Badly run clubs eventually get relegated

[pauliewalnuts]

Interesting stuff on Twitter today, from Matt Law of the Sunday Mirror, who is also a Villa fan, but which I thought absolutely smacked the nail on the head in terms of where we are and where we're going.

Badly run clubs eventually pay for it. Villa are paying for it and look like going down.

and then:

@StanCollymore Boro, Newcastle, West Ham were all badly run clubs that paid for it - Villa very similar at the moment.

This to me sounds like a pretty astute observation.

He then went on to say:

@StanCollymore You can't go from A (paying 60k a week) to C (paying 15k a week) without doing B, which is what Villa have tried to do

which to me hits the nail squarely on the head.

I can't help but think we're struggling against the tide here, and paying for sins which go way beyond what we see on the pitch week in, week out.

Unfortunately, since MON flounced, it has become more and more clear that having a domineering, club-running manager was covering up the cracks in the rest of the management of the club.  Once we were left with them to run things, we started on a sequence of dreadful decisions which have led us to where we are now.

The Houllier appointment wasn't such a bad one on the surface of it, but we struggled, and we spent to stay up. Towards the end of that season, we were showing distinct signs of improvement, and finished ninth. It looked like the money was paying dividends. He then gets ill, can't come back, and we're looking for a manager again. We then have a frankly embarassing saga of a managerial hunt which ends up with an appointment which wasn't just poorly judged on the basis of the guy's record, but made zero sense in terms of continuity. Starting to play football and then back we go to a traditional, outdated playing style.  Ask yourself, what kind of joined-up policy at board level has you going to talk to Roberto Martinez one day, then Alex McLeish the next? Where on earth is the bigger picture in that? That appointment was the point at which the scales tipped, in my opinion.

Over the last three years we have lost some excellent players, and replaced them with poor imitations (if we've replaced them at all). The chairman and his CEO have decided we're going to become Ajax - somehow - an approach which fits conveniently with their dogmatic approach to the wage bill, and here we are with a squad which is part inexperienced kids who aren't ready to be thrown into it all together, and part older, experienced players who look like they don't care.

If you look at the experiences of the clubs mentioned above:

Boro - spent big, trying to live the dream, spent so big that when they tried to claw back the money, they did it way too quickly, and got relegated.

Newcastle - one poor managerial appointment after another, a novice to the football industry takes over, ultimately relegation.
 
West Ham - a ridiculous transfer policy from previous owners (that sounds familiar, except with us it was a previous manager) draining the club of money. Ultimately, relegated.

It's really hard to look at that and say that there isn't a distinct pattern there, and that we do not fit in with it. We do, perfectly.

And that is the worst thing about where we are today. It's not a squad of decent players being let down by a clueless manager, and I suspect it's not a case of the manager losing the dressing room, either.  The problem is that we are led by people who do not know what they are doing. We've clawed back on the wage bill - something that needed to be done - but we have done it way, way too quickly, and as a result have a squad that looks like it belongs in the championship, and will probably end up there - in the season in which the TV money increases massively, so much so that it would solve the fabled wage bill problem overnight.

We spent some decent money in the summer, but every one of them of the profile that would fit with adding as little as possible to the wage bill. We have young players we have either grown or bought, like Westwood, Lowton, Baker, Bannan, Stevens, Bennett et al, who may turn out to be brilliant players in the future, but right now they're all being thrown into it together, week after week, and we're watching their confidence rapidly disappearing. They're basically getting ruined in front of us, week in, week out. That is a direct result of decisions taken at the very top of the club.

Changing the manager now is not going to change this. The owner randomly throwing a huge amount of money at it again might change it for a while, but ultimately, it'll probably just going to be delaying the inevitable.  Lambert is just one of the players in a gradual process of disintegration. There's a malaise at the club which is dragging us down.

I don't want Randy Lerner to just magic up an enormous sum of money and throw it at the club with the vain hope that some of it makes a difference. I want him to start to run this club sensibly, in a way that does not mean boom or bust. If he can't do it himself, and is inclined to stay as remote and detached as he is currently, then he needs to put people in at the club who know what they are doing, because right now, it all looks like an amateurish, ill-judged mess, which is doomed to end in tears.

[PaulTheVillan]

Other good examples are Blues and Leeds.

