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I'm afraid that I have to disagree with this analysis. I won't pretend to speak for all Norwich City fans but i would be very surprised if my view is minority one. There is something far more important than winning football matches and it shocks me that you should think otherwise. Many years back at the end of a dreadful season that ended in relegation I was trudging up King St with my dear late son Neil. After a long period on silence I tentatively ventured to suggest we might save ourselves further pain and chuck our season tickets in. He literally stopped in the street and lectured me about the reasons we were Norwich City supporters and that we would always go to Carrow Rd regardless of what division we were in. When I thought about it I knew he was right, he had the knack of putting things into perspective. Of course we want to be successful and enjoy our triumphs but it goes much much deeper than this. It is about making memories, a sense of pride in our city and our community and the joy that shared experiences can bring. I know it, my son knew it and I sincerely believe that every true NCFC fan feels the same. Our fortunes may fluctuate, Owners, Managers and Our footballing hero's may change but they are not Norwich City Football Club. We are.

"That's enough running lads. Your tea is going cold and we bought doughnuts."

Absolutely no need to apologise Ricardo, emotion is where the true support comes from, the heart. And I tell you what bor, your match reports are one of the things I enjoy most about our club, they are as important to me as the Canary on the badge, we are lucky to have you, a true supporter, so keep em coming. The first thing I ever read on match days, you put us in the picture, the mood in the ground, the weather, the way you feel, & the EMOTION. Our very own Henry Blofeld of football! Looking forward to more, onwards & upwards, Thanks Ricardo

Could be. I think the main thing that will hold Deano back is that he’s a crap manager.

Magnificent Ricardo. Well done for fighting your - our - corner. @BigFish is certainly one of my favourite posters and I respect his counterpoint view, though it misses too much. There are 4 trophies a year to play for at the top level. Four. This year one team won 3 of them. One is a European trophy, one league, 2 cups. That’s it. Generally speaking in the recent past, 4 clubs - occasionally stretching to 6 - have been repeatedly involved in sharing those trophies. So - pace Leicester - winning at the top level is nothing to do with us. We can’t say it, we can even put ‘Premier League at all costs’ on our public letterhead, but it isn’t and can’t be what we are about. Behind closed doors, in our Board room and operations room, we must adjust to our finances, structure and parameters. We must soul search and identify our needs, whilst taming our wanting creature. Emotionally as fans we can dream of such glory, play it out on FIFA, set it at a low setting so we can beat Ipswich 8-0 every time we play, though we can’t operate the business like that. We must talk about it, push for it, drive on towards it, but….but….….we must recognise that pride, love, beauty and a sense of seeing ourselves played out on the grass in front of us - as we did thrillingly, exceptionally, memorably, realistically, educationally, portentously with Daniel Farke and the positional play methodology he introduced, encouraged and enshrined - is our true apotheosis. Winning is ephemeral, a chimera, unsustainable and not - ultimately - the real point. ‘May you not get what you want’ as the Chinese say when they mean ‘good luck’. You need thousands of years of mindful wisdom to know why that’s right. We must listen to Neil. Parma

He'll get a lovely brew in Yorkshire.

Yep, I call it the “Webber Technique”

