Our Problems are as Old as the Hills

[Athelwulf]

The weather's about what it's doing now, and it's what we're all principally concerned with.

 

The climate is the general state of the weather, stretching back many millions of years.

 

As with meteorology, so with football.

 

The seeds of our failure were sown many many years ago, long before Pulis' and Chansiri's great-great-grandparents were even conceived.

 

To begin with, our passion for football in this region was our downfall; too many clubs for too few people/resources.

 

Yorkshire isn't like Lancashire, where towns and cities are all closely packed into one big conurbation.

 

Yorkshire towns and cities are widely separated by large tracts of countryside, and our own conurbation has six clubs.

 

Up until the 1920s even Rotherham had two clubs.

 

The great schism in Sheffield football many believed sealed our fate.

 

In the mid-1990s Reg Brearley at the Lane engaged three London financial companies to run the rule over Sheffield football.

 

All three independently concluded that Sheffield could not support two top-flight teams.

 

Brearley warned that if Wednesday were still in the top flight in the new millennium they'd be OK, but if not we'd be in big bother.

 

Big Ron made his similar dire predictions in the late 1990s too.

 

Secondly, there's the matter of the abolition of the maximum wage in 1962.

 

That may seem obscure now, but it probably played as big a role as any in our failure.

 

At a stroke it made our way of doing things, that is a club with no owner and thousands of small shareholders, a thing of the past.

 

In retrospect, it's remarkable that we ever played at the top level for a decade and a half with that system.

 

But our failure to change the system back then is the reason we never got a Revie or a Shankly, and why we lost Catterick and Wilkinson.

 

Our final fall from grace in 2000 was decided almost 40 years earlier, since the main reason for our relegation was the inability to produce sufficient funds to stay up.

 

Had, say, Spurs gone down - assuming the FA would have ever allowed it - they'd have borrowed the money to go straight back up and then paid it off once promotion was assured.

 

We just spiralled down and down.

 

Some may say that Chansiri has now vindicated the old system, but had we sold out in the early 60s, or the early 1990s, then we'd have got someone far superior to Channers.

 

Let's face it, if he'd have known anything about this game he'd never have taken us on, and I bet he bitterly regrets it now.

 

Finally, there's the lack of a youth policy.

 

Seasons pass and the years fly by, but you can be sure of three things.

 

Night follows day, winter follows autumn, and Wednesday don't have a youth policy.

 

Other clubs do for goodness sake, Leeds, Barnsley and the Blades to name but three, but we cannot for love nor money produce talent and that has had a grievous impact on our finances.

 

Like the weather, this current ********-up is just about the here and now - but the climate of failure here is much deeper-seated and long-established than that.

[quinnssweetshop]

Well written and very true in all respects.

Missing one very important factor

The greed and rape of clubs by agents and advisors.

[Manwë]

Totally disagree.

 

Wednesday are not in competition with the other five clubs, Wednesday are in competition with Meadowhall, XBox, Costa Coffee, apathy, walk in the Peak District, Sky TV, Ryanair, Skegness and Cleethorpes.

 

Football is more expensive than ever, the alternatives are cheaper than ever, and the product at Hillsborough is dire and poo .  Serve that up, hand the customer the bill and hope they come back.

 

I earn a reasonable wage, but I struggle to justify to myself the high prices at Hillsborough.  I can only call it buyers remorse.   Nothing beats the pre-match excitement, but it doesn't last long.  Like a drug that you no longer get a kick from, but still hoping you do next time.  Mix it with a bit of duty, and a dose of routine and they've got my cash.  But they're running on fumes now in terms of paying unquestionable support.

 

I remember taking my wife to her first (and last) game.  Birmingham at home, over £100 spent.To put that into perspective, that was more than a 6 night stay in a four star hotel in the centre of Vienna, or a 4 night stay in Venice.  Yes they were bargains and we got lucky, but still.  I've never paid more than £80 for a return flight to Europe.  Eurostar is not much more.

 

The failing at Wednesday  is the product.  We've spent £350m on the product and it's still utter poo .  Just how much money does a club ninth place in the Championship with 23000 paying customers each week need to get to the PL?  How much would a combined Wednesday/United generate that's above the £350m mark to be successful?  

 

Football is a sport, a competition.  It relies on 11v11 individuals that form a team.  That's the crux of the matter.  

