Peter Lawwell

Leeds seems a safe bet to be one, with the amount of rumours at that time with it. The other one that’s not Spurs is curious though, there was a lot of murmurs that seemed nothing substantial with a few clubs but nothing else that seemed a solid approach. I have Brighton stuck in my head, but don’t think the timeline adds up with Potter leaving them

 

First result on google throws those three up. We're just guessing at how serious they were but it doesn't actually matter now.

 

Ahh Leicester makes sense, Chelsea I can remember infact, but that seemed 100% Scottish Media at it. I don’t understand why any of our fans could resent his move though, outwith sheer denial of how Scottish football and us as a club are viewed in football. Ange wants to be the best, and he has a real opportunity to prove that he should be talked about as one.

Does anyone believe he’d have been nominated for World Manager of the Year, if he hadn’t made the start at Spurs he did? Even though he was nominated for his time at us. Never would.

 

There's a trend of fans turning on anyone who dares to suggest they want to move to pastures new. So it wasn't surprising when some folk turned on Ange when he left.

 

Aye there’s been a few I’ve felt is out of order, Hooper, KT and Ange being the ones that when they get bitter comments because of it genuinely annoys me. 3 of the most obvious fair play moves I’ve seen.

 

Honestly, it’s engrained in us as fans to be distrustful and resentful of whoevers running us. We booed Fergus McCann stopping the ten unfurling the flag, we booed Brian Quinn after delivering a Treble under MON against the Huns Dutch team £70m odd spending.


And will we * acknowledge that Lawwell has delivered the most consistent success for us domestically since he got the job in 2003. He’s always frustrated the * off me because he was always that wee bit of ambition away from making us the best we could possibly but always seemed to just not, but he delivered 20 year of silverware.


Is there anyone else that you could put up against his record?


And it’s really annoying in general I don’t * like him, but it needs to be acknowledged what he actually done for us as well.

 

I'd put our success over the last 20 odd years entirely down to the players, the managers, and the supporters in the stands.

We had success in spite of Lawwell, not because of him.

If you said he'd done an adequate job in charge of our finances I'd maybe accept that, but to be honest I think he's been a shambles.

I could go on for ages about what a useless * I think he is but for me the biggest giveaway is that the huns have went bust, started a new club, and been insolvent for over a decade, and they still operate at the same level of the transfer market as us.

We're just lucky the * running them are even more useless than Lawwell or our star summer signing would be playing for them right now.

 

It can’t be both ways mate, can’t be him when it’s bad and nothing to do with it when it was good.

There are specific things that you can label as him being a hindrance but you don’t run a business for 20 years, to one of the most successful periods in its history, through some of the most tumultuous periods economically like 2008 Credit Crunch and Covid accidentally because employee after employee is bailing him out.

he was here too long and got too big an ego, 2003 - 2011 Lawwell was insanely good and most agreed outwith the usual reflex * the board guys. After that, when he went football managery and thought he knew better was the parts he deserved loads of grief because he liked just better enough, rather than best we could be.


I will never forget the reason we got Rodgers first time was Desmond not getting a handshake off a Rangers director. Then he decided to make us the best possible, before that it was just enough and experimental and mostly Lawwell’s moneyball plaything. One handshake would have stopped 4 trebles in a row for us, if Desmond felt respected then 2016-17 onwards is far different. And that I cannot stand.

BR came in, and we didn’t have the same framework, we had a budget and if we wanted to bring in a guy we could afford on higher wages we would. Sinclair and Dembele were the main ones.

before that, Lennon was allowed £1.5m transfer fee up front and £25k wages at most, they’re on record saying if Van Dijk was £1.6m, we would have stopped the transfer as too much.

Lenny both times he took over at the club was labelled as a board yes man, and he left the first time, he quit, because the board was not backing him. And he’d just made the last 16 and got £25m odd transfer fees. Our biggest profit ever at that point, and they cut him down from progessing at all. Van Dijk was * luck they didn’t realise what they had and that he’d watched us beat Barca and wanted to be a part of that. Because he wasn’t on much money either, was £8k odd if I remember leaked info on here that got one of our TC’ers in * at work haha

 

100% during major world financial crisis like 2008 and the pandemic year, I'd have no one but lawwell in charge of us. For those two periods, he's the most sensible and pragmatic person to be running the club.
The problem is, he's perfect for those two periods, because that's literally how he ran the club for the entire 20 years, as if we were in some sort of financial crisis that needed a careful management of it.