In responding to Ricardo’s outstanding and heartfelt contribution the ever perceptive Parma has neatly encapsulated the thoughts of many others (you know who you are), which has caused me to pause and think again about things germane to the endemic dissatisfaction. Overall, this splendid and revealing thread has at least three closely linked themes: - a) The need to establish a management structure to meet an agreed purpose b) Discussion of how it all “came good” and where it all “went wrong” c) The strengths and weaknesses of the players and the team organisation. In recent times there has been an apparent (but tentative?) change of purpose from Top 26 to Established EPS. This has had consequences including perceived failures, dismissals and supporter dismay. The organisation is now struggling to find itself. In former posts I have burbled on about a), I know diddly squat about c), so this is mostly about b) and its relationship with a). [Alert! Management Consultancy BS Incoming!!!] *Any organisation exists primarily to provide a service to its targeted customers. *A good organisation provides a service to satisfy its customers *An excellent organisation seeks to provide a service to delight its customers Quite clearly, if the customers of NCFC are the supporters posting here, neither satisfaction nor delight are anywhere in view, and this is worth thinking about. I have been struck by the passion expressed by quite a few of the excellent and impressive posters on here, now so beautifully and poignantly expressed by Ricardo. It was seeing this passion that caused me to see a new viewpoint, which is the distinction between customer wants and needs. A few more axioms: - *A good organisation fulfils the customer’s wants *An excellent organisation fulfils the customer’s needs *Wants and needs are not at all the same. Any want can be urgent and pressing, but it can and does change. If your club is in Div 1 you want to be in the Championship but when that want is met you want to be in EPL, then you want to win the Champion’s League, then you want to win it again and again. Wants can never be satisfied, they constantly change. Any need, on the other hand, is in-built at gut level. It exists amongst many other needs in a hierarchy of importance. There are books and papers on this topic if you want to follow this up. (See Maslow for details). Maybe what the Owners and Executives of NCFC are seeking (and failing) to meet in such turmoil is a set of self-defined wants, whereas Ricardo and the others are so passionately concerned about is a deep and heartfelt need – the expressed passion being the clue. That need is for for honesty; integrity and good football. That can be satisfied no matter at what level the contests take place. There is no such thing as “Mid-table-mediocrity” if you go home delighted, win or lose. Is this the source of the obvious tension that exists between the fans and the club management? These priorities cannot coexist. The choice needs to be made somehow, or your club will go nowhere. An excellent organisation will delight its customers – by meeting their needs. As a choice, in my book it’s a no-brainer. Who needs to be in the stinky EPL anyway? Best to all, Don

I came away from this meeting with the distinct impression that the Club desperately needs an experienced leader with business acumen in the style of Alan Bowkett. Zoe seems very much of the modern breed with plenty of corporate talk but seems to be building an ineffective "administrative empire" with no concrete results. A bit like our local councils !!! Rather concerning, she states that Mark is having some useful input at Board meetings yet at the same time is spending time learning from others as to how the game should be run.

If talk built a new stand we'd have a fifty thousand seater by now.

Safe standing can only increase capacity with a stand built from scratch to allow 'deeper' standing areas (i.e. the space between each rail) OR major rebuilding work is done to create such space. At FCR (and pretty much all other English grounds I think), 'safe standing' just means a 'rail', 'barrier' between you and the fan immediately in front of you but doing no work to the existing steps themselves. That would not increase capacity at all. At least this is my understanding of the concept although there may well be those with far superior knowledge of these matters to which I will, of course, give way.

rubbish all the whiners who wouldnt renew the seasons tickets and yet once again they sell out even towards the of the season to get two seat together as a non member was nearly impossible as a late purchase there is a big difference between people paying for a ticket and not turning up and not selling tickets I used to regularly skip a game if I ran late for work or the missus was and would never resell the seat occasionaly I would give it away if someone else wanted it but thats not a given hell my brother didnt go to a single game last season but still has his season ticket

A new poll tonight sees the Labour lead increasing to 23%. Nearly all polls this week have seen a swing of 4% towards Labour ( even the lower ones ) over the last month. Added to the swings to Lib Dem’s if people don’t bottle it on the day it is closing in on a huge defeat. 58% now reckon SKS would be better leading the country than 42% who said Sunak would. When asked a similar question before the last election, 58% said Johnson and 42% said Corbyn. Labour poll lead reaches ‘alien invasion’ levels A new Deltapoll today put Labour’s lead at 23 points, up 4 since a week earlier. The party’s average lead has risen from 17 points at the start of May to 21 points now.

It should have been a red flag when Placheta was asked to take a seat at the interview and promptly left the room with it.

I feel i must apologise for getting a tad emotional at the end of my recent post but being a NCFC fan has for me always been more about the heart than the head. If it had been just about the results I would have fallen by the wayside a long time ago. I have often cautioned people on this Forum not to get too attached to players and managers because they all move on or move up. Unfortunately with the sacking of Daniel Farke I failed to take my own advice. Foolish perhaps but I really did believe that we were set on a different path and it did leave me feeling bitter and disillusioned for a while. I will always feel that we carelessly discarded something that was exceptional but I have rationalised it to the extent that joy and despair have always been an intrinsic part of the fortunes of our great club and at bottom none of us true believers would swap it with the followers of Man City, Liverpool etc etc. The past is gone and we must leave regrets behind us.

