This looks bad for Paul Conway and co.

[Young_Nudger]

Copied and pasted from the message board that cannot be named.
This is shockingly bad news !!!
How the foooking hell do they expect a football coach to be successful if he’s been told what to do.

If relegated then hopefully the directors losing potentially £££millions of income will sharpen their thought processes.

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THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ESBJERG.

Americans want to run EfB with data, youth and financial balance

In future, there must be a shorter way from EfB Akademi to the club's first team, states American Paul Conway.
The young EfBs Phun Mang must be on the team card. This is just one of the cash announcements from EfB's new American investors, who last week took the majority of the seats on the club's board.

Apr 14 2021 at 11:24
Jan Maass Lindhardt jli@ugeavisen.dk

When American Paul Conway was a boy, he was forced to play football. Back in the 1960s, his father got something as rare as a football scholarship to college, and it later ended up spreading to Paul Conway's leisure activity.

- I played baseball as a child, but the baseball season is only three months. My dad said you can not just sit and roll your thumbs the rest of the year you have to play football. I also coached a youth team in high school for a year. I got a red card in my last match and that was the end of my coaching career.

Paul Conway played the Europeans' favorite sport for seven years, he was left-footed and played in central custody.

Today he is the spokesman for the investor group that has taken over the majority of shares in EfB Elite A / S and last week the group sat on three out of five seats on EfB's board of directors for the annual general meeting. But why did it just become Esbjerg that the American investors chose to work with? The answer lies in the new owners' strategy of playing offensive high-pressure football, or using data to recruit players, or having a football club where the budget is in balance and of building up the EfB squad of Danish and Scandinavian players.

- We have met several different clubs in Denmark, where we have said that this is what we believe in. And we have said to them: Tell us what you believe. Do you believe in a youth academy? A couple of clubs said: No, we want older players. Ok, then it's not a good match with us, so those clubs smoked out. We met with another Danish tradition club, and we were told we would invest in a Danish club that primarily invests in Danish players. Maybe some Norwegians, Swedes and Finns. But they said they had a new strategy with some Croats and Eastern Europeans, so it was not a good match for us either, says Paul Conway.

It was different in EfB. Here there was both a desire to use young Danish players from the academy, and then the American investors' strategy of creating balance in the accounts was good news for the local investors, who over the years had repeatedly given financial first aid to football.

If we look at a player at left back we have ten topics. Most clubs look at one player at a time, but it is not effective. You end up paying too much money for the players that way.

So that's why EfB is today in a football family with Barnsley in England, Ostend in Belgium, Thun in Switzerland and Nancy in France. In France, EfB's new investors were previously involved in Nice, at the time they were criticized for not being ambitious enough because they kept up with the finances, so the question is whether you as a football club can be ambitious with a balanced budget?

- Liverpool balance their budget every year. They're doing ok. You can be successful with a balanced budget. The problem in Esbjerg is that you have neither had balance in the budget nor success on the football field. In Esbjerg it did not work, so when we met with our new local partners we showed them what we had done with a balanced budget in Nice, where we came in the Champions League. Belgium is another example. Last season, the club was four days from bankruptcy when we arrived. We came and said there is another way to do things. We halved the salaries, we brought 12 new players to the club and right now we are in fifth place with the lowest budget in the league.In England in The Championship we are in fifth place with the 18th largest budget. So you can be successful with a balanced budget,

- The raw data is out there. You can subscribe to it, the art is to add your own algorithm that suits your business model, says Paul Conway and says that the group has three data analysts employed in England, two in Belgium, and that another will soon be added in Esbjerg.

- Data is a tool, but you need a strategy to manage it. For example, the season we picked up Mads Andersen (from Horsens to Barnsley ed.), We sold three players and we were in the third division at the time and we made a profit of seven million pounds. That's pretty good. We reinvested that money in 12 players. We can not pay the highest salaries or the highest transfer sums, so to get the 12 players we had to make 50 bids, and to get to the 50 bids we looked at 4000 players. One of the biggest mistakes clubs make is that they stare blindly at picking up a particular left back. And if he does not want to come to the club, they bid the price up. We need to pick the best players we can afford.Data allows us to know the market better than anyone else. Data also enables us to run the business better,

- In Nancy, we sat down with the coach and said: We have the eighth biggest budget in Ligue 2, and we are in 17th place. He had his story about what had gone wrong, but we looked at the data. We had six players over 30 sitting on 44 percent of the salary budget. Some of the players should not play, we could show him that from the data, but his response was that it was the highest paid players, says Paul Conway, who also helped point out that one of Nancy's youth players who represented the French u17 national team was to play.

- We told the coach this kid is going to play. Now we are number eight with the same coach with a more attack-based playing style. The coach trusts us that he does not have to play with the highest paid players if they are not good enough.

The young people have to play

So when will we see you tell Olafur Kristjansson in EfB that he should play more attack-oriented and high-pressure?

- We have just arrived, but Jimmi (Nagel Jacobsen, EfB's sports manager ed.) Has already encouraged the coach to be more attack-minded. I would like to see some of the youngsters play, so Phung (Phung Man, who debuted as a 16-year-old editor earlier this year) will be playing. He is one of our best resources. We do this because we have a good academy and the academy boys have to play. It has been a slippery slope in recent years that old players from other teams have been brought in on free transfers. But it must stop, states Paul Conway.

[Hemsy_Phil]

You dont like the BBS but view it and reference it a hell.of a lot.

[Nozzer1953]

Good article and a good find

[animallittle3]

The plot thickens .

[Arblasterfromthepast]

Not looking good is it Nudge. It seems we can expect things to become even more of a shambles than they are now.