Is Webber taking us full circle?

[Google Bot 3,259]

2 minutes ago, hogesar said:

I think people forget the tiny amount of money we spent to get promoted first time round. Even Leitner and Trybull delivered for us considering the outlays.

Webber had much different backroom stafff supporting him in the initial seasons though, didn't he?

I'm a big fan of his.  But strongly feel that we've lost some good assets who following the success here have moved on. 

There's nothing wrong with that, or suggesting that they didn't like Webber as some have said - for me, it's just how things progressed... We just had a blend with very low expectations coming together at the right time.  Success spoils the best of things.

[Davidlingfield 63]

44 minutes ago, hogesar said:

Without promotion this season Webber leaves this club in a hugely better position than he left it and without being rude you'd have to be blind or purposefully ignorant not to realise this.

He has, as long as the c£100m player related payments due in the next two years can be funded by parachute payments and player trading whilst maintaining a competitive squad.

I am not so sure, but time will tell.

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

3 hours ago, KeiranShikari said:

Because we now own something of significant value to a football club whereas we didn't after McNally's tenure.

McNally made the necessary investments into Colney to achieve Cat A academy status, the one which produced Gunn, Rudd, Aarons, Lewis, and the Murphy's, four of whom were sold to help fund what Webber has done here, one who is in our team and another who we deemed good enough to buy back for £5M. 

This investment included the covered pitch which enabled youth sides to train in averse weather conditions. 

Meanwhile in his last season here before being ditched he stated in an interview that investment in Colney was necessary in the near future order to attract talent and establish ourselves in the Premier League. The idea that Webber is pioneering just because he bad mouthed a man who probably couldn't reply due to an NDA relating to a pay off (as is typical) doesn't wash with me.

Let's not forget that everybody Webber has sold for big money was already at the club, apart from Buendia.

[TheGunnShow 5,933]

 

16 minutes ago, chicken said:

Look here you two ( @Bert) I hate to be a pedant, but it's AMBISHUN otherwise it doesn't count... for added dramatic effect, you can throw in a NEYUL! too if you want.

No, it's HAMBISHUN! Rhymes with PASSHUN!!!!!!11!!!!! 😉

Never forget the odd 1 mixed in with the plethora of exclamation marks as the hallmark of the Illiterati. 😉

Edited October 17, 2022 by TheGunnShow

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

1 hour ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

We have progressed to the point where we're a club that's actually expected to be in the running for promotion at the start of a Championship season

Am i missing something here?

In Webbers 5 seasons here we won two promotions and had 3 full seasons in the Premier League.

Do people forget that we had Moxey sandwiched in between? If we were so skint when McNally left why did we spent £8.5m on Pritchard, £7m on Wildschut, £5m on Oliviera and £2.7m on Canos in the summer after he left, following relegation. 

I swear people forget that there was a period in between McNally and Webber.

I bet McNally rues that day he signed an NDA.

Edited October 17, 2022 by TeemuVanBasten

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

1 hour ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

That's right. Attanassio, who built a $240m baseball team into a $1.2bn baseball teamo has bought shares and joined the board because he has no ambition and recognises the club has no ambition either. 

Let's not assume that success in one sport means an easy crossover into another. 

Tony Fernandes... need I say more?

And we all know that Attanaso wouldn't be interested if Delia and hubby were 71 rather than 81. 

Edited October 17, 2022 by TeemuVanBasten

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

1 hour ago, chicken said:

In fairness, we are no where near the state the club was in when Webber arrived.

We were in a much worse state when McNally arrived.

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

27 minutes ago, Icecream Snow said:

I think considering that Maddison, Aarons, Lewis, Godfrey, Cantwell, the Murphys were in the building when Webber arrived, and that the recruitment team dined out for far too long on the success of Buendia and Pukki, it's hard for me to view our overall recruitment in a positive light.

The fact that Rashica and Tzolis were signed for £8-10m each and they're currently on loan, and doesn't exactly look likely that we're get any money back. Gibson was bought for a decent fee and isn't even first choice centre back.

Smith gets bashed, but the contracts of Pukki, Dowell, Hugill, Mclean, Byram, Hernandez, Sinani and Cantwell are all due to expire at the end of the season.

So a rebuild is needed. But we have no real saleable assets and I wouldn't be surprised if a few fallow years were coming.

Anybody who can't see this is blind, it's the inevitable consequence of our poor recruitment.

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

26 minutes ago, chicken said:

Omibamidele, Gibbs, Idah, Rowe, Springett, Tomkinson were not all here when Webber arrived though. 

And all of them still have it all left to prove. 

[chicken 2,605]

2 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

We were in a much worse state when McNally arrived.