A more poignant post I have yet to read on these forums. thank you Ricardo. I too thought the same, managers come & go, as do players, but that time round I thought we were onto something, to get a team playing like that, with the resources we had, & the players that were available, getting the best out them, giving youngsters a chance, getting the team believing in something, getting the fans behind it, even the national press started to take notice. At that point it has always been that our managers leave for bigger & better things, that our best players leave for better bigger & better things, but I thought that hang on a minute, we got something good going on here. How wrong I was, we shot the goose that laid the golden egg, & I still wait to see a manager who could get a team playing better.

I guess some just don't have it in their souls Parma. I didn't choose to become Norwich City fan, Norwich City choose me. I certainly wasn't attracted by the glamour because in one of my earliest seasons we finished stone last in the old Division 3 South., had to apply for re-election and nearly went out of business. Survive that and you can survive anything. I am reminded of friend from my youth. We both loved football and played the game together at an amateur level. For some reason he became Liverpool fan when they were in their pomp in the 1970's. Yes, I could appreciate their quality but it used to stick in my craw when he would refer to them as "We". With both of us being Norwich born and bred it puzzled me, I couldn't see where that conection came from. For me it is part of my identity as a Norwich person and not something I can just discard when times are bad. There have been many moments of pride and achievement over my lifetime but the style and togertherness of the Farke years was something I had never experienced before. I am not ashamed to say that I think I will always miss it.

Maybe 2017/2018 Webber with a fair wind and a dollop of transfer good fortune is more difficult to replace Webber of recent seasons is a total bust. “Backbeat , the word is on street that the fire in your heart is out”. Nothing lasts forever and that includes Webber. He outperformed for 2-3 years then regressed dramatically to the long term mean as all unsupportable trends do. 2020s Webber as far as recruitment and comms is concerned is replaceable by Blind Pew with a pin

Leicester weren't far off survival, to be fair.Most fair-minded people would recognise there was a substantial improvement in their results from where he took over, which is doubtless factored into why serious clubs still take him seriously.

In anticipation.....

Webber said he didn't want to name the player but went on to mention how much he cost and the length of his deal, basically making it very easy for anyone with google to figure out. Bizarre to blame the person reporting back what our Sporting Director is saying publically but not the Sporting Director himself for saying it.

Needs, all of them. Profound and permanent. Thank you, sir. That is what the club should be seeking to fulfill.

It is the lot of a football fan to be subjective rather than objective, emotional rather than rationale, to be unsatisfied rather than content. Success is rare and fleeting, while disappointment is common and enduring. The attempt to move from a Top 26 club to effectively a top 17 club failed, but if it had succeeded it soon wouldn't be enough. Ultimately what the fans need is for the club to be there, to exist, to give a sense of identity. What the fans want now, and will want in the future probably isn't obtainable. I thought @ricardo knew this, probably deep inside he did, but he became seduced by something else, the dream, the romance that there was something more important than winning football matches at the highest level. It was how the team played, how they carried themselves. It was Art rather than Science. It was also probably a mirage, it couldn't last because eventually this dualist conflict would destroy it. In fact, it did.

Doesn’t work mate does it? Because that was the the same guy who coached Leicester to become premier league champions

It was.

From personal experience I've found the opposite is true. The more you train the better you feel.

Considering fans on here have been slamming Idah into the ground and then saying he's "not young anymore" I find it interesting that when Ipswich sign a League One player who struggled last time in the Championship as a "young up and coming player".

Thought it was the money we got for Kevin Reeves from Man City.

City stand season ticket holders protest at the redevelopment.

