Donald’s biggest mistakes


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Buying SAFC
Owner / Director of Eastleigh purchases Sunderland Association Football Club
Wheres the Sundance kid fucked off to ?
smarmy bellend giving it the billy big bollocks
 
Hiring all his old pals who where not satisfactory to do their jobs.

Ran down the academy to the bare bones. Surely we should have enough talent to make a impact in league one.

No plans for recruitment, poor judgement in players.

A decent summary of the wider problems.

I'll add:

Selling Maja (Harsh maybe as it was a tough call)
Sticking with Ross a little too long.
Appointing Parky when he eventually sacked him.

Fronting as open and transparent, taking all the credit, then not sticking to that as soon as the going for tough has lost him a lot of respect too.
 
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I will give you 9/10 .... don’t agree with num 9. The same logic as 6 surely applies, a fix was needed which was going take longer than few weeks. You already cover the original appointment in 7.



Yep. I fear he has



You mean he didn’t have an idea oven ready plan as promised...ooops sorry that was the other drama wasn’t it.
Fair point, I just fear Parkinson is a bit dour and not adventurous enough to push to win games. Time will tell I suppose. Hope he has identified a goal scoring striker to come in. We could swap Grigg and Wyke for the right player.
 
No disrespect but less than 4 year ago we were beating Chelsea and man united. We’re probably 15 times bigger than oxford. Many of our fans ‘ did enjoy a new league’ last season as we took over places like blackpool on NYD and please see footage of our support at Doncaster only yesterday ( yes amazing). Without sounding arrogant we’re not a little club who takes a mini bus full of fans to every away game. We are a MASSIVE club and we shouldn’t be in this league. Our stadium, fans and academy are premier league class and that is where we deserve to be as fans. If Stewart Donald isn’t capable of getting us there or at least back to the championship he shouldn’t be here. PS Do you remember when we put 7 past you at the stadium of light?

The Academy isn't PL class like.
 
I can’t blame him for that, he seen an opportunity to make big money, something most of us would have done also if in that position.
True, but a good business person should’ve known it was an impossible task with his very limited resources.
 
Said all along selling Maja was when our season changed. The goals started to dry up when he left. I honestly think we would of got promoted last season had we kept him.
We would have got promoted if Jack Ross had actually pushed for more goals when we were ahead. It was his dour park the bus tactics (with our defence!) that meant we missed automatic promotion in the first place.

There's a lot of revisionist views of Jack Ross because of who he was replaced with, but his tactics in the season we did have one of the strongest squads in the league are what have led us to where we are.
 
Twitter
His handling of the Maja situation
Inconsistencies in what he and methven said.

After Lyle Taylor turned us down Donald should have just sht up but he didnt.Smacked of small time mentality imo.

Players turn moves down for a variety of reasons,no need to have a public spat about it.

Because he tweeted so much and did so many podcasts the inconsistencies started to stack up.

The fact he went for journalists, who reported what has turned out to be facts, and told the fans they were wrong was a big mistake.
 
Posted on another thread but in case you missed it - recent post on our site (oxford) talking about stuart

I’ve always found north East fans bizarre. They really do have an insupportable superiority complex that makes them believe you’re privileged to meet them.

This lot have clumsily tumbled down to our level, like many other sides before with slightly above average support like Portsmouth, Blackburn, Man City, and seemingly want us to all be in awe. They are no different except for the sheer levels of delta between reality and expectation. That article is completely devoid of the actual reasons for their anger , just more emotive nonsense about some romanticized ideal of who they claim to be. So what are these awful crimes the owner has committed. He’s had about 18 months to turn around years of engrained failure embedded into the seeds of their dna. Do they understand what it takes to turn a business around? Methven, for all his ills, may be right about the lack of corporate education up there.

1. Stadium sold off?
2. Name and colors changed?
3. Asset stripped?
4. HMRC payments missed?
5. Failure to buy players? (Griggs must be a record at this level and shows huge commitment given debts and operating losses at this level)

They’re actually showing huge ignorance as to the operating costs at this level relative to the lack of tv revenue and commercial revenue. They built this pitiful lower league existence by being part of the premiership money gravy train for so long, suckling on the teet of sky TVs money and ignoring the plight of the lower leagues. Now they reap their reward. Welcome to the other side of the fence you gravy train muppets. Deal with it or change it if you ever rise from league one, which no doubt they will eventually.

What they really need to learn is a dose of humility and recognition of where they are. The article states that those outside the region won’t understand. Another statement laced in self importance and the equivalent of Christians argument of “the greatest trick the devil pulled was making you think he doesn’t exist”. Impossible to disprove but substantiates nothing. We are perfectly capable of recognizing what we see.

In reality their first season they got to a play off final. Good season. They can look to their own impatience for the demise of their reasonably decent last manager and so called current plight where they are still well within touching distance of the play offs and only half the season gone. How many teams get relegated and bounce back first time?

Given they’ve won f**k all in decades then perhaps they should just enjoy a new league with new stadiums to visit and more real opposition fan base to engage with rather than the plastics of higher leagues.Rather than creating a toxicity, forcing a relatively decent guy out as owner, and ending up with a genuine devil in charge that the likes of Blackpool and Charlton could reference for them
Some valid points there Charlie, but an average of 30,000 paying fans in League 1 is somewhat more than "slightly above average", and should be a significant advantage given the lack of TV money, regardless of "operating costs at this level".
 
