Where did it all go wrong Daniel, Stuart, Delia?

[nutty nigel 7,509]

3 hours ago, Monty13 said:

But Emi got assists and finished the league statistically as one of the most dangerous players regardless of the team as a wholes performance.

Yes it would have been nice if he’d scored some goals on top or got a few more assists, but the evidence that he was someone to build a PL team around was there IMO.

Sorry Monty, missed this. He did do those things but was still part of those ten defeats and relegation.

Building a side around him would be interesting albeit with a much smaller budget which would make it hard to do.

[Monty13 2,229]

5 minutes ago, nutty nigel said:

Sorry Monty, missed this. He did do those things but was still part of those ten defeats and relegation.

Building a side around him would be interesting albeit with a much smaller budget which would make it hard to do.

I agree with what others have said, of course the budget would have been less, but we’ve gambled on having a lot of options over a few strategic additions. It was a choice. 

I’m not saying what we’ve done can’t or won’t be successful, but it’s getting harder as each game passes. Or that if we’d kept him and added less additions it would have guaranteed success. 

I’m just saying I agree with Parma given the two choices perhaps keeping Buendia may have been the better option. PL games are won and lost on tiny margins and moments, I think Emi would have created more opportunities to give us at least a chance.

[BroadstairsR 2,138]

We might do better if we didn't have such a  collective inferiority complex when it comes to little old Norwich playing in the Premier League.

From the owners, to the management and amongst the fans. That it permeates the playing staff is inevitable.

The bookies are against us, the referee and VAR are against us and the pundits are against us we wail and the only way we can change all this is to go on a run of success as soon as possible, and before it's too late and rigor mortis sets in.

Before due time we are relying on dunces around us continuing to slip up whilst hoping the new boys click.

Our financial limitations are nothing new. We like the model when romping the Championship, question it when struggling at the top table.

There was no way we could have held on to the temperamental Buendia with that sort of money being dangled and the player wanting away. Nobody knows the facts of the matter but to keep him with the lure of a massive wages increase would have opened up a Pandora's box. Skipp was not a City player.

Although it seems like our fate is already sealed, there's a way to go. Will Webber do a MCNally and go hit or bust in the January window? A 'bite yer legs' cruncher in midfield to supplement Normann?  A class act up front to supplement Pukki? It would seem out of character and there would be financial restraints in any case, unless we sold Aarons, and/or some of Rupp or McClean or (regrets) Sorensen to Championship hopefuls. Idah should fetch a bit.

For the time being, and may be endlessly, we are stuck with a model that relies upon punching above its weight when it comes to the Premier League, we need not be stuck with the complex.

I'll never blame Farke after the revolution he brought to our club. That first period of play against Bournemouth last season, before the sending off, was the very best I've ever seen from a City team. I suspect he'd go down a treat at a club like Leicester or even Spurs or Arsenal. We need to be careful what we wish for.

Edited September 28, 2021 by BroadstairsR

[Ulfotto 623]

Palace were able to hold onto Zaha as they gave him a contract worth 100k a week probably over 5yrs. This is exactly what Norwich don’t want to do and the main reason why our players leave. The minute you hand that contract the rest of the senior players demand it to hence why Palace had one of the biggest wage bills in the league. The minute you give those contracts and things turn sour you have massive financial issues even if you have someone who get underwrite it all. We had a taste of it with Naismith 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Ulfotto

[Parma Ham's gone mouldy 2,219]

6 hours ago, BroadstairsR said:

We might do better if we didn't have such a  collective inferiority complex when it comes to little old Norwich playing in the Premier League.

From the owners, to the management and amongst the fans. That it permeates the playing staff is inevitable.

The bookies are against us, the referee and VAR are against us and the pundits are against us we wail and the only way we can change all this is to go on a run of success as soon as possible, and before it's too late and rigor mortis sets in.

Before due time we are relying on dunces around us continuing to slip up whilst hoping the new boys click.

Our financial limitations are nothing new. We like the model when romping the Championship, question it when struggling at the top table.

There was no way we could have held on to the temperamental Buendia with that sort of money being dangled and the player wanting away. Nobody knows the facts of the matter but to keep him with the lure of a massive wages increase would have opened up a Pandora's box. Skipp was not a City player.

