Watford Fc - A Deeply Rotten, Toxic Club

I'm yours. You don't need that Moog....

 

I thought it was a sausage on a barbecue on a hot summer day, couldn’t have been further from the truth!

 

Exactly. It would it good sideshow for some of them though. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m on the fan advisory board…”

 

Cheese ? That's just a rarebit of fun for the forum !
Like the new avatar - what could it possibly be referring to ?

 

It's a bit of a lesser-spotted version of Oliver Kay's Athletic article, which isn't in itself a bad thing - they're certainly clearly not that afraid of any 'access' concerns.

 

Feel like this is the right thread for this particular Athletic nugget, given discussions of 'toxicity':



Lovely to hear of the disconnect between some key players and the rest of the dressing room

 

Top quality proof-reading there.

 

Grauniad's got nothing on them.

No joke, I wouldn't for a second imagine the Athletic employ sub-editors - everyone else has got rid of theirs (stupidly) in fairness.

 

No, but you might think a journalist would spot that crucial words were missing from a sentence.

Weren't like that in my day.

 

Gone further mate.

https://newsthump.com/2022/01/25/managing-watford-to-become-the-new-jury-duty/

 

In total fairness, they did do that for the vast majority of words in the article, and I imagine deadlines from the Athletic make it rather a rushed job in general - I'm sure you're aware of the state of play in journalism these days. It's all a bit mental, but seemingly the new normal we all have to live with, and in fairness when most people refuse to, or even acknowledge the argument for, paying for writing/journalism, we're all just going to have to learn to live with it.

 

I think there are still jobs out there, they're just much fewer and further between - when I did my training in 2017 it was a noted theme that major and minor papers were all choosing to cut costs first of all by laying off subs as an extravagance, and placing the added burden entirely on the writers themselves. Obviously, it's not, and then the people who won't pay for anything they read start screeching about the quality of the grammar etc in the things they're not paying for!

I think if you're looking to do that and have any possible avenue, proofing in publishing might be more likely to be as healthy as ever?

(This is not in any way a subtweet at Keighley, I was, as ever, amused by his comment)

 

Yes, certainly still jobs for proofing in publishing, I have a friend who does this.

I am thinking of taking it up as a little money spinner when I retire.

 

You forgot to add rancid as well

 

Fair play to Ryan Gray

 

I'm on a similar page as this comment.

2022 is the 30th anniversary of my hating the corporate greed that the Premier League represents.

For most of this time, Watford haven't been able to compete. But since 2012, we've had owners who - without the same money as the biggest clubs - have had a business model that has got us competing. Credit to them for that.

Maybe the model is less effective now - now that we're using a mere business model to compete with nation states and billionaires.

But I don't blame Gino and his colleagues for the comparative wealth of these other owners. Our owners gave us a great run in the top division - which for all its grinding misery does give occasional joy.

My sense is that much of the anger in the early part of this thread is probably caused by the way football has gone - and that, now that we're finding it harder to keep up, people are blaming the owners who, for many years, have actually done really well.

Blame the Premier League for our not being able to enjoy football the old way. It's a bit unreasonable to blame our owners, who are trying to hard to find a way to compete.

They know far more about how to succeed in running a football club than I do, so I shall continue to support them and despise the Premier League.

 

This will go down well...

 

Looking forward to it.

If someone wants a football club with "heart", I'd love to hear their strategy for having a heart and competing in the brutal and amoral capitalism of Premier League.

 

Good post and really agree with the bit in bold. I probably hadn't made that connection before.

I don't expect us to be able to compete with these other owners financially, and we need to be almost flawless in our decision making just to hang in there. My frustration is that quite a few of our poor decisions were obvious at the time. But on the other hand can hardly argue with the on field performance of promotion, five consecutive Premier League seasons, a cup final and a bounce back promotion!

The other thing that nags at me though is the amount of debt Pozzo has placed on the club. That's probably the price of being in the Premier League when you've not got a big backer but it does worry me for longer term future of the club and responsibility for this does sit squarely with Gino Pozzo (even if the debt doesn't as it's loaded on the club).

But totally agree that the PL is quite a repulsive product for a whole host of reasons.

 

It’s when you get the whole 18 team debate and people scoffing at the likes of us and Norwich that gets me. It doesn’t matter what size a league is you will always get teams at the bottom of it so the argument is just so utterly ******** it’s just mind blowing people come up with this stuff. What with the prize money in the PL and parachute payments teams at the bottom are not weaker than they used to be, far from it, the overall quality is higher but the reason teams at the bottom struggle to pick up as many points is the obscene money at the top and teams like Man City being bank rolled by entire countries. That’s what really makes me sick, people insinuating teams like us don’t deserve our place because we struggle to compete with teams owned by billionaires, its utterly backwards logic. The problem is teams being able to cheat the system, not teams trying their very best to compete with the system.

Imagine we had a salary cap and player franchise model like the NFL, just imagine going into a season with the same chance and opportunity of winning the league as Chelsea or Man City.

 

I agree . Good well balanced view .it looks like we are heading back to the championship for now, but I don’t personally believe the model can’t work. The random and unpredictable nature of signing promising , rather than proven talent means we need for a number if those signings to actually work at he same time and we could have a few successful seasons .

