It's Character Forming

It's a combination of the ridiculous money that's come in from TV which started in the 90s and has just gone up and up, plus the Bosman ruling. When Sky started to pump money in, there were plenty of dire predictions about the effect on the game, and the doomsayers have pretty much been proved right. If you want a competitive league when any team, including newly promoted, has a genuine chance of winning, you have to go back to the 70s/80s. Nowadays you've got to be willing to chuck around hundreds of £m just to have a decent chance of staying up, or hit on a formula that works for a season or two (viz Brentford, Sheff Utd a few seasons back, or us under Lambert /Hughton) but doesn't last. There are upsides, basically the PL attracts a lot of the best football talent from around the world so there are some incredibly talented players on display (although the very top players such as Messi, Mbappe etc generally stay away) and there are a lot of exciting games. Personally my take from the past 10 years is as follows : It's lots of fun to get promoted to the PL. Seasons in the PL itself vary from "mixed at best with a few standout moments" to dire, unless you have serious money to chuck at it. there is no magic formula that can achieve long-lasting PL success without lots of money to back it. Getting "established" in the PL is a pretty meaningless concept. The one thing that's worse than getting promoted to the PL followed by relegation after a season or two (or three) is getting marooned in the lower leagues for 15-20 years as happened to the binners.

It's a combination of the ridiculous money that's come in from TV which started in the 90s and has just gone up and up, plus the Bosman ruling. When Sky started to pump money in, there were plenty of dire predictions about the effect on the game, and the doomsayers have pretty much been proved right. If you want a competitive league when any team, including newly promoted, has a genuine chance of winning, you have to go back to the 70s/80s. Nowadays you've got to be willing to chuck around hundreds of £m just to have a decent chance of staying up, or hit on a formula that works for a season or two (viz Brentford, Sheff Utd a few seasons back, or us under Lambert /Hughton) but doesn't last. There are upsides, basically the PL attracts a lot of the best football talent from around the world so there are some incredibly talented players on display (although the very top players such as Messi, Mbappe etc generally stay away) and there are a lot of exciting games. Personally my take from the past 10 years is as follows : It's lots of fun to get promoted to the PL. Seasons in the PL itself vary from "mixed at best with a few standout moments" to dire, unless you have serious money to chuck at it. there is no magic formula that can achieve long-lasting PL success without lots of money to back it. Getting "established" in the PL is a pretty meaningless concept. The one thing that's worse than getting promoted to the PL followed by relegation after a season or two (or three) is getting marooned in the lower leagues for 15-20 years as happened to the binners.

That was amazing, I was in the lower barclay right hand corner and my view was totally blocked, I could just see the ball crossed back over and the next thing I knew it was in the back of the net. From the replays I'm not sure Jackson knew a lot about it but it's all about being in the right place ! Also loving the fact that Robbie Savage taking so long to walk off gave the added time that allowed the goal

Brilliant, thanks for posting that.

Also when we came back from 2-1 down against Millwall to win in injury time, just magnificent.

Up at the top of the list has to be a certain last-gasp equalizer, when I have a moment I'll post another link to it as there's no limit on how many times it's worth watching.....

Absolutely. The question is whether Wagner can come good with time and the right players, or not. We need to remember that Farke had a very mediocre initial period. At the same time, with Dean Smith, he was clearly able to convince the SD/owners that he would come good, given time, and most on here thought it was never going to happen long before he was finally sacked. Of course, as fans it's easy for us to say the coach should be sacked, we don't have to find a replacement and sort things out financially and if the replacement is not an improvement we'll be the first to complain.

Quick skim people seem to be saying he has potential but is not ready to play in the Prem yet and needs game time, makes sense really. The old problem about it being harder to bring through younger players when you're in the Prem, it's much easier to get them starting in the Champs.

to be fair to cambridge he said "the only honest and decent binner I've ever seen" which is a different thing altogether.

If positions were reversed and we'd not beaten them for 15 years & we were having our first decent season in forever while they were struggling, I'd absolutely be nervous. A derby is a one-off and there are no guarantees, after the Klose equaliser they will be rightly worried. On our side equally it's not looking good, with our worst start to the season in the 2nd tier since we were relegated to L1 and them consistently getting results, it's not pant-wetting just realism. I hope we can get a result, but realistically it's their best chance for a win since forever.

The relevant part of the quote is this : Ever since I was a kid, the football that I’ve enjoyed watching is attacking, proactive football where teams try and control the game with the ball. They’ll be the protagonist in the game, and want to go to win the ball back high and be aggressive and try to entertain and score goals. So I'd say he is talking about a bunch of different things (and Ideally we'd achieve them all). If you're trying to win the ball back high and then attack directly, that's a different emphasis from controlling possession by passing it around at the back and slowly developing an opening. Under Farke, we certainly didn't have the approach of trying to win back the ball high, I was hoping for this from Wagner, but it seems to have dropped away. I agree fans are nervous about us playing it about at the back, for me this started when we were in the Prem under Farke and it too often led to us giving the ball away in our defensive 3rd and again under Dean Smith when we did that a lot (it didn't help when Krul got into the habit of suicidal passes direct to the other side). For me these are a mix of aim and we want to have a playing style including them all, but sometimes you've got to be a bit pragmatic on some aspects. I totally agree it would help if at home the fans could be less nervous and let the players play the way they are being coached, but the nervousness will go if the style starts to deliver results.

Thanks you Purple for quoting this. I'm at work so haven't had time to watch the interview yet, but it's good to hear what he's saying rather than just quotes pulled out of context. For me as a City fan of 30 years, this is what I want to hear and I hope he's able to implement it. Our style of play has clearly been variable over the years, but generally when we've been successful IMO it's been when we've had an approach with many of the above points included. And not for example more of a Stoke or Burnley (pre-Kompany) approach which I'd never want to see from City.

On the process to select Farke, I've never seen anything said about how it happened, and it would be really weird if he'd just gone back to the Dortmund B team coach, I'd seriously hope it was a case of Webber becoming aware of Farke because of the historical connection and then meeting with him and coming to the conclusion he was the right guy. It's all speculation. We can be much more critical about the Dean Smith appointment where he was still in a job at Villa when Farke was sacked, and the decision to appoint him after Villa sacked him was clearly made in a rush, and he had a totally different coaching style to Farke and could not have been a worse successor to Farke for that reason.

So by common consent are we ignoring Ip**** ground on this thread as it would be obviously the worst ground by any measure and so we may as well just talk about other grounds ?

A 12-month rolling contract for a manager is pretty common isn't it (and I'm sure this always means they have 12-months notice) ? It would be really unusual to run down a manager's contract to the last few months because if they're doing well (like Lambert was with us), you've a massive risk that someone can poach them with minimal compo.