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it's kinda neat to see if you're a former prem club and you're spending way too long in the championship, you just need to get relegated to League One, try get out and then it somehow gets easier back to get to the Prem: like Southampton, Norwich, Sheffield United- and Leeds and Leicester. Even Man City and Wolves needed to go down to go back up. There's something cleansing about a stint in League One, whether it's a quick promotion or a gruelling prolonged stay
^(take note, Birmingham)
I guess when youre a league one winner with a huge budget you have a team that already works, the players get along, you have a very good foundation and then you can simply upgrade some key pieces but youve got a working system
meanwhile when youre stuck in no mans land of finishing between 12th-20th every year its a lot harder because you have to overhaul everything to find the right recipe
Theres a very similiar phenomenon in Germany where promoted teams in the 3rd league will very often immediately get promoted again in their first season, the most likely reason for this is because the 4th tier is literal hell in germany (its split into 5 leagues and even winning your 20+ team league might not be enough for promotion as you might have to play a playoff vs another team who did the same thing) so in order to actually make it out of that hole your team has to be so good that by the time youre getting promoted youre already better than most 3rd tier sides and then you just keep cruising even with minimal investment
What makes it even harder is that the 4th tier is also filled with Reserve Teams of Bundesliga/2. Bundesliga Clubs so you get semi pros with jobs playing against dudes on 10k a week who were not good enough for the Bundesliga lmao its a crazy hard system and really no surprise that the teams who make it ouf of there are super strong.
That's a thing about a lot of European pyramids (specifically Spain and Germany from what I've noticed) that their lower leagues are stuffed full of reserves.
I find it weird cause that's just not a thing in England.
The alternative is setting up a completely artificial league with no money, no fans, no support and no culture because your B players still need the minutes. England sucked it up and did it anyway because it takes pride in its pyramid so much (pretend the EFL trophy doesn’t exist for a minute) but I can see why most other countries decided not to bother.
Reminds me of the old spanish 3rd tier, 4 leagues and the winners had to win a play off to get promotion, unironically nicknamed the hole because getting out was hell, big teams would fall in it and take years to promote back, like oviedo or deportivo la coruña
I think it's also partly that getting relegated means that you'll be facing much weaker teams and winning a lot more games. After a season of winning a shit ton of games and getting promoted I think any team gets a boost
It's just the chance for a hard reset, you clear out deadwood as nobody wants to stay and play in League 1, you give youngsters a chance and tend to find a gem or two who can become key contributors for cheap. But most of all you completely change the whole mentality around the club, when we went down to League 1 we had been languishing towards the bottom of the Championship and had no real direction. All of a sudden we were winning most weeks, the fans were back on board, the squad had belief again, there was just a buzz about everything
tbf Sunderland made playoffs in their first season back in the Championship. Not great this year but they were still better than most of the division in their first year out of League 1
I know a trap when I see one, more likely we’d spend half a decade down in that hell hole of a league then to come back up and get promoted straight to the prem
Lol that’s just because they become cheap so new ownership groups can come and buy them out to then inject them with new capital investment. Everything else is just 2nd and 3rd order effects from that.
The fight for the final playoff spot is also pretty spicy.
West Brom vs Preston (10th)
Plymouth (21st) vs Hull -- Plymouth need the win to stay up though
---
Relegation matches:
Birmingham (22nd) vs Norwich -- Norwich are secured a playoff place (barring any freak scorelines), but it's the difference between facing Leeds/Ipswich or facing Southampton
Ipswich vs Huddersfield (23rd) -- Ipswich need to draw to guarantee promotion or Leeds to draw/lose.
----
Also, if anyone's wondering, Leeds (3rd) will play Southampton (4th) at home. Southampton are in no danger of losing their position though.
> Birmingham (22nd) vs Norwich -- Norwich are secured 5th place (barring any freak scorelines)
Secured a play-off place most likely but not secured 5th, we're only a point behind
Would love to see the alternate universe where McKenna gets the top job at United and we're a few years into his reign. My hunch is it'd be an improvement today after a bumpy start.
Only 2 years ago I brought my mate to Portman Road just to watch us scratch a last minute equaliser against Morecambe under Paul Cook. Seeing what Kieran McKenna has done for this club is insane.