Next guy out of the window in Belarus at this rate. Rostov-on-Don is the major logistical point for resupply of the war effort from the Russian side. Having that out of action even temporarily has clearly given Ukraine a lovely gift to reclaim land all of a sudden. The only slight concern is that Prigozhin looks to regain favour by setting up Wagner to run out of Belorusia on Putin's behalf; the Ukrainians will have a new front to contend with. I can't quite believe that that might have been an end game they'd have conspired to, but most of the Wagner forces are now in Belorus and Prigozhin must surely be nervous of Putin right now given how much damage he has done to him. It's not like Belorus is going to protect him if Putin does break his word. Mind you, I can't imagine Putin breaking his word, can you? ;-)

Over rated is Onel, Omobalidele (Although there is a lot of potential there) Underrated is McLean, Hanley, Sargent, and Gunn

Are you paying!?!

You have nothing to apologise for Ricardo. Your original post was perfect. Eloquent, heartfelt, intelligent and empathetic. New season, new signings, new Manager, New Sporting Director, New owner. Everybody loves new. One of the world’s most effective sales tools. However some things are David Gow and some things are Grant Holt. Whatever Sky says. We have lost a great deal - on many, many levels. It was so unnecessary. It so rarely happens and it’s what we all live for as fans. The pride in our team. Seeing them play the way we all dream of. ‘Guardiola watches us in his spare time’ It was historically successful. As Webber himself acknowledged. And we traded it for what? Of course Wagner could be a Lambert. Of course you could stumble on a Hoolahan a Huckerby or a Holt. But you mostly don’t. These are historically significant errors, made for flawed reasons, via reflex actions, with some personal motivational drivers, that haven’t worked. Parma

Some fine points on this post. One which I raised early on and which I think Don has brought up again is "what does success look like, and how will we know we've achieved it?" In a business context it's a question I ask every time I start a new project, yet no one at NCFC has ever seemed to ask that question let alone try to answer it, other than with a vague, "Establish the club in the Premier League". So, is that irrespective of playing style, debt, reputation or do we have some guidance as to how we try to achieve that "success"? Does it include a successful Academy? Does it include a "world class" training venue? Does it include a stadium with a capacity for more than 30,000 people? Does it include the women's team in something? What does "establish" mean anyway - 5 years? 10? Do they really mean "compete" rather than "establish" - if so, what does "compete" mean? "Ignore the noise" and other soundbites was never really enough of a philosophy to get us there. Without a CEO leading an aligned Board, with appropriate accountability and responsibilities I just don't see how anything else follows. Despite our recent partial success, we haven't actually achieved that much. Without some kind of measurement we don't even know how much is not much. What is the Board's policy and plan for the next 5, 10 and 20 years? Even without parachute TV money NCFC turns over around £30m a year. It's a decent sized business. I've never known a £30m company not have any kind of plan, yet we don't seem to have one, beyond occasionally winning some games of football. We certainly don't have a clue about what to do when we do win enough games of football to get promoted; and now we also don't seem to know what to do when we don't. I recall Webber being interviewed on the pitch, I think it was after the Blackburn game when we confirmed promotion in 2019. He said it had come earlier than they'd expected and it was surprising to the club and the coaching team what had been achieved that season. I realised then he was out of his depth - no one in an executive position should be surprised by achievement. He should have had all kinds of plans in place already.

I think this is a reasonable time to wallow in the self-pity of recent failures and perform a gory post-mortem on the cadaver of Farkeball to truly understand how it died so suddenly. I'll always differ in my views from some others who (in my opinion) either place too much emphasis on the single event of selling Buendia or claim that Farke was so bad in the top-flight that sacking him was right at the time. The problem, as I see it, is simply the underlying belief that a) we should automatically be able to compete in the Premier League and, b) the only way to achieve this was through a fundamental change to the process which had given us two Championship titles in two attempts. Ironically enough, I think a more dogmatic adherence to the original plan (with greater continuity of style, recruitment, philosophy etc.) would have been far more successful. Ultimately we can never actually know, but the events as they did unfold represent just about the worst outcome we could have envisaged. So it's probably fair for those of us who vociferously backed Farkeball to roll our eyes a little at the people who wanted him out. But this is also the time to look forwards. Indeed there's little to be gained from focusing on the past other than how it might help inform future decisions. And forwards we must look because the squad now contains none of the goalscorers or creators. The good news is that things can't actually get any worse in the short term. Our form at the end of the season, if continued, would see us relegated to League One so a period of mediocrity would actually represent a significant improvement. And the skill level of the remaining players sets the bar very low for any new signings. Better still is that, with low expectations, any success will come as a great surprise. So now is very much a time for shedding any sense of entitlement and taking each game as it comes. If you boo the team, even when they make mistakes and lose, you're only perpetuating the negative cycle; players aren't going to improve if we put them under pressure. Let's take a bit of time to see where we are when the dust settles. Hopefully we'll get a new sporting director under a proper corporate structure with a decent injection of funds and a more progressive outlook. For the time being we should be getting behind the team and enjoying the roller-coaster that is supporting Norwich City.

