The underrated anti-hero

[teblin]

Dead pool and wolverine are anti heroes.

 

Claude was a ham sandwich, ready salted crisps and a bottle of water meal deal.

 

That said some times you just need to have something plain to start something off.

[BenTheFox]

2 minutes ago, teblin said:

Dead pool and wolverine are anti heroes.

 

Claude was a ham sandwich, ready salted crisps and a bottle of water meal deal.

 

That said some times you just need to have something plain to start something off.

People knock this, but it's very solid meal deal and one that doesn't let you down. I'd rather that thab a sickly sandwich or wrap drenched in mayonaise. 

[BenTheFox]

3 hours ago, Tommy Fresh said:

To be fair if Benkovic wasn't always injured he'd of likely made us a decent profit

He was a signing that made a lot of sense at the time. He was a young CB that was very highly rated from his time at Celtic. There were even conparisons with VVD, which I know seems absurd looking back now. 

[Mark_w]

9 hours ago, Stadt said:

Also what is the obsession with trying to appoint ex-managers as DoFs?

 

Appoint a good director of football with a proven track record in that position, you wouldn't sign a goalkeeper to play in midfield because he's good with his feet.

There's huge overlap between what makes a really good manager and a Director of Football. Great managers do most of the most difficult/taxing aspects of a Director of Football's role.

[The Horse's Mouth]

My favourite puel moment was him dropping Vardy to play Gray number 9

[Dan]

I've not read the rest of this thread so I'm thinking somebody has probably already said this, but I am starting to think Puel is becoming overrated if anything now.

 

His floor was not as low as the likes of Rodgers or Van Nistelrooy. Fair enough.

 

But he wasn't good. Very limited, dour football which consistently failed to produce wins at home to 'lesser' sides - something I was warned of pre-appointment by somebody who followed French football.

 

The recruitment while he was here was great, but even then there are a couple of issues for me. The first is we still managed to piss £25mil on Ghezzal & Ward in the summer of 2018. The other is that how much truly was that down to him? Ricardo I will give him credit for. I've no idea how much input he had on the likes of Maddison, Soyuncu, Evans.

 

Given the way Rodgers tanked the club I'll always have a bit more respect for Puel given he on numerous occasions I think took a more difficult decision for the benefit of the club. He would at least try and do right for the club - something that should be an absolute least you expect but clearly this isn't really the case when you've seen some of his predecessors. I also think it's pretty telling that he's had one club since he was here - St Etienne where he was sacked before he took them down.

 

Not a disaster of a manager but the revisionism around his time is getting a bit of 'a lie told a hundred times is still a lie'. Don't miss that era. It was far better than this, granted.

[Langston]

..

Edited 19 June 2025 by Langston

[Stadt]

8 hours ago, Mark_w said:

There's huge overlap between what makes a really good manager and a Director of Football. Great managers do most of the most difficult/taxing aspects of a Director of Football's role.

They used to, not so much now.

 

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of directors of football out there who would be an improvement on the incumbent twat.

 

Yet, two of the most cited names on here are Pearson and Puel, this sort of myopia is part of the reason we’re in trouble.

[teblin]

9 hours ago, BenTheFox said:

People knock this, but it's very solid meal deal and one that doesn't let you down. I'd rather that thab a sickly sandwich or wrap drenched in mayonaise. 

Yep as a said after, it serves a purpose like Claude did. But he's not exciting enough to be an anti hero.

[Sol thewall Bamba]

21 hours ago, filbertway said:

Geoff Peters burner account?

Blimey his hatred of Puel was off the charts wasn't it. Was there any particular reason @UpTheLeagueFox?

[LCFCCHRIS]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preki

[Finnegan]

9 hours ago, Mark_w said:

There's huge overlap between what makes a really good manager and a Director of Football. Great managers do most of the most difficult/taxing aspects of a Director of Football's role.

 

A good manager IS a good director of football. That's what a manager is/was, it's both the Head Coach and Director of Football roles combined.

 

The British public have struggled with the semantics of Manager and Head Coach for the last twenty to thirty years, not helped at all by the English media refusing to get on board. It used to always be with a big eye roll and talk of "The European Model" and even as it's slowly become more entrenched in best practice in this country, the likes of Pep are still referred to as "manager" and Man City's transfers are still referred to as "his."

