Following the deflating 3-0 defeat to Sunderland at the weekend, fingers are being pointed at a number of factors that have been contributed to Norwich’s disappointing return to the Premier League.
For weeks now, the failings of the board in the transfer market have been cited as one of the major reasons for our current scenario and it has been confirmed by the club that they tried and failed to sign a number of players in the summer transfer window.
The acquisition of Timm Klose and the impact he has made underlined the desperate need for a better centre-back. For every fan in attendance in recent weeks it has been overwhelmingly refreshing to see a Norwich defender in so much control of the opposition’s attack and for the first time in a plethora of Premier League games, fans had confidence in the team’s ability to keep a clean sheet.
Klose being ruled out for the rest of the season was a killer blow in what ended up being a torrid week for City fans. A drab away performance to Crystal Palace, a deflating loss to Sunderland and the thought of Seb Bassong leading the line for the final four games hasn’t filled the fans with much confidence.
Listening to Canary Call on the way back from the game on Saturday I found myself thinking more and more about the board’s admission that they did indeed try to sign players in the summer window but for undisclosed reasons those signings didn’t come to fruition.
Well, based on the Robbie Brady saga those reasons appear to be obvious.
When Norwich first went in for Brady their bid was met with derision from Steve Bruce. I recall him stating that Norwich’s initial bid was an “embarrassment”.
This seems to be our general approach in the market and it makes me question whether the Benik Afobe bid was perhaps dealt with in the same manner?
I don’t subscribe to the…“It’s hard to convince players to come to Norwich” excuse. If you’ve ever read The Secret Footballer he does reference Norwich City and within the game players do see the club as a nice place to play football and a club where players are well looked after.
The two key issues in the transfer market from an outside perspective is that we don’t give the top targets the respect that shows we are serious about signing them and the wages simply aren’t what other clubs are willing to pay.
When you take into account the signings of Ricky van Wolfswinkel, Lewis Grabban, Steven Naismith, Matt Jarvis and Brady there is an obvious effort from the club to improve the squad but what we have found from this season is that living within your means as a football club will unfortunately not spell success at the top level.
I do believe however that the reluctance to pay the premium wages only paints a small fraction of the picture. There are a number of other underlying factors to take into account and a large majority of these are out of the club’s hands.
There will be agents’ motives, selling clubs who will only let players go when they have their targets, and many more elements to consider, but Norwich have failed to master the element they are in control of: identifying the right players.
Our squad is now littered with players that look, to me at least, like the fourth or fifth man on the list of target acquisitions. You only need to look at our strike force for this.
The signings of Dieumerci Mbokani and Patrick Bamford never set the world on fire because neither player offers anything different to what we already had. Okay, they’ll have the odd good game, all professionals do, but on the whole there’s nothing in either that gives us a new dimension. We needed to identify players with different skill-sets.
The headline reason for our failure to improve the squad in preparation for the season boils down to the fact we didn’t offer the right money for the players we wanted to sign. However, even if we did get those players in, would they have been able to give us the different options going forward that we so desperately need?
I believe the problem runs deeper. We need to take a leaf out of Leicester City’s book and invest more into the recruitment team within the club. I don’t expect us to be signing the next Mahrez but as a Premier League club (at least for now) we should be able to identify players across the globe.
The goal behind this approach is to find players with the qualities that the team need at a market price much lower than that of a player in England or Spain.
Perhaps then the board can find a happy balance of identifying promising players and being able to put in those low-ball offers to sign them up.
I don’t believe that Norwich will change their approach and start offering big money for players to come and play for us, so improving the recruitment team is going to be the best solution going forward and then to start identifying players who have qualities in areas we are lacking.
If we do manage to stay up, unlikely as it looks at this point, we aren’t a million miles away from having a good team, but whether we stay up or go down, in the summer transfer window there will be a lot of pressure on the board to perform and not leave us once again lacking in quality.
No, the answer is to weed out the root of the problem, not add more fertiliser. The board are the problem and changes must be made. How many times can they make the same mistakes without being pointed out and held accountable? This recruitment problem has existed since the rise from league 1! We have had about 5 heads of recruitment and they keep getting the blame for some strange reason. Its the board people…wake up.
