The Randy Lerner thread

[Harry]

If the question was, "Could Randy Lerner have managed his investment in Aston Villa better?" I would say yes. Clearly he gave MON too much power in my opinion and he probably misjudged the way the owners in the premier league would change. He went for revolution when it should have been evolution IMO.

[Houlston]

He is a businessman and obviously a very, very successful one.

based on what???????

he inherited evrything from his dad incuding the Cleveland Browns. He didnt make his own money.

Looking at what he has done at Villa since he has been here in terms of running it as a business I would say he is pretty clueless when it comes to running a business.

Must have been some luck to nearly double our revenue since taking over then if he's clueless.

[CI]

Surely the revenue would have gone up by default anyway as TV incomes have gotten much higher

[Houlston]

Surely the revenue would have gone up by default anyway as TV incomes have gotten much higher

When he took over revenue from tv was £28m which was 54% of our income. TV money is now £52m which is 55% of our income. Which obviously means that our other revenue streams have also grown much higher too.

[jon_c]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

[wedge]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

Beat me to it.

[Mantis]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

Cue the rumours tonight about Arab looking business men being present in the director's box at VP.

[beasley14]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

Beat me to it.

Right this maybe a daft question i haven't been on here in a while. What was suppose to happen in Feb then?

[CI]

They will want this sewn up before Ramadam as basically nothing will happen for a month during that period

[lp_villa830]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

Beat me to it.

Right this maybe a daft question i haven't been on here in a while. What was suppose to happen in Feb then?

Basically one random poster on a different forum predicted a takeover by QAI after the January window and certain people are wishing it ain't some bluenose laughing his ass off at them.

[GarethRDR]

Actually, rumours have it the takeover is not Qatari...

It's Qamiga.

[beasley14]

It's February, where's our Qatari takeover??

Beat me to it.

Right this maybe a daft question i haven't been on here in a while. What was suppose to happen in Feb then?

Basically one random poster on a different forum predicted a takeover by QAI after the January window and certain people are wishing it ain't some bluenose laughing his ass off at them.

Right cheers mate, so it's a total wind up then. One person? I'm guessing with no track record.

[leviramsey]

Possibly interesting, if only for the rarity of the phenomenon, Lerner interview with The Cleveland Scene

The Browns owner, who has rarely spoken to the media since taking over the team after his father died in 2002, has been described as aloof, media-shy, private, and absent. And those are among the nicer things said about him.

Lerner, for better or worse, has never helped his PR cause, offering fans little insight into his thoughts or his life, and leaving reporters a short list of adjectives by which to describe him.

The list of interviews given by Randy Lerner during his tenure as Browns owner is relatively short. He has unabashedly talked about his desire to stay in the background, letting his football people and the players on the field make up the public face of the team. That public face, however, was never a single face, but a collage of the various misguided, ineffectual, and thankfully departed figures who have been unfortunately, unforgettably, and unmistakably ugly for more than a decade. The one constant has been Lerner.

The portrait of Lerner that emerged from those meetings was a compelling one, at times diametrically opposed to public perception; at others, refreshingly informative, like seeing a puzzle when it's just started and then again when it's half-finished. He's a thoughtful and deeply intelligent man, contemplative, starkly candid and honest, readily aware of his mistakes, hopeful about the future, cognizant of the past, keenly aware of tradition, passionate about his family, his teams, and his hobbies.

And, as it turns out, not at all like Mr. Burns.

Randy Lerner stops me the first time I use the word "owner."

"I don't like that word," he says. "Owner means you bought something. What I am ... I like to think of it more of a custodial relationship, a stewardship."

Where have we heard that before?

Lerner doesn't just mean that he inherited the team — that he's taking care of his father's legacy, though that's certainly part of the equation. He means the team is owned by the Lerner family trust, and he has a responsibility and obligation to its members, both current and future. He means he's the shepherd of a tradition, something he cares deeply about. He means the team is a larger civic concept and possession. He means that in a large way, it's the fans' team, not his.

Of all the other owners in the league — the Jerry Joneses, the Daniel Snyders, the newly rich, the old money — he's closest to those in similar ownership situations, the legacies. The Rooneys in Pittsburgh, the Maras in New York. And not based simply on familial lineage, but out of respect for the long, storied, successful histories of those teams.

Green Bay, too, which is an organization Lerner greatly admires. He recently passed among his front-office staff an article from Business Week called "The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football." The piece chronicles the wild and sustained success of the only team in the NFL owned by the city in which it plays. It's an arrangement now forbidden by league rules.

But that idea of public ownership — the team as city property, a civic institution never to be taken away — sticks with Lerner. "I think it should belong to the city," he says in a hypothetical reverie.