Although it seems like our fate is already sealed, there's a way to go. Will Webber do a MCNally and go hit or bust in the January window? A 'bite yer legs' cruncher in midfield to supplement Normann?  A class act up front to supplement Pukki? It would seem out of character and there would be financial restraints in any case, unless we sold Aarons, and/or some of Rupp or McClean or (regrets) Sorensen to Championship hopefuls. Idah should fetch a bit.

For the time being, and may be endlessly, we are stuck with a model that relies upon punching above its weight when it comes to the Premier League, we need not be stuck with the complex.

I'll never blame Farke after the revolution he brought to our club. That first period of play against Bournemouth last season, before the sending off, was the very best I've ever seen from a City team. I suspect he'd go down a treat at a club like Leicester or even Spurs or Arsenal. We need to be careful what we wish for.

Great post @BroadstairsR. Quite happy with that counterpoint 👍🏽
 

Parma 

[Jim Smith 2,314]

18 hours ago, Robert N. LiM said:

I still can't work out what I think about this. That formation plainly didn't work for us in the PL last time so you can see why Daniel thought he needed a different approach. But obviously so far the alternatives have been just as leaky at the back and even more toothless up front.

There's part of me that thinks we need to stick with the 352, try and become much harder to beat, and try and become more expansive as the season goes on. Another part of me thinks that if we're going to keep on making individual errors like the two that led to the goals on Saturday, we might as well be throwing caution to the wind and trying to cause the opposition more problems. Apart from anything else, it'd be more fun. 

I certainly don't envy DF having to solve this problem, and I think that goes back to the original post in this thread: no obvious first choice XI and too many players all of similar not-quite-good-enough quality. 

I don't think there was necessarily a problem with the formation, it was as much the personnel playing and how it was applied. There's no inherent problem with 4-2-3-1 but if you play it without a natural holding midfielder and push your fullbacks as high up the pitch as we did then you will get caught out. Added to that we were making the kind of errors and mistakes we are still making which will cost you goals in any formation. 

If you look at our record last time out in the premier league, it wasn;'t good enough to stay up in any combination if you extrapolate the points per game across the whole season and Tettey was perhaps starting to struggle a bit for pace but we took 18 of our 21 points in games where Tettey (or in one case Amadou) played in midfield so we had a genuine holding midfielder. We only won 1 game (against what at the time was a hopeless Newcastle side) without one playing. prior to the pandemic break we were averaging around a point a game when Tettey started. After that of course things went wrong. I haven;t been able to check it but I suspect that the points per game when Byram played (and didn;t push forward as much as Max did) was similarly higher.

4-2-3-1 with Normann and another disciplined midfielder (able to cover the full backs) next to him coupled with a slightly more disciplined approach from the full backs will work fine in my view if we can also teach the centre backs to just mark adequately. Really, whilst Dimi is an excellent player, another full back who is better going forward than defending was not quite what we needed with an eye on another premier league campaign.

 

[Son Ova Gunn 165]

2 hours ago, Ulfotto said:

Palace were able to hold onto Zaha as they gave him a contract worth 100k a week probably over 5yrs. This is exactly what Norwich don’t want to do and the main reason why our players leave. The minute you hand that contract the rest of the senior players demand it to hence why Palace had one of the biggest wage bills in the league. The minute you give those contracts and things turn sour you have massive financial issues even if you have someone who get underwrite it all. We had a taste of it with Naismith 

Remind me how this was a disaster for Palace?. Rather than providing an argument against raising a salary cap to match our competitors for exceptional individuals who have outgrown the club it’s a blueprint on how to do it and retain survival!

[king canary 7,578]

7 hours ago, BroadstairsR said:

We might do better if we didn't have such a  collective inferiority complex when it comes to little old Norwich playing in the Premier League.

From the owners, to the management and amongst the fans. That it permeates the playing staff is inevitable.

Yes, this is something that has bugged me for years.

Last time we had Webber talking about 38 free hits and Farke talking about needing little miracles to stay up. This season it is Farke saying Watford was the first game that mattered. The last person who talked like the club really belonged in the Premier League was McNally (although he had many other flaws).

I get we have financial restrictions but sometimes the way we talk about ourselves at this level makes it sound like we're a team like Blackpool who found themselves in the Premier League almost by chance, rather than a team with a generally solid history of playing in the top flight.

[Hank shoots Skyler 2,094]

1 minute ago, king canary said:

Yes, this is something that has bugged me for years.