Matthew – your article does pose one interesting question. Having recently spent three consecutive seasons in the Premier League, it’s surprising that the scouting network still needs improving.
The poor selection of transfer targets was identified as the major contributing reason for our relegation last time around, yet we entered this season, seemingly, with a revised set up which ultimately failed to deliver.
One or two transfers not getting over the line can be considered bad luck, three or four sounds like a systematic failure?
Interesting article on a subject I’ve wondered about for a long time. In defence of the board, quite rightly not spending more than we have means we are always going to miss out on some players and this is excerbated by bouncing around the divisions so we cannot confirm our budget as early as some other clubs.
The recent signings of Thompson, Maddison & Godfrey suggest that there is a change in policy, but up to now, I would accuse the board of overly conventional thinking. The best example of this is the strikers we’ve signed, I’d argue that we haven’t had a really successful signing since Grant Holt, a couple had been ok (Jerome, Jackson) but most (Morison, RVW, Hooper) have been disastrous.
Norwich are never going to outspend anybody, so if we are going to compete we have to do something different but better than anybody else. I would take Wigan’s run in the Premiership based on signing obscure South Americans as a good example of what can be achieved on low budgets by doing things differently.
Norwich either need to develop a definitive style of play (regardless of the Manager) a la Swansea, get a lot better at Youth development (eg Southampton) or get used to scouting in the Congo. I don’t really know what the change should be but whatever we are doing now is not working.
Guys Guys
The problem is as I see it is The manager failing to stick with a team , players being played out of poston swapped round every other game , bringing in players and not playing them what’s the point Bamford for example , Carrow Road needs to be expanded to a decent size eg 40,000 will’d fill it , which would bring more income ,some investment from abroad wouldn’t go a miss , instead of trying to run it on the cheap , but having said all this otbc lets hope we can do it , but I fear with this management it will end it defeat
Some good points, especially about the scouting network.
Jeff (1): You’re correct about the Board only in the sense that they’re not Russian billionaires. I could list the (many) advantages to us of having the owners we do, but the downside is we have less money to splash around than – say – Bournemouth.
It’s hard to swallow, but the reality is this: for the moment, we can’t match a club like Stoke for wages or the probability of staying in the Premier League. That’ll change if we stay up this year.
One final point. Steve Bruce’s “embarrassing” quote is often cited as criticism of our approach. Well, we actually signed Brady for a sum closer to that initial bid than to Mr Bruce’s initial demand.
I was considering writing a similar article You cannot build or create a Premiership team by shopping in the seconds or bargain bucket department of other Premiership teams. Those players are in the bargain bucket for a very good reason, their parent teams do not consider them not good enough to take their own Premiership ambitions forward.
Is this problem due to lack of financial management, poor team image, or just an inbuilt attitude of gambling on being able to do things on the cheap?
I suspect that it is down to an element of all 3.
The financial problem is that we are probably the only team in the current Premiership that doesn’t have a major investor underpinning our campaign. Because of that we are forced into gambling and shopping in footballs Primark.
Until we find ourselves a White Knight we will be the perennial yo-yo club. Too good for the Championship, yet not quite good enough to survive in the Premiership
A very interesting article and one that I’ve thought about for some time. As I see it, we have 2 choices –
1. We have to improve our scouting network and recruit players who are going to fight for the cause whichever league we’re in and a top striker is a MUST. If we can recruit another Grant Holt for a modest sum then great, but why didn’t we increase our bid for Afobe and not waste £Ms on Naismith???? An extra £2M – £3M would have been ‘loose change’ had he helped us stay in the PL.
2. We have to either improve our youth recruitment and give them a chance to prove themselves with the first team. We have invested a lot of money in getting our Academy up to the top standard and I sincerely hope that we do begin to see academy players being first team regulars.
If we’re serious about signing players who will benefit the team, we need to start bidding at a sensible level, without being reckless.