Clubs who are run well, but manage to just about survive are Wigan. Although DW is a prick and I'd love them to go.

[DB]

Yep. Randy cannot run a tap let alone a football club, ask a Brown's fan.

[TheSandman]

Paulie, I don't know what to add to your post. For me you've hit the nail on the head. Lambert isn't blameless, but he's not the biggest cause of our malaise. It's Lerner, Faulkner and their years of mismanagement. It's not easy for us to solve and it definitely won't be the kind of thing that can be resolved in time to save our season. It's sad.

[hilts_coolerking]

Very good post and right on the money.

[Fergal]

If we can't or won't pay premiership wages then we won't get premiership players.  If we don't get premiership players we won't be playing in the premiership for very long.  What's so hard about understanding that?

[hilts_coolerking]

You'll never get some on here to accept we're a badly run club.

[bertlambshank]

You'll never get some on here to accept we're a badly run club.

Well it's about time we told them.

[pauliewalnuts]

You'll never get some on here to accept we're a badly run club.

You just need to look at the figures.

How much money have we invested, or spent on players since 2006, and where are we now, and how strong does our squad look? That says it all.

The squad is the club's main asset. Of course, the manager has a massive input on that, but managers come and go, it is up to the owner to set the limits on spending, to ensure that his manager really manages that asset, and that it is renewed or improved as it needs to be, that as much value remains in it as possible.

On that front, Lerner has been an utter disaster.

[hilts_coolerking]

You'll never get some on here to accept we're a badly run club.

You just need to look at the figures.

How much money have we invested, or spent on players since 2006, and where are we now, and how strong does our squad look? That says it all.

The squad is the club's main asset. Of course, the manager has a massive input on that, but managers come and go, it is up to the owner to set the limits on spending, to ensure that his manager really manages that asset, and that it is renewed or improved as it needs to be, that as much value remains in it as possible.

On that front, Lerner has been an utter disaster.

The money we've spent on compensating former managers alone is staggering.  How much we had to pay SHA for poaching TSM and then TSM himself for fucking him off is scandalous, especially when you consider there were only two, possibly, three men on the face of the earth who thought appointing him was a good idea.

[OzVilla]

So depressed.  You can change players and change a Manager if they aren't performing.  But an owner............

I'm having real trouble working out how we're going to get out of this one.  Quite surprised the Board aren't getting more stick from the terraces.  Perhaps he does but it isn't coming over on the TV.

[Risso]

Over £250m spent and here we are hanging our to our Premier League existence by our fingernails, hoping against hope that a random bunch of kids will somehow find the quality to keep us up.  People keep saying "it could be worse, we could have Venky's" but the end result looks like being exactly the same, and if anything having spent so much money, it's an even worse performance.  We're trying to stay ahead of teams who have spent a fraction of what we have, and have long been passed by other better run teams like Stoke, Swanse and Norwich.  Lerner is the worst owner in the Premier League, even worse than that pair of twats at West Ham.

[pauliewalnuts]

The money we've spent on compensating former managers alone is staggering.  How much we had to pay SHA for poaching TSM and then TSM himself for fucking him off is scandalous, especially when you consider there were only two, possibly, three men on the face of the earth who thought appointing him was a good idea.

The whole concept of having to *pay* Small Heath for the manager who had just got them relegated whilst playing the most nauseatingly sterile brand of football seen for years is just incredible, but yep, we did that.

[Billy Walker]

I think the appointment of Houllier, purely on health grounds alone, was crazy.  Such is Houllier's condition I wouldn't have have felt comfortable giving him a job as a teacher let alone re-appoint him as a Premier League manager.  Common sense should have told our Boardroom that, at best, it would be a very short term appointment.  Utterly bizarre.

I don't blame Lambert for where we are at the moment, I lay the blame firmly at Randy Lerner's door.  The parallels with Doug Ellis' rapid cost-cutting in the mid-eighties are there for all to see, too.

[levico]

My bss is a big Wednesday fan and he often recounted to me how the club sold its best players in the early to mid 1990s. Their ultimately relegation (and this is a big club) from the PL was predictable and inevitable.

I truly believe that not only is our demise inevitable, I think we also will slide even further as did Wednesday. Lets hope Lerner sells up after the first relegation.