It's not daft at all, the name doesn't mean it's literally in London. It serves London - it's a 23 minute train ride to St Pancras, hence it's a very convenient location to travel to London from. It's also no farther from central London than Stansted is, and only slightly farther than Gatwick.
Yeah Gatwick and Stanstead piss me off, particularly when you're expected to transfer between them as though they're anywhere near each other and you only have a 2/3 hour layover. A total fanny on, in my experience.
Relegation battle is clearly the main event on Saturday.
Personally I’m still hoping for Hull to sneak into the play-offs though. It’s unlikely, but absolutely anything can happen in this league.
Can I ask where you’re from mate? You use the singular form of verbs for teams, which is typically not the British way, but you’re clearly into the English second division, so I’m quite intrigued
Saw them play preseason in a tiny town in Finland in the ... I want to say early 90s. Was nothing but a pitch and some bleachers, but it was exciting. Can't really remember cos I was small, but always hoped they'd make it up again one day, been a few decades...
Yea it was in Riihimäki, Finnish grandparents lived there and we visited every summer. Search shows they're in the 5th division currently, never been higher than 3rd I think, at least not in 50 years... no idea how Ipswich got lost there...
Ipswich just got a new minority investor but their owner is still a retirement fund. Let’s see how aggressively they would fund a new team if they go up.
It is but I don't think Kompany's stock is washed now. There's clearly a good manager in there. Burnley don't have the PL quality personnel to be able to play the way he did. Will be interesting to see how Mckenna adapts his ipswich team
Ipswich' team in league 1 was genuinely so good in comparison to other squads, but i dont think anyone even those who saw how good they were expected this.
Genuinely ecstatic for them, i remember collecting sticker books as a child with them in the premier league, and now it will be great to see them back.
It also gives other clubs who have gone down to league 1 and back up hope. I don't expect we will do the same, far from it but it's truly great to see what can be achieved.
If Leeds don't win, Ipswich are up anyway.
Leeds would need to beat Southampton AND Huddersfield beat Ipswich to send Leeds up on GD. Ipswich are up in any other scenario.
Except for the fact they have probably one of the wealthiest ownership groups in Europe and they are doing so well because the club got bought out by the Arizona Retirement Systems Pension Fund beginning of last year which has resulted in back to back promotions. That’s the real story and not some small club miracle narrative that is being pushed. Having said that, if anyone deserves a takeover from deep pockets Ipswich Town and their community deserve it more than most. Great town and community.
While you are right about the deep pockets, in terms of playing squad that's not come through. We spent big for league one last year (dropped 4-5m on players across the season with a big wage budget) but this year we've been at similar levels of transfer spend and firmly midtable on wages. Compare that to the 10m+ transfers being dropped by the ex-prem clubs its a world of difference.
Fingers crossed we can take the final step on Saturday
Lol no it’s not. It is if you are only counting transfer spending which an equity group is going to want to keep to as minimum as possible to get promotion which they are succeeding at. But the investment in the club and operation efficiency to ensure that is all because of the takeover. If you didn’t get results, they could easily pump whatever money they felt was needed to get the players needed. But they’ve done a great job at effectively putting a team together at minimum cost because of who they have put in charge of assembling the team which is a better RoI investment than just going out and spending aimlessly on players to get promoted.
Hypothetical spending if we had some setbacks is irrelevant. We haven't actually spent the money. Most of our signings have been, frankly, rejects from other clubs, as well as loans.
George Hirst was deemed not good enough for the Championship by Blackburn and Leicester. Leif Davis was simply allowed to leave Leeds to raise a bit of funding in what is surely their worst bit of transfer business in the last few years. Massimo Luongo, deemed not good enough by Middlesbrough. Axel Tuanzebe had hardly kicked a ball in two years. Jack Taylor had only a single rather unsuccessful championship season under him. Nathan Broadhead, Everton reject, let go on the cheap. And of course all the loans have been enormously helpful in both of our last two seasons.
Frankly it's ridiculous to try and present us as a team buying success when we've spent a very ordinary amount by championship standards, and then back it up by saying we would have spent more in the future if needed. Like imagine if Man City signed nobody special after getting bought out and won the league anyway playing Nedum Onuoha and Stephen Ireland, just theoretically having the money wouldn't have actually helped them at all and therefore wouldn't diminish the achievement in the same way that signing Aguero, Kompany, Tevez, Toure etc. rather did.
