I’m no fan of the Prince but from his point of view he surely saw how Wilder had spent the millions at his disposal yet we basically had the same starting eleven. His premier league signings have basically been very poor value for money. We were so far adrift you can see why he might have been so reluctant to release more funds?
We had some fantastic times under CW but if just 50% of his prem signings were successful then it might have been a different story.
Personally I’ll give polite applause before kick off but the fact he left through the very back door he constantly told us he wouldn’t leave through will always leave a slightly sour taste
I think you're right that the Prince probably by that point decided not to sign anyone, I would guess Wilder wanted a loan or two of real quality such as Lingaard, but the Prince said Wilder wanted a defensive midfielder, I think?! We won't know until Wilder says his part, that could be ten years off when a book inevitably comes out. More chance of a player saying something that was there at the time.
In terms of Wilder's recruitment in the PL, it wasn't great, but there's a few factors here. Firstly we already had a decent side, that may have been from the Championship but as we know from the season where we finished 9th, the likes of Fleck, Egan, Stevens, Baldock, McGoldrick, Lundstram, Bash and Norwood were immense. So it was never going to be easy for anyone coming in to oust them. That's the first part. Second season obviously is a different story but you have to remember that in the pre-season before we got relegated who would have thought we'd need to replace Norwood, Fleck, Stevens and Lundstram for example; as I said, they were quality before.
Wilder signed players from the Championship by in large, most bar Freeman were under 25 so they had time to develop into PL players, or if not they would likely be takers in the Championship where the likes of McBurnie, Robinson and Freeman had excelled. Likewise Brewster was only 20 and time to develop also. He didn't sign expensive older PL squad players on huge money; he couldn't with the wage budget. We do know we lost out on the likes of Matty Cash and Robinson from Wigan. The transfer fee was millions for the players we signed because top end younger Championship players do cost upwards of £10m but the wages were small, relatively speaking and affordable. We could have gone abroad, but that didn't work out too well from the loan signings of Zivkovic (whatever he was called), Retsos and dare I say Berge. Who signed those three players I would like to know, I wonder if none of them were Wilder signings because he hardly played the first two and Berge was of course hot property when he arrived, and to be fair could still turn out to be a good signing.
I think for all the arguments on Wilder's pay off, the recruitment etc, the main beef people have is that he left us before the end of the season and many see that as cowardly; the easy way out. I'd love to think I would have stayed to the end of the season if I was Wilder, but that's easy to say from the outside; what we don't know also is what was it like behind the scenes particularly with the players, maybe Wilder knew that his time was up - in fact I'm sure he would have thought he's going come the end of the season, by his own accord saying that. So if the dressing room atmosphere was poor, maybe he thought he'd flogged the horse as much as he could and it was time for a fresh face to liven things up. Maybe he sensed that the players just didn't respond to him anymore, maybe even several were bad mouthing him behind the scenes and he thought he was losing the dressing room, although I doubt that. We just don't know, but that's the point; I do find it astonishing that most on here are very happy to say he's a Judas, quitter etc without even hearing his side of the story, and trusting everything the Prince has said, and with all due respect to the Prince, he's a clever fox, he knows how to play people the media, just look at how it went in the case with McCabe.