 

Most successful modern clubs realised a while ago that splitting the role in two had several advantages. As football gets more tactically and structurally complex, the Head Coach who has more time in his day to focus solely on coaching the team and worrying about less off-pitch issues is obviously going to have a huge advantage. Moreover, the club that has a longer-term sporting director to maintain consistency between coaches and to hire not just for himself but for the benefit of the club, also has an advantage. Win win.

 

All of this is a ridiculous conversation to have in this thread anyway. Again, not to just sit bashing Sly but how anyone, with a straight face, can tip someone as a potential Director of Football and then in the same post reference that he signed Benkovic, Diabate, Ghezzal and Danny Ward (all of which for hilariously inflated fees) is beyond me. Puel would never be a good fit for a DoF, he's just a fitness coach that managed to rise too far for his talent.

 

Edit: oh and as for "he built our best midfield" blah blah blah. Ndidi was signed under Ranieri and Puel had Madders dumped out on the left ****ing wing, isolated and alone in every game.

 

Edited 19 June 2025 by Finnegan

[filbertway]

[Beliall]

19 hours ago, Fox92 said:

I like him for getting us out of a mess, as I do believe we'd have gone down under Shakespeare, but he could never quite push us on. Despite the fact the quality we had. He stabilised us but we needed a manager like Rodgers to just win us something. 

 

I'll never have a bad word about Puel though. He never had us anywhere near a relegation battle.

relegation fight would have been too exciting

[inckley fox]

The way fans respond to Puel has always confused me a bit.

 

At the time, I disliked the football and considered it to be a slightly outdated, one-dimensional take on the possession game. But I was also impressed to see us building for the future again and greatly reducing the squad's average age for the first time since 2012. Of course, the Levein era serves as a reminder that assembling a 'younger, hungrier' set of players, as he used to put it, doesn't necessarily mean that they're any good, but by early 2019 we were still aiming for a 7th-place finish and the likes of Maddison/Pereira were looking the part. Even when form dipped, we got to see Youri added to the squad, albeit on loan, and the emergence of Barnes, and there were many more unknown quantities waiting in the wings. So, in spite of all the bad stuff, I was still a bit surprised to see people so keen to get rid of him. The upturn when Rodgers arrived seemed to confirm that the squad was healthy and dispel the idea that Puel had taken us nowhere (even though he left us in the same position we'd been in when he took over.)

 

However, if I didn't fully understand the hatred for him at the time, I certainly didn't get the revisionism that took place later. Perhaps Puel became a stick to beat Rodgers with - because Brendan didn't build that side, his success came largely on the back of what he inherited, and his own recruitment was nowhere near as good. Even the likes of Soyuncu and, in his early cup displays, Ward seemed to indicate that Puel's team-building had been even better than many thought it had been at the time, so a narrative developed that Puel had been the mastermind behind a bright new era which Rodgers benefited from but couldn't build on.

 

And yet it was clear that Puel didn't have it within him to make the step-up to CL and trophy contention, whereas Rodgers did, and as time rolled by there seemed to be more questions - not less - about his recruitment. Ward turned out to be awful. Benkovic - largely due to injuries - didn't make the grade. Neither did Diabate or Ghezzal. So there you have 40m down the drain.

 

And what about the good ones? Did they have the ruthlessness and character required to deliver real accolades? Again, there were more questions than answers. Maddison's form seemed to trail off in the second half of every season. And when things started to go awry the resolve of Evans, Youri and Soyuncu also seemed lacking. He'd brought in good technical players, but the part where previous recruiters emphasised the 'right sort of character' had been overlooked. And personally I think that needs to be a priority right now.

 

When you look at where our post-Puel success came from in terms of personnel, it's hard to give him too much credit. We got to 5th in 2020, and Maddison and Youri (despite the latter struggling to regain his form early in the season) had a big part to play in that, even if both went missing when we blew the top four spot. But Evans, Pereira and Soyuncu were also major players for us, and the consensus was that Puel's team-building had turned out very nicely. Yet you looked a bit deeper and there were also Sven-era (Schmeichel), Pearson-era (Vardy, Albrighton and to a lesser extent Morgan / Fuchs), Ranieri-era (Gray, Ndidi, even Mendy) Shakespeare-era (Iheanacho) and academy products (Chilwell, Barnes, Hamza) who made up the bulk of that squad. Not to mention all of Brendan's signings.

