PieFacE Posted July 3, 2014 VT Supporter Share Posted July 3, 2014 By not allowing the manager to build a wage bill that was unsustainable. Yeah quite, But I was responding to the fact that we were a top 6 team with the 6th highest wage bill in the league. Having this 6th highest wage bill in the league was crippling us, so it's impossible to build on like Mark suggested. We had to cut back, there was no two ways about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCJonah Posted July 3, 2014 Share Posted July 3, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amo69 Posted July 3, 2014 Share Posted July 3, 2014 (edited) Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? He wouldn't even know, or care. Edited July 3, 2014 by Amo69 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted July 3, 2014 Moderator Share Posted July 3, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? I turned about 5 years ago, the guy is incompetent. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markavfc40 Posted July 3, 2014 Share Posted July 3, 2014 For me he did half a job and then decided to do a complete about turn. In his first 4 seasons we had around a 70 mill net spend and the sixth highest wage bill in the league and for that we had established ourselves as a top 6 club which was a decent achievement. It needed to built on though not recklessly abandoned. But how can you sustain that level of spending on transfers and wages when 80% (or whatever it was) of your turnover goes on wages? It's easy to say "increase income"... but a football club from Birmingham finishing 6th isn't all that desirable, if we had have made the Champions League it may be a completely different story now. But that's just ifs and buts... I think the problem stems from Lerner expecting too much from his initial investment over the first few years. When he came in we had just finished 16th and had been on the slide for a couple of years. Four seasons later he had spent a net approx 70 mill and our wage bill had peaked at being the sixth highest in the league. For that we had established ourselves as a top 6 side. Personally I don't think we ever quite spent enough to break the top 4. I could accept the argument that we should have maybe finished above Everton on a couple of occasions but equally we punched above our weight in terms of what we were spending when we finished above Liverpool in 2010. I think Randys incompetence can be summed up for me in that having decided in the spring/summer of 2010 that spending needed to be reigned in he then went on to sanction the best part of a 30 mill spend in the January transfer window of 2011 because he panicked after making a very poor managerial choice in bringing in a known cheque book manager, at a time he wanted to cut spending, who had also been out of management for years. It was at the end of the 2010/11 season that our wage bill peaked under him 12 months after he supposedly decided to start cutting back. He should have cut back steadily but instead over the last 3 years the cuts have been reckless and that has now left us with the poorest squad of players I can recall since we were last relegated in 1987. As said previously the guy, and more importantly us the supporters, have been lucky in only one regard and that is that this great club hasn't yet been relegated under his watch. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted July 3, 2014 Share Posted July 3, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? I turned about 5 years ago, the guy is incompetent.just after mons second season for me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lexicon Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? I turned about 5 years ago, the guy is incompetent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob182 Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 I knew he was a bad owner before he even came here, I also knew that Roy Keane was going to be assistant manager and that Kozak would break his leg, but that's off topic (which I knew before I typed it, but it adds weight to my point about Randy Lerner, which is therefore keeping it on topic). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Risso Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Some of us queried the wisdom of the huge losses, and spending ridiculous amounts (ie, anything at all) on the likes of Harewood and Heskey, but were told (by the General, amongst others) that the spending and the losses were all part of a plan and were completely in line with expectations. Bare-faced lies, as it turns out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 And some of us said he needed to spend more than he could afford to make us genuinely compete for top four and if he couldnt afford it he should seek alternate investment or go, we were told to stfu . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VillaChris Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? I turned about 5 years ago, the guy is incompetent. just after mons second season for me That would be summer 2008 then. That summer and 2009 Randy Lerner was still righting cheques of 40m for MON to buy new defences each summer so I don't buy that timescale. If you criticise Lerner, you should be criticising MON for wasting untold millions on very mediocre defenders like Shorey, Davies and Knight which meant we then had to sign the likes of Warnock and Collins the next summer. The crux of it was MON was the manager we needed in summer 2006 to get the club going again and then as his reign progressed we saw he was pretty limited. Of course if Lerner had intervened much earlier say around 2008 then knowing what a spiteful man O'Neill is he could've walked out at that time and I doubt the fans would've been sympathetic to Lerner. Still it could've worked out the best in the long run as we were on an upward trejectory at that point. No defence at all for the majority of decisions taken by the board since August 2010. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshVilla Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 SELL US NOW!!! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Is this the year the villa fans turn on randy Lerner? I turned about 5 years ago, the guy is incompetent. just after mons second season for me That would be summer 2008 then. That summer and 2009 Randy Lerner was still righting cheques of 40m for MON to buy new defences each summer so I don't buy that timescale Thats the timescale Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozvillafan Posted July 4, 2014 VT Supporter Share Posted July 4, 2014 Randy was exactly what we were crying out for at the time. He was an owner who: - Put money in instead of taking money out - Backed his managers instead of signing his own players (*cough*Ginola*cough*) - Stayed out of the limelight instead of believing it was all about him - Wanted to celebrate our history, not bury it - Brought our assets up to date (pub, training ground) instead of counting coins. - Opened up communication with supporters instead of ignoring the "men of the terraces". So what went wrong? 2 major things, imo: - He did not have enough football knowledge himself nor did he surround himself with others who did. As such, he made poor decisions. - He lost interest when it turned out to be tougher to compete than he thought. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AntrimBlack Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 My doubts started when he hired McLeish. I am not a local, so care nothing for his connections with Birmingham City, but I just thought he was a poor appointment considering his management history. At this point in time the best thing he can do is to get out as fast as possible, which I think he is probably trying to do anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhan_Zhuang Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Is Frank Dux our new owner, or is it Van Damme...I can't tell with these cryptic clues! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post TrentVilla Posted July 4, 2014 Moderator Popular Post Share Posted July 4, 2014 Randy was exactly what we were crying out for at the time. He was an owner who: - Put money in instead of taking money out - Backed his managers instead of signing his own players (*cough*Ginola*cough*) - Stayed out of the limelight instead of believing it was all about him - Wanted to celebrate our history, not bury it - Brought our assets up to date (pub, training ground) instead of counting coins. - Opened up communication with supporters instead of ignoring the "men of the terraces". So what went wrong? 2 major things, imo: - He did not have enough football knowledge himself nor did he surround himself with others who did. As such, he made poor decisions. - He lost interest when it turned out to be tougher to compete than he thought. At the time he took over we were crying out for anyone who wasn't Doug Ellis, that was about it. When Randy arrived he seemed too good to be true and so sadly it proved to be as what we thought were his strengths in reality with the passing of time turned out to be his weaknesses. Yes he spent money, but subsequently we found out it was money neither he nor the club could really afford, we thought he was backing managers when in reality he simply didn't have any kind of handle on things or controls of budgets O'Neill wasn't backed he was left unattended with keys to the sweet shop. He stayed out of the limelight but ultimately left the club lacking crucial management, leadership or control. Celebrated our history but spent so much time focused on it he wasn't watching what was happening in front of him. Brought assets up to date, I'll give you that re the training ground but in reality he simply funded and improved plans already in place, the pub isn't an asset. Opened up communications with supporters but then we realised that the General was frankly full of it and nothing but a PR man and then he showed he hadn't listened to a thing and appointed McLeish. As for this myth he hasn't taken any money from the club, he has. Check the accounts for management fee's, if I recall correctly they were £7m in one of the sets of accounts. Yes he has put money in, yes he has waved interest but he has also charged interest in his time here. Ultimately when he walks away I rather suspect he won't be out of pocket but that is immaterial really, he chose to invest, he spent the money the way he spent it and his decisions have led to where we are now. If he walks away with a big loss then its nobody's fault but his own, he got rid of anyone from the club who might just have helped him. He has made major mistake after major mistake almost from the point he arrived so much so that about the most positive thing I can say about him after all these years is that he isn't Doug. We were taken in by the spending after the Doug years, we ignored the warnings of the Browns fans but they were right, Randy was and is a fool who didn't/doesn't know how to run a sports team/franchise successfully on either side of the pond. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smetrov Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 My doubts intensified after MON walked - he appointed advisors to find a replacement, then sanctioned Houllier, allowing him to dictate his own start date, pretty much every decision after has been to the detriment of the club. As a Browns fan once posted on here 'Randy's great for flag and scarves for the supporters - but he gets almost all the big calls wrong' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PussEKatt Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 By not allowing the manager to build a wage bill that was unsustainable. Yeah quite, But I was responding to the fact that we were a top 6 team with the 6th highest wage bill in the league. Having this 6th highest wage bill in the league was crippling us, so it's impossible to build on like Mark suggested. We had to cut back, there was no two ways about it. Now we are a bottom 6 team with a corresponding wage bill. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villianusa Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 Thanks for trying Randy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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