Unfortunately for him, he gets plenty of stick, because football isn't a balance sheet game like running majority of other businesses.

He's like a kid who sent to business/accounting school and passed with flying colours by hitting every perfect tick box answer possible, then brought that to a football club that needs you to be flexible, risk taking and thinking a little outside and a step ahead of the box you are in.

He runs us like an Aberdeen club, where sensible money approach for the domestic front to ensure we are the best of the bunch we domestically compete against. But forgets we need to push on elsewhere, where if he did, his financial gains would be massively more. Instead of the safe option to keep the balance sheet happy.


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For the entire 20 years? So he wasn’t dishing out wages bigger than Larsson’s to sign Real Madrid players? Or Dutch international strikers on big money?

Or broke our transfer fee several times?

Now that varied wildly depending on just how in control he was, and the only time he was fully was Lennys last year into the Ronny years. And it was * awful.

I think we’ve done quite well since 2003. I think we’ve also squandered some big chances to have done as well as we possibly could be.

* knows how it would be with somebody else, I’ve enjoyed the majority of time he was in charge, I find him frustrating and don’t like him but people act like he has done zero to contribute to the success when he was at the helm as CEO. Which is bonkers

 

No worries mate just keep saying waffle when you’re stumped. It pure works so it does.

But please, keep saying how other teams are better as some sort of response to complaints about our recruitment policy. If it helps you to argue something nobody is denying then batter in.

Also what the * is that bit at the end?

“Our goal should be to win a trophy not get to a final”

Who are you even arguing that with? What a random * thing to say.

 

Out of interest what is our recruitment policy? Buy low, sell highs the biggest driving factor I think

 

For big signings it's "only buy if you can knock a few million off the asking price, otherwise try and get them on loan".

If they can't do that it's "buy literally any player that plays the same position and is a few million cheaper, and hope they turn out just as good as the player the manager wanted initially".

When the budget option turns out to be *, it's "spend more than it would have cost to buy the player we wanted in the first place on 2-3 project signings, and hope that there's a £20m player in amongst them".

Repeat ad infinitum.

 

The board are already dinosaurs and not getting any younger. Completely stale. We take about succession planning for the squad and manager, but never the board. it's mental that there has been so little change in the top people running our club over the last 20 years.

 

One of the main points of contention is that, with the Huns dying, we had a free hit at the CL every year. We had a huge opportunity to kick on and establish ourselv s as a proper European quality club, and we * it due to a lack of ambition. We had the chance to kick on and we shat it: the embarrassing things were appointing Ronny and Lennon.

 

I don't think a new board of directors would change the footballing side of things too much to be honest. We'd still face the same challenges such as being at a financial and sporting disadvantage due to the league we play in.

Possibly a different strategy from the top down could see an improvement in certain areas, but ultimately the quality of player we can attract won't be affected by who sits in the boardroom. We'll have to retain a sustainable business model regardless, as much as it's an unpopular idea with a lot of fans.

I think the footballing department is on the right track. We're gonna have transfer windows where we're disappointed in what we bring in, but equally things will fall into place sometimes aswell. The club are trying to perfect the scouting and recruitment side of things but it is a long process, and is never an exact science.

None of this changes with a new board of directors.

 

I don't think it's deniable that we have massively underperformed in Europe for a decade. Equally, it can't be denied that we have done incredibly well domestically. I don't know what lies behind this, because it's been over 4 different managers (2 of them world-class managers), 3 different recruitment and scouting systems, 2 different CEO's and half a dozen cycles in terms of the playing staff.

I can only imagine that it has to be either DD or something systemic.

 

So guys we could get that normally would be out our price range for one reason or other, guys like CCV, Eddy or Jota on loan to prove they’d be worth the dough or young guys with talent that we couldn’t afford in a couple years time if we let it happen like Matt O’Riley?


I’m alright with that really. What we need to do is SPEED UP THE * PROCESS.

 

I think a lot of us are praying for a good January window where we sign a few team ready players who will improve our team but, unfortunately, the realist in me thinks we will all be back on here raging at our board's failures once again.

 

I could use “incoherent nonsense” too. At the end of the day it would have the same outcome, you clutching at straws.

You were so insistent on mentioning the huns losing in a final that I felt the need to say that losing in a final shouldn’t be our aim. Hopefully you’ll understand that now at the third attempt of explaining.