I only keep a very, very distant watch on all things MyFootballWriter these days.
Which, in very large part, is testament to Gary’s superb stewardship of the site. This is his baby; the baton has been passed on.
But at times like this there is still this little hankering to throw your two-penneth in the ring after spending nigh-on half your adult life keeping a watching brief on Carrow Road.
And the personalities at the centre of this latest storm do intrigue.
Just as they did when Martin met Robert. And one wanted Dean Windass. And he wanted him before the end of the century.
Football is an ugly business. And, basically, getting ever uglier. Play nice and play by the rules invariably gets you nowhere.
Where was Norwich’s fine for breaking the Financial Fair Play rules? Bournemouth will be playing Premier League football again next season. Leicester City will be playing Champions League football.
Both have been fined. For not playing nice when it came to Financial Fair Play.
David McNally’s rise to fame and considerable fortune came on the back of a spell as Commercial Director at Celtic. Where, one presumes, his awareness of Paul Lambert started.
Celtic Park and Glasgow’s tribal divides is a School of Hard Knocks. McNally was a man for back streets and knuckle dusters; just as the more patrician airs of Alan Bowkett was all City boardrooms and Highland shooting parties.
The two were chalk and cheese; oil and water; the club was never going to be big enough for the both of them, long-term.
You can see, therefore, why McNally plumped for an Alex Neil. He was a known quantity.
Where – from a distance – McNally started to put his foot wrong was when he suddenly emerged as the ‘executive chairman of the football department’ – or whatever title that role carried.
It put him too close to Colney; should the worst happen – as it is about to – his finger prints would be all over the club’s recruitment policy. Or lack thereof.
Neil Doncaster may have had his faults, but he knew his place was in Carrow Road, not Colney. He did not presume to know his football.
But there is one other figure that is not getting much of a mention in the pieces I have read. And, I would suspect, must have had his say of late.
Ed Balls.
Football is on a par with Westminster in terms of the back-street brawls and late night stabbings that go on behind that grand Gothic Victorian facade.
And Balls has never struck me as one to shirk a fight. Particularly in the bear pit of the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions.
And then there is the heir apparent, Young Tom, Delia’s nephew.
“Most of my experience is about helping people make decisions, often in tough circumstances when there is an awful lot at stake,” said the former MoD civil servant, at the time of his appointment to the Board.
“For much of my career this was in military operations,” he added, for all the world sounding like Our Man in Kabul.
“I have a diversity of experience in a variety of roles. The single strand that runs through all of that, however, is the ability to inform decision making in challenging circumstances.”
Which makes him ideally qualified to deal with this one.
Or maybe it was his ‘informed decision-making’ allied to Balls’ Westminster ways that left McNally feeling left out in the cold as Neil’s first season in the Premier League all went a bit south.
Recruitment policy – be it of the teenage, Academy variety or of the Defoe-esque scoring ability – will be the weapon of choice this summer as the recriminations begin.
Reports are that Leicester will fight a £10m fine for breaching the FFP rules; Bournemouth got whacked £7.5m.
‘Yeh, whatever…
And this, I think, remains Norwich’s biggest moral dilemma given the current owners that they have. And will have for the foreseeable now under Balls and Smith, Jnr.
Are we going to play Premier League games nice – or dirty?
And is the era of relying on Glasgow’s finest coming to a close?
What lessons are we learning from the Southamptons and the Leicester’s, the West Hams and the Tottenhams?
It might not be a dull summer.
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I won’t be surprised if the name Andrew Neville pops up – he of the filling Carrow Road with season ticket holders and currently at Leicester City.
Interesting thoughts Rick.
If memory serves me right, the first version of the Championship FFP rules actually evolved during our three year spell in the Premier League. They also permitted exemption for two seasons for teams demoted from the Premier. As a consequence, they weren’t applicable to the Canaries last season.
Of course, they’ve since been revised into a three year rolling period, with an allowance for even bigger loses going forwards.
I guess, the $64,000 question remains, how do Championship and Premier League teams fund those accumulated loses going forwards?
No one seems to care about that factor as long as someone else’s money!
Well put Mr Waghorn, got to feel that Mr McN was pushed into that role which has led to him departing. I feel there’s more to this story than appears & if there is a conspiracy buff about I’m sure they’d say it’s also connected to Mr Bowketts departure. This summer it’s about toughening up & preparing to ride a storm which is brewing (disconnection of fans) in my opinion.
Yes the club has always done “right & proper” but that’s more to do with not having a super wealthy owner who can take the financial punishments, the club now has to clean house as it’s very stale, if we don’t have a team on the park no amount of healthy bank balances will make a difference so I implore the board to invest in the squad efficiently & allow it to challenge as a football club not a business.
Oh & yes Mr Gowers is doing a grand job!!
OTBC
Great summary of the dilemmas facing clubs like Norwich.
I want my club to play hard but fair. Don’t want to go down the Bournemouth route – if ever there was a case of the punishment not fitting the crime, this is it – or some of Leicester’s manoeuvrings. Nor the route of administration (in effect, screwing all the local companies who supply the club) like Southampton.
But David McNally’s ‘hardness’ was exactly what we needed, and what we still need. The frustration is that we sit here feeling (and I’m sure McNally felt) we could have at least survived this season if we’d got a couple of things right.
So near and yet so far.
You mention Southampton, amongst others, and there would be a strong case that they have had most of their success without playing nasty (administration notwithstanding). Swansea, too, have been a model of how to run a club well and be successful on and off the pitch. To me, it’s not about playing fair or not, it’s about playing smart. If Les Reed and Huw Jenkins could bottle and sell what they’ve been doing at their clubs they’d be billionaires and not undeservedly.
What’s never been proven with our current business model is how it stands up under a 3-5 year stretch in The Championship and we may be about to find out.
