I don’t often contribute a great deal on this forum, but I enjoy reading the views of others and keeping up with general opinions (or opposed opinions), it is of course a game of opinions. I may be completely and utterly wrong, but these are my own observations.
I have spent some time around football, especially strategy areas in the game, it has been interesting to watch the transition for the Blades over the last few months, it has not been easy watching.
In terms of COH, they are a US based consortium and I think this is key to understanding the thinking of the business of the club. By all accounts it was tough for the group to buy the club and in the end there was a scramble to find investors to make it work, in the end it did, but this would have come with the promise to investors that there is money to be made in the English game, especially with a team that – from an outside perspective – was too good not to win promotion. It was a gamble, but it would pay off – unfortunately it didn’t. Not only did we not go up, but the investment into Cannon was suddenly seemingly a bad investment, it didn’t win us promotion and I think this risk is everything. US investors would not have liked that one little bit.
So, we come to what we see today. There is no way that a US consortium is going to lose masses on an investment by ‘chasing the dream’, they don’t have the dream, they have hard cold cash invested and they want to gain, not to lose. It is of no surprise to me that Anel, Vini and Moore went for sums of money that was not really invested back, they want their ten million spent on Cannon back and now they have it, I would take an educated guess that any money spent on new players would not exceed a figure that would mean dipping back into peoples investment or profit that had only just been recouped from the Cannon deal.
When COH took over, they talked about bringing ‘the entrepreneurial spirit of California and the hard-working industrial culture of Ohio’, when you look deeper into this, you will find that the basis of this is innovation, doing things differently and away from the norm, streamlining systems and saving money. The AI process of recruitment is no surprise, imagine if you could find cheap unknown players, raw talent in far deep corners of the world where nobody has looked, save on your transfer fees, save on your wages – beautiful yeah? But it comes with a massive naivety, it makes a lot of (potential) assumptions and does nothing to account for the mass differentiation between top level leagues across the world. From a US perspective, it would make sense that they would be blind to this differential, after all, there are very major few US sports where another country is better or as strong as them? US football, basketball, baseball, Ice Hockey? It makes sense that a gem of a basketball player from Sheffield getting seen, scouted and sourced to the NBA will generate thousands in profits, so this model would make sense to someone in US sport. No real risk.
If anybody can take themselves out of football as we know it for just a minute and look at the game from a neutral eye. It is business madness to spend the ridiculous amounts of money on players, get into debt, pay crazy wages, it simply does not make sense to go into the football business if you want to make money, it is more a world of the passionate local businessman acting philanthropist rather than the entrepreneur. I feel that this is where COH sit, can they change the game? look at a different way of doing things?, if it doesn’t work – do we have enough assets to cover our losses. I think we have seen the small scale of this acting out over this preseason. After all, when Wilder was announced as gone, Selles was announced as the new guy within the hour, so forward planning is not seemingly a weak point or a naïve point, they had obviously been talking to Selles for weeks and got the exchange down to a tee for business continuity.
The Blades are everything to us, football is everything to us, COH recognise this by saying ‘The club is rooted in the fabric of this great city and our fans are the beating heart who back the team no matter what. Our fans will be at the heart of what COH stands for, and we are deeply committed to ensuring Sheffield United is accessible and affordable for our supporters.’. This doesn’t sit right with me, apart from the fact that to an investor I am a customer, my passion to the badge and the city is a USP and the brand is exactly that ‘a brand’, what Chris Wilder brought to the club worked, local boy done good, took us out the depths and to the edge of Europe, it united fans, sold tickets, brought sponsors etc. Any decent business analyst would see that and capture that, try to sell that from day 1. But the reality is that I think COH sell this to its customers (the fans) in everything, the kit launch, the media, the ticket sales etc, but do the board really hold the fans at the ‘heart of what COH stands for’?