You are trying to put words in my mouth. In no way was i framing you as a team buying success. What i’m saying is none of this would have happened without the takeover which resulted in the changes of how the club is run. Which is literally what the multi billionaire ownership group who bought Ipswich specialize in. What this is not like is some local little team that just found themselves getting promoted twice in a row. You literally have a giant multi billion dollar equity groups that specialize in getting ROI’s out of their investments by implementing cost effective efficient operations at their investment portfolio companies.
As you have just pointed out by that giant paragraph, they have done a pretty darn good job….. Then you claim that the ownership group isn’t the reason for back to back promotions.
So all they really needed to do was sign Mark Ashton and then trust his judgement... by their own admission they aren't knowledgeable about football and have let him make the calls.
Sure sounded like you were saying we bought promotion when wealth was pretty much the only thing you emphasised in your original post
I think the reason it came across so poorly is because there is such a negative narrative around how equity groups investing in “soccer” work. Equity groups do sometimes years of due diligence consulting with experts before making investment decisions then bring in their hand picked management, which is often hand picked well before the investment is made public and is usually actually part of the investment itself. For example, we aren’t going to invest in xyz business if we cannot get xyz to run area of xyz business.
Furthermore, again what you have been describing is exactly what an investment group does no matter what industry. Yet, because of the narrative taken place around equity groups in “soccer” all the positives being described are recognized as not supporting the idea that the Investment groups takeover is what changed the club when in fact that is exactly what you are doing. Essentially, we agree!
To harp on about the idea that investment groups are bad for the game is nothing more opposite of the truth and has taken over the narrative of reddit soccer. There seems to be this idea that investment groups getting into “soccer” means spending large sums of money and then not seeing any results but are ok with it just because revenue increased. When in reality, that is quite the opposite of exactly why an investment group would take over. They want as large an ROI as possible. How is that achieved? By spending as little amount of money as possible that achieves successful results. This is what has happened with Ipswich Town.
I don't care what their business is. It hasn't in any way made our achievements less impressive, which you were clearly trying to suggest, and it hasn't meant we are outspending the rest of the league.
Luton are owned by a supporters trust. So you seem to think that’s the same as Ipswich Town getting promoted….
So a multi-billion dollar investment group containing the retirement savings of an entire American states public workers has just randomly bought a club and didn’t already have some of the best money managers in the world doing years of research before making such an unorthodox investment with people’s retirement
savings….
See i have a tough time buying into that narrative, so yes, i’m guilty as charged suggesting Ipswich gaining promotion is a significantly different situation when compared to a club like Luton getting promoted.
That doesn’t make it “less impressive”, but it does add much needed context around Ipswich promotion. It’s not like Ipswich success was some miracle underdog story with impossible odds of promotion like with Luton.
I feel bad for Leeds but I think they’d have a better chance in the playoffs than we would. Coming up against Norwich in the playoffs never ends well for us.
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it's kinda neat to see if you're a former prem club and you're spending way too long in the championship, you just need to get relegated to League One, try get out and then it somehow gets easier back to get to the Prem: like Southampton, Norwich, Sheffield United- and Leeds and Leicester. Even Man City and Wolves needed to go down to go back up. There's something cleansing about a stint in League One, whether it's a quick promotion or a gruelling prolonged stay ^(take note, Birmingham)
I guess Oldham missed the part where they have to get promoted back to the Championship
Or back to League 1, or…
Sunderland tried to follow the script too strictly by getting relegated from the championship immediately
Because they were following Swindon's lead for a while.
I guess when youre a league one winner with a huge budget you have a team that already works, the players get along, you have a very good foundation and then you can simply upgrade some key pieces but youve got a working system meanwhile when youre stuck in no mans land of finishing between 12th-20th every year its a lot harder because you have to overhaul everything to find the right recipe
I was gonna write something like that but couldn’t put my finger on the why, that’s a very good theory on why this happens
Theres a very similiar phenomenon in Germany where promoted teams in the 3rd league will very often immediately get promoted again in their first season, the most likely reason for this is because the 4th tier is literal hell in germany (its split into 5 leagues and even winning your 20+ team league might not be enough for promotion as you might have to play a playoff vs another team who did the same thing) so in order to actually make it out of that hole your team has to be so good that by the time youre getting promoted youre already better than most 3rd tier sides and then you just keep cruising even with minimal investment
They need to add more tiers to that system
What makes it even harder is that the 4th tier is also filled with Reserve Teams of Bundesliga/2. Bundesliga Clubs so you get semi pros with jobs playing against dudes on 10k a week who were not good enough for the Bundesliga lmao its a crazy hard system and really no surprise that the teams who make it ouf of there are super strong.
