italian dave

It almost seemed like it was done on a kind of percentage basis. We've bought from lower league/France and made money before. Therefore, buy 5 from lower league/France, and if 4 fail, but one makes a 6x more than he cost then we're in profit. And it didn't go much beyond that!

But, nevertheless, and for whatever reason, we DID sell them for a huge profit. In contrast to previous regimes where, from Goater, through Marvin Elliott to Maynard, we didn't do so at the right time or in a canny enough way. I find myself saying all this through gritted teeth because I can't stand the guy, but back at the time we thought we were doing well to get the money we did for all of them.

Thanks - bit more than I'd imagined. Presumably the lower end is for Monaco/Frieburg (I know that's a fixed amount). I don't imagine that will worry them If the £1m is Burnley then that might affect how they view it.

It’s not going to be much though, is it? In the overall scheme of things, not an amount that will make a huge difference to the decision for those three clubs?

Yes, but the point is that in the past we had good players and we failed to capitalise on them. And yes, it came unstuck towards the end (Nagy, Fam, Paterson etc). That’s why I was very careful to explicitly say “in one respect and for a while”.

Yep, agree. The strategy of buy cheap, sell high isn’t bad. It just has to be balanced with a football strategy. We had an objective - top 6. I’ve no doubt LJ had a strategy but I suspect that he felt it was repeatedly sabotaged by the financial strategy.

Yeah, I don’t argue with that. I think it’s just semantics. Clearly LJ had control over what happened on the pitch - selection, tactics and so on. But my point is that MAs financial objectives were allowed to take precedence over the ‘on the pitch’ objectives. And he is a financial man, not a football man (whatever he may wish!).

And great response Ole! I think I’d add/suggest one thing though, in an attempt to be entirely objective and fair. And that’s that - for a while and in one respect - he was quite good at it. The one thing he did well was to extract maximum value from our assets. That was something that SL had always been clear was an objective for him, and it was something we’d been pretty poor at. We had a long history of turning down generous bids for players at what turned out to be the peak of their career - we’d expect them to take us to the next level and usually they’d end up the following season getting injured and/or losing form. Or allowing players to wind down their contracts. There’s no doubt that - in purely financial terms - we couldn’t have done much better than we did with the likes of Kelly, Kodjia, Webster, Brownhill. I think that impressed SL. I think you’re dead right about him being a wannabe footballer who actually had no idea about the football side. @Davefevs talks about SL leaving him to run the football side: my view is that SL left him to run the financial side and LJ the football side, but failed to manage the balance between the two when those objectives came into conflict. Either way, a mistake. And, ultimately, I agree - I for him it’s all about him, his income, his status, his objectives, and LJ wasn’t strong enough to stand up to that (and possibly also had a more balanced view and did actually recognise the financial drivers). And the way he stitched us up with the Americans was unforgivable, and surely must have made SL see the light? Even if too late. Finally, and again trying to be completely objective, I can understand why our friends from Ipswich might be a little baffled: we must seem oddly obsessed to the outsider. Right now, the top two threads on our Bristol City football forum are about MA/Ipswich and LJ/Leeds - three years, a whole pandemic, two managers, a whole squad after both men left us!

Jumping Jack Flash……..Rolling Stones

European Son…..The Velvet Underground

?? Portishead might be doing OK too!!

Living Next Door to Alice……..Dr Hook and the Medicine Show

Good Vibrations……The Beach Boys

Alice’s Restaurant……..Arlo Guthrie.

Man in a Shed…….Nick Drake

I’m not going to debate this on here, because it’s a football thread in the football forum and I know that people dislike them straying into politics. But there’s a whole thread on this subject over in the politics forum so please join us over there to debate this……we’ve been looking for ages for someone to tell us some (even one) of the benefits of Brexit.

Even if the English side was one Bristol R*****s?

Nope…..just ours. ?

Toreador......Georges Bizet

You started it……?

Nice with some (Colin) Cramembert?

Of course that’s ridiculous. (Not that I’m aware of anyone on here who holds quite such an extreme view). It’s just as ridiculous as “LJ was a complete disaster and never did anything good in his whole time with us”. (Of which there are one or two!) LJ had his strengths and his weaknesses. He gave us good times as well as bad. Just like any manager has. Ashton had his strengths too: he was more adept at cashing in on our assets than anyone else I can remember. (Although he was a horrible toad too!) But (my view) the dynamics have to work, the competing objectives have to work, and for their last year or two together (Johnson and Ashton) they didn’t. And SL didn’t seem to be able to sort that out and (for example) be clear that ultimately LJs footballing objectives had to take priority over the financial objectives. LJ once talked about writing a book one day about what was going on behind the scenes - and there was lots of speculation about what he meant. My money is that much of it was about that conflict.

John Pelling. Now at Stoke I believe.

I think that where we also took the eye off the ball was in allowing the financial imperatives to take precedence over the footballing ones. We all knew that we were having to balance the two - making the top 6 whilst also making the club self sufficient, which meant buying players cheap, developing them and selling them at the height of their value. Early on, we did well with players like Kelly and Kodjia: we maximised value but we did so in the knowledge that we had a plan B in place on the pitch. Towards the end we failed on the footballing front. We might have maximised value from Webster and Brownhill, but we did so with no plan B in place at all. I’d love to know how we’d have got on that season if we’d kept both those players. There’s no doubt in my mind that they left massive gaps.

I’m not saying that he deserved more time: it’s more about the club than about an individual and I just wonder whether, as a club, we shot ourselves in the foot by adding to the chaos that was unfolding around us. I don’t think you can disregard non footballing factors, especially when they are as massive as the pandemic was for football. And, yes, agree that the mess around his replacement contributed…but again that could have been avoided by hanging on with him in place and getting a proper plan b in place. I’d hasten to say that I’m suggesting all this with the massive benefit of hindsight! At the time I wasn’t particularly surprised or upset - although I think I probably hoped that we had a replacement lined up. But it’s just that I’ve often wondered since where we’d have ended up if we had hung in there for a little longer.