Protests should be a last resort. A river of anger flows through the veins. Emotions bubble through to the surface. You’re left with no alternative but to stomp your feet and bust the odd blood vessel – in the hope someone of importance will take note.
I’m old enough to recall the ‘Chase out’ demonstrations, and this current situation is so far removed from that one that it makes me wince to hear people even contemplate similar action be taken.
This planned protest is not a ‘last resort’ and, for the record, I do not agree with it.
It is borne out of a frustration with modern football. Ultimately, the nitty gritty of it is that Delia isn’t rich enough – nobody at the club is – and the protesters want someone who is able to afford it. This isn’t about what’s happening on the pitch. It’s about money, and she and her colleagues don’t have enough of the stuff.
Financially, football has moved into another stratosphere since Smith ‘n’ Jones stormed in to save the club from extinction, 20 years ago.
I’ve delved a little deeper to find out just how far our owners are lagging behind their Championship peers. Details of wealth within football can be somewhat sketchy, but for context, our investors’ wealth is estimated between £40m and £60m combined.
Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bristol City, Cardiff City, Derby County, Fulham, Ipswich Town, Leeds United, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, Preston North End, Queen’s Park Rangers, Reading, Sheffield Wednesday & Wolverhampton Wanderers all have owners with estimated worth between £500million and (unbelievably, in the case of QPR) £16.5billion!
Brighton & Hove Albion, Huddersfield Town, Rotherham United and Wigan Athletic are closer in comparison, but also have owners worth more than Delia and the two Michaels combined, estimated anywhere between £60million and £190million.
Amazingly, only Barnsley – of the current Championship teams – have investors with lower personal wealth than Norwich City. I’ve had to miss Brentford and Burton Albion out, as I couldn’t find any information on their owners’ personal fortunes.
And yet, ignoring the money for a moment, how many, if any, of those mega-wealthy clubs in the Championship are ahead of us in terms of facilities, playing staff and ability to pay wages?
To my mind, only the two who came down from the Premier League alongside us, offer a serious threat on at least one front – and they are bigger clubs than us anyway.
Is it grossly unfair to criticise our owners just because they aren’t super rich? Or is it ‘that’ unreasonable to suggest that a club of the stature of ours – with a recent history of top flight football – should be able to find investors able to plough more money into the club than the current regime?
Without larger investment, the club has little chance of growing; such is the current state of play in English football. FFP ‘should’ be our safety blanket, but is largely ignored.
So why are other clubs fancied before us?
I don’t know the ins and outs, the reasoning, the back-stories, behind owner’s decisions. Some may be fans – like Steve Lansdown, the Bristol City head honcho (estimated at £2bn, if you’re interested), which is fair enough.
But what of the others? Thai-owned Reading, for example – are they a more appealing purchase than us, and if so, why?
Does our location play a part? We all know what a wonderful place it is, but we are still perceived by the outside world as a ‘backwater’. If it’s an investor’s choice between Norwich and London, we’ll lose every single time. But Norwich and Reading?
Is the club more saleable in the Championship or the Premier League? Perhaps we would be seen as more of a bargain in the top flight?
Maybe it’s a simple case of our owners refusing to relinquish power. Perhaps they only want part-investment. Could they be asking for too much?
Or, do we take their word for it – that there really is nobody capable of putting their money where their mouth is?
In their defence, they have used companies to search for investment before, in 2011, and again more recently, which is why I was surprised to hear Jez Moxey say the club is not for sale. But does that mean any search for investment has been dropped, or is it just an outright sale they’ve given up on?
“We have approached 52 potential investors around the world – in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, the United States and, of course, the UK,” said ex-Chairman Alan Bowkett, speaking in 2011.
He continued, “We have had some expressions of interest. But every time when I asked the question ‘Could you please verify you have funding?’ no one passed the test.”
Surely if there is any doubt about a potential investor/owners intentions, that deal should be scuppered.
“Money is no guarantee of success” was the line from Moxey the other day – and he is of course correct. QPR are the perfect example at the moment but there are countless others.
