WTF is going on?

[Trickytreesreds]

I think the problem was he ..... ermmmmm couldn't load ��������

It was funny with Afgoon though.

What did they used to wind him up with?
His mates had ammo clips but he was pushing paper clips.

[Rattea]

It was funny with Afgoon though.

What did they used to wind him up with?
His mates had ammo clips but he was pushing paper clips.

He basically looked after the stationary budget for his camp. Once people got wind of that it was private paperclip 🤣

However the pinnacle of funny was the mention of a certain cut of lamb. Caused the biggest implosion and no one is sure why to this day! 🤣

[swaledale]

I’m not sure that last bit is true, Swale. I certainly did, you too, but I do remember being at odds with Rats, Bloomer and the other guy - the best mod there’s ever been on this site imo, but who’s name I now forget - right from the get go, and it is an eternal source of shame that Rats would appear to have been right and I was wrong.

Morris’ intentions were, I’m sure, originally good and he has undoubtedly put a huge amount of his own money into the club and shown no lack of ambition via the expensive acquisition of the likes of Clement, Pearson, Rowett, Lampard, Cocu and Rooney. The footballing wisdom of some of those appointments may be challenged with only one of them, imo, overseeing any improvement...but it is the financial decisions/malpractice that have been taken on Morris’s watch...the FFP rule breaking and the neglect as regards tax bills, that now see us in our current perilous position and that I will only forgive if he dips his hand into his very deep pockets to sort out the tax bill and the ground ownership issues.

‘Wealthy life long fan’ is how he might originally have been described...’fit and proper person’ he has certainly proved not to be.

Oh I don't dispute that Mel mismanaged things, something which has happened many times with other clubs, whether the owner be a local fan, some top shot businessman a foreign investor or some strange consortium. Derby have had its fair share of weird and wonderful owners, Maxwell being the most notorious.

But those who didn't like Mel, couldn't really come up with a concrete reason, the previous owners were fiscally prudent, but the club stagnated and was heading for league 1.

I'm not sure who in their right mind would become a football club owner, even in the prem they are merely a way of losing vast amounts of money - the only person I can think of in recent times to make money is Ashley with Newcastle.

I think the fact that we have players now being paid in the region of £500K per week is indicative of just how bonkers its all become.

This has spread to the championship, isn't Lawrence on something like £30k a week? I mean being paid more than the average annual salary per week is just ludicrous.

[Ramshank72]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, Ramshank...and I’ll readily accept that, as a one time supporter and defender of Morris, I was one of those to be proved wrong.
Why though would you have ‘cringed’ at the ‘clever businessman’ and ‘one of our own’ descriptions? I know it hasn’t worked, but why is the idea of a self made multi millionaire who was an actual genuine fan of the club so bad?
We’ve seen owners from the Middle East (Man. City), the U.S. (Liverpool), Thailand (Leicester) and Russia (Chelsea) do brilliantly well...I’m just not sure why investment from a local owner (and supporter) was such a bad idea...in theory of course.

It's not that it's (local owner/fan) a bad idea (well, that's another argument anyway), it's more that it absolves (is that the word?) the individual of any criticism because of it. "It's ok because he's from Derby" isn't an excuse for poor decision making. "He's a clever businessman" could be attributed to any man who's made their millions... doesn't make them a good football chairman. People should be judged on their merits, not where they are from.

[Geoff Parkstone]

So anyway, another day when a preferred bidder was to be announced has gone by it seems. Plus ca change.....la meme chose

[Ramshank72]

So anyway, another day when a preferred bidder was to be announced has gone by it seems. Plus ca change.....la meme chose

Can't wait until the April 1st updates!

[Geoff Parkstone]

Can't wait until the April 1st updates!

I can just see it....Quantuma announce that the selected preferred bidder is a small Panamanian company with a share capital of £ 3 controlled by meerkat called Pushkin and his finance director Andrew Madoff (dec'd). The EFL welcome the news and lift the transfer embargo on the meerkat family, leaving the club unable to bring in a new Brazilian coati as central defender. Either that or Evangelos Marinakis.

[Trickytreesreds]

So anyway, another day when a preferred bidder was to be announced has gone by it seems. Plus ca change.....la meme chose

The way it's going, we'll have a new owner before you

Oh for Fawaz to bang a bid in

[Ramondo]

Evening. My ears were burning so I thought I'd swing buy and see what's going on.

And we're discussing that cretin, Mel Morris are we? Well, as I haven't been here for a while, I'll contribute a short essay!:

Many fans were unhappy with GSE, opinions were spilt on this forum I think. Bloomer was very anti the Americans, stating that he would no longer attend games while they were running the show. This was because of a widely held idiology with football fans of all clubs that there is some devine right that fans have to demand owners spend whatever it takes to achieve success, no matter how much it is and how much money they might lose. he history of this goes back to the early days of the Premier League, with clubs like Blackburn starting the trend. Spend money and you too can win the league. Only a few years before Blackburns success they'd been an average team hovering between the second and third tiers, then came Jack Walker and... BOOM! It was Abramovich who really started the spending boom though and everyone else piled in from there. Pundits and journo's were partly to blame too, often commenting on and clubs owners not showing enough 'ambition' (not spending enough) and fans lapped it up. I heard many people complaining about GSE not showing that amnition, not 'investing' was also a popular term, as was an accusation that they were 'creaming off the profits'. Yet the club was still clearly losing money, it was right there to see but people only see what they want to see and what they wanted to see was that the Americans were bad and a new local millionaire owner was good. Mob mentality completely forgot that the GSE era brought us the best team (arguably) since our Jim Smith promotion year, and nearly managed to go up itself.

