It’s all anyone does, let’s be honest, because nobody outside of those directly involved is privy to the inner workings of transfer deals and internal club business. That’s everyone from journalists to people posting on here, from those who set up Twitter accounts and pretend to have ‘insider info’ through to people in the broadcasting industry. It’s all conjecture and hot air.
The absolute truth is that I think the local media and fans need to cling onto reasons why things necessarily aren’t fair in football, rather than face up to the facts that we rode fast and loose with a short termist policy for much of the last decade and a half which has left the club in the position of being a stable mid table Championship club, in a world where the club can no longer financially compete with the big boys and has to be ran sustainably.
To overturn that big spending mindset takes time, and it requires a great deal of patience. We’ve got someone in Kieran Scott with experience of implementing such a model, firstly at Burnley, and then at Norwich, and a recruitment analyst team which the only thing I can remark on is the fact they’ve all came with shining reputations from stable top flight clubs who are in the position we want to be in. We’ve got a young manager who had an amazing honeymoon period, and hit choppy waters due to the limitations of a squad built largely using a freewheeling and free spending approach, but has evidently shown enough to his mentality that he’s not going to take complacency lying down. Our acquisitions this summer have been on a base level good. Data analysis of all our signings shows them to be better than what we permanently had on the books on June 1st, 2023, we have signed players with vast amounts of potential who when gradually blooded into the setup will shine.
It’s worth ultimately bearing in mind that it took Brighton and Brentford, the two most similar exponents of our model, at least three years to start showing results. Brighton went through some pretty rough patches under Sami Hyypia at first, and Brentford had the vastly ill fated experiment with Markus Dijkhuizen and Lee Carsley. We arguably (across a league season in the two seasons since we introduced the model) have been one of the top 7-8 sides in the division, so we’re already on a better footing than those two ever were. In a much stronger division than last year, I think we’ll be in a similar position, and I think that we need to steady ourselves for regular playoff challenges until we have built a side capable of promotion. It worked for Birmingham in the early 2000s, it worked for Brentford at the turn of this decade, and it will work for us too. We just cannot afford to be knee jerk and force the club hierarchy into abandoning the captain of the ship prematurely. Keep the faith and stick with this, have trust in the process and it will ultimately deliver.