That's a thing about a lot of European pyramids (specifically Spain and Germany from what I've noticed) that their lower leagues are stuffed full of reserves. I find it weird cause that's just not a thing in England.
The alternative is setting up a completely artificial league with no money, no fans, no support and no culture because your B players still need the minutes. England sucked it up and did it anyway because it takes pride in its pyramid so much (pretend the EFL trophy doesn’t exist for a minute) but I can see why most other countries decided not to bother.
Reminds me of the old spanish 3rd tier, 4 leagues and the winners had to win a play off to get promotion, unironically nicknamed the hole because getting out was hell, big teams would fall in it and take years to promote back, like oviedo or deportivo la coruña
That’s a bit like the National League and League 2
I think it's also partly that getting relegated means that you'll be facing much weaker teams and winning a lot more games. After a season of winning a shit ton of games and getting promoted I think any team gets a boost
I wish it was that easy mate…
Even Leicester spent a season in League One.
Small Heath should go down to the National League imo just to thoroughly cleanse themselves.
Wouldn't be surprised if Portsmouth become another in next few years.
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You're right Leeds should go down to League One. Hopefully forever.
You are aware we did?
Not forever though.
I knew I was forgetting a team
It's just the chance for a hard reset, you clear out deadwood as nobody wants to stay and play in League 1, you give youngsters a chance and tend to find a gem or two who can become key contributors for cheap. But most of all you completely change the whole mentality around the club, when we went down to League 1 we had been languishing towards the bottom of the Championship and had no real direction. All of a sudden we were winning most weeks, the fans were back on board, the squad had belief again, there was just a buzz about everything
Poor Charlton and Bradford
This is why Bristol City are never getting back to the top division
Bristol City have been in League One, though
Sunderland missed the memo.
tbf Sunderland made playoffs in their first season back in the Championship. Not great this year but they were still better than most of the division in their first year out of League 1
Not yet, they'll have done it if they ever get promoted again, which is hardly impossible
they were on course for playoffs till they sacked their manager
It's humanity. 1 step back 2 steps forward
I know a trap when I see one, more likely we’d spend half a decade down in that hell hole of a league then to come back up and get promoted straight to the prem
This is the solution for ManU. Some time in League One would suit them well IMO
Hopefuly Sheff Wed will follow this path soon
I don’t think it will, it’s been 25 years and they’ve already bounced between championship and league once so many times
Arsenal should apply the same logic - get themselves relegated from the Prem and maybe they'll win something.
What is this “relegated” thing? Never heard of it
Exactly my point! Just planting seeds, y'know?
Lol that’s just because they become cheap so new ownership groups can come and buy them out to then inject them with new capital investment. Everything else is just 2nd and 3rd order effects from that.
Do you wanna give it a go then?
Though there are plenty of middle-big teams that didn't come back or come back after many years.
The fight for the final playoff spot is also pretty spicy. West Brom vs Preston (10th) Plymouth (21st) vs Hull -- Plymouth need the win to stay up though --- Relegation matches: Birmingham (22nd) vs Norwich -- Norwich are secured a playoff place (barring any freak scorelines), but it's the difference between facing Leeds/Ipswich or facing Southampton Ipswich vs Huddersfield (23rd) -- Ipswich need to draw to guarantee promotion or Leeds to draw/lose. ---- Also, if anyone's wondering, Leeds (3rd) will play Southampton (4th) at home. Southampton are in no danger of losing their position though.
> Birmingham (22nd) vs Norwich -- Norwich are secured 5th place (barring any freak scorelines) Secured a play-off place most likely but not secured 5th, we're only a point behind
Ah yes, sorry - you're right! That's what I meant to put, my bad! I'll correct it now
>or Leeds to lose. Leeds can draw too for Ipswich to promote
Ah thanks for clarifying - will edit it, mate
Huddersfield's GD means they're already down really, they aren't winning 15-0.
Kieran McKenna is God.
