Most liked posts in thread: Perfectly sums the club up

What gets me is how clubs like Crawley, and Swindon a couple of years ago, have hardly any players a couple of weeks before the season starts and then somehow cobble a squad together that goes on to do very well and, in the case of Swindon I believe, win promotion. Tiny clubs like Morecambe or Accrington have also done much better than us. We just seem to consistently sign poor managers and recruit poor players. It's bewildering how we get it all so wrong so consistently.

 

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so according to wotp, it's no ones fault

What a disgraceful article.

 

I don’t think the article is saying that, it is highlighting what has gone wrong.


Rupp has to take some responsibility for this. There’s no getting away from it. He is the leader of the club. The guy at the top. He might not set the culture that exists day-in-day-out within the club, but he oversees how it is built. And adding to the supporter frustration is how distant he appears to be. Communications with supporters are rare. A recent Instagram post about silencing the doubters was misguided. Predictably, his comments after the Newport success were pocketed by his detractors and used against him the week after.

The question we keep returning to is whether Bradford City can ever succeed with Rupp at the helm. And the evidence gathered so far makes it difficult to make a positive case. So yeah, those who are advocating change are not being unreasonable. The club surely cannot go on forever like this.

 

It's so frustrating because we're one of about 5 clubs who refuse to appoint a DoF or similar, and the majority are midtable fodder.

We point to other teams who have a DoF or similar and aren't working out, then pretend it's okay.

IT'S NOT OKAY.

We lack the knowledge and expertise. I could care less how it's working at X or y club, we specifically have a total lack of knowledge and expertise. We're in a small minority of pigheaded clubs that just want to pretend everything will magically be okay because without a navigator, a good driver should be sufficient.

No no no no no no no.

Will a Director of Football automatically get us promoted? No. You don't just win a race because you know where you're going and what you're doing. But you've got a much better chance to get things right if everyone is pulling in the same direction with expert oversight for the long haul.

Some will make the same old boring excuses to avoid change.

Those people are now allowing Rupp and Sparks to hold this club back with impunity, and it has to stop.

 

Agree totally. Big Geoff delivered us a fantastic ground and premier league footy. Put us well on the map for all the right reasons. What followed was shite but every decision in business is a gamble at the end of the day. As the old saying goes, you have to speculate to accumulate. How very true that is

 

It’s been said many times but those few years under GR were some of the best times I’ve had supporting city and I suspect that goes for a lot of the older fan base as well.
Admittedly it was built on sand but that will never deter from the buzz that surrounded the club.

There was none of the current malaise that seems to hang over the club for the last few years.

Yes,he gambled with other people’s money but I wouldn’t swap those feelings you had going to Anfield,Highbury,Old Trafford on equal terms for anything.

 

If Rupp took money out of the club then he took money out of the club. Many owners do. I can’t see any point speculating over it but I think it’s funny that it’s suggested we can’t talk about it because of some kind of liable threat. That’s frankly ridiculous.
Rupp needs to go. We all know that. People talk about his asking price etc etc but in reality we have no idea. The club isn’t worth very much at all I wouldn’t have thought. 3-4 million maybe but even that’s stretching it as we don’t hold any assets.
I do think that it’s time to once again show Rupp and Sparks that we have had enough. Protests do work and they apply pressure. The flyover should never have been cancelled at the time but those who did pull it at least had the right idea to begin with. I’m done with Bradford City at the moment. I don’t feel a connection to my club at all. That’s down to Rupp and Sparks. Their time should be up.

 

I'd love to work in a job where stuff that goes wrong is no one's fault. Like at Westminster.

 

I like WOAP, their articles and podcasts are a very good read/listen with usually most topics covered around the club at the time. However, i do totally see where some people come from when they say WOAP sits on the fence a little too often and this article does have those elements to it.

For me, the biggest part they fail to address is what @Dennis posted above, the connection between fans and ownership/structure running the club is so opposite at the minute. I think you can feel it in your seat that something feels off about the club, fans don't have that engagement or 'buy-in' at all this season and it problem flows onto the pitch. Rupp wants success without the spend, fans want both. It's almost like we are in a scenario with Hughes and likely the manager after him, that if the club is successful it's in spite of the structure/model that we run the club by, rather than because of it.

 

Anyone else wake up this morning with a horses head on their pillow?

Scared to discuss anything on here now! Good game last night wasn’t it? Lovely performance. Fantastic club and super chairman. Long may it continue!

 

Possibly not this saturday ....

 

Get that plane banner out of the cupboard! Time to start the engine again.

 

Totally understand the predicament Jon would have been in. To me it shows the true colours of the club in that they didn’t want their total miss management of an upwardly mobile club shared across probably the national sports press.

I contributed and was gutted it never went ahead but I got the position the club rep put Jon in. I like everyone probably thought change was coming maybe a new investor or owner…. No it was to save their faces. That’s why he’s rarely at games!

 

Unfortunately that’s the mindset that runs quite deep through some of the fan base.

 

It doesn't make it any less true though.

We even have sections of the fan base that detest the most successful chairman of our entire existence because he gambled with the future.

They'd much rather consistently finish 16th in league two every year just so they've got a hobby that gets them out of the house for a couple of hours once or twice a week.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, each to their own but it's not for me and I suspect it's not for the majority of the newer fan base either.

 

Yep. Rupp doesn't have to be a villain, or even do anything more on a day to day basis.

But he has to make sure there are enough top people running the club, and right now, were running more like a grocery store with a good marketing team than a sports club with top field-specific execs behind the scenes.