So I have always been a firm hater of RD and everything he has done to our club. He’s made numerous mistakes and led to me boycotting. However. I have just been reading the below:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2019/08/20/experts-warned-efl-two-years-ago-clubs-like-bolton-bury-faced/Now don’t get me wrong this doesn’t mean RD was right all along or that I forgive him for his utter ineptitude. And I place the recent success and upturn firmly with Bowyer, Jacko and Gallen.
But maybe, just maybe RD had the right idea when he took us over. He’s clearly got it seriously wrong but his plan, to make us self sustainable, was not a bad thing. I now look at these other clubs, Bury, Bolton etc and feel glad it’s not us. Let’s be honest we were in a bad way after the Cash/Jimenez debacle but now we are probably one of the more healthy clubs in the Championship.
Im actually glad he hasn't thrown money into us and I’d take our position now over most.
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It is only now, once he has lost all interest and essentially seems to set a budget and do no more that we have become more successful.
The last 12 months or so, a lot has gone right. The credit for that is with Bowyer, Gallen, JJ and Marshall in my view.
RD has little involvement. The occasions he deigns to speak are the only recent times when things are done badly. He is the the only decision maker in the club who seems to be making a feck up of a good situation.
I am glad we are not currently Bolton or Bury and hope both clubs pull through.
He is wrong in that he thinks he can beat it. He can't.
Owner of the year material, he isn’t.
Of course we'd all love RD to sanction Bowyer millions to spend but it comes back to the same argument seen on many posts about RD and football owners in general. Who would own a football club when the fans demand you to spend your own wealth - but not theirs, as the saying goes it's great spending someone else's money until it runs out. And who would be willing to be a football owner to answer that call and make heavy losses year after year?
Unfortunately in some ways while a break even approach can be admired, the rest of the league aren't playing by those same rules and the longer he owns us and continues this approach RD's luck will run out again one day.
A few wins and people are quick to forget. The gullible fools.
And also to the other posters I know he has run up 60 million. But what I mean is I’m kind of glad now that he didn’t throw obscene transfer fees and wages at people in a desperate attempt to reach the premier league. Imagine he had, we would now be sitting on far worse debts and in much deeper trouble.
Did he really say that when Karl was appointed? WOW!!! So glad you're that sad as to dig it up to prove, well, nothing.
Like all of us we hope, more than expect, the good results to continue but, be in no doubt, the core problem remains - he needs to sell for a realistic price and probably no better time than now.
That all collapsed when we realised 'sustainable' meant selling your best players whilst in a relegation dogfight and forcing the manager to play Sunday league players in their place.
Zero ambition has been shown beyond the unique proposition, meaning weird, Meire espoused in Dublin.
The point being that the idea of trying to build a sustainable football club is good in reality.
But unfortunately it is likely an impossible deal nowadays and Roland’s cockwombled approach to trying to achieve it was never gonna work.
Thats why the dream owner for football fans like us is a billionaire from something like oil where the money rolls in easily for them - but really football is a glorified version of champ manager for them where they can just throw millions at it....
We have found ourselves at one extreme end - but I’ve always said that if (or hopefully when!) we get a new owner, we don’t want to end up like a Bristol City, Brentford etc down the line. Which IMO is gonna be another fucked club of the Bolton ilk.
Lets see what he does in January.
In his time as owner, all RD has managed to do is put us back to a similar position in the league as when he acquired us, having spent something like £50m to stand still.
If he had run the club sensibly from the outset, extracted proper value from player sales and not disaffected a huge proportion of the fans, even without investing large amounts in players his losses would have been a small fraction of those he has incurred.
His view that football is unsustainable on the current basis unless there's an endless supply of rich people happy to lose significant sums is clearly right, but he could have lost a bucket load less if he hadn't entrusted the running of the club to inexperienced idiots.
Its no coincidence that we have been on the up now that football people are making the decisions.
I will be doing a few home games this season to support LB and the team, but more aways than homes to keep my cash out of RDs pockets.
Absolutely none of where we are currently is down to Roland, he got extremely lucky stumbling upon Bowyer and Gallen. I dread to think where we'd be without those two, but i'd guess it'd be the bottom half of league one playing in front of 7k crowds.
But it a false argument
IE "He's not as bad as these really bad owners at Bury and Bolton so maybe let's give him some credit".
But he's still bad, everything Bowyer is doing is despite his bad ownership, not because.
Three games unbeaten and some people lose all sense of perspective.
Duchatelet also lies. He talks about breakeven but lost £13m getting relegated.
That the debts aren't far worse than £65m is only due to academy player sales, the academy that was in place and successful before he came and which signed players outside of Duchatelet and Driesen's ridiculous system.
But Duchatelet then pulled the plug on the training ground rebuild, despite this spend being outside FFP so stopping the academy getting cat 1 status that would have protected us from poaching.
The man is a walking disaster zone, he's not on to anything.
I distinctly remember Airman at the time saying that he thought that FFP would be unenforceable. He was proved to be correct.
Then the rules were changed about the maximum number of loans, completely pulling the rug from under his feet.
None of this detracts from his failure to correctly finance the club for the last 3 years, in his Quixotic attempt to tilt at windmills.
What makes you think he is the only owner who would like to operate a financially sustainable model?
That kind of nonsense only reinforces his delusion that he is some kind of genius that can see things other cannot. That was the story of his venture into politics too. He pretends he invented the "basic income" policy. In fact it has ben considered in many countries, and even experimented with in Finland but nobody has really found a way to put it into practice without unleashing economic and social chaos.
The last phrase of that sentence of course sums up the last five years of CAFC.