The future of FFC

There are hopes, there are dreams, and there is facing the reality of the situation. Part of that reality is past performance and reputation.

Fulham FC has been in the Premiership since 2001. A lot of mid to low-mid-table performances and a relegation battle that I personally was surprised they escaped. Six years before that they were playing in the freaking FOURTH TIER of English football and generally stinking up the joint. "Go for the view, maybe watch some football" was the way things were. Yes, it's been a good 3-4 years of mid-table, Europa-Qualifying overachieving, but it is exactly that... over-achieving.

Players have various motivations when it comes to accepting transfers (And they do have some say on where they end up, as Personal Reputation isn't as big a motivator as one would like to think.) It can be Get Paid, Get Face-Time, or Just Be-Cool-Via-Osmosis (That would be the Charlie Adam "I love Liverpool, even if I'm on the bench... it's still Liverpool" stance, though now he's over at Stroke-Me Slowly... a little blow to my point, I guess). Being a Top Dog at Fulham is not a great motivator at this point, and it might take a good 5-10 years of consistent Top-7 "Fighting For a Europa Spot while hoping to not gag a Cup match against some Championship club" before it would be "Cool" to play on the bank of the Thames.

I agree with the thought that FFC's Finances are probably shot up a bit, regardless of the largess from Spurs. It's been FFC's lot to have their best players get antsy for things other than money (Glory, Face-Time, and JBCVO) and then sold off. Louis Saha in the early 00's, Chris Smalling (Though I was never big on Captain Own Goal v1), now "The Two Dems" over to Spurs.

So yeah. the future? I see it as being perennially in the top flight, scratching out whatever wins that come up, occasionally mega-gagging a match to someone like Swansea for no apparent reason, and scaring the Top-6 from time to time (Or beating them, in the case of Liverpool last year.)

I'll be happy with Mid-Table and getting teased with FA Cup runs. Anything beyond that (Europe) will be a treat if/when they happen.

 

We generally can't buy until we sell, per se. While we could have (and should have) estimated what we could reasonably expect to get from moving the Dems, I think the club were hoping to get through the window w/o moving Dembele. Thus, b/c it happened so late, we ran out of time. I'm pretty sure that if we'd had another week we would have pulled off another signing or two.

So there's the loan option (I think) or the January window. If we don't spend some money then, I'd start lowering the expectations bar some.

 

Since The (Hatter) Donald alluded to it in the Kelly to Reading thread, I thought I'd resurrect this one to get things going again. If Kelly, and potentially Baird, being moved to dump long term salary commitments, is this a sign the club is on the selling block? Is MAF setting the wheels in motion. HD mentioned that it's hard to remember the last time new ownership coming into the PL changed things for the better. Would we attract suitors like Abramovoch or Dubai royalty (and would we really want to), or like Venky's, Owen Oyston, or Carson Yeung? The renovation of the Riverside Stand is supposedly approved for the club, regardless of ownership, but would new owners be obligated to proceed with it? Or is The Chairman just trying to abide by the fair play rules (even thought the big clubs are laughing at them).

Discuss.

 

Unfortunately, I thought it was time to resurrect this topic given our current plight.
So, what happens if we're relegated?
Who stays and who goes? Assuming the owner stays, of course.
What happens with the Riverside Stand expansion?
The Jax preseason friendly?
Ticket prices?
Sponsorships?
International fan base interest?
What am I leaving out?
Discuss, merci beaucoup.

 

Jump, your guess is good as mine on most of those questions, but my 2 cents;

On who stays or goes, it will depend on whether Felix is still here. I just can't see him staying and managing in a division even more foreign to him than the Prem is.

The stadium expansion seems to be on hold anyway, but no chance millions are poured into building for a Championship level team.

The Jacksonville friendly will be on no matter what.

I have no idea about what happens to the Marathon Bet sponsorship. My guess is that relegation and the amount of $$ the club receives is in the agreement.