Last time we had Webber talking about 38 free hits and Farke talking about needing little miracles to stay up. This season it is Farke saying Watford was the first game that mattered. The last person who talked like the club really belonged in the Premier League was McNally (although he had many other flaws).

I get we have financial restrictions but sometimes the way we talk about ourselves at this level makes it sound like we're a team like Blackpool who found themselves in the Premier League almost by chance, rather than a team with a generally solid history of playing in the top flight.

Considering this was the season of stabilisation in the prem you'd think we wouldn't need to write off half our fixtures. All feels very Hughtonesque doesn't it?

Then you have Brentford who run a similar model with similar financial strength (or lack of), and they're in a completely different ballpark when it comes to their approach with the media. With Ivan Toney basically saying he wants the golden boot and to win the league with Brentford! Quite a lot of people scoffed at those comments before the start of the season, but I don't think anyone is now. 

Our season (so far) really throws up our transfer policy in 19/20 too now, again. I was happy to take the L on the basis we would go up stronger, and we definitely did, only for everything we'd built to totally unravel (at least for now). So now it looks like we'd have made a much better fist making 2-3 key upgrades in 19-20 to supplement the team, again a la Brentford this season. Can't expect to build for something across 2-3 seasons when our key players outgrow us during that time and we end up having to reset again!

[Robert N. LiM 4,241]

56 minutes ago, Jim Smith said:

I don't think there was necessarily a problem with the formation, it was as much the personnel playing and how it was applied. There's no inherent problem with 4-2-3-1 but if you play it without a natural holding midfielder and push your fullbacks as high up the pitch as we did then you will get caught out. Added to that we were making the kind of errors and mistakes we are still making which will cost you goals in any formation. 

If you look at our record last time out in the premier league, it wasn;'t good enough to stay up in any combination if you extrapolate the points per game across the whole season and Tettey was perhaps starting to struggle a bit for pace but we took 18 of our 21 points in games where Tettey (or in one case Amadou) played in midfield so we had a genuine holding midfielder. We only won 1 game (against what at the time was a hopeless Newcastle side) without one playing. prior to the pandemic break we were averaging around a point a game when Tettey started. After that of course things went wrong. I haven;t been able to check it but I suspect that the points per game when Byram played (and didn;t push forward as much as Max did) was similarly higher.

4-2-3-1 with Normann and another disciplined midfielder (able to cover the full backs) next to him coupled with a slightly more disciplined approach from the full backs will work fine in my view if we can also teach the centre backs to just mark adequately. Really, whilst Dimi is an excellent player, another full back who is better going forward than defending was not quite what we needed with an eye on another premier league campaign.

 

Really interesting, thanks. Do you think we have that other disciplined midfielder at the club at the moment? From what I've seen, PLM is more box-to-box, Gilmour is too lightweight and the Mayor seems to have a catastrophe per game in him at the moment. That leaves Lungi, who seems miles from the team, and LR7...

[Jim Smith 2,314]

15 minutes ago, Robert N. LiM said:

Really interesting, thanks. Do you think we have that other disciplined midfielder at the club at the moment? From what I've seen, PLM is more box-to-box, Gilmour is too lightweight and the Mayor seems to have a catastrophe per game in him at the moment. That leaves Lungi, who seems miles from the team, and LR7...

I’d love to see Sorensen tried there. I do think Gilmour could do it as it’s as much about positional discipline as anything else. Failing that I guess Kenny is the next best option.

it then gives us 4 attacking players with a bit of freedom to attack as they know there is a more solid back 6. 

[Ulfotto 623]

1 hour ago, king canary said:

Yes, this is something that has bugged me for years.

Last time we had Webber talking about 38 free hits and Farke talking about needing little miracles to stay up. This season it is Farke saying Watford was the first game that mattered. The last person who talked like the club really belonged in the Premier League was McNally (although he had many other flaws).

I get we have financial restrictions but sometimes the way we talk about ourselves at this level makes it sound like we're a team like Blackpool who found themselves in the Premier League almost by chance, rather than a team with a generally solid history of playing in the top flight.

The argument is simple Palace by paying these wages wracked up the 7th highest wage bill in the league and they are backed or underwritten to an extent that if they are relegated they are ok in the short term. 

we are not similarly underwritten and there fore the appetite to take the risk is not there. Plus I think you need to stay up before this even becomes a topic.

