Most liked posts in thread: Rhodes speaks

Should be our turn soon to win the Tom Banks memorial trophy ...

 

The interview reads like the club is in admin. Just enough investment to keep it viable but no mention in regards to the fundamental reason we all attend... the football team. He's a massive part of the reason we're back in league 2. He sold out to those 2 idiots. Now he comes out having a pop at the very fans who have consistently put their faith and money into the club, in the hope our ambitions were aligned with theirs. We're just limping along, slowly dying as a force in the bottom league(if ever we were one). He's shown no enthusiasm whatsoever. We're no nearer to knowing if he's been successful in his search for a new CEO. He's identified a suitable candidate doesn't mean he's agreed to join us. We need Rupp to clarify his long term position.

 

There are many things I can afford to do but chose not to, I could swap my Ford Focus for a BMW 5 series. There are things I might want to do and can afford to do but which make no sense at all, I could fly business class to Vegas and spend my cash on the slots. On the face of it my wife and I are worth a bit of money, but the overwhelming majority is equity out house I can’t realise quickly. Doesn’t mean I’m wealthy enough to charter a jet to Vegas and put £300k on the roulette table.

Maybe similar scenarios apply to Stefan Rupp. He was apparently believed Edin Rahic, and I suspect Julian and Mark did, many of the fans believed him. I don’t recall too many fans saying the Germans arriving was a bad move. So what more should Julian and Mark have done, what more could they have done, my recollection is Edin talked a bloody good talk.

Why should he piss good money after bad? At the moment football is about surviving, nobody or very few are spending in the lower leagues.

I don’t think he’s not spending enough, I think the money has been spent dreadfully unwisely on unsuitable players and managers, but he’s made the money available for his executives and football staff to spend.

What assets can he gain? Training ground? Stadium? Both aren’t happening. Players? There’s a salary cap which includes transfer fees I believe. Like I say, he made money available which could have been spent on scouting and coaching but the management wasted it on players. Maybe different on and off the field management would have done differently.

I’m no Rupp apologist, him and his erstwhile business partner have cost the club dear and set it back years, but I’m not sure what else he can do.

 

Love him or loathe him it was Lawns loan that helped turn this club around, boosting the funds available to Parkinson. Let's face it, no one else would have lent them the money and the interest made by Lawn was more than justifiable.

 

Little bit worried about holding off with Wood as we could have a Mezza situation again

 

A clean sweep is what we need. A completely fresh outlook and strategy from the top down. The reason we never go anywhere is because we keep looking back, not forward.

 

Harrogate - have built that squad over about 4-5 years. Much like Parky did with us before Rahic meddled.

Rhodes doesn't have to big himself up. He is just explaining the current medium term strategy for the club. I agree that season tickets would have slumped if this had come out before the season.

I agree that Rhodes is not the future of Bradford City. I look forward to the new guy coming in and a bit of positivity coming back to the club. But it is still gonna be a massive slog and we'll all have to have patience.

At least the conspiracy theory of Rupp syphoning money out of the club has been put to bed.

I want us to romp up the leagues like the club I am proud to support should do. I just know there is a right way and wrong way to do it. Currently we are about half right. We just need to sort out the footballers!

 

Unbelievably out of touch. Progress doesn’t nearly mean throw money at it. The recruitment has been horrendous for years, how about employing a team whose job it is to rectify this, that’s progress to me. Don’t get some people’s thinking.

 