Looking at our bloated squad we must have a wage bill that vastly outweighs our income, even after relegation clauses kick in. Certainly after the parachute payments dry up.
Now is the time for us to become lean-mean-fighting-machines. Cut all the dead wood, take what we can get for the likes of Mulumbu, Lafferty, RVW, Bassong, Jerome, Dorrans, Wisdom, Jarvis, Andreu, and all the other players not fit for purpose. Reduce wage costs and get 10-230m in transfer fees. Pull home the youth boys and start a three year plan to get us promoted with a team of “winners”. Put the money towards keeping the core of the team on the books (Ruddy, Klose, Bennet, Howson, Olsson, Tetty, Redmond, Brady, Wes, and Pinto & O’Neil (at a push)).
We also need to phase out those players who were great 3 years ago, either passing them on or moving them into club roles. I’d love to see Wes transition into coaching for instance.
Personally I have no issue with a few seasons in The Championship as long as we have a well formulated, properly communicated, long term plan to clean up the club and be truly prepared when we are promoted.
“Personally I have no issue with a few seasons in The Championship ”
Looks like you picked the wrong East Anglian club to support then Dave!
Joking apart I know what you are saying Dave but it’s very difficult to have such a plan because you’ve got to walk before you can run.
I can’t agree with the bring back youth idea – if any of them were close to top championship standard or better I very much doubt if they would have gone on loan to MK Dons at best, and in most cases to League One or below.
As in 2014 if we are relegated many of the players, who have again proved they are Championship at best, will stay. Martin, Wes, Howson, Tettey, Ruddy, possibly Redmond even – nobody came in for them then and I’m not sure anyone will now. So provided Alex Neil doesn’t follow McNally out of the door – that’s the big worry for me – then I think we will do a Burnley and bounce back again.
@7 Of course I’d prefer we be in the Prem and if you asked me 10 games ago if I’d accept a stint in TC I’d have dismissed the idea. But, tbh, it’s going to take quite a turn of events to avoid that now.
So since we’re practically there, let’s have a proper plan in place for a prolonged return. The joy over a Wembley final I think masked the fact we weren’t ready as a club to step up again.
I agree there’s certainly a risk with using the youth and I wouldn’t make them the heart of the team. But I’d give them a chance.
(3) Stephen – not sure DMcN was pushed into any role. If anything, the opposite was true, seemed to want to control everything!
(6) Dave B – isn’t this what we had prior to promotion to the Premier League in 2011 – no parachute payments, turnover of circa £20m and losses accumulating?
As things stand at the moment, teams in the Championship with parachute payments have a turnover of £40m – £50m, those without a maximum of £25m. Consolidation isn’t really an option unless you don’t get back up within two seasons, then you have to reduce your costs substantially.
Based on the club’s past history for appointing someone at board level who is known to the directors or has previous connections to the Canaries I would have thought Andrew Cullen is worth a flutter at the bookies to replace DM. After 11 seasons at Carrow Road he is currently Executive Director at Mk Dons where he has been for the last 6 years and is a member of the Football League Board. He seems to tick quite a few boxes.
Interesting thoughts above.
It sounds good to step back, cut out the dead wood and build a hungry young team. The problem is that each year we’re in the Championship, more teams will be coming down bolstered by money from the new TV mega-deal. It’ll get progressively harder to be promoted.
So I’m largely with Keith (#7), except that one or two of the youngsters may have potential to break through. Josh Murphy was outstanding this year, apparently, and some observers who know their stuff see James Maddison as a special talent.
Dave (#6) – as you say, without the guiding hand of McNally we may have to get more familiar with the Championship than we’d like. But some of the players you’d like to ditch have exceptional records in that league, e.g. Jerome and Dorrans. If there’s one player who’ll surprise us by coming to the fore next season, my money would be on Mulumbu or Jarvis.
By the way, I don’t believe Wisdom is ours to sell.
Gary – I’m not saying consolidation is ideal. I’m saying that’s probably where we find ourselves.
The number of teams that bounce straight back up is (I believe) around 1 in 3. The number of teams that bounce straight back consistently, a subset of that. So what I’m saying is that perhaps we weren’t as well run as we thought and that we should definitely have preparations in place for 2-3 years down there at least.
Perhaps McNally left because he knew that he couldn’t sustain the profit making Norwich City the way things were headed and that was his legacy. Walk away now and he’s Alex Ferguson, someone else can be David Moyes.
Dave B (#12) – Not to argue with you (this time!) but to pick up a tangent.
If the worst got even worse and we were to lose Alex Neil, my top target would be David Moyes. Not a success at Man U, but his record at Preston and Everton – two clubs much more comparable to Norwich – is absolutely outstanding. A tough but straightforward man, a very good manager.
@11 – I didn’t say that.
With David McNally at the helm we’re already more familiar than The Championship than we’d like, assuming a minor miracle doesn’t occur, of course.
Keeping Dorrans and Jerome sounds reasonable, except they’ve proven relatively useless in the Premiership (certainly Jerome). It seems like a terrible idea to go up again having to either risk another goal drought by Jerome OR changing our strikeforce once again as we arrive. We need to be looking years ahead, not years behind.
Dave B (#14) – We’ll never see eye-to-eye on McNally, so let’s move on.
I take your point about building, but it’s a dilemma that’s only going to get more acute. Do you try to build a team that, when/if it eventually gets to the Premier League will stay there? Or do you (as we did in 2014-15 with Jerome etc) bring in players who’ll get you straight back, then use the PL money to bring in better ones (as we tried to do but failed)?
Both avenues have their attractions and downsides. I’d normally be an advocate of long-term building, but in this case I worry hugely about being left behind. For me, we have to strain every sinew to get back asap.