To get a progressive club with a progressive manager…We first need progressive owners.
Our owners have shown that they want to be progressive, but they got it wrong.
Last summer they sacked Wilder and replaced him with Selles. They tried to follow the model of other clubs by signing data led players from foreign markets. That in itself is progressive.
Given Wilder's midweek interview in which he revealed why he only likes to mainly sign British born or British based players it's no real surprise that they sacked him last summer given what they were aiming to do. They clearly didn't agree on recruitment.
Their fatal flaws were that they appointed the wrong manager on bad advice from someone, and the AI data driven recruitment was being run a professional poker player, someone with no footballing knowledge other than he had invested in some football clubs, coincidentally clubs we then bought players from and then sold one of the summer signings to.
Why they abandoned it and went back to Wilder I will never know when it just needed refining and the right person recruited to be put in charge of it. Why the summer before we scoured League One and bought Cooper and Burrows for low fees with success and then abandoned this model I will never know.
The one consistency in all of this is the presence of Bettis, who is not a footballing man. Is he the one offering the advice? Was he the reason Wilder came back? Is he the reason we abandoned last summer's plan, which was moving in the right direction but executed poorly.
What we need and has been blindingly obvious since our "greatest ever transfer window" in the Premier League is a Director of Football. Perhaps one of the reasons they didn't give Wilder money this summer is because they don't trust him with it given his appalling record when it comes to spending big fees.
Perhaps they thought they could write off this season as one for stability with a view to implementing the changes needed next summer, but this season has now gone pear shaped. The length of a manager's contract is irrelevant if you sack them as you only owe them compensation up until they are appointed at a new club.
As someone else said on this forum, lots of clubs now have a Director of Football, a head of scouting, head of academy, head of fitness/conditioning and then a head coach who's job is to improve and develop players not just to win matches, but so that they can be sold on for profit to fund future transfers to build a competitive team over 2-3 seasons geared for promotion. If you sack the head coach then it doesn't derail everything else as they remain in place. The infrastructure remains the same. This is what we need which means no Wilder and no Bettis.
I do think our owners are progressive in thought but they don't know football and have had to rely on listening to Wilder, who is stubborn and old school and doesn't agree with their vision as he wants total control and refuses to scour foreign markets, where you can pick up Championship level players for low fees/wages, and Bettis, who by his own admission is not a football man.
So called "smaller" clubs like Brentford, Brighton and now Bristol City have/are leaving us in their wake because they are run as modern football clubs using this model. We are still trailing behind because Wilder refuses to move forward and so have we in sticking with him. Even clubs like Notts County, Plymouth and Peterborough in League One are showing more progression than us now.