Babylon

And therein lies the problem: it's not been consistent throughout their time in place. As little as just last season, the club made a great decision in getting Maresca, and made a few cracking signings. Less than 5 years ago we won the FA Cup and were finishing Top 5. I'd say there is an inconsistency of performance and inconsistency in decision-making 100%. Enough to warrant a change now, but as an owner it's understandable they look at the whole and not forget the good stuff.

Read what he said again. You're missing a very important word.

“Flaccid Poultry” doesn’t have the same ring to it though.

No doubt, the point is as fans we don’t know what’s really going on behind closed doors and why people might x or y decision. What looks a poor decision can in time look like a good one. Take Okoli, digging him out of his boots seems odd when you can just have a quiet word. But, he might be a total d*** and he’s just trying to force people out. (As Nigel did). It’s a long road ahead and a total reset is needed that’s for sure.

Yeah and the vast majority on here at the time absolutely slated him for not playing them and wanting rid of them and complained at how terribly they were being treated.

Doubt it’s much, he had the power being out of contract.

I’m not working on any assumption. It’s what John Perry reported about what Cooper was requesting, it’s not my idea or what I thought we needed. It’s Cooper’s idea and that’s why we ended up overpaying for players and getting ancient players on long contracts. I said at the time I disagreed.

You can't submit for international clearance in advance. It can take three days to come through, as it goes to Italian FA who need to process certain checks and then approve the deal.

I've explained at length in other threads, but the posts have been deleted. When you submit the international clearance application, it is sent to his previous association (Italy). They have UP TO 3 days to do the relevant checks on him and the move and agree on the registration transfer to his new association (England). If he signs on Tuesday and we submit it then, the approvals could take until Friday. This would prevent him from training here until the move to England is approved. And if it comes through at 1pm Friday, it would mean he couldn't take part at all, because he's missed the noon deadline. In other threads people used the Faes transfer as an example of us messing up. Again, we announced it pending international clearance and Faes missed the squad of the next game for the very same reason. The clearance didn't come through in time for the next game deadline. Perhaps if we're Man City spending £70m on someone, the international clearance might get fast-tracked by the other association. But we're not. If a deal is announced "Pending international clearance" then it means the player may well not be available for an upcoming game. If it's announced and we don't say that, then it's likely they can go straight into the squad, if the manager deems them ready.

And how many CHEAP premier league experienced players have they bought that have done well? Nobody is excusing them, we've once again been rubbish in the market, but as I say. If the manager is given the power to dictate premier league experienced players, you are basically doomed to fail most of the time, if you don't have the budget. We need a total rethink at the start of the chain in how we operate. Rather than nitpicking at every little thing, I'd rather go back to the root cause of issues. Focus on the bigger stuff, and the smaller stuff should sort itself.

And my issue with that is people going “they’ve ****ed up again by failing Ruud by not backing him”. We haven’t failed again, the failures, the main failures were years ago. And us being very limited with our budgets are an off shoot of those. What we did in the summer is again another argument. Which stretches deeper, in terms of our piss poor planning and letting a manager dictate total direction of the club and him wanting premier league players. We all know we aren’t going to buy the best ones and they are expensive. So you end up with old players or you overpay.

It’s a totally different argument. And if we’ve got a budget of £2 or £3m to spend it’s made much much harder to get people in. In days gone by you could just go out and buy a player and not worry about budgets so much (Not a great financial strategy granted), now we have to worry about PSR. Which means the scouting team are basically trying to pull rabbits out of a hat. And yeah I’m well aware PSR is mostly our own making and we could have spent our budgets differently.

He was brilliant for Norwich, so think he might end up being ok if we go down.

Yep... half the stuff people moan about now all goes back to mistakes made years ago. Bashing the club for not backing the manager in January is totally nonsensical. We are operating with our arms tied behind our backs due to PSR and we simply have to be responsible to ever hope to have a reset from the PSR mess. And yes, a large portion of it is of our own making clearly. I'd have happily banked the lot and spent nothing this year, so long as there was a long term plan in place.

Passing doesn't mean we have money to spend though. You can't bash the club for financially being stupid in the past and then ask them to be financially stupid now. It's going to be a while yet until we're back on an even footing in terms of PSR.

I thought this had already been cleared up. Can't remember his name, but one of our usual press guys pointed out that on the retained players lists, he was listed as an under contract player, and not one who was released or been offered a new contract. Which would mean he'd already signed up to a new contract by 1st June (latest) as that's when they had to be submitted. And Maresca going to Chelsea was 3rd June, and thus likely to have been done whilst he was manager as he would obviously have wanted him. We can debate length of contract until the cows come home, but when someone is on a free they are in the driving seat. And we'd end up spending a tidy sum on a replacement anyway. So a few million for another year often makes more sense than spending the money on a new player.

Use some common sense. There are a number of stages to all transfers, agreeing with the club, agreeing with the player, medicals, filling out all the registration stuff and submitting to the transfer systems. In terms of ITC his previous association has to get involved and confirm all the details, do relevant checks with previous clubs etc and they have up to 7 days to do that. Then you have the player being a human and having to pack up a life in another country and move here. Ruud said on Thursday the most to expect was being on the bench as he hadn't even trained yet, and at most he'd have one session on the Friday. Moaning that this particular transfer has dragged on is frankly laughable, people have lost their minds.

Because as per usual people are talking out of their arse. Stating this deal took ages to complete, come of it. From the moment people heard of the rumour it took FIVE days to complete. Stop trying to conflate different arguments because you don’t like the fact I’m right and this particular transfer didn’t drag on. Of course we all wanted deals done earlier, the club would have wanted deals done earlier. But it might have escaped your attention that we don’t have a lot of money to throw about, which is going to make deals harder to do and players harder to find within our budget. People can’t moan about them being shit financially and then moan when they are trying to be financially prudent. We all know we need strengthening, but if the money isn’t there in PSR then we can’t do it. You all bitch and moan about us being close to failing it, so suck it up.

So you might be wrong and might just be massively overreacting.

Blah blah blah.

You keep a spread sheet if that data?

Or perhaps the manager decided not to chuck someone in who has probably barely even kicked a ball with his teammates yet.

Yeah it took a whole 5 days from rumour to signing… terrible that.

I don't think you can ignore them; that's just as bad as saying it's all the fault of PSR. It's compounded some bad decisions and created almost a snowball effect of problems.

The problem is we seem to flit between good and bad. Rodgers and Maresca were very good choices, the choices after they went make almost no sense compared to what came before. Same goes with some of the recruitment. It's almost like there is a plan, but any curve ball coming our way we resort to something else entirely.