As Rick Waghorn alluded to in his article, for every successful takeover story, there are opposite scenarios ranging from ‘no discernible change’ to ‘complete catastrophe’.
I’ll take your Leicester and raise you a Portsmouth. Lob me a Bournemouth and I’ll kick an Ipswich back. Chuck in a Manchester City and I’ll hurl back a Coventry, Charlton, Leeds, Cardiff, Villa, Blackburn…
Football’s only true mainstay is the fans. Everyone involved takes the glory when it arrives, but only the true supporters live with the pain when it goes belly-up. Any takeover is a gamble – but so is keeping the status quo is.
With the latter, at least we know what we’re getting – even if it isn’t perfect.
The irony is, our club has never been in ruder financial health, and that is why protests look more than a little silly. But football is evolving and whether we like it or not, money has become the overriding power.
I think we should be rather proud of our club that we are one of the few that has managed to get up – and stay up, albeit it was short-lived – when we are at such a gargantuan disadvantage to those we are competing with.
So I share the frustrations of the small few ready to protest. But that’s all it is. Frustration.
Frustration that clubs viewed as ‘lesser lights’, such as Bournemouth, Swansea and Watford, can spend a few squillion quid more than we can.
Frustration, that we cannot fund stadium expansion. Frustration that nobody has said “d’ya know what, Norwich City – that’s a great club – I want to buy them and spend loads of my dosh on them – and I want nothing back in return.”
Life is not always fair and football definitely isn’t. We are not desperate for investment. We should not feel exasperated by our current standing in the game. We are not in a ‘bad way’, wondering where our next dime will come from.
It’ll happen when it happens and in the meantime, continuity isn’t the worst thing.
Despite being torn on the matter, in a way, I like the fact we are doing things differently. We are the underdogs – the ones without the need for Billy Deep-Pockets – yet still able to gain a modicum of success, often more so than our peers who have a Billy sitting in the directors box, looking confused.
But football continues to blow up at an alarming rate and our little foot pump is beginning to look a bit knackered, so its unsurprising that some fans feel a wind of change through the corridors of power at Carrow Road may prove essential.
Follow James on Twitter @JamesFinbow
An interesting and pragmatic piece. Plenty of food for thought. For my part, I wouldn’t criticise smith and Jones for being relatively poor in comparison to all other club owners. It is more the fact that they admit to this fact but are unwilling to stand aside for the benefit of the club. On one hand they acknowledge their financial limitations but on the other refuse to rectify it. A year in the championship and our team rosta will look an awful lot less inspiring than it does now. I want to watch good quality international footballers in yellow and green, not the bring and buy sale garbage we used to have under Bryan Hamilton. I’d love an FA cup final. That doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable.
In two years time, if we are still in the Championship, we will have no parachute payments and financially could be one of poorest teams in the division. Will be interesting to see if The Smiths then change their mind about selling.
We were told the Club was a very attractive opportunity to applicants for the vacant Chief Exec role, and it must be foreign investors too.
Good article and some very good and true points
That’s a terrific article James, there are so many pitfalls in pumping money into a club, only to lose interest later and plunge the club into turmoil!
Your point about “why Reading?” Maybe, like the Pozzos at Watford it is to do with the proximity to London without the huge price tag of a London club.
We miss you on the forum, would live to see you back! OTBC
Bravo. I’m rarely moved to comment on articles, but this was an excellent read. Thank you James.
The fact that we are financially strong should allow us to stump up the cash for a decent centre back and striker. The reported prices paid for some of our targets were not that far out.
I am not one to start mounting public protests but for those that do, what is the alternative. If they keep quiet, it will be assumed all is well, when clearly it is not.
The Kyle Laferty scenario sums up the running of the club a striker that will never play but we have had 41/2 transfer windows to offload the player . We can’t find a striker in our price range .
Andy (7), I’d suggest that says more about the limitations and attitude of Master Lafferty than the running of the club.
Yes very true. However I’m assuming we had the budget to buy the striker we needed but due to a lack of shrewdness in the transfer market we have a squad full of dead wood instead. That’s not an issue of capital, more of incompetence. One repeated over the last two seasons.
