Ferguson is an exception to the rule. He's in a position where his club can spunk £40m on players and if they're all jarg he's still sound.
Doesn't work like that for the majority. You'll get cash (or not), and how you spend that cash dictates your job generally.
Seems the point is Ferguson and ManU have had the capacity to make those huge failures and either carry them and still succeed or offload them and move on or simply spend again to right the mistake and spend again heavily, again. They are still paying some of the highest wages in the land and being on their books means players are often involved with money spinning side deals with sponsors as well as. Ferguson isn't picking up Cantona's for a paltry million anymore, he volleyed 24 big ones up the wall at Arsenal for RVP a player in his final year that had a titty lip on him. 24 big ones has paid off big time. ManU under Ferguson has been able to cherry pick some of the best players at competing clubs - Berbatov, although we werent direct competitors Rooney, Keane, Ferdinand. Be under no illusions the pressure on Moyes to make a £5 million budget work and work well is a universe of difference away to the one Ferguson operates in.
Agree on Ferguson to a point. He only has that allowance because he's earnt it. But the reason Man U are able to spend big money now is partly due to them being a massive club with a truly global fan base, partly revenue from their stadium and prawn sandwich eating fans, but also massively due to what de did in the early nineties there, at a slice of luck with the timing. And he's only an exception because the other rich teams around them have employed some aweful managers (FSW, Mancini etc).
And I agree the pressure on Moyes is different, and probably greater, because we don't have money to waste. But certainly my point still stands is that it isn't the money he's had to spend, and how he's spent it that has made him such a good manager.
Of course there's a direct correlation between spending & success. The biggest 5 spenders in the past decade currently occupy the top 4 PL places & the 5th is the ****e, who've spent their money badly. Spending money is guaranteed to bring success if you spend enough of it & don't have to work within any form of financial framework e.g. what City did to buy the PL title - they made mistakes in the market, but just wrote them off & spent some more - until they won..............
As for Ferguson, he's made some poor buys over the years, but his good ones have outweighed the bad by a considerable distance - his team & bench is full of multi million pound players. The most important part of a managers job is assembling a side with enough quality to win.
I'd hardly define that as success. IMO the money Liverpool has spent has one them nothing. If it wasn't for Gerrard I'd vouch that with all the moeny they've spent they would have won nothing at all in the last 10-15 years. How much have Chelsea spent for how many years, yet they only managed to scrap their way to the CL last year. Man City won the league last year, have been pathetic in Europe, and are miles of the league pace this year. I don't consider any of the teams that have soen big money to have achieved any thing like the success they should have. And I'd have to have a closer look, but I'd say his overall transfer success is somewhat worse than you are suggesting, especially when several of his are no-brainers (Rooney, RVP etc).
The point is hes finishing where he should be not beyond expectations.
Everyone below us apart from Liverpool and maybe Newcastle.
Well clearly he is. Last few years averaging around 7/8th, we're 6th, so everyone below us bar poss Lpool/Ncastle would be 12 teams, leaving us 8th.
I'd say the most important part of a manager's job is to set up his side to get the best out of his players, in order to win games.
The transfer market can be used to fill a void that a club may have in their playing staff, but ultimately it's all about the matches.
EFC currently has a negative EBITDA & has been for sale for years according to it's current Chairman.
It's not sold, so therefore there's either been no interest - which is again something that has been dismissed by the Chairman as he's described there being plenty of interest, or something else has put off ALL of the prospective purchasers to this point..........I'm guessing it wasn't the washed out blue gravel myself like....
This.
The relatively new wrinkle to this argument is the suggestion that we've only spent such a small amount of money because we've had the same manager all this time. Okay ... so Stubbs came out recently and basically admitted Moyes wanted more money to spend and the board has said no. Yet by the logic of that argument we will spend money if we get a new manager. So why would they refuse to let Moyes spend money (with arguably the best track record of spending money in the league) but happily let a new unproven manager spend more money than Moyes? (Even if that were true do you think that's a logical way to run a club with such delicate finances?)
Spurs, RS etc. don't spend more than us because of new managers -- they spend more than us because they have more money than we do. So they spend it. One of the ways they spend that money is by firing managers a lot (which costs money to pay out a contract and costs money because of squad turnover from a new manager). This is a correlation/causation problem.
In addition people are making a faulty assumption that a new manager will have the "4th-7th best squad" in the league. They might for 13/14 but after that they will have the squad they build with no money. It's an odd assumption too because even most Moyes out types admit he's better than average with transfers. Better than average means something -- it means we're statistically unlikely to find a better manager at transfers. Not impossible ... but unlikely.
If we get a manager who is average at transfers we'll eventually end up with the 14th best squad in the league.* He'll then need to outperform that place tactically to get us back to 7th. Of course that just gets us back to where we are now.
What you want is a manager who outperforms his net+wages *and* outperforms the squad quality with tactics. You'd be hard pressed to find a manager who outperforms Moyes in the market; you'd also be hard pressed to find a manager who outperforms his squad by 7 places on a consistent basis. Finding someone who can do one of those things is tricky enough -- the vast majority of clubs fail to find someone who can do even one of those things -- but we need both. You essentially want us to hire the best manager in the world. So do I ... I just don't think that's especially realistic.
* If you want to get really technical I'd argue we wouldn't have the 14th best squad. We spend so much on wages because Moyes assembled a team which can support (to some degree) such high wages. A manager who is average (not bad ... just average) at transfers will miss out on a few of the players we pay highly. I don't believe that money immediately goes back into transfers because that money might not exist (if we finish lower in the league). We spend next to nothing (net) on transfers but spend a lot on wages which helps our squad.
Don't underestimate the importance of this distinction. Money on wages is lower risk than money on transfers. More often that not our big wages are on a player's second contract (Heits being an exception). So they are a somewhat proven commodity at that point and can be relied on to get us a decent league finish which in turn gets us more money.
To just assume we'd have the same spending level with a squad assembled by someone less adept in the transfer market doesn't make much sense.
No offense njligernj, but i haven't read your whole post as I was expecting someone to make this point. What the original post was meant to mean I think is not that if we'd changed managers we'd have spent more, because clearly there hasn't been more for Moyes/N.E.Other to spend, but that if Spurs/Liverpool etc had kept one manager for the same amount of time then they would have spent less, due to the lack of player turnover usually associated with management changes. Obv Rafael has a fair few yrs across the park, it would be interesting to do some sort of comparison looking at his expenditure (after the first season or so).