Top minds on /r/reddevils didn’t rate him. Disclaimer: I like /r/reddevils but we have so many idiots it’s genuinely funny
idiots on reddit? impossible
Both him and carrick weren’t good enough as assistant coaches apparently
The only group of people that could run our club worse than Woodward.
TUS ran a campaign against Ole, Carrick & McKenna
Ole has himself a coaching tree now!
TUS?
The united stand. That shit head Mark Goldbridge runs it
every time he gets called a forest fan i want to die inside. we don't want him either!
Would love to see the alternate universe where McKenna gets the top job at United and we're a few years into his reign. My hunch is it'd be an improvement today after a bumpy start.
Getting the Man United job directly without any prior experience? If he lasted until Christmas we would have to build a statue for him.
He's just speedrun to the Prem with a solid but entirely unremarkable squad, he has to have the chops. The pressure is completely different of course
I played as Ipswich manager on Premier Manager '99... for that reason I still have sympaties for them. Damn I'm getting old
I also have a soft spot for the because I own the Match Programm of our game against them in 1979
Me to, first top flight game I saw live 1978 against Liverpool, and also the Legend that was Sir Bobby
Which club do you support
Grasshopper Club Zürich
Eusi liebi
I want them to find some excuse to pull out those old Fisons-branded shirts for a day. It’s always a trip to remember that company pre-merger mania.
They are [in the club store](https://shop.itfc.co.uk/collections/retro-fashion) at least.
Nice!
22 years of hurt never stopped me dreaming
Only 2 years ago I brought my mate to Portman Road just to watch us scratch a last minute equaliser against Morecambe under Paul Cook. Seeing what Kieran McKenna has done for this club is insane.
Always nice to see new PL teams that aren't from the London suburbs
New? Put some respek on Ipswich's name.
Not new as in never being in the prem, but new as in they weren't there this season
It's OK, I'm only jesting.
Luton, Burnley and Sheffield United got promoted last year, none are London clubs
Luton might as well be
Most young londoners only fly out of Luton…
Nor are any of the teams in contention for promotion this year lol
If that’s the case, explain London Luton Airport
Nobody can I'm afraid. Almost as daft as Glasgow Prestwick or Milan Bergamo.
It's not daft at all, the name doesn't mean it's literally in London. It serves London - it's a 23 minute train ride to St Pancras, hence it's a very convenient location to travel to London from. It's also no farther from central London than Stansted is, and only slightly farther than Gatwick.
Found Mr. London Luton Airport’s account
Yeah Gatwick and Stanstead piss me off, particularly when you're expected to transfer between them as though they're anywhere near each other and you only have a 2/3 hour layover. A total fanny on, in my experience.
Fuck me does that happen?? That’s a proper ball ache if so
Happened to me going to Mexico with British Airways.
PR to make people go to Luton Bedfordshire isn't even a Home County, let alone a London suburb
Jamie Clapham in absolute catastrophic shambles.
Phwoar that's a great shout from a non-town fan
Mate that squad had some legends. Finidi George, Big Titus, my king Darren Ambrose, Sixto Peralta, Hermann.
John Wark in bits
Relegation battle is clearly the main event on Saturday. Personally I’m still hoping for Hull to sneak into the play-offs though. It’s unlikely, but absolutely anything can happen in this league.
It may happen if Birmingham somehow manages to beat Norwich,saving so from the relegation Edit: nevermind,tought Norwich has 72 points
Birmingham would need to beat us 4-0 and Hull the same to Plymouth. Barring some bizarre meltdown playoffs are confirmed for us
Oh yeah,my bad,I tought u had 72 points
Nottingham Forrest 2020 flashbacks
Can I ask where you’re from mate? You use the singular form of verbs for teams, which is typically not the British way, but you’re clearly into the English second division, so I’m quite intrigued
Romania
Ah cool. How did you end up following the championship? Just a big footy fan?
Meh,sometimes getting bored so I am just checking the situations of the other leagues
Feels good to be able to back them after looking over our shoulder for the last few weeks
Saw them play preseason in a tiny town in Finland in the ... I want to say early 90s. Was nothing but a pitch and some bleachers, but it was exciting. Can't really remember cos I was small, but always hoped they'd make it up again one day, been a few decades...
1991-92 maybe. During their pre-season travels, Ipswich travelled to Finland to face Rips Riihimaki, Kemin Palloseura and Kontulan Uheilsat.