To an extend paying Zaha is not the issue it’s the the rest of the squad who want parity. If we paid Burundi’s say 100k a week Aaron’s, Cantwell, Pukki, etc.. would all demand the same it then snowballs and if things go wrong you can end up being Sunderland…

[Badger 2,405]

18 hours ago, kirku said:

Palace, as an example, might not meet Zaha's sporting ambitions but they've certainly met his financial ones. We can't do either.

We probably could if we wanted to with one player - it would not be beyond us financially, if we chose to do it. I think that the calculation is that it would be too risky for a number of reasons.

I don't think the Zaha + Emi comparison is a good one for a couple of reasons:

1. Zaha is a local lad - he came through the youth system; his childhood friends and family live nearby; Buendia is a mercenary*, thousands of miles from home.

2. Zaha has seen the promised land - and it wasn't quite he was expecting. Playing for a top team (Man Utd) wasn't as great as he dreamt that it would be.

* I don't mean that pejoratively, but he has had to leave his home continent to further his ambition.

[king canary 7,578]

I don't want to get into the weeds with this again but I have to point this out every time as people seem to miss the point I'm making re Zaha/Palace/Emi.

My original point wasn't 'we should have kept Emi like Palace kept Zaha.' My point is simply that keeping Zaha didn't stop Palace from recruiting other young talented players to play for them. I mainly take issue with the idea espoused by Rock the Boat earlier on that not selling Emi collapses the whole model and Palace are, in my opinion, a good example of that that doesn't actually happen. I don't think a Tzolis or a Normann is turning down a shot at the Premier League due to Emi not being sold.

[Badger 2,405]

9 hours ago, BroadstairsR said:

We might do better if we didn't have such a  collective inferiority complex when it comes to little old Norwich playing in the Premier League.

From the owners, to the management and amongst the fans. That it permeates the playing staff is inevitable.

...

Our financial limitations are nothing new. We like the model when romping the Championship, question it when struggling at the top table.

I couldn't agree more. I get irritated by people emphasising our weaknesses all the time and suggesting that "failure" is inevitable. We do have financial limitations which will limit our progress but so do half of the other clubs in the Premier league. In fact our underlying finances are stronger than several clubs.

In many cases it is a chicken and egg situation - once we stay up for a year or two in the premier league, our finances will be much stronger: the performance element of the TV money rewards strongly, teams that stay up. In addition, once you have a squad that's already competitive in the premier league, you don't have to buy loads of players to upgrade it, but can be more selective.

It is the staying up that is proving hard! But this is not a problem that it is unique to Norwich. In the last three years, 9 teams have been promoted.

• Of these 5 were relegated first time round (56%) Us, Fulham x2, WBA and Cardiff;
• A further two were relegated in their second season (22%)
• Only two have survived for two years or more - Villa and Wolves, both with multi-billionaire owners. Leeds could become a third this season

It's hard staying up - even for billionaire owners (cf Fulham). However, once we have doe so, we will have an income stream in excess or comparable to most of the bottom half of the table. If we expand the ground using the sort of methods PH suggested earlier, we could be mid-ranking.

The idea that we are doomed to fail for ever is just wrong.

[Petriix 2,834]

12 hours ago, Monty13 said:

I agree with what others have said, of course the budget would have been less, but we’ve gambled on having a lot of options over a few strategic additions. It was a choice. 

I’m not saying what we’ve done can’t or won’t be successful, but it’s getting harder as each game passes. Or that if we’d kept him and added less additions it would have guaranteed success. 

I’m just saying I agree with Parma given the two choices perhaps keeping Buendia may have been the better option. PL games are won and lost on tiny margins and moments, I think Emi would have created more opportunities to give us at least a chance.

I think there was a third option, which would (in hindsight) have been even better: sell Buendia then sign 4 players for £20m each. Quality over quantity. Of all the permanent signings, only Tzolis looks to have the genuine potential to become a Premier League quality player, and not necessarily in the short-term. We really needed to buy better players with that money.

[Petriix 2,834]

16 minutes ago, Badger said:

I couldn't agree more. I get irritated by people emphasising our weaknesses all the time and suggesting that "failure" is inevitable. We do have financial limitations which will limit our progress but so do half of the other clubs in the Premier league. In fact our underlying finances are stronger than several clubs.

...

The idea that we are doomed to fail for ever is just wrong.

