Keep right on
I have to say I’ve been pretty impressed with Birmingham City’s start to the season.
The Premier League can be bought, The Championship can be bought thanks to parachute payments, and a bit of investment can go a long way in League Two but buying success in the third tier has long been fraught with impediments.
League One has been a graveyard for big names coming down from The Championship, and the Prem, and those so called smaller teams within it take no passengers. Without fail every campaign the L1 promotion race always turns up a few wild cards.
The embryonic league table already includes Mansfield, Lincoln and Stockport in it’s top six. It includes Wrexham too, Hollywood’s answer to City’s well funded investment group ownership.
Over the past two decades only Leicester, Norwich, Wolves, Hull, Wigan and Rotherham have managed to go straight back up after relegation. The latter two became a yo-yo for a couple of seasons.
Yet Nottingham Forest, Bristol City, Leeds, Wolves, Brighton, Sheffield Wednesday, their neighbours United, Brentford, Bradford, Blackburn, Bournemouth, Coventry, Sunderland, Ipswich, Portsmouth, Reading, Derby, Bolton, Barnsley and of course us have all stagnated in the division for some time or other, and some even fell further.
Not since Wolves has a team thrown some money at it and with a good managerial pick, won promotion at canter. That finger can be pointed at us too when Powell took us to over 100 points in 2011/12, but we simply just cleverly reinvested money made from selling a couple of younger assets.
What Birmingham’s new American owners have done is extraordinary and there is nothing to compare it to, and not many examples of this kind of net spending are even in existence in The Championship.
The Blues have blown a hole through any previous trends for League One. Average summer spending over ten years in League One has been between £3m and £8m, but this season the total spend by L1 clubs was £37m, with Birmingham responsible for almost £30m of this.
There’s also spending money and spending money, and City broke almost every record possible in managing to entice players who have ability way above this level.
I have to say with an untried manager, novice owners that had hardly made good decisions previously and a big fat cheque being waved around I was expecting a season’s voyage of Titanic proportions, but thus far they look like walking this division surpassing even the points total of Charlton in 2011/12 and Wolves in 2013/14 .
Their commercial revenue, attendances and overall turnover means that their spend is within FFP or PSR. Still, if they don’t go up this season, then they might come unstuck, but at the moment they are resembling a steam train. Fair play to them, Birmingham are a proper football club and we have had our battles. I just wish we could provide some sort of opposition for them tomorrow.
I will address the elephant in the room that is Alfie. His comments this week ‘saying the story will come out’ not surprisingly suggested plenty of angst around his summer move.
Talk of abuse seems a bit far fetched unless by children hidden behind a social media handle, but I don’t know any Addicks who’d wish him harm.
We are not to know how Alfie and Nathan Jones left things, maybe it’s that, that will come out if it has to at some point in the future.
For supporters we were sent the goodbye video, which by all accounts might have been recorded when he was on his way to Huddersfield, but Alfie took the wonga, and at his age it was absolutely the right decision for him and his family.
He’s a local lad, he was good for us, and a pleasure to support. We all move on better or for worse.
May only did what all of us would do – that someone was prepared to QUADRUPLE the salary of a 31 year old AND on a long term deal was a total no brainer. And anyone saying they would not do the exact same thing is deluding themselves.
No way we could even start to compete.
I still cannot get over the sale of Alfie. There are supporters who have convinced themselves that his going is good for the club. There are some that insist he wanted to go. Well he may have done at the end but he certainly didn’t a few months before the season end. I don’t believe in bad mouthing players who wear the Charlton shirt.No one goes on that pitch to fail but some of the signings particularly Alfs replacement show very poor judgement by someone. Continuing to play them shows poor judgement by Jones. Talking of which I do not share a lot of the blind optimism some supporters have for him. So far he hasn’t impressed me with his tactics or his verbosity. I hope in him we have found a coach we can get behind – who really understands Charlton- but so far its 50:50 for me
It has to be acknowledged, May did not want to leave Charlton. However NJ made it clear to him, he wouldn’t feature in the squad this season. NJ wanted to play his system (what a hopeless mess that has been) which excluded Alfie.
Faced with that information and with other clubs aware of it, two approached seeking his services, what could May do? He knew he would have to leave and as said above, the deal at Birmingham was exceptionally attractive.
A sensible manager would have done all he could to keep May, and built a team aound his ability. It was his goals that saved us from relegation. It could have been his goals the drove us toward promotion.
Not sure he even touched the ball today before being hooked at HT – battered by Ramsey and never came back. Another shocking display from NJ 😄
May was forced out as Charlton wanted the money. I have a feeling he’ll score today. The spend by Blues needs to be tempered with roughly £14m brought in by selling the likes of Jordan James, Koji Miyoshi, Sriki Dembele, Junhino Bacuna, Alex Pritchard. Nobody truly knows how much Stansfield actually cost I’ve seen figures from £10m to £20m. We did rebuild the whole championship ready team by getting rid of 21 players and binging in 17 players. The only players remaining from last year are Jutkiewicz, Paik, Bielik, Sanderson and Buchanan. Of course Stansfield was on loan here last season. I’ve no idea what the nett spend is but my back of fag box calculation is about £10m.
I think the story about Alfie May has come out…our CEO fessed up in the recent you tube interview that NJ sold him as he wanted to play a different style and AM didn’t fit that formation.
But, with his wife returning to Yorkshire Alfie would have had to effectively commute to train and play and he was in the last year of his contract, at the end of the season he would have left on a free. I don’t begrudge him going, the deal he’s on at Brum is said to be worth £16k a week – he’d be foolish to turn that down, especially at his age. As we discussed at the time he came into pro football relatively late and he hasn’t had a long, lucrative career like others in his situation so he needs to bank this money while he can. He never stopped running or trying for us so good luck to him.
We got good money for a 31 year old player but the question is, did we spend it wisely? We signed Matt Godden and Gassan Ahadme in the same week. Godden I’d argue has been a success with four goals and a couple of Alfie May style finishes this week, including today, but Gassan doesn’t look to me at least to be a Charlton player, at least not yet. We look unbalanced when he’s in the team.