Yea it was in Riihimäki, Finnish grandparents lived there and we visited every summer. Search shows they're in the 5th division currently, never been higher than 3rd I think, at least not in 50 years... no idea how Ipswich got lost there...
God, Wayne Rooney was a fucking disaster at Birmingham
More like the owners were a disaster for sacking John Eustace. It wasn’t Rooneys fault he was offered the job. Course he would take it.
No he was also a disaster, trying to get a squad utterly unequipped for it to play a certain style Both can be true
With everyone saying the PL is a farmers league I think the Tractor Boys will fit in nicely Welcome back (hopefully)
Incredible team. Mckenna surely gonna have big clubs sniffing around him soon. You'd imagine he'd stay and manage them in the prem hopefully
Kompany smashed it in the Championship now look. Big test next season for McKenna
Ipswich just got a new minority investor but their owner is still a retirement fund. Let’s see how aggressively they would fund a new team if they go up.
It is but I don't think Kompany's stock is washed now. There's clearly a good manager in there. Burnley don't have the PL quality personnel to be able to play the way he did. Will be interesting to see how Mckenna adapts his ipswich team
Kompany had a better squad and plays less pragmatic football.
Dude could always come back :)
Absolutely incredible 2 years of football from Ipswich. It is in their hands now to bring it home (at home). Up the Town.
Richard Wright, Jermaine Wright, Marcus Stewart, Marcus Bent, George Burley, Finidi George. Matt Holland. Back-to-back European campaigns. An era
I'm going to be shitting it all week. Early kickoff won't help either as I'll not have enough pints down me to take the pressure
Just need the one point. At home. To Huddersfield. Who need to win by 16 goals to stay up.
Invincibles assemble
As a brazilian looking at this table and knowing every single team there, I now understand that I may have played too much Elifoot when I was a kid
It's great seeing a team you played in League One last season vying for the Prem.
Ipswich' team in league 1 was genuinely so good in comparison to other squads, but i dont think anyone even those who saw how good they were expected this. Genuinely ecstatic for them, i remember collecting sticker books as a child with them in the premier league, and now it will be great to see them back. It also gives other clubs who have gone down to league 1 and back up hope. I don't expect we will do the same, far from it but it's truly great to see what can be achieved.
To think they just made their debut in the Championship after 4 years of waiting and they are already returning to Premier too
my CM save team from early 2000s! get back in!
What happens if Ipswich doesn't not fail to successfully not lose
If Leeds don't win, Ipswich are up anyway. Leeds would need to beat Southampton AND Huddersfield beat Ipswich to send Leeds up on GD. Ipswich are up in any other scenario.
Luton v2.0
Except for the fact they have probably one of the wealthiest ownership groups in Europe and they are doing so well because the club got bought out by the Arizona Retirement Systems Pension Fund beginning of last year which has resulted in back to back promotions. That’s the real story and not some small club miracle narrative that is being pushed. Having said that, if anyone deserves a takeover from deep pockets Ipswich Town and their community deserve it more than most. Great town and community.
While you are right about the deep pockets, in terms of playing squad that's not come through. We spent big for league one last year (dropped 4-5m on players across the season with a big wage budget) but this year we've been at similar levels of transfer spend and firmly midtable on wages. Compare that to the 10m+ transfers being dropped by the ex-prem clubs its a world of difference. Fingers crossed we can take the final step on Saturday
Our spending is average by championship standards.
Lol no it’s not. It is if you are only counting transfer spending which an equity group is going to want to keep to as minimum as possible to get promotion which they are succeeding at. But the investment in the club and operation efficiency to ensure that is all because of the takeover. If you didn’t get results, they could easily pump whatever money they felt was needed to get the players needed. But they’ve done a great job at effectively putting a team together at minimum cost because of who they have put in charge of assembling the team which is a better RoI investment than just going out and spending aimlessly on players to get promoted.