Int'l fan base won't increase that is for sure. I'm guessing Metroglue will be staying and Greece could be the one country where there is a spike, but since the Championship isn't exactly must see tv (or even found on tv) the fan base will erode.

 

I think Khan cleans house, starting with Alistair. Who knows who'll be left when the dust clears. Felix won't be, that's for sure. Even Gentleman Jim won't be safe, I reckon. But he should be. So should Kit Symons. And whoever else has made our academy and under-somethings so successful over the past few seasons. Everything that can be done to improve the quality of play at the top must be done ASAP. Or we'll end up like Wolverhampton. Or worse.
I don't know what the holdup is over the expansion/renovation work. The last I read, it had been approved by the local authorities. The ball, it seems, is in the club's court. Perhaps they're just waiting for the end of the season to commence work. It needs to be done regardless of where we end up.
Player wise, I think Sidwell, Stockdale, Ashkan, and a few others will stay. I mean, seriously, where else would they go? I'm hoping we would give the kids who've been WINNING our academy squad leagues a chance to prove themselves. Seems to me that's the best way to stop the bleeding since we can't hold on to guys like Dembele when they pan out.
I don't know enough about how the sponsorship stuff works to comment intelligently on it, except to say I hope we got top dollar from all of them. We're gonna need it.
Khan's going to have to spend a lot of money soon if he expects to see his return on investment in the future. The current state of the Jags does not give me reason to be optimistic that, even if he does, it won't be enough. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, and that he finds better people to run FFC than he has so far in Jacksonville.

 

Once they revamped the academy and started talking about sustainability, I thought that the club was hoping to replace the old guard with players brought through the academy. At least for the most part. As old as our squad was (and still is) that's really the only way to address such a high turnover while maintaining profitability throughout. Given the average effective shelf life of footballers, I remember thinking that the kids probably wouldn't be ready in time and that we were going to need some luck with getting productive players on bosmans and loans to keep us out of trouble. I also think the club over-rated the talent and quality of the players we had on hand and their ability to get us through that transition. If we go down, with even less revenue, then I really don't see any other way short of Khan taking a big loss to try and bring us back up. I'm not sure what the Financial Fair Play restrictions are for Championship clubs. To my understanding, the FA has it's own FFP that it holds the lower leagues to and it's more restrictive than those imposed on Premier League clubs. I could be wrong on that though.

Having looked at other Premier League teams that have suffered the drop, I think you'll be surprised by who stays and who goes. It isn't usually the mass exodus you'd expect. But I would expect we'll wait on the academy kids to make the jump to first team football and count on them to bring us back up. As such, I doubt we'll bounce right back up.

Owing to Don's theory, I've always suspected that clearing hurdles for the Riverside Expansion was just an attempt to make the club more attractive to potential buyers. I don't believe MAF ever planned on undertaking the project. Whether Khan will is anyone's guess but I don't think it's an even remote possibility if we're not in the Prem.

As for Khan, he says many of the right things, but I fear it's all talk. On the one hand, I feel for him as he was sold a bit of a lemon. It looked stable and good when you walked past the shop window, but upon closer inspection there were a lot of flaws. The fact that he started his reign by maintaining the standard operating procedure already in place would suggest he didn't see any of them. That's concerning. The fact that they made about as big a mess of the management situation as you possibly could is somewhat alarming. While it's too early to judge his ownership of FFC and there's plenty of time for him to get it right, he's off to a poor start. He also inherited a mess in Jacksonville and I see no discernible, clear plan for improving the product on the field there either.

Khan has made no qualms that he doesn't know the business of either sport, thus why he empowers others to run them. However from what we've seen with both teams, I question his ability to identify the proper people to do just that. Pointing to his success as a businessman is a misnomer b/c he spent his entire career in one industry. It's entirely different identifying people to effectively run his company, where he knows the ins and outs of the industry, versus identifying people to do the same for his sports teams. He may well get both teams sorted in time, but I'm not optimistic from what I've seen so far. I hope he's a very fast learner.