In 1899, England's Football Association created a rule, later to be known as Rule 34, that restricted the profits of member clubs. Shareholders could take only a 5 percent dividend, and directors were not allowed to be paid. The idea was to legislate the protection of clubs as nonprofits, to ensure they were not run out of greed. Directors, history notes, should be "custodians" — that word sound familiar? — and running the team was a public service, all in pursuit of keeping the heart and soul of the sport pure and ticket prices affordable.

Lerner likes to talk about Rule 34, which obviously isn't in effect any longer. He gave a speech on the arcane, now almost-unthinkable idea at Clare College in Cambridge, where he studied for a year before graduating from Columbia.

"It really just gets to the heart of the idea of ownership," Lerner says while miming like he's twisting a screw. He often talks with his hands — pointing, gesticulating, demonstrating. "What does it mean to own one of these teams? Are they just playthings? Toys for the super rich? Are they public service? Civic institutions?"

Lerner's role now that Mike Holmgren is in the building has settled mainly on league and business matters. That means sticking up for the average Cleveland fan more than you would think, especially if you assume it's all sponsorships and corporate partnerships and big cardboard checks.

For starters, he's proud that the Browns have the third- or fourth-cheapest average ticket prices in the league. "That is important. When I look out in the seats, I want to see a real cross section of what Cleveland really looks like," Lerner says. "But it's not easy. That's shared revenue, and I have to defend those ticket prices to other owners who ask, 'Why don't you charge more?'"

The Browns, incidentally, also have the cheapest beer prices of any stadium in the league.

But consultants and experts are always looking to squeeze every penny from the finite commodity that is stadium real estate, which is to say: You, Joe Clevelander, should be happy that a guy at the top speaks for you when New York comes calling with an idea on how to pry an extra dollar from you.

Tradition — including sacrosanct institutions like, say, the Dawg Pound — is worth defending in the face of cold, harsh spreadsheets. Lerner is not afraid to raise his voice or let his temper go when the NFL brain trust proposes changes that run contrary to the very ethos of Browns football and the city of Cleveland itself. He is against his team playing a "home" game in London, as other teams do each year, and he's opposed to selling the naming rights to Cleveland Browns Stadium.

Randy Lerner is not a professional football talent evaluator, not an X's and O's guy. He has opinions, sure, and he bounces them off his staff, sometimes to deaf ears in past years. (Browns fans: Would you have preferred Drew Brees over Derek Anderson?) But he hires football people to make those decisions, defers to their choices, and lives with those decisions as the rest of us do.

The decisions haven't been very good: Two winning seasons, one playoff appearance, a record of 68-140. That's the sum total of the Browns' accomplishments since returning in 1999. And that 10-6 mark in 2007?

"A fluke," Lerner says. "It wasn't sustainable."

"You can't depend on things like Derek Anderson running down the sideline to win games," he says.

Two years into the Mike Holmgren era, Lerner is relieved, emboldened — ecstatic over the atmosphere they've built.

Lerner's demeanor, which had been cheerful and optimistic, changes when talk turns to the days before Holmgren's arrival. As if he were recalling a nightmare, his stare grows a little distant, his mouth goes slightly agape when he describes what might charitably be called a toxic workplace.

"Not good," he says simply. "Just unbelievable." Indeed, the list of failed and disgraced executives and coaches in Berea is almost as long as the list of failed quarterbacks.

Former GM Phil Savage and his "**** you, go root for Buffalo" e-mail to a fan is just the tip of the iceberg. In the background, there's John Collins and Butch Davis and Carmen Policy and, for a hot second, coach Eric Mangini's hand-picked GM, George Kokinis, who was unceremoniously fired after just nine months on the job. The rumors involving the latter's dismissal are still the juicy nuggets of media gossip, but they are eternally protected by confidentiality agreements signed by both parties after Kokinis' grievance against the Browns was settled.

Lerner, despite his impressive memory of people and dates and times, has trouble recalling so much as the man's name, which might be a testament to just how badly he wants to forget that mess of a year. He calls the week in which he fired Kokinis the single lowest moment of his ownership.

It was November 2009, and the team had just embarrassed itself in a 30-6 loss to the Bears that dropped the team to 1-7 halfway through Mangini's first season. That day, Lerner spoke to reporters, offering up a rare, impromptu font of emotion.

He said he wanted to find a "strong, credible, serious leader within the building to guide decisions in a far more conspicuous, open, transparent way." He was "sick" over the state of the team. Asked about the current iteration of the seemingly constant fiasco at quarterback and why Brady Quinn wasn't playing, he said, "I haven't been told about anything."

That strong, credible, serious leader would be Mike Holmgren — The Big Show, a man Lerner had coveted for years, but whom he pursued with heightened urgency as the season crumbled. Lerner finally landed his man in December 2009. Tom Heckert, who was on the Browns' short list of GM candidates after the 2008 season, would join one year later. Pat Shurmur, a rookie head coach, would be named Mangini's successor.