 

As for Reg Brearly, the days of a Wednesday/United merge talk was when United had nothing about them apart from guts, whereas we had something a bit more quality.  They still always seemed to beat us, 11vs11.  They'd beat us now, and now they own their own ground, training facilities. How tragic for us.  Would they want to merge with their older, bottom cousin?

 

Being in the top flight can be self sustainable, because TV money contributes so much overall in comparison to gate recipiets.  In that case, the size of the town, fanbase etc is less relevant.  

 

Money isn't the problem at Wednesday (well it is now), ability and quality is.   

 

We've blown our chance not because of geography, not because we are in a two-club city, but because we have someone incompetent leading every aspect of the club.

[Jack of Clubs]

The timing of our relegation from the PL 20 years again was just as the money started to really roll in for the league and we’ve struggled to try and adjust ever since. 
 

if we go down this season I really feel it will be just as bad (if not worse) than when we dropped out of the PL. we are already in a mess which culminated in us being docked points. What with the salary cap and the squad we currently have I foresee dark days ahead.

 

DC has a lot to answer for.

[Athelwulf]

19 minutes ago, Manwë said:

Totally disagree.

 

Wednesday are not in competition with the other five clubs, Wednesday M

 

Football is more expensive than ever, the alternatives are cheaper than ever, and the product at Hillsborough is dire and poo .  Serve that up, hand the customer the bill and hope they come back.

 

I earn a reasonable wage, but I struggle to justify to myself the high prices at Hillsborough.  I can only call it buyers remorse.   Nothing beats the pre-match excitement, but it doesn't last long.  Like a drug that you no longer get a kick from, but still hoping you do next time.  Mix it with a bit of duty, and a dose of routine and they've got my cash.  But they're running on fumes now in terms of paying unquestionable support.

 

I remember taking my wife to her first (and last) game.  Birmingham at home, over £100 spent.To put that into perspective, that was more than a 6 night stay in a four star hotel in the centre of Vienna, or a 4 night stay in Venice.  Yes they were bargains and we got lucky, but still.  I've never paid more than £80 for a return flight to Europe.  Eurostar is not much more.

 

The failing at Wednesday  is the product.  We've spent £350m on the product and it's still utter poo .  Just how much money does a club ninth place in the Championship with 23000 paying customers each week need to get to the PL?  How much would a combined Wednesday/United generate that's above the £350m mark to be successful?  

 

Football is a sport, a competition.  It relies on 11v11 individuals that form a team.  That's the crux of the matter.  

 

As for Reg Brearly, the days of a Wednesday/United merge talk was when United had nothing about them apart from guts, whereas we had something a bit more quality.  They still always seemed to beat us, 11vs11.  They'd beat us now, and now they own their own ground, training facilities. How tragic for us.  Would they want to merge with their older, bottom cousin?

 

Being in the top flight can be self sustainable, because TV money contributes so much overall in comparison to gate recipiets.  In that case, the size of the town, fanbase etc is less relevant.  

 

Money isn't the problem at Wednesday (well it is now), ability and quality is.   

 

We've blown our chance not because of geography, not because we are in a two-club city, but because we have someone incompetent leading every aspect of the club.

 

You're talking about now, whereas I was tracing our history from the 19th century and trying to explain why we're not a Liverpool or a Man Utd.

 

Back in the day, crowds mattered.

 

That was the main source of revenue, so the number of clubs in a particular area mattered too.

 

Rotherham United are bob, but imagine how bob they'd be if there was also a Rotherham Rovers.

 

Let's say the schism had never occurred here.

 

From the 1880s onwards Sheffield's finest would have been getting twice the crowds that they subsequently got, and thus twice the revenue.

 

That would have made an enormous difference.

 

With the fanaticism for football here we'd arguably have been the biggest club in the country.

 

As for mergers, they would have worked years ago but not now where crowds are far less important.

 

A merged club now would have no history.

 

But if we'd had one club from the start we'd have been "massive" when the maximum wage was abolished and money came into the game, and well-placed as Liverpool and Man Utd were.

 

And the Sheffield club would have had national support, as they do.

 

But the fact that we have two clubs didn't have to be fatal for us had we modernized.

 

The abolition of the maximum wage allowed a handful of clubs to hog the best players; even in a two-club city we could have been one of them had we changed our system in the 1960s.

 

We could have sold out in the 1990s, but Dave Richards had his eyes on a greater prize...

 

Man Utd and Liverpool are in competition with shopping malls , XBox, Costa Coffee, a walk in the Lake District, Sky TV, Ryanair, Blackpool too, but it doesn't seem to hamper them because they got in at the right time.

