From the Athletic, not too much new stuff here but it’s interesting that there have been these long read pieces here and from the BBC lately.
Special Investigation : Cardiff City, an unhappy club on a downward spiral
Sabri Lamouchi’s first media commitments as Cardiff City’s new manager brought a pertinent question about a figure he had yet to meet.
With two predecessors sacked in a season only just beyond its halfway mark, was he aware of owner Vincent Tan’s impatience?
“If I’m listening to all reputations in football, you wouldn’t work anywhere,” said Lamouchi. “I’m not here for the reputation, for this one or another one. I’m here for the challenge of the club.”
Lamouchi knows the eccentricities of the Championship after 15 months in charge of Nottingham Forest, a club familiar with volatility under Evangelos Marinakis, but Cardiff’s downward spiral has begun to chew up and spit out its managers at pace.
Mark Hudson lasted just two months and seven games as permanent manager. Neither Steve Morison nor Mick McCarthy survived a year before that.
The churn leaves Cardiff in a perilous position. Less than four years after relegation from the Premier League, there are fears this season might yet end with relegation to League One.
The gap is uncomfortable and fans have grown increasingly restless. The return of popular former defender Sol Bamba as Lamouchi’s assistant has gone some way to calming a growing storm, but there is unrest building beneath Tan.
A pocket of fans protested against the Malaysian businessman ahead of their most recent home game, a 1-0 defeat by Millwall last month. Tan has twice taken Cardiff to the Premier League since buying the club in 2010 but it grows harder to remember the good times, even for a club that spent all of the 1990s in either the third or fourth tier.
Cardiff have become an unhappy club; gradually at first but quickly more recently.
A disconnect is widening and the club’s hierarchy, headed up by Tan, attract the ire. Just seven league wins have come all season and none within the club can convince themselves it is nearly good enough.
Not least Tan, the owner who once infamously tried to change “the Bluebirds'” colours to red, asked for players to be shown videos of long-range goals and proudly showed off a red floor-length jacket in the dressing room.
He was responsible for sacking Morison and Hudson, with patience expiring quickly in the face of dismal results.
Tan had appointed Hudson following a rare trip to the UK in November but soon let the axe fall. Hudson was sacked within 10 minutes of a 1-1 draw at home against Wigan Athletic, a ruthless call that the former boss was later shown relaying to his young children in a family video that went viral.
Tan’s about-turn on Hudson entrenched the belief that Cardiff are a club lurching from one bad call to another. A sense of crisis comes in waves without knowing if there is worse to come.
It is hoped Lamouchi, who has been out of work since a spell with Qatari side Al-Duhail ended in August 2021, can find the answers. A short-term contract is in place only until the summer.
“A new level of professionalism that the club deserves,” said chairman Mehmet Dalman, flanking Lamouchi in front of the media two weeks ago, alongside Bamba and Ken Choo, the club’s chief executive.
Tan was not present. Nor, according to Lamouchi, had he yet even spoken to Cardiff’s new manager.
The interview process had been handled by Dalman and Choo but Tan remains the most influential figure in Cardiff’s thinking. Every decision of significance continues to be made by the club’s owner, typically from thousands of miles away.
An affection for Cardiff is said to endure, with Tan continuing to watch games live from his home in Malaysia. Publicly, too, he maintains there are no immediate plans to sell.
“To those guys who want Tan Out, or say Mehmet Dalman out, or Ken Choo out, if they are so smart maybe they should plough in their own money — or ask a rich Welshman, probably a billionaire, to buy this club and take it to the Premier League,” he told local reporters in November.
“A large part of my wealth has gone to Cardiff, all my family members want me to sell ASAP. What do I tell them in response? That when the time is right we will, but the time is not right, yet. I believe we can make this work, that I can get some of that money back.”