I also agree with AN’s team selection seems odd at times – how many fans winced when they saw Martin’s name on the team sheet for the visit of Liverpool and Ranieri I believe has had the same starting 11 for something like 11 games!!!! I think AN could become a good manager, but I know myself and quite a few other fans are beginning to question his judgement/team selection at times.
I’m looking forward to seeing Maddison next season and hope we can recruit some other players to bolster the team and move others on.
“When Norwich first went in for Brady their bid was met with derision from Steve Bruce. I recall him stating that Norwich’s initial bid was an “embarrassment”.”
I get really fed up the number of times this is used as a criticism of our board. Just have a think about Bruce’s lousy sense of value for money.
Steve Bruce only ever goes to clubs willing to spend a fortune. Some years ago IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP at Brum he spent £10m on 4 strikers (Jerome was one of them, Rowan Vine another – approx. £5.5m the pair, and in that first season they scored 10 goals between them), and in the end still he only just scraped promotion.
At Hull he was able to spend large sums on the wages of the likes of Huddlestone and Livermore – and still he got them relegated. We were delighted with what he paid us for Snodgrass if I remember correctly.
When we were pursuing Brady we were the only suitors, we were not in a fight for him, and he wanted away. So whilst I certainly don’t blame Bruce for getting as good a deal as he could, nor do I blame us for trying to doing the same. We would have been utter mugs NOT to try to steal him.
I am much more concerned about what is happening when we DO make signings. Of Neil’s permanent recruits only Brady and Klose have really come good. Our recent mini-run of form was based around O’Neill and Howson in midfield – not Dorrans or Mulumbu. Naismith has had his moments, but not many of them; Jarvis has done little since returning from injury.
My suspicion is that our underlying problem is more to do with coaching than recruitment. I have faith in Neil as a manager, but for me there are serious doubts about his support team.
Gary Holt? Loved him as a player but not sure he’s really a top coach. Not sure McAvoy is either. And below that there’s been no evidence of any ability to develop U21 players and get them up to First Team level in recent years, not even for the upper reaches of the Championship, let alone the Premier League.
Yes, we could probably have done better in the market last summer, but what’s coming through to me is that whoever we sign in many cases we are just not getting the best out of them.
We all too easily assume that we alone have a poor recruitment policy and an unhappy habit of buying players who, for whatever reasons, are not the sirt of signings we might reasonably expect them to be.
But this is something endemic to football as a whole not to Norwich City.
Manchester City laid out something like £90 Million on Mangala, Bony and Negredo-none of their fans will ever be championing their names from the rooftops.
Chelsea, reputed to have one of the biggest and most thorough scouting and recruitment set ups in the world- £45 million or so on Luis, Remy and Schurrle. LVG’s big money buys for Man Utd have hardly all set collective Old Trafford pulses racing either, most of the excitement surrounds Rashford who joined them when he was 7. He looks a lot better value than Martial @ £36 Million.
Clubs can put absolutely everything they can in place in order to sign the right players. Sometimes they get it right but the player still doesn’t make it at that club, look, again, at how easily Chelsea wrote off De Bruyne. No-one can say he isn’t quality but at the time he left them, most Chelsea fans would have wondered quite what the club saw in him and what on earth their scouts ever saw in the player in the first place.
Many years ago none of us lamented when we sold Danny Mills to Charlton. Yet he went onto play at a World Cup and in the Champions League. Was that down to a lack of foresight with the coaches at the club at the time? Or, simply, that Mills was never going to make it here. No-one at Notts Forest fancied Holty much, look at what he did here.
Player recruitment is much more of a lottery than we realise. Yes, we can, and should, have absolutely the best and most widespread recruitment team in place and yes, they should all have solid football/coaching backgrounds. The problem is, if you are THAT good at the job, then you’re not going to be working in that part of the game, you’re going to be a coach or manager in your own right.
Most scouts are freelance-few clubs have a full time scouting team these days. Most of those freelancers operate for little more than expenses. We’ve raised our own bar with the appointment of Tony Spearing who has a very good reoutation in the game here and in mainland Europe. We can but hope he helps us sign rather more gems than duds. But it isn’t, and can never be, guaranteed.
