Now all we have is more cheap individuals making up the numbers. Successful lining of mogi bayat pockets and we end up with more dross. Who can honestly say they enjoy watching any of those players. Even those that try you can tell they’re only in it for a move. Not one player plays for this club with heart and passion Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Don't even care anymore. He will stay, he will hire and fire, we will go up and down the football pyramid. Not a sustainable business model at all. Total chancer. I think it's become more and more apparent that his Dad was the brains of the outfit. I wonder what he makes of what his idiot Son has done with his football empire.......
How long until poppa Pozzo steps in and takes Ginos toys away before he ruins them beyond reasonable repair.
Unless this club is sold we are 100% about to enter a horrendous downward spiral. The honeymoon period is long since over. Utterly incompetent, clueless owner and board.
People around me were still singing ‘here’s to you Pozzo family’ during the game at one point today. Honestly, when is the penny going to drop with these people?
The Pozzo model guarantees promotion and some years of Premier League football yes. However, the price for me is probably too much now. The club has no soul, the players have no relationship, no dynamic, literally everyone is expendable and it's just not what I want from my football club. They are good owners, they will get you promoted and they will bring in good young players but there's a price to pay for that and I don't want to pay it anymore. Not mad at Gino, this is his model and his way of working and it brings relative success, two promotions, and an FA Cup final, probably the most successful period we've had for 30 years. The likes of Capoue, Deluofeu, Pereyra are probably players we never thought we'd see at Watford but it's not a model I am comfortable with any more, what you lose in return is just too hefty a price. I want academy players, I want a united dressing room, I want affinity with fans, I want a play style, I want feeling. I want a manager who builds something at least over 2 seasons. This is football, Premier League football for the sake of it isn't everything and the profit from player trading certainly doesn't go in our pockets. The joys we get aside from winning are the other things and they've been taken away. It's also frustrating because some of the issues are so obvious and so preventable, some money on defenders in the summer could've avoided all this, the potential is there to go from good to great it really is but it's not happening, won't happen and that's why it hurts more than say a relegation like the Boothroyd year. They've taken us as far as they can, I personally would thank them for some wonderful memories, fixing the stadium, giving us Premier League football and say goodbye, please sell up. Sadly, I think they are here for many years to come and our club will remain a soulless trading platform.
******* hate the ****s. Hate them. They've taken our club and made it something disgusting and corrupt. We are a loathsome team. We have no soul and we deserve to be relegated. We are everything that is wrong with the game. We used to joke about it when everyone was saying it, but some people still haven't noticed it's all true.
This Daily Mail article is from 2020, and you know what.. it’s spot on. We ARE soulless, and this season has been the real eye-opener for me and i’m sure, a lot of other Watford fans too.. Our 5 year stint in the Prem was a honeymoon period for us, and I’ll hold my hands up, I fell for it and looked at the Pozzo ‘magic’ through yellow tinted glasses. However, that time is over.. and truth be told, it started ever since we sacked Javi.. it’s all unravelling now.
I’ve just got home after the long drive back and thought of resurrecting this thread. Heartened to see I didn’t have to dig too deep. @wfcSinatra is right - under this owner everyone is expendable. Well Gino to me you’re now expendable and need to be ousted. The model is on the verge of consuming its creator and it can’t come a moment too soon. At a lot of other clubs I suspect the writing would already be on the wall, maybe literally. Unfortunately at Watford the noisiest fans are his docile pets, with their little bunker perk, so there won’t be a peep of dissent from that direction. Really quite sad as I can’t see where the push will come from. I’d rather we went back to being little old anonymous Watford than the laughable clown show we’ve become on and off the pitch.
Thing is, we're stuck with them. Anyone buying us will have to clear a whole bunch of debt and for what? We're not a sleeping giant that could suddenly fill a 40k stadium. You'd have to pay for the financial mess they've put us in and there aren't really many upsides as an investment. The most likely way out is that Pozzo sells us to some chancer who passes the laughable "fit and proper person" test and we go into administration after a couple of miserable seasons. Gino will go back to a role at Udinese with a nice wedge in his pocket and Duxbury will look back fondly on his time at Watford where he was earning a million a year.
Thinking about the star players you mention - Capoue, Delofeu and Pereyra (throw in Doucoure, Richarlison and Sarr, perhaps) and there’s a common thread, which is periods of brilliance, interspersed with spells of poor form and seeming indifference. This may be just them as individuals, a reflection of the club culture or a bit of both. I know football’s a different game these days, but if you think back to the Bobby Downes, Roger Joslyn, Ian Boltons (among many others), you knew what you were going to get - 100% effort, week in, week out - no sulking, die for the shirt. Quite a contrast.
The floodlights going out with a failed cheap back-up generator summarises the ownership of these provincial backwater chancers. Along with the warehouse scrap new stand.
Yep best hope assuming we don’t stay up is for the upcoming sales of our remaining assets to cover the debt their dreadful stewardship has left us with and cover the contracts on the useless deadwood like Sema, Cleverly, Cathcart, Gosling and Kabasele. Then perhaps we can reset at zero and become attractive as a lower stakes investment. No profit for the owner though so guess we are stuck with this corrosive poisonous owner.
Definitely coming round to this way of thinking. The club does have feel like ‘Watford FC’ to me anymore, it’s just the Pozzo “project”. We’re the poor, beaten up pet that’s been given to the friendless slow kid in the village as their plaything.