I think the mistake a lot of fans make is they don’t look at the club for what it is.....a limited company.
The great thing about Rhodes is he understands the basic principles of business. If money in is less than money out, eventually your fecked. Unfortunately he thinks like an accountant, so he cuts his cloth to suit the clubs income rather than looking at how we increase profitable revenue streams. To grow & develop the club and brand we need a visionary who can maximise our sponsorship streams & increase profitably.
I really thought Rupp would bring this to the party, especially after the “video” record by a German TV company.
I hoped we’d attract European sponsorship on the back of Rupps contacts but it didn’t happen.
German sides charge lower ticket prices and rely on sponsorship to pay the bills. Tinkering with the season ticket prices isn’t going to make much difference in the scheme of things.
If I were in charge I’d be studying how teams across Europe attract and engage with sponsors. I’d be identifying which business sectors target Bradford residents (even if it’s payday loans, Cash for Crash and B&M bargains!!) and target them. I’d have someone on a plane for meetings with big companies in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Poland.
Locally I’d be smooshing every business owner in Yorkshire, get them to the ground for a match and push the boat out - Richmond was great at this and it worked.
I’d study the “on trend clubs” like Posnan & St Pauli, see what they do differently and bring the good bits to City.
I’d set up the website for multiple languages and promote the Brand around the world. The intention being to sell merchandise. I’d try and set up twinning with other clubs around the globe. Basically put everything into growing the “Brand Bradford” only when you’ve sold the dream, wrung every available pound into the coffers and maxed out sponsorship opportunities can you even think about new training facilities, buying back the ground or even league busting playing budgets.
Either that or hope for an Arab prince to come knocking!!

 

It's tempting with the benefit of hindsight to blame JR for the club's faults.

However at the time of all the manager appointments that he was involved with, the fans were generally pretty positive - the vast majority welcomed Gary Bowyer for example. As regards the sale of the club to Messrs Rupp and Rahic (or is that Herren?) it is conveniently forgotten that in the summer of 2017 - a good 15 months after the sale - City fans were in Germany toasting Rahic as the new Messiah. In fact when I told Stefan Rupp in February, 2018 that Edin was a complete disaster he suggested the fans were fickle because what he had seen the previous summer was a whole load of Bradfordians singing Rahic's praises. Even then the club was still on the fringes of automatic promotion. (NB SR also attached no credibility to the inflammatory comments on social media which served if anything to persuade him otherwise about Edin.)

SR acknowledges that he was taken for a ride (and he won't be the first of the last investor to make such a mistake) but it is easy to see how, from afar, there didn't seem to be a problem. Even at the time of Stuart's sacking SR felt that there was scope to turn things around on the pitch. For the record, his delay getting rid of Edin was until he had someone to hold the fort on his behalf and being able to persuade JR back to VP - Roger Owen will confirm this. (JR returned to VP in 2018 as much out of a sense of duty as anything else, it's not necessarily what he wanted to do.) My sense is that by the start of the 2018/19 SR had already come to terms with the error of Rahic and it was the last couple of months of the previous season that started to sow the seeds of doubt in his mind.

As regards the accounting and financial management in the club it is no coincidence that Edin stopped the flow of information to SR during the last five months of his involvement, citing internal issues. Rahic was a complete conman. You can blame JR for being taken in by him. You can blame SR for being duped but for a pretty lengthy period of time, so was everyone else. And if you go back to 2016 I think we were all relieved that the club was not being sold to a dodgy Italian - the fact is that there was a generally positive response to the sale and we all knew that unless the club was sold it could never progress beyond the third tier.

In 2004 and then 2018, JR and in turn SR both had the opportunity to walk away and cut their losses. We also forget that in 2004 JR was feted as a hero and likewise forget that prior to 2016 there were no credible offers or interest to buy the club. Mark Lawn was the only man prepared to inject money and before the 2012/13 cup run there was no guarantee that he would get his money back. JR's cheap season ticket initiative in 2007 was also the basis by which interest was revived in the club.

I am not suggesting that there have not been mistakes at VP or that things could not have been done better, but to judge what has happened needs a slightly more balanced assessment.

 

You do it by up-selling, 1st season Tickets....You keep the headline ticket price at £149, but add on a five pound admin charge which is non negotiable. You then say £154 is a base ticket which gives general admission to a nominated stand, want guaranteed seats, that’s an extra £20 quid. Fast track half time pint, program on seat when you arrive, loads of incentives which we could use.
2) sponsors - nothing, and I mean nothing is purchased by the club unless a reciprocal sponsorship deal can be achieved, from banking and credit providers down to paper clips.
The problem with City (and most clubs) is, not since the Richmond days have they aggressively chased sponsors through sales channels & targeted sectors. Sure we’ve pushed the suites, and the usual sponsor packages and I’m not trying to belittle what our sales teams have achieved, but it just seems to be an afterthought.
So many ways to increase the clubs revenue from alternate sources alongside taking more wallet share from existing fans & sponsors.