Exactly.

And we've proven, repeatedly, to be better than the rest at turning our limited resources into success. There's nothing inherently wrong with the model.

Our problem seems to be in effectively adapting to the increased budget of the Premier League. I think we've really struggled with recruiting the right players for our attempt at survival. We've tried to change too much and it hasn't worked.

[Robert N. LiM 4,241]

2 minutes ago, Petriix said:

I think there was a third option, which would (in hindsight) have been even better: sell Buendia then sign 4 players for £20m each. Quality over quantity. Of all the permanent signings, only Tzolis looks to have the genuine potential to become a Premier League quality player, and not necessarily in the short-term. We really needed to buy better players with that money.

I wonder if we could have done this. Obviously in terms of transfer fees we could spend £20m on one player rather than two, but could we, at this point in our development, attract a £20m player to the club? Would they not be more likely to join an established PL team who can also pay £20m. I wonder whether the route we took in the summer is the only route currently open to us, to buy players a bit further on in their development than previously, but who are not the finished article yet. This has obvious downsides and it does beg the question why we didn't add some old warhorses (Cahill the obvious example) to 'give them a hand' as PL used to say. 

[Petriix 2,834]

24 minutes ago, Robert N. LiM said:

I wonder if we could have done this. Obviously in terms of transfer fees we could spend £20m on one player rather than two, but could we, at this point in our development, attract a £20m player to the club? Would they not be more likely to join an established PL team who can also pay £20m. I wonder whether the route we took in the summer is the only route currently open to us, to buy players a bit further on in their development than previously, but who are not the finished article yet. This has obvious downsides and it does beg the question why we didn't add some old warhorses (Cahill the obvious example) to 'give them a hand' as PL used to say. 

The point being that a £20m player only becomes a £20m player if someone is willing to pay that much. We would need to offer more that the next highest bidder, and maybe enough to persuade a club to sell a prized asset that they would otherwise keep. That means knowingly paying a slightly inflated price and 'investing' some of our hard won cash in the quality of the squad.

Wages are a complication, but it's conceivable that we could have afforded 4 players on £50k per week with a 50% wage reduction on relegation. 3 year contracts with a club option of a 4th year would add up to £20.8M in committed wage expenditure, worst case. So a spend of ~ £100M, which is the sort of figure many of us were imagining after we sold Buendia.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch for our budget, but I'd still contend that rather than signing Tzolis, Sargent and Rashica, we could have signed one better striker and one better AM for the same total money, and rather than PLM, Gilmour and Normann we could have signed one significantly better CDM.

[robert choice 24]

11 minutes ago, Petriix said:

The point being that a £20m player only becomes a £20m player if someone is willing to pay that much. We would need to offer more that the next highest bidder, and maybe enough to persuade a club to sell a prized asset that they would otherwise keep. That means knowingly paying a slightly inflated price and 'investing' some of our hard won cash in the quality of the squad.

Wages are a complication, but it's conceivable that we could have afforded 4 players on £50k per week with a 50% wage reduction on relegation. 3 year contracts with a club option of a 4th year would add up to £20.8M in committed wage expenditure, worst case. So a spend of ~ £100M, which is the sort of figure many of us were imagining after we sold Buendia.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch for our budget, but I'd still contend that rather than signing Tzolis, Sargent and Rashica, we could have signed one better striker and one better AM for the same total money, and rather than PLM, Gilmour and Normann we could have signed one significantly better CDM.

You'll always get people who go to the Poundshop looking to get volume rather than quality. I've always been a Marks and Spencer sort of person myself.

[Highland Canary 76]

Fundamentally, an ownership whose wealth is simply incompatible with facilitating PL success. A board happy with being little ole’ Norwich just making up the PL numbers. A strategy that seems to accept (reward?) relegation (top 26) in any given PL season. Supporters who in the large majority seem entirely passive and content with a continuing cycle of failure. It seems obvious that the players lack the quality to compete - that’s not their fault, Farke’s or indeed Webber’s but simply a financial model which is doomed to fail.

[hogesar 9,618]

18 minutes ago, Highland Canary said:

Fundamentally, an ownership whose wealth is simply incompatible with facilitating PL success. A board happy with being little ole’ Norwich just making up the PL numbers. A strategy that seems to accept (reward?) relegation (top 26) in any given PL season. Supporters who in the large majority seem entirely passive and content with a continuing cycle of failure. It seems obvious that the players lack the quality to compete - that’s not their fault, Farke’s or indeed Webber’s but simply a financial model which is doomed to fail.