COH communication has been poor at best, rumours of back office squabbling and public silence. This had left to a shift in fan perception, it has led us into the unknown, we no longer know what the clubs identity and this is leading to questions like:
What is the ambition of the club right now this season?
Just how much is AI influencing what we do?
Are we a money saving sustainable club, or will you invest in the future?
Do we want big names, or is the plan of the club to grow youth and find obscure players and make them into saleable superstars, is that why you asked us to be ‘patient’?
Do we want to push for the Premier League or build something for three or four season that make us sustainable and not a yo-yo club?
When these questions are not answered, fans take to forums, phone ins, social media and present their own take (I am doing it right now), views become fact, fact becomes counter-fact and before you know it the fan base is split on opinions that everyone is taking a best guess at because the silence from the club is deafening.
Now enter Ruben Selles.
Now, I was a Chris Wilder fan, he gave me my club back at a time when it was as bad as I could remember, it wasn’t enjoyable, all of a sudden Chris came along and saved us, I loved that. But at the same time, I felt it was time for him to go when he did, his ‘fingerprints on everything’ stance worked well at a terribly failing club, but not with a new group that had put a load of money into a buy-out, the two wouldn’t work in my opinion. Chris was a Manager who took big risks with money, Brewster, McBurnie, Cannon that didn’t really match the money spent, but he also had success with the modern bargain types with the likes of Cooper, Cambell and Burrows, Wilder could walk into a boardroom and demand money when he liked, after all, he had proved his ways successful against boards that had made bad decisions, but that had now gone, he tried it once, asking for big money for Cannon and it didn’t work, it didn’t get us over the line into the Premier League, they would not allow that mistake again, and to be fair, his conduct was costing money and become a little bit embarrassing, other fans loved to hate him, it took away from the success to a certain extent and had a touch of Sunday league about it.
But Selles appointment made no sense to me at all, not to say that I would not be behind him or thatI would be calling for his head, but he had no calibre managing teams or players who are pushing for promotions or honours, he had only managed teams that were in trouble and needed rescuing, no resources, no money, little transfer movement, very much a ‘crisis manager’ who could work relative success with nothing to play with. Surely it would make sense to get a Wilder type manager (experienced, had a history of working with players and getting the best out of them, knew the pressures of a play off fight, a promotion fight, a tough transfer window) but without the demand element that was so risky.
Selles strikes me as a great number two, a good head coach, the type of person you want heading up an academy. Highly academic, a wide range of experience, highly theoretical and a coach of idealisms, in all my experience of the game I have seen many coaches of this level succeed really well, but I have seen many have a downfall when it comes to taking that skill to management, I have seen good coaches come crashing down because they thought they could transfer those skills into management. David Weir is a perfect example of this, managing us killed him, a good guy, good coach, highly liked by those that worked with him, thrown into a lion’s pit and eaten alive. I am glad to see he is back doing what he does best.
So why take this massive risk?
Well this seems to go back to my original point that even though this is a football risk, it is actually more likely less a financial risk, probably demanding less wages (that is an assumption), and probably less likely to be asking big money for signings – and if things do go south and we end up near the bottom of the league – then who better to protect the investment than somebody who has done it down there before?
I have been going to the Lane for near on forty years, I remember the Premier League coming in, I remember the Sky Sports Deal and the arguments about money and ruining football, but now I see a new era. Fans are customers, the roots of clubs are saleable stories - not reasons to do things. The Blades have now stepped fully into this era, no longer will a manager appeal to a board that we ‘need a centre half’, ‘need a twenty goal a season striker’, ‘need an extra back up to get us over the line’, we are now in the territory of asset protection, business modelling and returns on investment. Love of the game exchanged for profit and loss and where people are assets and not fans, players and members.
After all, I have been buying quality street tins at Christmas my whole life, I get annoyed at the reduction in size, the amount of chocolate I get, the quality of the tin and the wrappers getting worse over the years, but I carry on buying them year after year after year, the loyal customer, because I love them and always will.