You re right , how could people have possibly missed that hypocrisy . Probably too busy doing stupid things with their life instead of investing their time in surfing social media looking for things to get irate about . D1cks.
Fair point. Although I was more directing that comment at people who do all those things. Or like us, who post on football message boards after midnight on a Friday night. Bloody hell, what have we become? Life used to be fun and exciting. Now I’m just sitting here wondering if the apostrophe button is actually broken on your keyboard.
Guaranteed promotion with a squad of Sarr, Hughes, JP, plus a fair few players who weren't quite good enough for the Prem but who were plenty good enough for the Championship, sure, guaranteed promotion going into next season when anyone with any ability has gone, absolutely not
I've long realised the Pozzos are **** owners, but the only thing stopping me from being fully-fledged member of the BWO is the fact that there's every chance the next owners, whenever we have new owners, are more likely to be another Bassini than someone like the Brentford or Leicester owners
Why does it have to absolute. It might not be Leicester but equally it might not be Bassini or someone who is so completely tied to someone like Mogi Bayet.
True, but I also don't think we're anywhere near as attractive a prospect as even a Leicester, who are at least a yoyo team historically, we're naturally a Championship club, I think any kind of progressive thinking owner would consider quite a few clubs before us
I'm angry at The Pozzo's too but you can't really deny their Championship record man. 3rd - Playoff final loss one win shy of autos. 13th - 15 wins 15 draws 16 losses. The definition of average. 2nd - Auto promotion. 1 point shy of the title. 2nd - Auto promotion.
But we quite simply won't be lucky enough to keep the players who were far too good for the Championship last time around, one of them has even gone to Palace in the meantime (and one of the players who absolutely bossed it in the second half of the season is sat on Fulham's bench). In addition, all those players (ie Clev, Cathcart, Kabasele, Masina, Kiko, Sema) who proved not up to it at Prem level had enough in the tank to be decent for a team towards tvetll of the Championship, would they be that next season?
Maybe, maybe not. Kiko will be gone anyway. For example, Samir might be okay, Sierrelta should hang around. Let’s say roughly some of these names stick around (the more realistic ones): Okoye Samir Sierrelta Cathcart WTE Kamara Louza Clevs Gosling Kayembe Sema Fletcher Cucho Kalu There’s a decent Championship core there and that’s assuming Pedro and Femenia leave. I’d love to hit the restart button and cut out low upside players like Cathcart, Clevs, Gosling etc but it’s not realistic to be able to move those many bodies in one window. I’d aim for at least £50 million in sales with Sarr & Dennis out the door so you can strengthen too. I reckon we could put up a challenge with the right manager and some dressing room leaders.
I think that is a 8th -14th place squad personally. Average, declining, overpaid. I don’t think we will be able to do any strengthening with the finances Pozzo has left us aside from free agents and Udinese cast offs.
Its been a disappointing season and i can understand people's frustrations as i share some of them. But words like a toxic club and a disconnect well i don't feel that way tbh. Watford will always be my team and its only football, other things in life are more important. We are going down but we used to anyway before the Pozzos. Only difference is that (so far) when we go down we are competitive in going back up again whereas in the old days once we went down it was more difficult to come back up quickly as it would typically take years to 'rebuild'.
Bear in mind we don’t ever spend money as a championship club, not a penny. Don’t get me wrong we wheel and deal and we have a good track record of bringing in players that can get us out of it, but if strengthening means spending money it has never happened before.
I started this back in 2019 and am still of the same opinion. Not many agreed back then and I have suffered much abuse BUT I was not wrong then and am not wrong now, the Pozzo ownership of Watford needs to end. More and more people are seeing through them now and the tide is turning. We want our Watford back. WE are Watford, Watford is US, not those idiots who have turned the place into a circus, an embarrassing mess. From this messageboard, to Facebook groups, to Twitter, even Roy Moore is questioning the owners. The tide is turning. Unless Pozzo changes significantly and shows some humility he should leave. Posts asking for which owners would do a better job are not welcomed, at present a list of who would do worse would be appropriate and incredibly short.
Remember at the end of last season? There was almost an arrogance about Duxbury when he spoke. ‘We are better together and as one big family. We heard the dissent but we stayed on course and we were right, you were wrong….yada yada yada.’ This is the problem. The dissent is much louder now and they will be behind closed doors, believing their course is right and the fans are wrong. They don’t want to learn and they don’t want to listen. But they do expect everyone to pipe down and be ‘part of the big family’.
Every time I think of that Duxbury interview it makes me angry, it was nothing more than gaslighting. The suggestion that we ‘lost our way’ and yet this season we couldn’t have possibly doubled down more on all the stuff he said we wouldn’t do again.
Until ownership of Watford ceases to meet the owners requirements he won’t move out. There are always people wanting to buy a football club, and we are more marketable than say Derby County which is being sold without a stadium, massive debts a rookie manager and near certain relegation on the cards. Two groups are competing to buy. If the owner let it be known he would sell, he could do so this season and walk away with a massive profit. But at the moment he does not need or want to, because it is still working for him. Covid was the thing not on the risk register that nearly broke him. Tearing out the plan that saw him in January 2020 probably on course to secure another Premier League season. Now he has built in the financial impact of relegation he feels more secure. I very simply can’t see him going or changing his methods, because he has now amended his model to factor in relegation. Having survived, he probably feels more immune.
Derby would still be a significantly better long term purchase than us, bigger fan base, cheap and no debt for the buyer.