Yeah, but if it wasn't for all that, we wouldn't get to enjoy posts from your happy self, would we? 🙂 

[Essjayess 307]

As for our financial model thats almost unique in its set up and is incredibly successful now, im happy sticking with it and would not like to see some other model that  could fail as much as succeed.

On the pitch its a simple matter really...can Farkeball ever work for City in the Prem?...we have seen it  absolutely dominates in the Championship. But even though Farkeball has had 44 games up to now it has come at a time when extraordinary occurences have happened.

Lest we have forgotten, we started the first DF Prem season virtually having almost our entire CB line up injured...then..halfway thru that season..when we were bottom of the pile...Covid struck. Yes, all clubs had to deal with that unprecedented situation for the run in...but we were bottom of the pile and never looked like being able to escape that fact.

This summer transfer window has seen a heap of changes and with Covid again interrupting the pre season schedule...add to that the fact that there are so many new players who have to find a role within the starting eleven and understand  how Farkeball works, what their team mates are capable of etc etc..plus  the fixture list laughing at us by giving City as hard a start as is possible..then i for one am not surprised where we are right now.

Im not using all the above situations as excuses but as realities that have hit a club such as ours...a club with a truly unique model and a head coach that has a certain philosophy..so has that philosophy truly had a proper time to succeed or fail properly?. Crazy times..we have a club where the fans mainly  adore their head coach..why not after all...he has given us two consecutive Champs titles at a time when a certain other blues colored lot languish in L1...but maybe would'ave been easier if most disliked DF..

So , i have my reservations about Farkeball succeeding in the top tier..but same time acknowledging that those 44 games have come at undeniably the most difficult time period possible given all the circumstances. It could yet succeed...but realistically even if it did..would be well into this season and likely to late for any dramatic survival chance. Even so, i firmly believe that DF deserves much more time, irrespective of where we finish up at this season end.

[Monty13 2,229]

2 hours ago, Petriix said:

I think there was a third option, which would (in hindsight) have been even better: sell Buendia then sign 4 players for £20m each. Quality over quantity. Of all the permanent signings, only Tzolis looks to have the genuine potential to become a Premier League quality player, and not necessarily in the short-term. We really needed to buy better players with that money.

Yep I can see that, although I’d argue Normann actually looks the best signing so far in terms of PL quality which is probably why it was so hard to get him.

Edited September 28, 2021 by Monty13

[king canary 7,578]

1 hour ago, Petriix said:

Wages are a complication, but it's conceivable that we could have afforded 4 players on £50k per week with a 50% wage reduction on relegation. 3 year contracts with a club option of a 4th year would add up to £20.8M in committed wage expenditure, worst case. So a spend of ~ £100M, which is the sort of figure many of us were imagining after we sold Buendia.

Wages are the big issue.

I think most £20m players come with £20m player wage demands and there is the question of how willing are they to sign the relegation wage drop clauses.

This is the reason, in my opinion, why we did most of our shopping in the 'lesser' leagues so to speak or at teams who'd suffered relegation and needed the money. 

[sgncfc 1,221]

46 minutes ago, Highland Canary said:

simply a financial model which is doomed to fail.

Except that given the model remains top 26 (as you say), that isn't failure. The financial model is a staggering success.

The issue we have is that we as supporters seem to no longer be prepared to accept the top 26 model.

However, no one has yet come up with an alternative, other than to agree that we need wealthier owners prepared to lose lots of money in order for top 26 to become top 17.

I would add my voice to those suggesting we should be careful what we wish for. There are many, many clubs in the EFL who would swap their model for ours in a heartbeat. There are also many who are now actively copying us (and Brentford, who we actually copied in the first place).

I am strangely comforted that our players (Normann, Krul) and our manager still seem to completely believe that we will stay up. I accept that might be slightly naïve of me because "they have to say that, don't they", but I still think we will improve massively over the next few weeks once we have bedded down the system and gor our squad up to the required fitness levels. Normann and Kabak have played 2 games. Cantwell and Tzolis have also barely featured, and fitness is still clearly a problem for several players.

