Quote Originally Posted by tHeArAb View Post
Imo, we have a recruitment team who are responsible for the sourcing of players - players the manager has requested for a certain position. The manager is then given a list from which he chooses, and Asghar works to close the deal. Not for a second do I think Asghar is actually scouting players. Yes, he may have contacts offering him players & yes he may have a more direct route to a player than the recruitment team (Levitt for example), but I don't believe he is signing guys without the managers say so.

Happy to give him credit for signing guys like Levitt & McGrath as it is his selling of the club that plays probably the largest part in convincing them to sign. Is he to blame for the GK situation? I have no idea. I doubt it. Look at the signing of Niskanen for example. A player our recruitment team had tracked for years. A signing based on data. This could easily have been the case for the GK's and that is the responsibility of the recruitment team, not TA. It's far too easy to blame him for our poorer signings. Every club makes poor signings. We've been it doing long before TA was in place. Then it was primarily down to the manager. These days, with the way football player recruitment works, it's a collective thing rather than one man's decision.
I'd say that both the Aussie lads and the African lads had nothing to do with the managers of our team but down to Fat Tone's connections and if like you say that we tracked Niskanen for years then he also wasn't down to a specific manager.

I'd say that Edwards was an MM signing and maybe Sibbald is a JR signing but the rest are down to Fat Tone - good or bad.

For me Fat Tone has too much of a say in running/overseeing ALL aspects of the club but is too much of a narcissist to delegate certain sections of it out to others who actually know what they are doing . This is evident with all the resignations in the hospitality sector in the last few years with even volunteers having binned it and the subsequent shambles that hospitality has become(I sit in the next section along from hospo and can see how empty it is).

I actually don't know what his strengths are job wise but it certainly isn't in man management and going by what the Boat posted yesterday re the display guys mustering 400 fans for the Shed v the sheep( which I know for a fact is true as one of them asked if anyone wanted to sit in the shed on our aways bus's WhatsApp group)then it it won't be fan relations.

Fat Tone quite rightly should be judged by us on performance just like our players and managers and for me he just ain't cutting it imo, he's just not a likeable guy.