Does no one think we have to increase Carrow Road or relocate ? Oh her ground more potencal income
As Ed so eloquently states the situation, there are no guarantees with any incoming player whatever his reputation or background.
The classic example is Gary Hooper. We paid a good price at 5 million, but were any other PL clubs interested at the time? If another had been tempted, that fee would have shot up and he very likely would have gone elsewhere, especially if it had been a London-based club (QPR, Fulham, Palace). Whatever Hooper says, he wasn’t good enough in the PL and on occasion didn’t try hard enough.
Decent overseas players invariably will plump for the capital (or its suburbs) if they have the choice. Clubs such as Southampton and Stoke have managers with international experience and connections which is a big plus when tempting a foreign player to another area of the country.
A good scouting system doesn’t guarantee success but it makes the odds better. The hoovering up of other lower half PL clubs’ excess baggage has proved to be, with the exception of Gary O’Neill, a failure.
We’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Can PL stability be achieved without ditching our principles and joining the rat race?
Whatever our fate is to be this season, a major re-think is essential (if not already being done) as to the best way forward over the next 5-10 years. Let’s not flog ourselves to a mega-bucks overseas tycoon/consortium though as Swansea now seem to be doing. I don’t want success at any price.
Steve – McNally is very much against redeveloping the City Stand, saying it will take ‘two years’. There are rumours that the club are/have looked tentatively into a moving away and it is the preferred option to redevelopment, yet gate receipts aren’t so important in the PL as they are in The Championship…
For me Norwich City are scared of the PL. In an ideal world, they would win the Championship every season and refuse to get promoted. Let’s not forget, the club is a professional club, yet run by amateurs.
Darren (12): Our club is OWNED by amateurs.
In effect, it’s run by David McNally. Despite the sometimes valid criticisms directed at him, he is in every sense a professional.
The redevelopment debate is an interesting one. I try to be objective about it, setting aside my season ticket in the City Stand…
Darren (12) Why would the Board settle for life in the Championship, with a budget of circa £50M – including parachute payments – when the Premier League it’s double that?
The football budget exceeds £80M for current season.
So, Matthew, after all that your final paragraph reads
“If we do manage to stay up, unlikely as it looks at this point, we aren’t a million miles away from having a good team, but whether we stay up or go down, in the summer transfer window there will be a lot of pressure on the board to perform and not leave us once again lacking in quality.”
We aren’t a million miles away from having a good team – your words, not mine.
We have a budget, we stick to it. We’re not put off by snide comments from Steve Bruce, who has his own audience and agenda. McNally will not bankrupt the club and that is the price we have to be prepared to pay. We offer what we consider a player to be worth and even then the manager may not ‘fancy’ them.
I don’t know what your sources are concerning why players won’t sign for us and that we don’t offer enough salary – or is that just guesswork? “we don’t give the top targets the respect that shows we are serious about signing them” Really, how do you know that?
Of course other clubs can offer more money, even ‘little, plucky’ Bournemouth.
My understanding is that we had two very serious offers on the table before the end of the Autumn transfer window, both in excess of £10m, but both failed, one because the selling club failed in their bid to get a replacement.
The consensus seems to be that Klose’s injury might be the final straw and there’s little the board could have done do about that, but they did put up the readies in January. Just imagine if one of autumn targets had been Klose or maybe an even better central defender?
At the end of every season there will be three clubs relegated, that’s life. If we’re one of them this season then don’t blame the board for a lack of ambition or for trying. At least our club makes life interesting for us!
OTBC
Moving away being considered? Seriously? I’ve not heard anything about this. What sites are proposed? The 147 acres up for bidding by the Hospital/A47? I can’t think of a better location for the ground than Carrow Road, to be honest, especially considering the proximity to the Station, which services many home and away fans on matchdays. This is a story that deserves its own thread…
for years the set up at Norwich City appears to have been nice family run club, but the club has not grown with their status on the field, many supporters have a fancied notion the club is a big club but in truth you are a small provincial club that has not kept pace with its growth
John (17), I’ve never entertained the notion that we are a “big” club. Size doesn’t come into it, football is not all about “my club is bigger than your club…look what we’ve won… at least we’ve got a history” etc etc.
