Shambolic Ownership

You clearly haven't digested some of the questions raised.

If you save £700k a season in trimming back the staff but then spend that on transfers your losses are still the same and it's just papering over the cracks this club has. We need to be picking gems like Conteh earlier.

The key to us being a successful as a club would be building a footballing talent department. DOF/HOR and scouting network to identify, improve and sell on players. This would help cut the losses but provide us with a footballing conveyor belt too.

If we don't action this what we do is overload the footballing management, add to his workload and ultimately it falls apart.

This club needs more than a couple of £300k transfers for it to be right.

It's odd you've never posted this previously when Wael was in charge, why's it such a big issue now than it was under DC (who had TW pretending to be a HoR then DoF) and JB (who had his mate EJ probably doing the same as TW). The only time we've had a proper DoF was under PT and even then LL was booted as it was felt he wasn't good value.

We've no real idea what the new owners intend doing in the next few months but getting through this window means signing whatever players are available now, unless you want them to keep their cheque book closed and then see the season drift away to nothing, or even get dragged into a relegation fight? We all know if we end one season poorly we usually struggle at the start of the next season.

It was more Adam’s comment about the leadership than the over the top post he RT’d. Trying to get some balance to all the negativity on here

Fair enough. I see what you are doing.
Adam has used a poor tweet to get his message out though, imo.

Where does it say that in the tweet?
Plus, a fan travelling to us or city can have largely the same experience until getting in the ground..
I'd take a random Welsh, English, Jamaican fan who supports forest(the last time we played them was?) with a pinch of salt tbh. Adam was clearly trying to find anything to get a message out though. Attaching that tweet to give credit to the owners at this time is weird, but each to their own.

Do we really think that south stand is going to make coming to the Mem a fearsome experience 😆

Why have I never mentioned this before? Well, this is an obvious one to answer and you have answered it yourself already.

Who do we have as a DOF/HOR/Club secretary at the moment?

No one.

Who did we have before?

Dave Sams. Tommy Widdrington. Eddy Jennings. Behind them there were people like Enda Barron and Jamie Hedges. So 7 years worth of back room staff in important positions.

In the case of TW and EJ they were appointed by our managers rather than the club. TW had a spell where he survived manager sacking/appointments but we had people in place doing scouting and analytics.

"We have no idea what the owners are doing over the next few months"

That's the problem. We need a plan and then a structure. We currently don't even have a completed back room staff for MT. You can't leave all of the above to MT. You want him solely focused on the first team football otherwise you are diluting his time away from what is important.

Obviously MT will know of players who he will want and sure we can splash the cash to get them but that is just a short term plug. What about players for the summer window and next Jan?



This may give you an idea why structure and club secretary's are so important.

If you think that the case then you're as stupid as the comment you have just made.

As a side note, do you think there is any great motivation to work for anyone that wont pay you? You'd be the worst businessman in the world if you thought it was even 10% if a good idea.

As so it's not only our club then. 
Earlier in this post someone quoted Oxford as a club running nice and smoothly ha ha ha

If I look at Oxford now, that same social contract needs to exist and has, to some degree, broken down. Teams lose games and they have bad performances, and wins cover a multitude of sins, but some of the strands that bind the club together have frayed.



What does that mean? These abstract ideas need to be converted into real things. Take, for example, the red and black kit that we wore against Rovers. It’s a throwback to the 1995/96 promotion season. The design carries a quality of ‘if you know, you know’, a nod and wink to an enjoyable shared experience from the past. But you can’t pull that trick too often and the exact same stunt that was pulled within very recent memory. It felt clunky rather than smart, not a decision of someone who understood the club, more someone who’d looked at a graph to make a decision.



Similarly, the club’s social media output is formulaic and distant – the recent signing of Will Goodwin was accompanied with more than ten social media posts, replicated across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (and probably others). I worry about three tweets promoting our podcast.



The week is punctuated by pictures of training sessions (working hard, strong arm emoji), matchdays might as well be the same content reposted (The boys have arrived, fist-bumps going into the changing rooms). Thinking of the days of Sarah Godding, our social media had personality, it was a fan, it was one of us.



We see the same in distance in club communications, for example, the recent message from Tim Williams applauding the club’s success in ‘matchday activations’. I don’t mind that particularly; nonsense business jargon taken seriously is always funny. But he also announced Chris Hackett as Des Buckingham’s assistant (or at least that he will continue to assist him, which is slightly different, broadly correct and fundamentally no change from what we already knew.) That sent hares running that then needed to be stopped. There was the announcements about when the planning application for the stadium would go in. But it hasn’t.



Des Buckingham has tripped up a couple of times reassuring the fans that new players were imminent. The appointment of a football analyst – not normally a big deal apart from for the super-nerds – seems to be in a muddle as they’re both working behind the scenes and working out their notice at the same time.



I think the desire to communicate is all done for the right reasons, but the fans want reassurance as much as they do stone cold deliverables. I think Williams and Buckingham both come over well when they speak, but the content of what they say rings hollow. I even think, if you look hard, you can see what Buckingham wants do with his team if he had the right players. I think I’d prefer it if the club were to recognise that the departure of Liam Manning – himself still transitioning from Karl Robinson when he left – was a wrench they hadn’t anticipated, and that this season’s focus moved from promotion to another transition. It set us back a bit. Few fans could have complained, it’s not as if the club were at fault when Manning left.



Re-establishing that trust, the social contract, will help re-set expectations. Nobody enjoys a defeat, let’s not pretend the goal of a social contract between club and fans will mask a poor performance. But, if we can agree and accept where on the path we are, then we have a firmer foundation to build from and those difficult periods become easier to manage.



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Not sure if I’m the only one thinking this…but the last few years under Wael he managed to stop a lot of the rumours etc coming out, however since the new owners have arrived it appears we have (for want of a better description) loose lips again.

Lots of player transfers, wages, contracts, budgets etc coming out from various sources, feels like we’re back in the Hamer era 🤔