 

We didn't, and we're paying the price now.

[TrueOwl]

How long did it take the Wolves or Blades to go from league one to the PL? Probably 3 years of year on year honest to god progress. The wheels are falling off now for them but you don’t even need investment to get out of this league, the manager is the by far the most important man at the club and ours is taking us backwards from Monk, work that one out. 

[TrueOwl]

If Burnley can sustain a Premier League club for a decade so can we.

[Athelwulf]

Just now, TrueOwl said:

How long did it take the Wolves or Blades to go from league one to the PL? Probably 3 years of year on year honest to god progress. The wheels are falling off now for them but you don’t even need investment to get out of this league, the manager is the by far the most important man at the club and ours is taking us backwards from Monk, work that one out. 

 

I'm 54 and I can only remember Man Utd or Liverpool being outside the top division on one occasion, and that's when Denis Law put Manchester down in the mid-70s.

 

That's the level we could have been at had we done things differently.

 

As for the Blades and Wolves, the Blades unearthed the kind of manager who comes around once in a generation, and Wolves gambled even more than we did and it paid off.

 

If it hadn't they'd have been in the brown stuff too.

 

I guess you can argue that Chansiri gambled half-heartedly, so I take your point on that one.

[billyblack]

58 minutes ago, Manwë said:

Totally disagree.

 

Wednesday are not in competition with the other five clubs, Wednesday are in competition with Meadowhall, XBox, Costa Coffee, apathy, walk in the Peak District, Sky TV, Ryanair, Skegness and Cleethorpes.

 

Football is more expensive than ever, the alternatives are cheaper than ever, and the product at Hillsborough is dire and poo .  Serve that up, hand the customer the bill and hope they come back.

 

I earn a reasonable wage, but I struggle to justify to myself the high prices at Hillsborough.  I can only call it buyers remorse.   Nothing beats the pre-match excitement, but it doesn't last long.  Like a drug that you no longer get a kick from, but still hoping you do next time.  Mix it with a bit of duty, and a dose of routine and they've got my cash.  But they're running on fumes now in terms of paying unquestionable support.

 

I remember taking my wife to her first (and last) game.  Birmingham at home, over £100 spent.To put that into perspective, that was more than a 6 night stay in a four star hotel in the centre of Vienna, or a 4 night stay in Venice.  Yes they were bargains and we got lucky, but still.  I've never paid more than £80 for a return flight to Europe.  Eurostar is not much more.

 

The failing at Wednesday  is the product.  We've spent £350m on the product and it's still utter poo .  Just how much money does a club ninth place in the Championship with 23000 paying customers each week need to get to the PL?  How much would a combined Wednesday/United generate that's above the £350m mark to be successful?  

 

Football is a sport, a competition.  It relies on 11v11 individuals that form a team.  That's the crux of the matter.  

 

As for Reg Brearly, the days of a Wednesday/United merge talk was when United had nothing about them apart from guts, whereas we had something a bit more quality.  They still always seemed to beat us, 11vs11.  They'd beat us now, and now they own their own ground, training facilities. How tragic for us.  Would they want to merge with their older, bottom cousin?

 

Being in the top flight can be self sustainable, because TV money contributes so much overall in comparison to gate recipiets.  In that case, the size of the town, fanbase etc is less relevant.  

 

Money isn't the problem at Wednesday (well it is now), ability and quality is.   

 

We've blown our chance not because of geography, not because we are in a two-club city, but because we have someone incompetent leading every aspect of the club.

Its nowhere near 350million by the way. Nowhere near, 150 mill probably. Dont know where he makes that number up from. Agree with the rest of your sentiment.

[Athelwulf]

3 minutes ago, TrueOwl said:

If Burnley can sustain a Premier League club for a decade so can we.

 

But that's based on management.

 

Management only matters that much at small clubs.

 

Without Dyche Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnley would be bob.

 

Liverpool lost Dalglish, Manchester lost Fergie, but they didn't sink into oblivion.

[TrueOwl]

2 minutes ago, Athelwulf said:

 

I'm 54 and I can only remember Man Utd or Liverpool being outside the top division on one occasion, and that's when Denis Law put Manchester down in the mid-70s.

 

That's the level we could have been at had we done things differently.

 

As for the Blades and Wolves, the Blades unearthed the kind of manager who comes around once in a generation, and Wolves gambled even more than we did and it paid off.