Not really the point though is it.

You said "full circle" we're not. Simple.

It wasn't just McNally either, however, it is fair to say that Colney, the Academy and the youth route through to the first team is much improved. McNally gave us the Lambert years... and that can't be forgotten. Though it's also worth noting he gave us the Hughton years, which frankly, can. He didn't take us to the wall though and ensured that we ran a tight ship, to an extent. Still had bad signings under his leadership and I don't remember us axing the head scout or whoever it was that would have been assisting the manager to identify players at that time - I mean seriously, Elmander? 

[chicken 2,605]

2 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

And all of them still have it all left to prove. 

When Webber arrived, so did the players mentioned in the post I responded to.

Bit worried about you tonight TvB.

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

Just now, chicken said:

I mean seriously, Elmander? 

Has any striker ever had a good season in any team managed by Chris Hughton? He even went to Forest and managed to get Lewis Grabban firing blanks.

[littleyellowbirdie 2,514]

20 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

Let's not assume that success in one sport means an easy crossover into another. 

Tony Fernandes... need I say more?

And we all know that Attanaso wouldn't be interested if Delia and hubby were 71 rather than 81. 

Oh really? No crystal ball on any potential positives then? 

CEOs in business regularly transfer between industries, relying on the expertise of specialists in the industry to make the decisions on the actual product, and making changes to those people if they don't think they're doing the job. 

He didn't have much experience in baseball before he bought the brewers either. The man has intelligence, analytical skills, humility, and huge financial resources. The idea that anyone should be pessimistic about that after the years of moaning about needing some financial muscle in the club is laughable. 

Fernandes, in contrast, had no history of success in sports business before acquiring QPR. 

Edited October 17, 2022 by littleyellowbirdie

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

3 minutes ago, chicken said:

When Webber arrived, so did the players mentioned in the post I responded to.

Bit worried about you tonight TvB.

Both of the Murphys were established. 

Pritchard £11m, Jacob £10m, Howson £5m, Josh £10m, Maddison £23m. 

That's what funded Webbers rebuild.

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

5 minutes ago, chicken said:

Bit worried about you tonight TvB.

Cool, I'm worried about our club.

[chicken 2,605]

1 minute ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

Has any striker ever had a good season in any team managed by Chris Hughton? He even went to Forest and managed to get Lewis Grabban firing blanks.

I mean, I would love that to apply to Elmander, but it doesn't. At his very best he was a 1 in 3 striker give or take some very low level leagues. His best in this country was in 2010-11 for Bolton when he score 12 in 45 games... Prolific was not a word you would associate with him. He wasn't as good as Holt either. Or Morison. Or Chris Martin. All of whom he was preferred to.

[PurpleCanary 5,554]

Webber has got some things right and some things wrong. Just like Doncaster and McNally before him. They had good seasons and bad seasons. And it is the nature of the job with Norwich City, because of its financial position, that the mistakes are more obvious and get more heavily punished than is the case with some other clubs. For what it is worth I believe Webber is still comfortably in credit. But then I regard both Doncaster and McNally as both having had overall positive records, despite some obvious failures.

[chicken 2,605]

3 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

Both of the Murphys were established. 

Pritchard £11m, Jacob £10m, Howson £5m, Josh £10m, Maddison £23m. 

That's what funded Webbers rebuild.

So you changed the goalposts? 
 

Quote

I think considering that Maddison, Aarons, Lewis, Godfrey, Cantwell, the Murphys were in the building when Webber arrived, and that the recruitment team dined out for far too long on the success of Buendia and Pukki, it's hard for me to view our overall recruitment in a positive light.

Jacob left at the end of the 16-17 season so Webber had no real benefit team wise of him leaving, other than the money to plug the financial hole. Worth noting that it's "already here" and not established either. Because Jacob had just finished his first season as a regular for us.

You notice here, TVB, that the point isn't about money, but that good youngsters were already here?

Josh we had for another season, he'd made some appearances before the 2016-17 season, but again, that really has to be considered the first full season as a first team regular.

The rest from that list?

- Maddison: sent out on loan and bar a couple of murmurings of decent performances from North of the boarder, a couple of glimpses at the end of 16-17 and a few from Coventry fans, no one knew he was going to be as good as the player we saw in 2017-18. It is true though, he was in the building. 2018 was when he was sold, after Farke's and Webber's first full season.
- Cantwell hadn't even been sent out on loan. Hard to think that the first full season of Webberlution Cantwell was out on loan. He returned to force his way into Farke's plans, not once, but twice, besting Roberts in the premier league too.
- Godfrey had been loaned out over and over. 
- Lewis and Aarons were only just in the building considering their ages and that they were signed at 16ish. 