 

Being spun a yarn by a conman, is a reasonable explanation as to why the behind the scenes carnage was masked. But to not have a view of the financial health of the club, the level of spending and forecast to budget, is negligence. It’s basic governance of any business. It requires little more than a monthly review of the clubs financial forecast. Whether its his biggest project or not, when he’s got a few million tied up in said project I can’t find any other word than negligence.

 

And Mark Lawn had every right to charge whatever interest he wanted, just as the club had every right to find an alternative loan provider. As a business twice in administration in five years prior to Lawn joining, I suspect it was a good deal for City and Mark’s cash was at serious risk.

 

We could but to be fair Julian talks a lot of sense in this interview - I would guess holding off on any contracts (exactly the same with McCalls position) is until the new man is in place so he can exert his own presence in the way forward and the future development of the club. This doesn't prevent discussions taking place behind the scenes.
There is still so much doubt as to what will happen this season (I still think there will be twists and turns relating to Covid) but I just hope we dont hide behind this factor - we have to be prudent but the club needs to show a vision of better days to come, getting the balance right of being prudent and showing suitable ambition is a difficult one to strike. It would be good to know a timeframe the club is working towards for the reigns to be handed over - this transparency would enable the fans to understand the position better and the decisions currently being made with perhaps a little less aggravation towards the club

 

Holes?

 

How come a club like Harrogate (fresh in the mind example) can look a league above us operating on a shoestring budget for players.

I thought he was just bigging himself up and having a pop at supporters with ambition which he translates as overspending (see above it isn’t about money and even when we had it we wasted it), but didn’t acknowledge any of his own shortcomings, our on pitch decline, not to mention not doing his own due diligence on the duo he sold us to. A bit worrying that he now gets to chose his successor.

A turgid interview and depressing, basically keep treading water guys and we hope to be promoted again, one day. Where is his passion and desire, non existent.

Supporters care passionately about what goes on on the pitch, not that we made 1 million over 11 years.

Like Northern Monkey said I can see why he isn’t reeled out ahead of a ticket sales campaign.

 

What an embarrassing read!.

I can't wait until he leaves. He's ruining this club!

He needs to leave ASAP and we need someone with vision because that man is a joke.

 

He's not ruining the club.

He's actively NOT ruining the club.

That's pretty much the main thing he's accomplished. He hasn't ruined the club, overreached, bankrupted, or crippled us.

Ultimately, in that interview Rhodes has competently dismissed whole swathes of his naysayers. What are the alternatives? Dramatically overspend, risk everything. For what? There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there's no profitable paradise outside the Premier League, and this idea of 'buy the ground' 'buy this, but that' is just another way of saying the exact same thing - 'please, sir, spend some more' - but for what?

That's not vision - that's just lack of imagination.

 

I agree with you Jon.

Ultimately, Julian is pretty financially competent. He's going to run a tight ship and get things organised. He's not brilliantly visionary BUT he also doesn't pretend he is. He is what he is and he needs complementing with a director of football or manager with vision.

There's a few fans on this thread that are not trying to see things through his eyes. To him, not overspending on wages, securing young players who maybe saleable down the line or good players for us and securing some decent sponsorship during a health/financial crisis is good business. That's how he thinks.

The lack of quality on the pitch is still really a problem of the choices of the last couple of years and some poor signings in the last two windows. That's not really Julian's fault! He's not choosing the players. The problem is slightly compounded by the owner being pretty distant so there is a lack of vision from the top really. I've seen these kinds of businesses before and they tend to feel like they're stagnating but ultimately they are run pretty well (as a business).

I have no problem with someone like Julian inside the club. It will be well run. What is needed is more thought on the playing side so that the team choosing the players spend their x millions with a but more thought and future focused. Really, Stuart should be saying, give me another 2/3 years, here is my plan and what I want to do. Unfortunately there isn't anyone with that kind of long term focus ON THE PLAYING SIDE in the club.