by Clyde1998 »
22 Sep 2024 15:40
WestYorksRoyal Didn't the Leicester owners enquire here to SJM, and he didn't trust them?
I'm sympathetic to the mistake of selling to AZ. He had a connection to the area through Bearwood school, and his Dad was a billionaire. It's perfectly rational to think the family as a whole will fund the club, and Russian owners were doing well at Chelsea. It all looked like a decent fit.
It was at the time seen as the only way to keep us competitive. If you look at the transfer revenue in SJM's later years, we were consistently selling star players and barely breaking even. He'd have had to cut us into a lower Championship side without promotion ambitions to stay on.
And his second sale to the Thais was a proper fire sale scenario; we were losing money hand over fist from contracts like Pogrebnyak and Drenthe, and Le Fondre was sold just to pay HMRC.
In hindsight, the Pogrebnyak signing was the first clue that things were changing and not in a good way. A wage structure busting 4 year contract is light years away from what we all knew at the "Reading Way". I don't think any of us were wised up enough to notice and call it out at that point though.
I think that Pogrebnyak signing was also a shift away from the manager having the final say on which players were signed, in terms of whether the manager want the player to be signed. We moved towards players getting signed without the manager wanting them and then having to somehow integrate them into the squad. That's probably a factor as to why, post-Madejski, we've usually made really poor signings.
If we had the resources under Madejski, we never would've made a Pogrebnyak or Drenthe signing. The manager almost certainly wouldn't have wanted that sort of player in the squad and likely the scouting team would've picked up on their character (especially Drenthe).