As GMF has said, both are perfectly realistic and the former perhaps the more likely. Certainly in the short- to medium-term. In fact the logic of the creation of just under 200,000 new shares for Attanasio to buy - as opposed to a much larger control-producing number - is that he and S&J will at least for now form a duumvirate with about 40 per cent each. But the logic goes further. If the initial aim is not for Attanasio to get a controlling majority then he pretty much has to want to be allowed a Rule 9 whitewash waiver, so he doesn't have to offer to buy up the minorities and accidentally reach 51 per cent. If that is the case then it would be a very plausible explanation for the fact that instead of the legalities concerning these shares being wrapped up in a fortnight or so after February 13, as the club predicted, we are now into the 19th week, with apparently nothing more than hopes of progress in the weeks ahead. Wanting such a waiver and getting one by successfully navigating a two-stage process, of approval from the Takeover Panel and then approval in a shareholder vote, are not the same thing.

He’ll be absolutely fine for them I imagine.

Am I the only one that heard what she said as 'we've been looking but haven't had much success, so we're appointing an external agent with better knowledge of the wider industry to help out'? I also think the further the next guy can appear to not be 'a Webber signing', the better in terms of getting the fans onside. Doesn't seem anything untoward to me at all but y'know, club-beating sticks come in all shapes and sizes.

I had to rewind when I heard that as I first thought she meant a new SD would be this week, then realised it was appointing someone to help source the new SD. Seems there's a lot of stalling and waiting going on, can only presume the Attanasio's are a factor in all this and want to get fingers in the pie at this crucial fork in the road.

Is that the best you can do ? Ours is down to under performance (allegedly) whereas other clubs are afforded any number of reasons. However, is Aarons U21 call up down to this 'underperformance', as is OMO's Ireland call up ? Not good enough, I am afraid. Your sort need to be a little more subtle in your dislike of the club.

There's a lot of people descended from Scandinavians in that part of the States, so it makes sense for him to go there.

Without a doubt, they always do it on payday

That's a good bit of business by them to be fair, virtually a free transfer at today's prices.

Yeah bye bye all....I've things to do, places to go....My mansion extension needs re-pointing, Servant's an' staff need shovin' through the sheep dip...My Bugatti needs a rinse and my current well fit lady friend needs taking out for lunch....then....maybe a game o' tennis.... As if eh?....We can be anyone we want to be on t'internet....I'm actually taking my alopecia sufferin' one eyed, one eared, stump tailed and three legged terrier called 'Lucky' out for a wander....If you happen to see us out....throw us an insult.... 😉 Or maybe save them later for on here....

Absolutely brilliant! Kudos young man. There's an argument to be made, perhaps, that Webber's greatest achievement wasn't Farke, per se, but was in hiring a manager who would finally instill an identity to the Club that COULD work long-term. Norwich have serious constraints BUT ... pretty possession football + savvy recruiting + player friendly + youth development + spirit is a good combination. In other words ... we should have never ditched the 4-2-3-1 and the desire to build from the back!!

If Webber gives the club nine times more attention than CC gives this messageboard, Norwich City would have won the Premier League, Superbowl, and several Oscars by now.

More sports-washing in open sight. A flimsy attempt to put lipstick on a veritable pig of a regime.

Very suss regarding Chelsea. Looks like it’s being used to allow Chelsea to get around ffp rules.