This really sounds way too Soviet for me. ‘We will invite influencers who are still on our side to become an insider, chat directly to the top brass and learn some secrets. But if you release anything, we’ll sue you. If you don’t like what we’re doing or stop supporting the club vocally, you’ll lose your access.’ And then to make it worse, Duxberry basically says ‘what are you worrying about? The oligarchs are representing you, because you cannot be trusted’ Reeks of desperation to control the runaway train narrative. Duxberry surely won’t make it to June.
I've written to the club about the new Committee and just received this reply. I hope you all will now have your fears assuaged. Dear Valued Supporter, For a while now we have felt that needs to be a new way to communicate with a broad cross-section of Users. We strongly accept that we can often get things and we fully accept the strong and deserved Criticism that sometimes comes our way is fully justified and we applaud this. We fully intend to Keep you fully informed via lengthy meetings and in-house media to inform what is happening. On and off the pitch and to give you a sense that you trully belong to a special club close to our hearts. Feel free to contact us at any time day aor night as we highly value your sought after ideas. Please Forum to openly express all manner of views. We are trully excited about what the immediate future holds. Please understand that your opinions are important to us and we appreciate that we cannot implement them now. Long term thinking and planning are vitally important and we fully intend to move this forward immediately. Extra resources are needed to help this new venture and encourage charitable donations to keep things moving, a Bright and prosperous future for the football club is within our grasp. Sincerely Yours, The Committee
My prediction? The club will fire up some sort of expanded Hive Live again next season (without live games) and that Jacob Culshaw lad will be brought in as Emma Saunders replacement for it.
I can't decide if I'm Pozzo out or in. I hate the club we have become but they have provided me and my family and friends with some of the best moments following the horns, my love for the club just wont go,even after 30 years of mainly let downs. But I think they could be the cause of this club being no more. This week has pushed me more to Pozzo out, but more so Duxberry out (first). They have completed a task of dividing this once very united fanbase. If we force the Pozzos out what happens next? I hate that thought as we either worse case possibly go bust or end up with a state owed immoral oil baron. However I will still be there next week with my nephew deluded that we will win easily, his youthful optimism and humour encourages me lol. Just hope he gets to see some good times when he takes his kids. My Dad has been a fan since the mid 70s and he said to me this week he is done with this club. He's said before he's had enough of modern football but never he's had enough of this club. Is that where we are at as a club? Or just modern day football annoying the 55+ age group?
Is there a list of fans who went to this meeting/ are members of this group? And how they were selected. if it’s social media influencers I think for me that’s the final straw and I’ll have to consider quitting this club and football
The fans selected are all known Pozzo sympathisers who were already de facto employees of the club anyway. Basically they selected fans who will be grateful for being chosen as they’ll do anything to get closer to the club, won’t openly criticise the club and will keep any information confidential.
To be honest most organisations that create customer focus groups/supporters liaison committees, (whatever you want to call it), are not doing so for any reason other than to test out views. And to be able they have done so. It’s not a meeting to shape or influence the core business. The club will know a lot about supporters, the demographic, spending trends on merchandise, attendance, et al. They will employ people who read this and other social media, press stories, (and if there are such things football trade stuff), summarising key thoughts trends. Reported each week and fed into the management meetings. So they will already know that there is a high level of discontent, even once you filter out the influence of the results. What this new committee of selected is to allow everyone to know they do talk to supporters in an environment where “confidential matters are discussed’; where ‘adult/adult’ conversations can occur in the spirit of ‘critical friend’ openness. In reality it will be test out stuff like dropping Z cars (yes please), changing the catering, views on how to get people to spend more time attending. Previews on plans for upgrades, sponsors, shirt and badge designs. Should we have vegan hotdogs. Or create unisex toilets in the stands? To hear why spending precious money on the academy is not as VFM as scouting kids in West Africa, etc, etc. There will be no opportunity to influence the core vision, strategy and culture of the way the club is run. For a start if you wanted that, a genuine vehicle to oversee and challenge, you would meet more often, and create its membership properly. You would invite supporters with experience and specialist knowledge through an application process. Having set out what experience you need to make the group effective. You would have those applications independently interviewed to form your supporters committee. The supporters committee would be properly supported with dedicated admin resource, with its own section in the website describing the remit, membership, documentation. Personally I see no harm in what they have done, but it’s not a channel to reflect on key issues about the club, so who is on it and why is irrelevant. I do though have views on vegan hotdogs and look forward to the day Sam etc can reveal what the decision is.
