I am finding the transformation of fan's opinions towards Tony quite interesting.
When he first arrived on the scene, many fans were sceptical. Is he rich enough? Is he serious? Would he just be a Chinese government puppet? Would he just be another Lerner, or worse? These were the sort of questions being bandied around due to the lack of knowledge about Tony.
Then along came the wonderful Deisler 123, with his interesting and informative posts about how football and business are conducted in China. His excellent posts allayed a lot of fan's doubts, but there still remained some scepticism while Tony was in his early days in owning the club.
Maybe, after the past 5 years of Lerner making bad decision after bad decision, some fans had become institutionalised into having their club being badly run, and were waiting on action to back up the bold words Tony had made, and therefore reluctant to jump on the optimism bandwagon. Honestly, I cant fault them for that, after all the crap that Lerner had put them through, and what he had done to their club.
Two months after purchase, and Tony is proving to be very popular. His openness, and his ability to back his words up with action have made him very popular. Initially, Tony on Twitter was met with some scepticism, now people are hanging off it. This all, of course, is great to see.
So whats next? Onward and upward? Has he set a new standard, where fans become institutionalised to expect this from him all the time? Time will tell. But so far, he has achieved a lot in the past 2 months, and has had a big hand in stopping the rot. He has followed through with everything he has said so far.
Still no theme park though.