 

It's too early to resurrect this topic, but I don't give a ****. I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more! Which is why I shouldn't go here yet. But I'm going to. Point fingers, do whatever you want. I'll start. The minute MAF decided to sell was the minute things started rolling downhill. After that it just mushroomed to the point we find ourselves at today. What to do? Sack the effing lot of them and start from scratch in the first team. Keep Kit and the U's and academy folks, maybe promote some of them...they clearly know what they're doing, at least. I'm most worried about the new owner. The Jags suck too, and now so do we. His fitness to own a major league sports franchise is very much in question. He'd better start coming up with answers...the CORRECT answers, quickly, or his investment will become a wash in a hurry.

 

There's no question there needs to be some serious work done with the front office. Three managers in a season? Seriously? Jump is right, things turned south real fast after the sale. With the way things turned out this season, I honestly believe it would be best to sort all this shit out through a couple seasons in the Championship. I have a feeling that if we bounce back, which certainly does not seem likely to happen with what brought us to this point this season, the disorganization will continue to pile on problems.

 

The sale is certainly a recent and thus easy culprit, but one could easily argue we are where we've always been, and the big outlier were the magical Roy years. And even then that could have very easily been so different.

A club like ours in a league like this should have been relegated many moons ago. As I wrote in another post, outside the ever-present-7, we had the longest run in the top flight. That's incredible.

Things need to change, but lets not forget all context

 

timmyg-

That is a great point. We have been punching above our weight for a while now. So, serious question, are we a Championship side that feeds our better players to PL teams? Do we continue to develop the youth program and be content knowing, we will build them up and sell them off? No accusation that is what you are insinuating, just wonder if that is a more realistic future for the club...

Cheers,

Steve

 

As HD and others noted in another thread, FFC are much more likely to be relegated again next year than they are to bounce back. Clearly, Hughes sniffed it out and departed while the getting was good, he just didn't disclose what he thought to the fans...until it was way too late.

We have been the worst team in the PL this season, with many players past it, not yet up to it, or just not very good. Blame/responsibility for this has to fall on ownership/management. Maybe Khan didn't appreciate what he was jumping in to (doesn't make you want to own shares in his company, does it?) but maybe he listened to people who are too insulated from consequences of making poor personnel decisions one after another, topped by the costly acquisition of the unfit Greek striker.

It will be telling to see which cable channel NBC Sports chooses for Fulham vs Palace next Sunday; most likely, it will be a channel not available in many markets, as a warm-up for League Championship football.

 

Here are the prophetic words of the right honourable gentleman from The Repbublic of South Texas on or about December 16th in The Year Of Our Lord 2012. They're the reason I cited as the beginning of the slide to relegation.

It makes sense to me now, also, Don. But it doesn't hurt any less.

 

The timing of the sale was especially problematic. Fulham cut spending just as teams were getting the new increased TV revenue bump and using it to invest in their squads. It enabled them to close the gap. As we've said elsewhere, it's only one factor of many.

I disagree about punching above your weight to a point. When I first started following Fulham, we had been somewhere around 32nd in all of English football in infrastructure. But with each passing year, making Premier League money, we got up to 9th or 10th in revenue in England. Clubs have the ability to change who they are. An extended run in the top flight can see a club raise it's status, just as an extended run in the lower leagues can turn a once great club into an afterthought (either Sheffield club, Leeds, Bradford). Obviously, other non-football factors can come into play as well and you could point to some for each of those examples I've given. Anyway, after fighting to survive for most of the first half dozen or so seasons, it looked like we'd built something and could continue upward (within reason, there is a ceiling afterall). We weren't able to but I put that more on Fulham's poor decisions than a law of averages.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Stoke. They are close to where we were when we broke through and made the Europa run. Can they continue to build on that? Or will the "odds" catch up to them?