 

When you look at the high water-mark of the Rodgers era, and the FA Cup Final, it's impossible to argue that it had Puel's fingerprints all over it. Evans came off early. Maddison and Pereira were subs. Only Soyuncu and Tielemans played a prominent role in the game, and maybe it was the fact that Youri got the winner which again redirected so much of the gratitude towards Puel.

 

Then we began to decline and, at the same time, so did his St. Etienne side, and it mystified me more than ever when people started to wonder whether he might have been the real hero of the day. Perhaps even a candidate for the DoF role. What, with his notorious communication skills? With his penchant for spending huge sums on fairweather players, or just plain dross? His man-management skills which saw Vardy sidelined at his peak, in favour of Gray? His often-mentioned 'negative vibes'? His failure to improve on our league position? It never seemed to add up for me. Yes, he'd been a slightly underrated boss at the time, and yes he'd brought in some key players, but there was a hint of mythology in the way that people, looking back, positively reassessed his team-building.

[Sly]

13 hours ago, Finnegan said:

 

A good manager IS a good director of football. That's what a manager is/was, it's both the Head Coach and Director of Football roles combined.

 

The British public have struggled with the semantics of Manager and Head Coach for the last twenty to thirty years, not helped at all by the English media refusing to get on board. It used to always be with a big eye roll and talk of "The European Model" and even as it's slowly become more entrenched in best practice in this country, the likes of Pep are still referred to as "manager" and Man City's transfers are still referred to as "his."

 

Most successful modern clubs realised a while ago that splitting the role in two had several advantages. As football gets more tactically and structurally complex, the Head Coach who has more time in his day to focus solely on coaching the team and worrying about less off-pitch issues is obviously going to have a huge advantage. Moreover, the club that has a longer-term sporting director to maintain consistency between coaches and to hire not just for himself but for the benefit of the club, also has an advantage. Win win.

 

All of this is a ridiculous conversation to have in this thread anyway. Again, not to just sit bashing Sly but how anyone, with a straight face, can tip someone as a potential Director of Football and then in the same post reference that he signed Benkovic, Diabate, Ghezzal and Danny Ward (all of which for hilariously inflated fees) is beyond me. Puel would never be a good fit for a DoF, he's just a fitness coach that managed to rise too far for his talent.

 

Edit: oh and as for "he built our best midfield" blah blah blah. Ndidi was signed under Ranieri and Puel had Madders dumped out on the left ****ing wing, isolated and alone in every game.

 

Ward I’ll give you. Horrendous signing.
Diabate I’ll give you. Albeit he was cheap-ish

 

Benkovic showed promise but was ultimately broken. A case of what could have been like Tunchev really.

 

Ghezzal ….. I’ve no bloody idea what we were thinking. Monaco were laughing at us. 
 

Puel was a steady hand, at the time as we transitioned. 
 

I get the football was bad and he’s very marmite in terms of what people think of him. 

[Gamble92]

On 18/06/2025 at 22:32, BenTheFox said:

People knock this, but it's very solid meal deal and one that doesn't let you down. I'd rather that thab a sickly sandwich or wrap drenched in mayonaise. 

I love how you genuinely diverted the chat in the way of debating the best meal deal. 

 

Sainsbury's is by far the best. Brie, bacon and chilli jam sandwich, scotch egg and lucozade 

[Suzie the Fox]

I never got the hate with Puel (k kill me now) ..but sorta guess why there was is hate.. 

 

He had alot of good signups in his remit, the flops were not even entirely flops... Take Benkovic he was really sought out as a player when we got him, had so much potential and on fringe of good Croatian squad. He got massively hampered with injuries.... Curse the club for shit or w/e reason but fml they cant see into the future.... Coulda woulda whatever .. with this player... 

 

Diabate yeah he was shit  

 

 

[sm1]

Shouldn't Macia get as much credit for players signed when Puel was here, since he was chief scout.

Apart from Diabete, who I believe was recommended by Puel's son, most others were Macia recommendations.