The list of groups are in the article here: https://www.watfordfc.com/news/club/news-supporter-committee-formed A decent number of them are social media influencers.
When will the first/next meeting be - bit pointless having one till the summer really as this season has gone and all they will say is "we will learn and look to do better in the future" We don't even know if they have even though about the next manager or preparing for next season.
Hasn't it already happened with NDA agreement in place? The Ucko chap posted this when he was in the "honoured to be part of this" mode before the 180 degrees about being thrown under the bus: "Scott, Emiliano Richard and Meg were honest and transparent and we’re looking forward to more in the future." No idea who Emiliano, Richard and Meg are though. Could be Hooter, VOR and Highgrade for all I know.
Yes guess so with the meeting about the club finances which Adam Leventhal then basically made public anyway! He's probably on the black list now. Probably should have said the next one - by then we might have some idea of the planning for next season.
Ucko now emphatically saying that he doesn’t want his two dads, Scott and Gino, to go. Mere hours after crying about being ‘thrown under the bus’ and demanding heads should roll at the club for this season. I assume he means in catering or something.
I haven’t posted for a while because lately I’ve felt really apathetic towards the club in general. They’ve eroded any enthusiasm or belief. The Pozzos have sold Watford’s soul for a few years of being humiliated in the PL. Can’t wait to lose all our decent players this summer, spend £0 on replacements yet still have the highest spend on agents fees in the division.
Haha where is he saying that? The guy’s posts change direction several times a day. Doesn’t help his credibility.
Leave him alone. Bananaman has well-publicised mental health issues. He's immune from criticism and completely entitled to change his view depending on which way the wind is blowing.
I have only brushed past this guy's SM and my conclusion is that for his own sake, he should get off Twitter etc. He's clearly a young lad and makes it clear he's had MH issues. Putting himself in the firing line by toadying up to the vipers at the club in return for their favour is not gonna give him the peace of mind he needs.
They can NEVER tell you. Sworn to secrecy. I’m hearing they are just going to badge the regular hotdogs as vegan and add 30% to the price but please don’t quote me.
I must say I generally enjoy Ucko’s Twitter thread. He’s a passionate fan, goes home and way and seems to post with his heart of his sleeve like any of the rest of us. Changes views according to events but don’t we all. His forthright discussion on previous issues will also inspire others. What I find deeply troubling is a CEO on £900k per year who has failed over and over again is now seemingly using this young man as a shield against fan critisism. I find Duxbury disgusting.
Yeah I sympathise with him. Not so much the grown adults who jumped at the chance to join a secret committee to make themselves feel like alpha fans, but this kid is putting himself in harm's way IMO and needs to take himself out the game for a spell.
It's a bit like X Factor. Duxbury is giving this lot their Christmas number 1 before dropping them like a stone.
As far as I'm concerned, Pozzo's time here is done. The whole club needs a reboot, fresh ideas, a different direction (an 'actual' direction instead of knee-jerk solutions to problems he's caused). I view him as another of those sons of successful fathers that lack whatever it was/is that made the father good at what they do. Without checking the facts because I can't be bothered, wasn't our decline started around the time Jr took on full control? He's often referred to as a 'proper football man', having come from a family that's 'been in football for years'. But why does that make him qualified to run a football club? Wasn't he a business graduate from Harvard? Since when does that make you an expert at running a football team? My dad was an engineer but no engineering firm would take me on because I lack the skills to do it. He's only able to run a club (very badly) because he's rich (in comparison to the working man). The 'success' the club had at the start of the Pozzo era was - imo - a combination of his dad's involvement, Udinese being a much better team than they are now so the surplus dross was half decent, and their famed scouting system being more unique back then, but now (like most things Watford related) past its sell-by-date and not updated accordingly to move with the changing times in football. I don't understand the calls to have Duxbury removed and Pozzo retained. Surely everyone knows he's just a puppet? That all the decisions are made by or with the approval of Gino? To me, that's like the Allies thinking the war would end if they took out Himmler, overlooking the fact that he'd just be replaced by a different psychopath. The club is constantly referred to as a London club, so use that to its benefit as a selling point. I find it hard to believe there would be no interested parties with similar wealth to Pozzo in owning a 'London club'. I just don't buy in to this binary choice of it's either Pozzo or another Baz clone.
