside the existing regime monitoring progress in the coming months.
For me the failure to take decisive action in the aftermath of the playoff final defeat will cost us automatic promotion this season. We can’t improve the playing staff until January and we need to keep within striking distance until then but we’re winning less than half of our games so far this season.
I just hope we can make it through the playoffs this time around.
To do that we will need to have a seriously good January.
 
viccarlton said:
The business world is beyond me, I look at our team and our position in the league (the lowest in our history) their worth as far as I’m concerned is in where our team is, at the moment we’re abysmal and this needs to be addressed with utmost importance, I couldn’t give a f#ck who owns the club and how much money they will make in the future (their main aim) all I want is a decent football team.
Click to expand...

Ultimately this is what it comes down to. We are watching poor football that produces inconsistent results and are seeing players, and now a manager, to the club who have either been rejected by their previous clubs (usually bottom end Championship or middling to top end league one). We are seeing very few young academy players coming into the side and making any kind of impression and seeing our 18s and 23s get battered with regularity.

Until that turns around, it’s very difficult to give a great deal of credit to the people who are running the show. There have been very few positive indicators on the park in the last 18 months, particularly since January.

Hopefully, this new investment will start to change things round.
 
chriswallace85 said:
Gerraway.

I was referring back to @fyl2u's comment that Donald had said from the start we'd strip back and look for investment. That's bollocks. Investment was mentioned a lot times but he at pains to say it wouldn't be needed now, and might not even be needed in the future. Yet here are, still in League 1, courting investment for months on end whilst the footballing operation of the club has undoubtedly suffered.

So the money goes into infrastructure - into scouting networks, into this and that - and what of the first team squad? Are we just closing our eyes and crossing our fingers hoping that Parky pull off a miracle? Or are we settling in for another 18 months of League 1? Are we already "planning" for 2019/2020 or is our newfound wealth going to restructure our recruitment team in such a way that we unearth some cheap talent (cos the investment isn't for the team remember) in the January transfer window to all us to push for promotion this season? It's 1st November. I'm not exactly optimistic.
Click to expand...

The scouting network will help us target players from a much larger pool of talent than we had been. I.e. it will enable us to buy better players for whatever division we're in.
The youth recruitment and academy coaching improvements will enable u to target better players at a younger age and develop a greater number of players into first team players and saleable assets.
Improvements to these areas weren't deemed essential to our chances of getting promoted, and therefore SD hasn't broken his word when he said we didn't "need" investment to get us out of League 1. Now that we have investment money to spend on these areas though, our chances in the future will be improved.

This is a good thing.

I don't understand why some of you are so angry today. Of all days!
ab 65 said:
To be fair the ‘one things less for the whingers to bawl about’ comment is condescending and a sweeping generalisation.
I’m delighted that we’ve got these blokes on board and hope it’s the start of something special.
I’ve also got serious reservations that the team/person tasked with setting up the scouting network is up to the task regardless of Methven’s supporting statement.
Let’s be honest Hill, Reid and Coton were his and Donald’s choice and given Ross’s failure they’d be unlikely to come out and be overly critical of them at this stage.
Hopefully the FPP people have someone from outside the existing regime monitoring progress in the coming months.
For me the failure to take decisive action in the aftermath of the playoff final defeat will cost us automatic promotion this season. We can’t improve the playing staff until January and we need to keep within striking distance until then but we’re winning less than half of our games so far this season.
I just hope we can make it through the playoffs this time around.
To do that we will need to have a seriously good January.
Click to expand...

It's only a sweeping generalisation of whingers and bawlers. ;-)
 
Last edited:
fyl2u said:
To me, the "daft thing" to do is to analyse every word out of everyone at the club's mouths with a fine toothcomb looking for either something to go overboard with excitement about or something to go overboard with rage about.

