Can’t be arsed listing the mistakes from there but there’s loads some fucking massive ones with bells on which are still causing us issues now.
This was the list I came up with around June/July:
- Sold Jota
- Used that money to sign Fabio Silva and Ki-Jana Hoever
- Alienated the best manager we'd had in 40+, arguably 60+ years
- Sacked that manager
- Appointed some absolute nobody with a half page CV who can't speak English properly
- Allow him to alienate multiple senior squad members
- Loan out Adama Traoré for no money because we trust Barcelona to do what they say. He leaves for free eventually
- Retain the absolute nobody despite awful football and awful results
- Throw money at players that are either sub-standard or incompatible with how we play
- This includes a dreadful footballer for nearly £30m who the previous manager repeatedly refused to sign and who never wanted to come anyway
- Sack the absolute nobody, way too late, when we're now in a relegation fight and have thrown away multiple winnable games
- Mess up replacing him so we have to go through a chunk of a Premier League season with a bloke who wouldn't get a L2 job
- Appoint a proper manager but lie to him about our finances
- Act surprised when we move the goalposts on him
- Engineer a situation where he leaves less than a week before the season starts
- Despite the fact he resigns, we still end up paying him for nearly a year
- Appoint someone with another very thin CV (this time we get lucky that he's a decent guy and not a bad manager)
- Give Matt Doherty, a 31 year old free agent badly out of shape who was shit 10 years ago in League One, a 3 year deal on decent money. Meanwhile we let a Hungarian international who goes on to look decent at the European Championships go for free
- Saw off the season again halfway through by depleting the squad in January and adding no-one. Almost certainly costing us an FA Cup semi-final and possibly final
- Despite limited transfer activity, over £13m leaves the club to "agents"
- Allow the ground to deteriorate to the level I'd expect of an absentee owner in charge of someone like Walsall
- All the way through this, continually increase prices, while lying about other teams' prices (not that they should matter), the only club to put prices up after lockdown, the only club to do it every single year, up a minimum of 17% in a single year and a ridiculous rise from where we were in 2018
- Create your own fake clothing company to make our kit, almost certainly badly
- With a fake gambling sponsor, with no profile anywhere
- Lie to the local newspaper about how many people have renewed their season tickets, plausible deniability but stands up to absolutely zero scrutiny
And you can add on selling Kilman then not replacing him, and the mess we've made of our goalkeeping position to the list, while the new deal for O'Neil (not that we'll owe him 3.5 years money if we sack him, but still) looks less clever now.
They have painted the ground a bit since then I suppose.