My point was more that if they were already that good, why wasn't Alex Neil playing them? That argument had actually been made in his last season about Maddison. 

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

3 minutes ago, PurpleCanary said:

But then I regard both Doncaster and McNally as both having had overall positive records, despite some obvious failures.

What do people attribute to being McNally's failures, out of interest?

Signing Naismith in the January before relegation is all that people seem to be able to offer up.

[chicken 2,605]

18 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

Cool, I'm worried about our club.

Overly, at this point. And I think you are making arguments for the sake of it to try and stoke it up a bit.

I worry because this is almost like old you, and you had to address that before. So not taking the p!ss, been there before myself, just trying to check in. 

[chicken 2,605]

1 minute ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

What do people attribute to being McNally's failures, out of interest?

Signing Naismith in the January before relegation is all that people seem to be able to offer up.

That is a pretty big failure... not just in that it didn't work out with the player, but that the contract was so good it almost bankrupt us. 

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

1 minute ago, chicken said:

Josh we had for another season, he'd made some appearances before the 2016-17 season

Are you counting the 2016/17 season as Webber's here then? 

Joined us in April 2017 mate.

That's definitely Moxey's year.

[chicken 2,605]

6 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

Are you counting the 2016/17 season as Webber's here then? 

Joined us in April 2017 mate.

That's definitely Moxey's year.

No. You said "established". I was just pointing out what that equated to, which was essentially their break-through seasons. 

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

14 minutes ago, chicken said:

That is a pretty big failure... not just in that it didn't work out with the player, but that the contract was so good it almost bankrupt us. 

See I just struggle to buy this.

So yeah it was a bit of a f*ck up, it was rumoured he didn't have a relegation wage drop clause so he was on £50k a week. The problematic year was the year that he was contracted beyond the end of parachute payments.

So lets say for arguments sake that post-parachute payments in 2017 we could only really afford to pay a regular attacking player £15k a week (goalscorers get a premium). That's £35k a week that we really didn't need to be shelling out on that has been for a year.

Or £1.8m.

I'll round it up to £2m for arguments sake.

Yet between Webber leaving and McNally arriving, we paid £7m for Yanic Wildschut. Enough to pay Naismith's wages for three years. That's before you consider that Wildschut would have been getting paid.

Yes, I know, we sold Brady for £13m and needed a replacement.... however, we also signed Alex Pritchard for £8m, and we didn't him because we had Wes Hoolahan in the hole, and Naismith who played in the hole.

You could just as easily blame any financial woes on us signing the injury prone Pritchard when we already had Hoolahan in his position, or on us blowing £7m on Wildschut when we had both the Murphy's + Canos on our books that season.

I mean, if we didn't eventually recoup the £2.7m fee on Canos, who we never bothered to play, we could have blamed his signing also. I feel that the Wildschut one is the one with legs though really, considering how dreadful he was and how few times he actually completed 90 minutes for us.

Its almost as if Moxey gets a free pass for some bizarre reason.

Edited October 17, 2022 by TeemuVanBasten

[chicken 2,605]

18 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

See I just struggle to buy this.

So yeah it was a bit of a f*ck up, it was rumoured he didn't have a relegation wage drop clause so he was on £50k a week. The problematic year was the year that he was contracted beyond the end of parachute payments.

So lets say for arguments sake that post-parachute payments in 2017 we could only really afford to pay a regular attacking player £15k a week (goalscorers get a premium). That's £35k a week that we really didn't need to be shelling out on that has been for a year.

Or £1.8m.

I'll round it up to £2m for arguments sake.

Yet between Webber leaving and McNally arriving, we paid £7m for Yanic Wildschut. Enough to pay Naismith's wages for three years. That's before you consider that Wildschut would have been getting paid.

Yes, I know, we sold Brady for £13m and needed a replacement.... however, we also signed Alex Pritchard for £8m, and we didn't him because we had Wes Hoolahan in the hole, and Naismith who played in the hole.

You could just as easily blame any financial woes on us signing the injury prone Pritchard when we already had Hoolahan in his position, or on us blowing £7m on Wildschut when we had both the Murphy's + Canos on our books that season.

I mean, if we didn't eventually recoup the £2.7m fee on Canos, who we never bothered to play, we could have blamed his signing also. I feel that the Wildschut one is the one with legs though really, considering how dreadful he was and how few times he actually completed 90 minutes for us.

Its almost as if Moxey gets a free pass for some bizarre reason.

Ah, well now you are asking which is worse, not if there were failures. A failure can be getting in ten minutes late or running into an iceberg and sinking. One is more of an annoyance, the other is a disaster.