Andy (7) – We’ve facilitated a number of deals for Lafferty to leave. Short of paying vast sums to get rid, we couldn’t have done more. You can lead a horse to water…
Rex (6) – Yes, we’re relatively strong financially, which has enabled us to handle a £30m drop in income without a fire sale of players. It doesn’t, though, allow or justify a £20m+ package for a 30-year-old striker. Don’t forget that headline transfer prices are only part of the story.
Very informed & informative article, by the way.
Nicely written James, but, and it’s a big BUT, those stats relating to the respective owners wealth, are, in reality, completely meaningless.
Why? Because they don’t tell you how much, if any, loans / new share purchases they are making into the respective clubs each year.
So, for example, QPR’s owners may be worth £1.6bn but, if they aren’t making additional “investments” in the club, are we really any worse off?
As others have said, it’s more about what you do with it than the money itself and playerwise we have bought a couple of very expensive lemons in recent times.
James uses the word “Frustration” more than once – that word is the key to the whole thing for me. Not anger (the idea of a protest is frankly ridiculous) but sheer bl00dy frustration that we’ve failed to establish ourselves in the PL. We’ve had the chances and failed to take them.
Anyway a very good article and I agree with your comments about the Chase demos, many of which I took part in. This situation could not be more different. As much as I would prefer the Smiths to try a bit harder to sell up and leave, they have done nothing to warrant demonstrations against them. And five games into the season???
Gary (11), you’ve kind of made my point for me! QPR have owners worth £16.5 billion, yet we have more capability in the transfer market at the moment due to their investors not using their wealth. Our owners continually pump everything they have back into the football club. Whether that’s sustainable as the game grows bigger, I’m not sure. If we aren’t promoted in the next couple of years we could be in for a rocky ride without fresh investment.
An excellent piece. I think the reason I struggle with some of the comments is that I remember clearly the chase era and the nothingness pre/post Worthington so compared to that what we have now is actually really good. Looking at all those clubs in the Championship, I suspect the fans of most of them would gladly swap places with us and there’s certainly not many owners there that I’d want. I can understand some of the frustration however. There’s been numerous disappointing transfer windows, ludicrous manager searches and most importantly of all, two avoidable relegations. It’s no great secret that we need to go back up this season and my belief is that the best way to do that is to back the players and the manager as far as possible in each game and for the duration of the season, having the right atmosphere in the ground is vital. I’ll then reassess at the end of the season.
I suppose the difference with our owners is that we know they aren’t going to intentionally harm the club. Whether they harm it unintentionally from time to time is a different matter, but I suppose all owners will make mistakes, especially over a 20 year period.
@13 – James, looks like I got the decimal point in the wrong place with the wealth of the QPR owners – I’m sure they won’t be reading this
Great and balanced article as are all/most on this site. However, until the powers that be really do clamp down on those who openly violate the FFP rules, (are you listening Bournmouth?), then we are not on a level playing field. Also, where are all these mega-rich investors if NCFC have (supposedly) so many shares available to purchase on the open market? Oh for a Euromillions jackpot!
All I will say is if it was not for ‘Smith & Jones’ we would not have a club for fans to complain about!!!
18 – That is myth that has peddled about for years. The nearest anyone came to ‘saving’ Norwich City was Geoffrey Watling – but that is a discussion for another time.
My sources at the club made it clear that there wasn’t a lot of money spare after McNally’s ‘deals’ in January, so I did not expect much this summer. Any sensible fan knows that the club can only spend so much, but what is increasingly clear is that the club do not manage their money that well.
Moxey has come in for criticism, but why blame him? He had nothing to do with the previous CEO and how he ran the show. McNally’s has a lot to answer for with his lack of transfer nous at the sharp end and the club is paying the consequences.
NCFC needs to be efficient and transfer savvy. Currently we are neither of those and arguably the EPL money shows that we are not the best run business in then world. The club has traditionally made significantly better decisions when money is tight, so that will be the way forward.