Then step forward Mel Morris. An ego 100 times the size of Afgoons stationary budget, with claims of guaranteed promotion (everyone remebers that, right?), constant manager changes, overspending on players that simply weren't worth it, the stupid 'The Derby Way' nonsense, and talks of legacy. Hindsight may be easy but there were warning signs that had me very worried: First was the spending and the kind of player that was coming in for these daft amounts. Second was some of the managerial tinkering and appointments - the majority of the fans were frothing at the mouth at the news Frank Lampard had been signed as manager but it seems I was one of a tiny minority that was not only worried but realised Morris had finally lost the plot. My reasons were that there was already talk of having to trim costs and after constant changes it was important to find an experienced manager and start to rebuild again but for the LONG TERM, not just one or two seasons of high impact. Lampard was a big name, a very high profile but he had zero managerial experience and had spent the previous year out of football playing TV personality on shows with James Corden and Holly Willoughby. Only one of two things was likely to happen with his appointment - 1. He does well and gets lured to London, probably West Ham or Chelsea (this was before Moyes had properly established himself), or 2. he does badly and we sack him. Neither was likely to last more than a year or two tops, and then we'd be back to yet another manager and another rebuild... again. And so the cycle continues. But no, he went for the big name and it just made no sense once you looked passed the hype. And guess what happened, he did well and went to Chelsea. When I say he 'did well', we kind of fluked it to get into the top 6, we rarely looked good enough and if Boro hadn't lost something like 7 games in a row then we'd never have made it. We beat Leeds on that wonderful, amazing night that I will never forget (actually, I can't remember the end of it because I'd been drinking in the Sports Bar all night and I'm not sure how I got home, but I remember the match, which is the important bit) and I do remember that we were dead and buried and Leeds were coasting before they got cocky, took their eye off the ball (literally) and gifted us the first goal. After that we were amazing but the better team certainly didn't win. he did k, basically his main contribution was to sign Mason Mount for the season. Take that away and we'd have finished mid table.

But the biggest red flag was the stadium sale. Firstly I don't agree with clubs doing it, regardless of whether it's a rule or not. But my biggest issue wasn't whether it broke a rule or didn't break a rule, it was how did we get into such a state where it was necessary in the first place. That was a sign that we were in real trouble - but did it bother most fans? Some yes, but many just accepted it because, to them, football is about the 'now'. There is a culture of impatience amongst football fans, as well as hypocricy - for example: fans of other clubs criticise Derby fans for supporting Morris and yet they would have done exactly the same thing if the situation at their club was the same - because football fans are not genetically different to each other. There is no such thing as 'this club has better fans that that club', it's a myh, a sort of fallacy fuelled by tribalsm that is both good and bad for the game. Take Chelsea as another example - some fans are saying that the Chelsea fans deserve their club to be in trouble because they have been funded by a Billionaire mate of Putin, and yet there is no club in the land that would have turned him away if he'd arrived knocking on their doors at any point priorto Russias invasion of Ukraine. Newcastle fans don't care where their owners money comes from, or what their record of human rights are, or their involvement in the humanitarian catastrophy in Yemen that they have been a part of. And Bournemouth have a Russian owner (although i think he's now a British citizen, so no sanctions likely). Did anyone at Everton care that they had a Russian owner? The point being, as long as they're spending money, fans don't care. GSE weren't spending - demonstrations outside the ground. Morris spends stupid money on players that aren't worth it and then sells the stadium - fans call him a business genius and say he's playing the EFL like a puppet.

Morris is 100% responsible for our situation. To some degree he's probably unlucky that Covid came along and wrecked any chance he had of selling or getting additional investment, which then led to administration. But when you gamble like that then you have to accept the risk and he clearly did. What is more annoying, is he still seems to seek to blame everyone else. BUT.. to some extent, fans are also to blame. Not specifially just Derby fans, all fans. Fans have to level their expectations. It's all very well and good saying that we're happy to be frugal as long as we stay in business, but how long will that last? Fans have short memories. There has to be a shift in the game, a change of thinking.

I don't know if the rumours are true about his involvement in a new bid for ownership. It seems far fetched, although with his ego?? But if it did happen, I would be done. I will not associate myself with a club with that man involved, not after what he's done, and the way he's behaved. Loyalty is one thing but I'd be embarrassed to call myself a Derby fan with him at the club. So I hope it isn't true.

[Trickytreesreds]

Good to see you Ramondo. Great essay as well.