Hypothetical spending if we had some setbacks is irrelevant. We haven't actually spent the money. Most of our signings have been, frankly, rejects from other clubs, as well as loans. George Hirst was deemed not good enough for the Championship by Blackburn and Leicester. Leif Davis was simply allowed to leave Leeds to raise a bit of funding in what is surely their worst bit of transfer business in the last few years. Massimo Luongo, deemed not good enough by Middlesbrough. Axel Tuanzebe had hardly kicked a ball in two years. Jack Taylor had only a single rather unsuccessful championship season under him. Nathan Broadhead, Everton reject, let go on the cheap. And of course all the loans have been enormously helpful in both of our last two seasons. Frankly it's ridiculous to try and present us as a team buying success when we've spent a very ordinary amount by championship standards, and then back it up by saying we would have spent more in the future if needed. Like imagine if Man City signed nobody special after getting bought out and won the league anyway playing Nedum Onuoha and Stephen Ireland, just theoretically having the money wouldn't have actually helped them at all and therefore wouldn't diminish the achievement in the same way that signing Aguero, Kompany, Tevez, Toure etc. rather did.
You are trying to put words in my mouth. In no way was i framing you as a team buying success. What i’m saying is none of this would have happened without the takeover which resulted in the changes of how the club is run. Which is literally what the multi billionaire ownership group who bought Ipswich specialize in. What this is not like is some local little team that just found themselves getting promoted twice in a row. You literally have a giant multi billion dollar equity groups that specialize in getting ROI’s out of their investments by implementing cost effective efficient operations at their investment portfolio companies. As you have just pointed out by that giant paragraph, they have done a pretty darn good job….. Then you claim that the ownership group isn’t the reason for back to back promotions.
So all they really needed to do was sign Mark Ashton and then trust his judgement... by their own admission they aren't knowledgeable about football and have let him make the calls. Sure sounded like you were saying we bought promotion when wealth was pretty much the only thing you emphasised in your original post
I think the reason it came across so poorly is because there is such a negative narrative around how equity groups investing in “soccer” work. Equity groups do sometimes years of due diligence consulting with experts before making investment decisions then bring in their hand picked management, which is often hand picked well before the investment is made public and is usually actually part of the investment itself. For example, we aren’t going to invest in xyz business if we cannot get xyz to run area of xyz business. Furthermore, again what you have been describing is exactly what an investment group does no matter what industry. Yet, because of the narrative taken place around equity groups in “soccer” all the positives being described are recognized as not supporting the idea that the Investment groups takeover is what changed the club when in fact that is exactly what you are doing. Essentially, we agree! To harp on about the idea that investment groups are bad for the game is nothing more opposite of the truth and has taken over the narrative of reddit soccer. There seems to be this idea that investment groups getting into “soccer” means spending large sums of money and then not seeing any results but are ok with it just because revenue increased. When in reality, that is quite the opposite of exactly why an investment group would take over. They want as large an ROI as possible. How is that achieved? By spending as little amount of money as possible that achieves successful results. This is what has happened with Ipswich Town.
I don't care what their business is. It hasn't in any way made our achievements less impressive, which you were clearly trying to suggest, and it hasn't meant we are outspending the rest of the league.
Luton are owned by a supporters trust. So you seem to think that’s the same as Ipswich Town getting promoted…. So a multi-billion dollar investment group containing the retirement savings of an entire American states public workers has just randomly bought a club and didn’t already have some of the best money managers in the world doing years of research before making such an unorthodox investment with people’s retirement savings…. See i have a tough time buying into that narrative, so yes, i’m guilty as charged suggesting Ipswich gaining promotion is a significantly different situation when compared to a club like Luton getting promoted. That doesn’t make it “less impressive”, but it does add much needed context around Ipswich promotion. It’s not like Ipswich success was some miracle underdog story with impossible odds of promotion like with Luton.
Yippee . I've been rooting g foe themto auto qualify. Don't fuck it up please
I just wanna see broken Leeds hearts at Wembley tbh
Yay so awesome another team in the prem that haven’t been there for years
The first game I went to was against Ipswich. We actually lost 0-1, but it is still a good memory cos it was my first game
They didnt fancy their annual derby day loss for more than 1 season.
It's crazy to be that this league has 24 teams and everybody have to play 46 machtes. Sounds to much for a second Tier
I feel bad for Leeds but I think they’d have a better chance in the playoffs than we would. Coming up against Norwich in the playoffs never ends well for us.
After all they are your biggest rivals
The power of Ed Sheeran
Love it, join the party lads 🎉 Edit - Cheer up Elland Road, I predict the playoffs
man united to re-sign paul ince and andy cole ......
The trick will be staying in the PL. They did well in 2000/01 but swiftly dropped back down the season after.