Lerner is confident he has the right team in place this time. No, seriously. He readily admits that he's made mistakes, and he's paid dearly — he's still paying dearly, in the form of millions of dollars in contracts for guys doing analysis on television, working for other teams, or sitting on their couches. He also knows he's paid dearly for those choices on the field and with the fans, and he owns those failures. In a way, they've informed and provided contrast to the present.

Forbes cites the Browns as one of two NFL franchises to post an operating loss for 2010, largely due to payments of roughly $20-30m a year to former coaches and executives.

"At some point, if things never change, you have to look at yourself and decide if you're the man for the job," he says about his track record. "But I'm definitely not there yet. I believe what we have now is going to work.

"Mike is a pro. He runs every inch of this building. Tom and Pat are both young, smart, passionate guys. Tom is a bona-fide GM. You talk to the guy and you know this is what he's meant to do. They'll be here for a long time building this thing together.

"I know now why the other guys didn't work," he adds. "I can see that now. And I can see elemental reasons why this is different."

Randy Lerner made a trip to Afghanistan in late fall. It wasn't his first, won't be his last. His Marine roots run deep. Al Lerner was proud of his time in the service — flying the Marine Corps flag outside the stadium and in Berea — and Randy has spent most of his adult life involved with the Marines in one way or another. He's co-chairman of the U.S. Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, a member of the Business Executives for National Security, and he was co-creator of the Marine Civilian Development Program, a short-lived post-deployment assistance system for returning vets.

Because of some of his previous work with the government, he has security clearances that allow him to travel fairly easily to the war zone.

On his last trip, he spent time with soldiers near Kabul, toting Browns gear along the way, stopping in to visit, to talk soccer with whoever wanted to talk soccer, football with whoever wanted to talk football, and general bullshit with whoever just wanted to bullshit.

"It's an intangible but worthwhile thing you do over there," he says. "Just talking to them. Letting them know you care. Distracting them from whatever hell they're going through."

"I don't have a political bone in my body," he continues. "I've never given a cent to a political party. I don't think we should be over there, but that doesn't matter."

He pulls up an e-mail to a soldier on his Blackberry. A guy Lerner had met in the British army had told him he met a Clevelander — perhaps the biggest Browns fan on the planet, or at least in Afghanistan. He passed along contact info for the soldier, who then received an unsolicited e-mail from the Browns owner.

"I really like going over there," he says. "You get a better sense of what matters and what doesn't."

What matters, or at least what mattered back in the realm of the Cleveland Browns, once Lerner returned from overseas, was a season that was going very much according to prior scripts. That, and the concussion suffered by Colt McCoy during the Steelers game.

How the injury was handled during, immediately following, and in the days after the injury had blown up into a national story. Shurmur said during his Monday press conference that McCoy had been examined for concussion symptoms on the sideline. Two days later, Holmgren said otherwise. McCoy's dad had chimed in somewhere in the middle, quoted by The Plain Dealer saying that there's no way his son should have returned to the field. League representatives investigated the timeline. Though the Browns were cleared by the NFL, the story didn't seem to stop.

As for how the Browns became the bad guys? Lerner partly answers the question, then diverges off into a tangent. Naturally, that tangent involves Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War and the great debate in Corcyra. Along with art and music, Lerner is fascinated by history. He fell in love with Lincoln's letters when he was 9.

Whether it's a conscious acknowledgment or not, part of the reason Lerner isn't more media-friendly is because his answers don't fit the sound-bite mold. They meander, wrap around, pause while he collects his thoughts, split off from football to ancient Greece, and swing back around, with one more pause while he makes sure he's covered everything. That's not always the case, but it happens with some regularity.

Ask whether an empty stadium bothers him, and the simple answer is "Yes, but there's nothing I can do about it now. I understand people's frustrations. I understand their anger. I understand why they're not there. I think things will change when we win." But the detour to get to that answer includes visits with Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt.

[Denis_B]

Forbes cites the Browns as one of two NFL franchises to post an operating loss for 2010, largely due to payments of roughly $20-30m a year to former coaches and executives.

So he makes a bad habit of employing overpaid people that can't do the job he wants? So no chance of McEck getting sacked now then?

[Dodgyknees]

He has to go. Simple.

[smetrov]

Before Mcleish goes - can we get someone else to the hiring. Houllier , Mcleish , - whose next ? Steve Bruce Neil Warock, or Mick Mccarthy. .............not unrealistic either

[Moorski]

I reckon Steve Bruce

[OnlyOne]

Even if McLeish does leave, we're only half way. We still have to rely on his marvellous decision making. Don't give him that chance. Mock him, belittle him. Just don't think he'll bring the right manager for us.

[endof]

Steve Bruce on the cards for defo...

[JamesWithe]

Its a sad state of affairs when the Swansea manager probably would not want to leave and join us. Its a much as statement of how crap we are as much as how far ahead of us they are... :cry:

Sadly its Lerner that needs to go