 

If it hadn't they'd have been in the brown stuff too.

 

I guess you can argue that Chansiri gambled half-heartedly, so I take your point on that one.

We gambled as our investment in players was no where near the level of investment that Wolves undertook. They were signing players capable of competing for Europe in the premier league we gambled on might be good enough to get us up.

 

Looks like we need to find our own Wilder or Dyche. If we sign enough managers we’ll stumble on one eventually, not because we know what we’re doing just law of averages really.

[hasthagotanycheese]

All good points.

 

I think the clubs failure to deal with the implications of the Bosman ruling 25 years ago also had a huge impact on where we now find ourselves.

[fatzooma]

John Hills?

[Athelwulf]

52 minutes ago, TrueOwl said:

We gambled as our investment in players was no where near the level of investment that Wolves undertook. They were signing players capable of competing for Europe in the premier league we gambled on might be good enough to get us up.

 

Looks like we need to find our own Wilder or Dyche. If we sign enough managers we’ll stumble on one eventually, not because we know what we’re doing just law of averages really.

 

Yes, I think you're right.

[Athelwulf]

40 minutes ago, hasthagotanycheese said:

All good points.

 

I think the clubs failure to deal with the implications of the Bosman ruling 25 years ago also had a huge impact on where we now find ourselves.

 

Yes, true.

[adelphi1867]

3 hours ago, Athelwulf said:

 

I'm 54 and I can only remember Man Utd or Liverpool being outside the top division on one occasion, and that's when Denis Law put Manchester down in the mid-70s.

 

That's the level we could have been at had we done things differently.

 

As for the Blades and Wolves, the Blades unearthed the kind of manager who comes around once in a generation, and Wolves gambled even more than we did and it paid off.

 

If it hadn't they'd have been in the brown stuff too.

 

I guess you can argue that Chansiri gambled half-heartedly, so I take your point on that one.

This^^.

If Wolves and the Blades gambles had failed both clubs would have been admin.

We gambled, on a foreign manager + players, and lost, we have been paying the price of that since.

Doesn't take away the bad management of the club over that period, but explains a lot.

Does a change of manager work?, well looking at our record over the last 30 years, no it doesn't.

Will changing the manager confirm our safety now, no one knows.

1st we have to ask which manager of note would come and put their reputation on the line, I can think of no one, so it seem's we will have to take a punt on an unknown from abroad or a lower league manager, either way they will to be given the time and rescource's to do the job, both highly unlikely.

[Sova]

4 hours ago, TrueOwl said:

If Burnley can sustain a Premier League club for a decade so can we.

 

But Burnley haven't sustained a PL club for a decade. They've been relegated twice in that time. But, thanks to the miracle of parachute payments (and, yes, to being a well-run club), they bounced back on both occasions. In our case, yes, the long-standing factors mentioned in the OP certainly apply, but since our last relegation from the PL, we have, in addition to being badly run, been hit with a succession of blows beyond our control - getting relegated without parachute payments; the collapse of ITV digital; the introduction of parachute payments; the ever-increasing size of those parachute payments; the introduction of the FFP/profit and sustainability rules.

[Lincs Owl]

I think we've had as much chance as anyone else over the years to spawn a decent club.

Sheffield has 580,000 citizens.   If we were successful we would have fans coming from Barnsley Rotherham Doncaster Chesterfield Mansfield etc, like they do when we've had good teams in the past.

Stoke is half the size of Sheffield and has two league teams (admittedly one not very good).  Ditto Bristol. 

The reason we are so poor is that we've made so many mistakes over the years, and had so much bad luck.

Losing Dooley through a leg amputation when he could have been our most famous player.

Losing Swan and Layne through the bribes scandal.  It maybe cost us the 1966 Cup Final win.

Not signing Keegan after his Scunny team bumped us out of the cup in 1970.  I was living in Scunny at the time, and all their fans knew he would be special.

Not signing Cantona.

Atkinson getting beaten to it by Leeds when it looked like he'd signed Gordon Strachan.

Not selling Hirst to Man U and using the £3m towards buying that young Shearer from Southampton.

Letting Jaimie Vardy go as a kid.

Kicking Carlos out when we had nobody better lined up.

 

I could name about 50 big moments in the last 62 years that I've been watching Wednesday, where we've made the wrong decision.

 

And we're still doing it.

[Athelwulf]

3 minutes ago, Lincs Owl said:

I think we've had as much chance as anyone else over the years to spawn a decent club.