The Championship is full of owners wealthier than the Pozzos who have utterly mismanaged their clubs. Wealth is not a panacea that equates to a well-run club (though obviously it helps). I think Pozzos have over the last ten years gone from being clearly above average owners to roughly average. I don’t think someone with £200m or whatever the Pozzos are worth but without the Udinese link is likely to have us ‘achieving’ the same output but I do understand why some would rather roll the dice and find out if they would. But your point about Duxbury is spot on. I think axing Duxbury would be reflective of listening to fan criticism (which would be nice) but not indicate any actual direct change. What we need is (a decent manager who is backed and) a DoF who is independent of the Pozzo network and cares about his career trajectory to come in and be in charge of the footballing/recruitment side of things. Leigh Bromby at Huddersfield is doing v well. Stuart Webber is also highly regarded but probably couldn’t be tempted to come our way. Giaretta, even more so than Giraldi, is a yes man and isn’t accountable to football people outside the Pozzo network.
That's the point I've got to now. I cannot see anything getting better under this ownership. I don't think he'll ever repeat the success he had early on. I gave up my season ticket due to no longer working conventional hours which meant I'd have missed quite a few games. But now, the games I could make when doing the early shift or worse still having to go to work straight after full-time I've also binned off as it's just not worth the effort any more especially with the current cost of living. All sense of fun and occasion has been sucked out of it for me, and I don't see that changing until someone new comes in. When I checked my phone on my break yesterday, my instinctive reaction to the result was to laugh. That told me conclusively that I'd rather risk the unknown of a new owner than to carry on with more of the same.
Yep, I seem to remember Duxbury saying when we got to the Cup Final that now we were an established Premier League club, we wouldn't have to wait another 30 odd years to get to the next one?
Somebody took a photo of Scott, Emiliano, Richard and Meg during the committee meeting and posted it online:
One of the common themes of these type of threads is the desire to see a manager really given a chance and backed, not just shown the door the minute results aren’t achieved. The reality of course is that we will all be baying for change if we are bottom half of the champ after 15 games next season, irrespective of how positive we were at their appointment. No-one be saying, “no let’s give him the season to fully embed his ideas”. They have been pretty ruthless over the period of their but even with the benefit of hindsight I’m not sure there are too many sackings we’d want to reverse ? Gracia probably ? Munoz maybe ? Not sure we’d have won promotion if they hadn’t been fairly quick to dispense with Ivic. Of course the quality of the subsequent appointments is open to question !!
Many have said that it’s not the sackings that are wrong, but the subsequent appointments. I would argue the Gracia one was wrong, certainly in its timing, but if the appointments were better the need for sackings would not be so frequent. I think you’re right that most will be calling for a change if we are sitting in the bottom half of the Championship, but it worries me that so many seem to think that another promotion will be as ‘easy’ as the last one. This seems to be based on thinking that the level is so much below the PL. However I’m nowhere near convinced that our squad, whether it’s something similar to the current one or a hugely changed one with loan players recalled and others drafted in, will be battle-hardened enough to cope with a relentless schedule facing teams (and managers) who have been used to it for years and are desperate for promotion themselves.
I understand most wanted Ivic gone but the circumstances are important. Let’s not forget we probably only win promotion due to Deeney’s injury, yet as soon as Ivic tried to sideline him the club backed Deeney over Ivic and he was gone. How do we know how we would’ve performed under Ivic without Deeney in the team and Hughes back etc? The point really though is perhaps the situation with Deeney coincided with Ivic also not being the right man, but the players should never be backed over the manager. It also doesn’t help we only go for unemployed managers, which seriously weakens the quality of the talent pool we’re fishing in. In 15 managers we’ve only had one poached, which is an abysmal hit rate considering they’re self proclaimed 2 year get poached or get moved on model.