Thats got a feel of schoolboy scrapping behind the bike sheds and “my Dad is bigger than your Dad” about it.
We’re a ‘small provincial club’? Fine, suits me. If I wanted to support, else go and watch a large megabucks superclub, nothing can stop me. But no, I prefer my own team. Smaller than some, more downs than ups and never likely to be a serious contender.
But a joy to watch and support, bad times and all. That’s football.
Dominick (16) I’m hoping that those who regard McNally as incompetent turn out to be right and due to an admin error we move to Northwich – thus cutting down my travelling time to home games by about 4 hours!
John(17) – ouch! Which club’s pedestal are you standing on?
More than a grain of truth though perhaps..sadly, the ‘growth’ you speak of has not been a linear one on the pitch but an up and downy one.
Things are a helluva lot rosier right now in almost every aspect compared with just 6-7 years back. Some fans seem to forget that bigger picture in the hurly burly of the here and now.
Whether we stay up or plummet, the fans will be there at near capacity – unlike 99% of other clubs outside of the PL top 6.
Isn’t one of the problems buying fellow PL players that perhaps see Norwich as an easy gig? Look at the success that Lambert had with continuously purchasing players from the lower divisions that felt they had something to prove and had the drive and desire to play at the top level.
Let’s look at such “top level” players in question – all signed since Lambert left. Bassong. Turner. Garrido. Tettey. RvW. Hooper. Fer. Elmander. Odjidja. Miquel. Cuellar. Naismith. None of them have exactly performed consistently and many have been sold on.
The expectations have been so high since Lambert but the fact is that we have not had a better-fitting manager for a long, long while. He scouted and got the best out of lower league players such as Holt, Johnson, Bennett, Pilkington, Ruddy and Crofts in a time when money was really starting to rule the PL. We managed to hold our own and this is what is needed again.
There is some real quality in the lower leagues and hopefully the signings of Madison, Godfrey etc is the way the club is heading.
Some excellent comments and mirrors a conversation I had with a fellow Canary exiled in London this lunchtime. Firstly, Norwich is a provincial club with a passionate fanbase. The club benefits from having no real competition in the area but suffers as the highs and lows are not diluted. The days when every club operated on a relatively level playing field are behind us and we must accept this. One unavoidable fact is that three clubs will be relegated. I believed that there are three teams ‘worse’ than Norwich at the start of the season and still do. However, the table does not lie and looking at Sunderland with a striker on 16+ goals this season but they are still in the bottom three shows how hard it is. If their defence was better they’d be comfortably mid table with those goals. Norwich failed to score against Palace, Sunderland and Villa in crucial matches and that is the story of our season in a nutshell. Too poor for the Premier League and failed to win the games we needed to win. OTBC
I’m with Ed (again). Newcastle have spent £50m which is more than twice our spend. Do you really thank they got value? Even the lionised Ferguson has a string of transfer embarrassments such as Djemba Djemba.
I really don’t understand City fans’ obsession with the club going for the “cheap option”. Do these critics choose to shop at a Waitrose for the fun of it? What is the merit in paying more than you have to for anything including footballers?
The Brady transfer is constantly used to attack the club as being embarrassing. Why? Why was it wrong to try for the best price and even more importantly, why do City fans automatically assume that Bruce was telling the truth? The same with Lennon and Hooper. There is the bizarre situation where some fans appear to believe nothing that the club says and everything negative that outsiders say.
Bruce claimed to want £15m for Brady and we got him for £6m. I just don’t understand why I should be embarrassed about that.
Lucas (21) agree-“young and hungry” worked before, can do the same for us again. Players who feel they have something to prove else want to better themselves and ‘upgrade’ their careers. Look at Albrighton at Leicester, practically dumped by Villa, would have wanted to prove any doubters wrong. And how.