Sheffield has 580,000 citizens.   If we were successful we would have fans coming from Barnsley Rotherham Doncaster Chesterfield Mansfield etc, like they do when we've had good teams in the past.

Stoke is half the size of Sheffield and has two league teams (admittedly one not very good).  Ditto Bristol. 

The reason we are so poor is that we've made so many mistakes over the years, and had so much bad luck.

Losing Dooley through a leg amputation when he could have been our most famous player.

Losing Swan and Layne through the bribes scandal.  It maybe cost us the 1966 Cup Final win.

Not signing Keegan after his Scunny team bumped us out of the cup in 1970.  I was living in Scunny at the time, and all their fans knew he would be special.

Not signing Cantona.

Atkinson getting beaten to it by Leeds when it looked like he'd signed Gordon Strachan.

Not selling Hirst to Man U and using the £3m towards buying that young Shearer from Southampton.

Letting Jaimie Vardy go as a kid.

Kicking Carlos out when we had nobody better lined up.

 

I could name about 50 big moments in the last 62 years that I've been watching Wednesday, where we've made the wrong decision.

 

And we're still doing it.

 

That's my point.

 

We were a top flight club, Leeds were in the Second, but we still couldn't compete financially with them.

 

I remember Atkinson saying that we couldn't match them for wages.

 

Leeds had Leslie Silver pouring money in, whereas we didn't.

 

Prior to modernization and Mandy, I think the most anybody ever put into us was Dave Allen's couple of million.

 

We'd never have got Revie here, or even if we had he'd have quit us.

 

Or if he didn't, his players here would have.

[Hougoumont]

16 hours ago, Athelwulf said:

The weather's about what it's doing now, and it's what we're all principally concerned with.

 

The climate is the general state of the weather, stretching back many millions of years.

 

As with meteorology, so with football.

 

The seeds of our failure were sown many many years ago, long before Pulis' and Chansiri's great-great-grandparents were even conceived.

 

To begin with, our passion for football in this region was our downfall; too many clubs for too few people/resources.

 

Yorkshire isn't like Lancashire, where towns and cities are all closely packed into one big conurbation.

 

Yorkshire towns and cities are widely separated by large tracts of countryside, and our own conurbation has six clubs.

 

Up until the 1920s even Rotherham had two clubs.

 

The great schism in Sheffield football many believed sealed our fate.

 

In the mid-1990s Reg Brearley at the Lane engaged three London financial companies to run the rule over Sheffield football.

 

All three independently concluded that Sheffield could not support two top-flight teams.

 

Brearley warned that if Wednesday were still in the top flight in the new millennium they'd be OK, but if not we'd be in big bother.

 

Big Ron made his similar dire predictions in the late 1990s too.

 

Secondly, there's the matter of the abolition of the maximum wage in 1962.

 

That may seem obscure now, but it probably played as big a role as any in our failure.

 

At a stroke it made our way of doing things, that is a club with no owner and thousands of small shareholders, a thing of the past.

 

In retrospect, it's remarkable that we ever played at the top level for a decade and a half with that system.

 

But our failure to change the system back then is the reason we never got a Revie or a Shankly, and why we lost Catterick and Wilkinson.

 

Our final fall from grace in 2000 was decided almost 40 years earlier, since the main reason for our relegation was the inability to produce sufficient funds to stay up.

 

Had, say, Spurs gone down - assuming the FA would have ever allowed it - they'd have borrowed the money to go straight back up and then paid it off once promotion was assured.

 

We just spiralled down and down.

 

Some may say that Chansiri has now vindicated the old system, but had we sold out in the early 60s, or the early 1990s, then we'd have got someone far superior to Channers.

 

Let's face it, if he'd have known anything about this game he'd never have taken us on, and I bet he bitterly regrets it now.

 

Finally, there's the lack of a youth policy.

 

Seasons pass and the years fly by, but you can be sure of three things.

 

Night follows day, winter follows autumn, and Wednesday don't have a youth policy.

 

Other clubs do for goodness sake, Leeds, Barnsley and the Blades to name but three, but we cannot for love nor money produce talent and that has had a grievous impact on our finances.

 

Like the weather, this current ********-up is just about the here and now - but the climate of failure here is much deeper-seated and long-established than that.

This is a very accurate and astute post. Maybe Pulis should ask you to drop in on the Chansiri meeting to give the Chairman some perspective.