What's changed?

[martin]

Granted, plenty has. But on the fundamental question of our ability to compete with the best for the top prizes, where do we stand vis a vis the Doug era?

Seems to me, not much has changed. We sell our best players; we ask managers to sell to buy new ones; we give the impression we don't want to go the extra yard to compete for the top prizes; we patronise fans with a lot of flannel about our "ambitions"; managers and players leave/want to leave stating/implying all the above.

Your thoughts.

[Rick_avfc]

Unfortunately the era we are in prevents us from holding onto our best players as they all want to play in the champions league and them clubs are able to offer larger wages than us due to their income and the fact they play in the champions league.  If Villa started offering high wages then we would go under as we dont bring in the amounts of money the bigger clubs do.  MON tried do that and got quite close but always fell at the final hurdle.
At least we gave it a go when MON was in charge but I cant see if happening again for sometime.

[eamonn]

The gap has got too big during Lerner's tenure. I wonder how we would have fared had he been at the helm a decade earlier.

[Rick_avfc]

The gap has got too big during Lerner's tenure. I wonder how we would have fared had he been at the helm a decade earlier.

Now that would have been very interesting.

[N'ZMAV]

If only we'd have signed Juninho...

[pedro25]

M'ON showed a lack of ambition at various stages of his tenure, signings of Harewood and Heskey being obvious examples.  He had enough money imo to break the top 4 but wasn't shrewd enough in his last 18 months or so, we missed a Bent type goalscorer and a Modric type creator, but he spent millions on transfer fees and wages for squad fillers like Beye, Sidwell, Cuellar, L Young, etc., guys he barely gave any game time to, and Delph and Downing who weren't ready to make an impact due to inexperience and injury.  He should have relied more on the likes of kids like Clark, Delfouneso, Bannan and Albrighton for back up and spent the cash on a Bent and a Modric/Arshavin, to supplement Gabby, Milner, Barry and Young.

[KevinGage]

Well we're not having players leaving who cite ambition and then join West Ham or Boro anymore, so progress of sorts from the latter end of the Herbert era.

Unfortunately, until we nail a CL place ourselves we're one of many clubs vulnerable to losing our best players to sides directly above us. One minor consolation may be that after Downing -and possibly Bent- I can't see any of the players currently on our books attracting that kind of attention again for a while. So we might actually have a bit of breathing space to build.

[Iago]

If only we'd have signed Juninho...

If only we had have signed Beattie....

[Greg N'Ash]

M'ON showed a lack of ambition at various stages of his tenure, signings of Harewood and Heskey being obvious examples.  He had enough money imo to break the top 4 but wasn't shrewd enough in his last 18 months or so, we missed a Bent type goalscorer and a Modric type creator, but he spent millions on transfer fees and wages for squad fillers like Beye, Sidwell, Cuellar, L Young, etc., guys he barely gave any game time to, and Delph and Downing who weren't ready to make an impact due to inexperience and injury.  He should have relied more on the likes of kids like Clark, Delfouneso, Bannan and Albrighton for back up and spent the cash on a Bent and a Modric/Arshavin, to supplement Gabby, Milner, Barry and Young.

Spot on. If he hadn't spent 40m on squad players he didn't use we would have had enough quality in the 1st team barring injuries to have got a top4 place. The sad thing is its probably still possible but it doesn't look like Lerner's willing to stump up to try again.

[paul_e]

I think an important thing to understand is that a lot of work at the end of doug's era and the start of randy's time was done on the training facilities and youth setup.

In Rugby they (the rfu not individual clubs) did similar after the 2003 world cup where they realised most of that team were going to retire and there wasn't really the quality behind it.  Most of the kids that have really benefitted from that were 12-13 at the time so it's only now 7-8 years later that the real effects are being felt.

Give it 3-4 years then ask what the difference is and if it's not easy to answer at that point then we'll be free to suggest that nothing good has come from the change.

[Ian.]

I wonder if we would have signed Bent instead of Harewood what would have been?

[garyshawsknee]

The gap has got too big during Lerner's tenure. I wonder how we would have fared had he been at the helm a decade earlier.

This is the most important change. City coming from nowhere,Spurs spending big year on year,and the usual big four forever being in the CL gaining more dough every year have made it virtually impossible to crack.

 Randy gave it a good shot in those first 3 years or so,shame a lot of the money was spunked on very average signings.

[eastie]

I still wonder if we signed sheringham rather than cascarino what would have been?

[Greg N'Ash]

Top 4 teams have bad seasons, its just being good enough to take advantage. 5 years ago liverpool were guaranteed top4 now look at them, a best of the rest side. Its highly likely that one of them will do so again. We had our chance when Arsenal had an iffy season and blew it, Tottenham took their chance unfortunately.

[KevinGage]

The gap has got too big during Lerner's tenure. I wonder how we would have fared had he been at the helm a decade earlier.

It didn't seem it at the time (Harweood apart, that always looked a bit shit) but the purchases from the summer 2007 onwards ultimately did for us.  We had a narrow window from that period up until Jan 2009 -before Citeh's financial advantage could really be utilised and with Tottingham having one of their infamous season's of transition- where we could have cracked it had we utilised our own resources better.

I'm not going to be a hypocrite, as I thought most of our business back then was decent. Davies was the kind of signing other ambitious clubs would go for (and did), NRC was captain of the U21's and a big player for West Ham at a relatively young age et.c

But when you see some of the fees players like Parker and RSC went for back then -players that could have improved us immeasurably - it was definitely an opportunity wasted. I'm not sure if we'll get that chance again -barring a meltdown at the top if some of the big hitters get into financial difficulty.