We would have got promoted if Jack Ross had actually pushed for more goals when we were ahead. It was his dour park the bus tactics (with our defence!) that meant we missed automatic promotion in the first place.

There's a lot of revisionist views of Jack Ross because of who he was replaced with, but his tactics in the season we did have one of the strongest squads in the league are what have led us to where we are.
Because our form has been so dire since JR left people look back on it now with tainted coloured glasses. Allowing Maja to leave and bringing Grigg in turned out to be totally the wrong call.
 
The biggest one for me is his naivety to run a football club in the EFL and thinking that because it worked at Eastleigh it'll work for us which obviously isn't the case and have resulted in some of the biggest mistakes. For example being too much open about everything, you don't share all the details of your company and hiring ex Eastleigh staff who don't have the skills.

Over time this has just mounted up with us sliding down ever so closer to Eastleigh. There's a real sense of arrogance around him and he never has the sense to ever look at the bigger picture for example actually hiring to people to run the club with experience of running bigger clubs (not non-league) etc. Everyone makes mistakes but some (Donald) won't admit to them and this has been his biggest downfall.

Those saying selling Maja I kind of disagree with. I bet if you said that to anyone at the start of last season would you be happy to get Grigg (proven L1) for Maja they'd say yes. It's just a shame Grigg hasn't worked out and pinning that on Donald is a bit harsh.
 
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Because our form has been so dire since JR left people look back on it now with tainted coloured glasses. Allowing Maja to leave and bringing Grigg in turned out to be totally the wrong call.
The Maja situation was poorly handled, but to be fair I don't think anyone could have predicted quite how ineffective Grigg would turn out. He was a popular buy at the time.
 
Posted on another thread but in case you missed it - recent post on our site (oxford) talking about stuart

I’ve always found north East fans bizarre. They really do have an insupportable superiority complex that makes them believe you’re privileged to meet them.

This lot have clumsily tumbled down to our level, like many other sides before with slightly above average support like Portsmouth, Blackburn, Man City, and seemingly want us to all be in awe. They are no different except for the sheer levels of delta between reality and expectation. That article is completely devoid of the actual reasons for their anger , just more emotive nonsense about some romanticized ideal of who they claim to be. So what are these awful crimes the owner has committed. He’s had about 18 months to turn around years of engrained failure embedded into the seeds of their dna. Do they understand what it takes to turn a business around? Methven, for all his ills, may be right about the lack of corporate education up there.

1. Stadium sold off?
2. Name and colors changed?
3. Asset stripped?
4. HMRC payments missed?
5. Failure to buy players? (Griggs must be a record at this level and shows huge commitment given debts and operating losses at this level)

They’re actually showing huge ignorance as to the operating costs at this level relative to the lack of tv revenue and commercial revenue. They built this pitiful lower league existence by being part of the premiership money gravy train for so long, suckling on the teet of sky TVs money and ignoring the plight of the lower leagues. Now they reap their reward. Welcome to the other side of the fence you gravy train muppets. Deal with it or change it if you ever rise from league one, which no doubt they will eventually.

What they really need to learn is a dose of humility and recognition of where they are. The article states that those outside the region won’t understand. Another statement laced in self importance and the equivalent of Christians argument of “the greatest trick the devil pulled was making you think he doesn’t exist”. Impossible to disprove but substantiates nothing. We are perfectly capable of recognizing what we see.

In reality their first season they got to a play off final. Good season. They can look to their own impatience for the demise of their reasonably decent last manager and so called current plight where they are still well within touching distance of the play offs and only half the season gone. How many teams get relegated and bounce back first time?

Given they’ve won f**k all in decades then perhaps they should just enjoy a new league with new stadiums to visit and more real opposition fan base to engage with rather than the plastics of higher leagues.Rather than creating a toxicity, forcing a relatively decent guy out as owner, and ending up with a genuine devil in charge that the likes of Blackpool and Charlton could reference for them

'Slightly above average support'? Get to fuck, a clear agenda there. No disrespect to Oxford or Eastleigh but tweeting a few lies and false promises to a couple of hundred people is unlikely to have ever been put under the same level of fan and media scrutiny it is at SAFC.
 
The Maja situation was poorly handled, but to be fair I don't think anyone could have predicted quite how ineffective Grigg would turn out. He was a popular buy at the time.
A very popular buy. I was criticised on here for saying that. But in Maja’s case we should of made a lot more effort to keep him. He had the gift of knowing where to be and could cleverly stick the ball in the corner of the net. He was certainly an excellent finisher at the level we were at and just a Young lad. I was gutted when he was allowed to leave.
 
The Maja situation was poorly handled, but to be fair I don't think anyone could have predicted quite how ineffective Grigg would turn out. He was a popular buy at the time.
Because SD had us all believing we were minted. The fact is that transfer was done at the cost of rebuilding the clubs footballing infrastructure instead. A very, very poor transfer in retrospect.
 
Transfers are always a compromise between what you'd like and what you can get. We had no budget and are in League One - we were shopping in the footballing equivalent of a bargain bin of a pound shop. That said, our scouting was pretty piss poor.

Maybe but they kept making the same misyake over and over. Players that in the past were good for this league but too crap for the one above. Then he made the same mistake with the manager
 
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