[PurpleCanary 5,554]

2 hours ago, Petriix said:

I think there was a third option, which would (in hindsight) have been even better: sell Buendia then sign 4 players for £20m each. Quality over quantity. Of all the permanent signings, only Tzolis looks to have the genuine potential to become a Premier League quality player, and not necessarily in the short-term. We really needed to buy better players with that money.

But we didn't have anything like £80m to spend, leaving side the effect on wages. At the most we had a net spend of £25m, so £60m (rounded up) in total with the Buendia money.

[komakino 272]

9 minutes ago, sgncfc said:

Except that given the model remains top 26 (as you say), that isn't failure. The financial model is a staggering success.

The issue we have is that we as supporters seem to no longer be prepared to accept the top 26 model.

However, no one has yet come up with an alternative, other than to agree that we need wealthier owners prepared to lose lots of money in order for top 26 to become top 17.

I would add my voice to those suggesting we should be careful what we wish for. There are many, many clubs in the EFL who would swap their model for ours in a heartbeat. There are also many who are now actively copying us (and Brentford, who we actually copied in the first place).

I am strangely comforted that our players (Normann, Krul) and our manager still seem to completely believe that we will stay up. I accept that might be slightly naïve of me because "they have to say that, don't they", but I still think we will improve massively over the next few weeks once we have bedded down the system and gor our squad up to the required fitness levels. Normann and Kabak have played 2 games. Cantwell and Tzolis have also barely featured, and fitness is still clearly a problem for several players.

There is an alternative - The majority shareholders sell their shares to a party that will invest and/or attract investment. It won't guarantee success, but it could avoid consistent failure. 

It isn't Smith & Jones or bust. 

Secondly, never believe what any player says. At least until after they are retired. Most footballers are mercenaries and are there to say nice things and take their wages. There is little to zero a player has a genuine affection for, expect maybe for local players who grew up supporting the club. The world has moved on since players retired and ran a Pub or a Post Office. 

Edited September 28, 2021 by komakino

[Highland Canary 76]

7 minutes ago, sgncfc said:

 

The issue we have is that we as supporters seem to no longer be prepared to accept the top 26.

It seems to me that the vast majority of fans are entirely content with finishing 20th again (meeting the top 26 target). Carrow Road continues to be remarkably quiet; Everton away, the muttering was at worse muted.

 

 

[Robert N. LiM 4,241]

1 hour ago, Petriix said:

The point being that a £20m player only becomes a £20m player if someone is willing to pay that much. We would need to offer more that the next highest bidder, and maybe enough to persuade a club to sell a prized asset that they would otherwise keep. That means knowingly paying a slightly inflated price and 'investing' some of our hard won cash in the quality of the squad.

Wages are a complication, but it's conceivable that we could have afforded 4 players on £50k per week with a 50% wage reduction on relegation. 3 year contracts with a club option of a 4th year would add up to £20.8M in committed wage expenditure, worst case. So a spend of ~ £100M, which is the sort of figure many of us were imagining after we sold Buendia.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch for our budget, but I'd still contend that rather than signing Tzolis, Sargent and Rashica, we could have signed one better striker and one better AM for the same total money, and rather than PLM, Gilmour and Normann we could have signed one significantly better CDM.

I think we're slightly at cross-purposes here. The question I'm asking is not primarily financial, but why such a player would come to Norwich. Take Armstrong for example. I'm not sure how seriously we were in for him, but if you were him you'd pick Southampton over us at this moment in time, wouldn't you? On a similar note, it seems it took the whole window to persuade Normann and Kabak to come here, and presumably part of that was because they were waiting for offers from more established teams that didn't materialise. The idea that someone better than Normann, Gilmour and PLM combined  would been keen to come when a player of Normann's quality only agreed to sign at the very last minute seems a little unrealistic to me.

So, at the moment, our level is to attract players like Sargent, Rashica and Tzolis, who are further on in their professional careers than, say, Maddison, Buendía or Godfrey were when we bought them, but still far from the finished article. And because they are therefore all a bit of a gamble, you spread your bets by buying a few players of that quality in the assumption that the sale of one of them will eventually pay for what you spent on all of them. In the event that we survive this season (obviously that looks unlikely at the moment, but we can but hope), perhaps then we're in a position to go up a level and start competing for the sort of player you're talking about.

Obviously when you've played six and lost six it's difficult to sense the club is making any progress, but the players we've brought in this summer are a cut above those we brought in last time we were promoted, I would say.