It seems that some folks on here only have 2 settings - ABSOLUTELY OVERJOYED and ABSOLUTELY INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE. Three if you include "worn out to the point of apathy and depression after too many years of leaping randomly between those original two settings".
Click to expand...

with all due respect, you’re making some fairy big generalisations there. Quite a lot of people are neither overjoyed nor incandescent with rage. Calling people ‘whingers’, as I have just seen you do, for quite correctly wondering and questioning whether we have any kind of scouting network (we clearly didn’t now that Methven has confirmed we will be implementing one) is fairly unreasonable.
 
fyl2u said:
The scouting network will help us target players from a much larger pool of talent than we had been. I.e. it will enable us to buy better players for whatever division we're in.
The youth recruitment and academy coaching improvements will enable u to target better players at a younger age and develop a greater number of players into first team players and saleable assets.
Improvements to these areas weren't deemed essential to our chances of getting promoted, and therefore SD hasn't broken his word when he said we didn't "need" investment to get us out of League 1. Now that we have investment money to spend on these areas though, our chances in the future will be improved.

This is a good thing.

I don't understand why some of you are so angry today. Of all days!


It's only a sweeping generalisation of whingers and bawlers. ;)
Click to expand...
I think some posters just have moan on autopilot and can't take manual control anymore.
 
The Sheepfolds End said:
with all due respect, you’re making some fairy big generalisations there. Quite a lot of people are neither overjoyed nor incandescent with rage. Calling people ‘whingers’, as I have just seen you do, for quite correctly wondering and questioning whether we have any kind of scouting network (we clearly didn’t now that Methven has confirmed we will be implementing one) is fairly unreasonable.
Click to expand...

Not everyone is as measured and balanced as your fine self. Therefore you don't fit into the categories I described. You'll see I used the words "some folks on here" not "everyone on here". ;-)
 
The Sheepfolds End said:
It was absolutely clear what Donald meant when he was talking about budget in the podcast when it was discussed. And it was absolutely to do with transfers and recruitment. Go back and listen to the podcast again, listen to the context and then maybe reassess.

And whilst the 100 point thing is being used as a stick to beat Donald with, he did indeed open himself up to that. Why would he do that to the manager? Why would he say it? Especially when we were clearly having to cut the wage bill and reduce the quality and depth of the squad to make us financially viable? It was a moment of absolute madness that made life incredibly difficult for the manager and raised expectation. It was as daft as Moyes and the ‘relegation battle’ comment.
Click to expand...
It was a response when the conversion was about transfers. The budget was mentioned because the budget included huge weekly wages of the players we had. So in that context if someone says "are you going to spend a lot of money on new players" it's entirely fair to reply with "we have the largest budget in league 1" so we shouldn't need to spend huge amounts of money as the money we are already spending should in theory mean we have the best team, even though we clearly didn't have the best performing group of players.
 
The Sheepfolds End said:
I thought the plan was to rebuild a football club from top to bottom with long term aims? To make the recruitment smarter, the academy more productive and end the ‘piss taking party’?

To me, we have a squad packed full of never have been, never will be and are unlikely to ever be players that are the wrong side of 25. There have been substantial sums (for this level) paid on a couple of them as you mentioned.

I think it’s a reasonable question to ask why have the academy and scouting networks been existing on a skeleton staff when Donald has been telling us we’re the best financially organised club in the football league (also that we had data analysts and a scouting system when asked in a podcast), that we have considerably the biggest budget that teams in the division above wouldn’t be able to compete with and are now having to rely on outside investment (18 months down the line) to basically get us on an even keel in terms of club infrastructure again?

The tune changes quite a lot. It’s admirable that they realise it needs development but don’t try and pull the wool here.
Click to expand...
:lol: Aye that was a good one. A budget other clubs struggle to compete with in one breath, but in another, well actually it's just a very big budget that we ourselves need to cope with, so in actual fact most other clubs in this division and the next are better off without it. But aye, just say git big budget hew, that'll keep the proles happy for a while 'til we think of some other crap to feed em.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top