 

This isn't the model. Gosling, Sanchez, Kucka, Tufan, Sissoko, Fletcher, King, Rose. Significant contract extensions for Cleverly, Sema, Kabasele recently. Wilmot sold. £40m on a high profile winger. Endless mediocre belgian league squad filler brought in from Mogi Bayat.

This isn't the strategy of a club that wants to give young promising talent a chance, even if we do occasionally sign them (JP, Cucho, Asprilla, Ngakia). The Pozzo model is a myth. The only thing that still has value is the ability to use Udinese for permits, shuffle assets or signing out of contract UK players for no fee. Otherwise Pozzo is just splashing around and has arrived at a really poor squad, with many players of minimal value on long contracts, fuelled by excessive debt. And in addition the ownership lurch from one strategy to another both in terms of player recruitment and first team coach. An utter shambles.

 

And the person peacocking most recently in the thread said a couple of years ago that if we were relegated, our owners would be ‘underachieving’. People change I guess.

Or the forum’s own Nadine Dorries liking posts criticising others for negativity when she’s regularly posted that she’s not going to watch the game as she thinks we’re going to lose.

Our fans. Spesh.

 

This is absolutely the point. Only one team can win the league and there will always be 'rubbish' teams at the bottom. But the Premier League is uncompetitive and sport becomes boring when it is uncompetitive. There's just enough in it for everyone to say: "Oh no, it's not uncompetitive, remember Leicester winning the title? And Palace won at City this season." There's just enough to maintain the thinnest veneer of sporting credibility.

There might be a title race but it will be Team A or Team B that wins and the only way to break into the elite is to be owned by a state or entity with limitless funds.

The salespeople for the sport (rights-holding media, followed by a rush of copycats who have inexplicably joined in to eagerly sell the dream) have created false idols (the race for the top four) and false jeopardy.

The 'quality' of football is a red herring, I think. Manchester City are an unbelievable team, as are Liverpool. But they're just knocking down skittles week after week after week. Good football, to me anyway, is watching a reasonably closely contested game played out by two sides both trying to win. I am not interested in Harlem Globetrotters style attack-versus-defence exhibition football and the top two or three sides are engaged in matches like this more than half the time. The giant v giant clashes super-hyped by the media routinely turn out to be dreadful, cagey affairs. Pundits who played in the 90s go on for an hour before kick-off about how important it is to win the early battles and then we watch pedestrian passing. It's like their brains cannot process what they actually see, they just remember what it was like in their day. The clashes between the sides at the bottom are dismissed as the dross of the desperate.

To win the title now demands near perfection. 97, 98, 99 or 100 points are the requirement. That's a maximum of 17 dropped points all season. 90 points used to be a rarity from a 38-game season. In 1997, Man United won the title with 75 points – a tally that in some recent years would only just earn a top four place. That is what's ruined the Premier League, the meaningless, relentless march towards a sort of dreary corporate perfection. The biggest sides barely lose home games, rendering a trip to the Emptihad, Anfield or Stamford Bridge for most teams almost pointless (literally, metaphorically and in every other sense).

And yet, today I woke up with a knot in my stomach at the prospect of the relegation showdown part three. It's a broken system and I have no idea how it could be fixed even if there was a shred of desire to acknowledge and address the flaws. Bizarre, really, that I still want us to be part of it but I do.

 

• Amazing stat, Watford's last five Premier League away wins were under five different managers: Javi Gracia, Quique Sanchez Flores, Nigel Pearson, Xisco Munoz and Claudio Ranieri.

 

Blame the Premier League for that.

 

Also amazing that we have to go back all the way to the Gracia era to find only our fifth last away win. And four of those wins came against relegated (or likely to be) sides, the other one against a basket case.

 

This reminds me of the Scottish top flight that a lot of people make fun of. At least the other major European leagues are more competitive, though Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona dominate from time to time.

 

I don't think that's true (not that I follow foreign football). They are even more of an oligarchy than the prem. The same 2 or 3 teams hoovering up all the money, titles and glory.

 

I believe we have a much fairer distribution of TV money than a lot of European leagues, certainly compared to Spain, that’s why Gino sold Granada as there just isn’t the money outside the top clubs that there is in the PL. The problem is we have too many owners with bottomless pits of cash who don’t run their clubs as viable businesses, and now we have another in Newcastle. Obviously there have also been a couple of attempts by our top clubs to change the distribution in their favour though.

 

This simply can't be a serious post. England currently has 3 teams capable of winning the league, some seasons 4 or 5. And it had a 5000-1 winner in the last decade. Have you not kept tabs on German, Spanish, French and Italian league winners over the last 10 years!

 

But the success of the model unfortunately depends on us actually staying in the premier league for a few seasons . Otherwise , we go backwards as we have seen . When we stayed up initially, it was through shrewd signings like Berhami/Capone/Prodl .The young promising signings should then be slowly filtered in . You can’t expect us to sign a load of young players that are premier league ready and will keep us up immediately . It’s not realistic.

I fully accept there have been serious errors in neglecting our defense, but the model could still work. Again it is never gonna last for a long time , but we could have a few seasons of challenging for Europe . That’s about the best we can hope for anyway right ?