Wildschut didn't cost as much as was rumoured at the time, but he was on good wages. Naismith was rumoured to be on more like £60k.

Parma has put up a nice post in another thread which adds more perspective on this too in terms of transfer fees being paid over a period of seasons rather than all at once.

Back to Naismith, he never wanted to play here. He turned us down at the start of the season as he wouldn't sign a relegation clause. We got desperate in January and caved to that to get him in. Klose and Pinto were also signed with those type of contracts, no relegation clauses.

I'm not saying McNally was overall bad, but had it been left to Moxey, as you say, we'd truly have been back to square one in League One.

Worth noting that Hoolahan left us in 2018, it was fairly obvious his days were numbered even by that point. Naismith already being a dud, Pritchard was signed as an option to him and then Maddison for that one season. It made sense at the time, an ageing Hoolahan still had it but was certainly starting to slip a little. 

[Christoph Stiepermann 1,131]

I'd still be really interested to hear the details of how McNally left. I've heard some whispers but nothing concrete. From my vantage point it looked like he took that relegation really hard and got too p155sed one night and over reacted on social media and then resigned in embarrassment. I'm not saying I'd want him back or that he shouldn't have left when he did, but he was great for us without a doubt and I'd love to hear the full story of how it fell apart.  

[TeemuVanBasten 3,327]

2 minutes ago, Christoph Stiepermann said:

I'd still be really interested to hear the details of how McNally left. I've heard some whispers but nothing concrete. From my vantage point it looked like he took that relegation really hard and got too p155sed one night and over reacted on social media and then resigned in embarrassment. 

Didn't he also then tweet a few hours later changing his mind about resigning, when he'd sobered up, but the board decided they'd had enough.

I doubt that single incident was the reason, the whole club seemed to be in a bad place towards the end of that season. It was around that time that John Ruddy uppercutted somebody on Tombland and got dropped from the side, and there were lots of accounts of McNally chinning somebody on Prince of Wales Road who gave him abuse when he was out having a drink with his son.

[KeiranShikari 1,410]

57 minutes ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

McNally made the necessary investments into Colney to achieve Cat A academy status, the one which produced Gunn, Rudd, Aarons, Lewis, and the Murphy's, four of whom were sold to help fund what Webber has done here, one who is in our team and another who we deemed good enough to buy back for £5M. 

This investment included the covered pitch which enabled youth sides to train in averse weather conditions. 

Meanwhile in his last season here before being ditched he stated in an interview that investment in Colney was necessary in the near future order to attract talent and establish ourselves in the Premier League. The idea that Webber is pioneering just because he bad mouthed a man who probably couldn't reply due to an NDA relating to a pay off (as is typical) doesn't wash with me.

Let's not forget that everybody Webber has sold for big money was already at the club, apart from Buendia.

EPPP stuff is fair although it's clearly no way near the outlay that has come since. I'm not saying it was pioneering for Webber to get the training ground fixed but he got the training ground fixed. That's worth a shiny new training ground whereas talking about it is worth nothing.

 Less keen on the point big sales. Whilst it's true that they were here it was the opportunity in the squad and coaching that Webber and Farke gave them that made them the players we'd go on to sell. It's obviously what ifs but the reality is before Webber and Farke we rarely gave youngsters a pathway and now we have a constant stream of youngsters in the team.

1 hour ago, TeemuVanBasten said:

That's news to me... Galatasary aren't in European competition because they finished 13th in the league last season. 

And Twente didn't quality for the Europa Conference after losing a play off game.

Mistyped, should have said European. Would have obviously still been wrong but I knew Twente weren't CL. Shocked at the position Galatasaray finished in, guess they had an off year as I know they've won it recently. Still significantly larger than Hearts and Bolton though.

 

[glory.win or die. 270]

5 hours ago, KeiranShikari said:

Because we now own something of significant value to a football club whereas we didn't after McNally's tenure.

Our youth setup and training facilities will bring value long after the current set of players and webber have gone. Webber has helped pave the way for investment and potential future ownership change. They're also seemingly moving towards expansion of Carrow Road but I guess you can't really give him that until something more concrete happens.

I assume you're just being intellectually dishonest and aren't actually this zeroed in on the league table.

In fairness most of the players Webber has sold for big money were here during Mcnallys time. 

I'd argue Mcnally was better than Webber

[Google Bot 3,259]

1 hour ago, glory.win or die. said:

I'd argue Mcnally was better than Webber

It's very tough to call as everyone who comes through the club are all part of the eventual makeup.

Lambert wouldn't have had the immediate success he did were it not for Gunn bringing in Holty, and Roeder bringing in Hoolahan for example... One leads into the other.