No, it's not what they meant but it's how it's panned out. At the time they said it, there was enough money but since they said it, transfer fees and wages have gone up more than anyone anticipated. What may have been game changing at the time, just isn't anymore. That's not their fault.
What they can be 'blamed' for, is appointing a manager who'd built his reputation on slow and parsimonious building, giving him a load of money to do the job quickly and falling out with him when he didn't. What they can't be blamed for is the influx of foreign owners in the championship, in the main speculators, and the huge increase in parachute payments.
I did a list on here a couple of months ago showing which clubs in the championship had either parachute payments or new owners who were preparing to 'invest' heavily. It was something like two thirds of the clubs.
And of those clubs, only three of them will go up. We've just seen a meltdown at Brentford where they've cashed in on their best players. I predicted this about four years ago, on BM, when Benham was chucking his money at them and claiming to have reinvented the wheel. Like all owners, if you don't get 'success', i.e. promotion to the PL, owners tire of putting money in year after year. Every owner has a breaking point.
Most championship clubs are locked in a cycle where they get a new rich idiot owner, who gets rinsed of his money until he's had enough and sells. You can do millions a year to go from around 17th to 7th and you're still in the same league, still no nearer to the promised land of the championship.
But supporters (not just us, all supporters of championship clubs) see what the likes of Wolves, Brum, Villa, Boro, are spending and want some of that. We want to spend big and go up. But it's easy to ignore the others that spend big and don't go up (apart from the obvious one). It's easy to forget how much Forest spent under Doughty, how much Derby have spent since Clough got the boot, what a fucking shitshow Leeds have been for the past few years.