Cardiff managers since Tan takeover
MANAGER(S) APPOINTED LEFT
Sabri Lamouchi
27 January 2023
Dean Whitehead (caretaker)
14 January 2023
27 January 2023
Mark Hudson
18 September 2022
14 January 2023
Steve Morison
29 October 2021
18 September 2022
Mick McCarthy
22 January 2021
23 October 2021
Neil Harris
16 November 2019
21 January 2021
Neil Warnock
5 October 2016
11 November 2019
Paul Trollope
18 May 2016
4 October 2016
Russell Slade
5 October 2014
7 May 2016
Danny Gabbidon & Scott Young (caretakers)
18 September 2014
5 October 2014
Ole Gunnar Solskjær
2 January 2014
18 September 2014
David Kerslake (caretaker)
27 December 2013
2 January 2014
Malky Mackay
17 June 2011
27 December 2013
Dave Jones
25 May 2005
30 May 2011
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Investment during a 12-year reign has been in the region of £200million ($245m) and Cardiff owed creditors £114million at the financial year ending June 2021, a figure that will only have risen since. Cardiff’s most recent accounts outlined a further £22million had been borrowed at an interest rate of up to nine per cent.
Parachute payments — the guaranteed money clubs receive after relegation — from the Premier League are now long gone, ceasing in the summer of 2021. Cardiff, according to its last accounts, remain “heavily reliant upon the continued financial investment” of Tan. Without it, they add, “the future of the club would look much more precarious”.
Tan’s personal wealth, meanwhile, has also suffered in the last decade. Forbes estimated he was worth £1.32billion in 2014 but the most recent forecast pitched his wealth at £744million following the impact of COVID-19 on his business portfolio that includes hotels around the world.
Clawing back his investment in Cardiff is an impossible task in the Championship and even less likely should the unthinkable happen with relegation to League One. Like Reading and Bristol City, any change of ownership would require Tan to swallow an enormous loss without returning to the Premier League. That resolve is facing its greatest test yet.
“Something has to be done because at the moment we’re on a downward spiral where there’s no obvious way out unless something fairly drastic happens,” says Keith Morgan, chair of the Cardiff City Supporters’ Trust. “There appears to be no kind of plan. The club gives the impression of being disorganised from top to bottom.
“Fans are concerned. Performances on the field are no longer up to expectations. That triggers a drift from apathy towards anger and that’s been going on for some time now. That’ll continue to increase unless there’s more clarification on what the club wants to be.”
Tan saw potential in a club that had been struggling to pay its bills before his arrival in 2010. There was a methodical clearing up of an inherited mess before a hat-trick of play-off defeats in consecutive years ended with a first promotion to the Premier League in 2013.
By that time, however, it had become clear Tan’s reign would be different.
Malaysian superstitions decreed blue was an unlucky colour and ahead of the first promotion-winning season it had been decided that Cardiff should change their home colours to red. Fans reacted angrily and, though blue eventually returned in January 2015 following a public vote, that protracted issue has never fully been forgotten.
Those within the club forgave Tan his whims. He was propping up the club financially and offering the support required to make that leap. Even at a time when he would be a regular visitor to the Cardiff City Stadium, his interaction with players would only ever be fleeting.
He’d often visit the dressing room but only to wish us luck,” remembers one former player, speaking anonymously to protect their relationships. “There was a Tuesday night game and he was supposed to have gone back overseas but the manager tells us that the owner will be in at 7pm.
“We thought it was strange but he comes in with two security guards and this big, massive box. Five foot, something like that. He says ‘Lads, I know I said I was going home but I was in Italy on business and in the Italian airport, before I flew back to Malaysia, I saw this’.
“Then the security guy opens the box and it’s a red floor-length jacket. He says, ‘It’s a sign’. So he’s flown to Italy on business, seen this jacket in the airport and he’s come all the way back to Cardiff to show us this jacket because it matches the kit.
“The security man even holds it out for him to put it on in the dressing room. None of us know what to say but he says ‘Good luck, enjoy the game’, and he’s gone.”
In his early years as owner, he made it clear to management and players that there ought to be a greater willingness to shoot from long range. The more shots, in theory, the greater the chance of scoring.
“It wasn’t a tactical demand put on players but they put on a video of goals from the halfway line,” the former player says.
“The manager was asked to put it on. It wasn’t just halfway-line shots, it was long-range stuff. It probably didn’t help but Mark Hudson, our centre-half at the time, had scored from the halfway line for Cardiff at home (to Derby in 2012) and that fed into the narrative of what the owner wanted. He thought we should shoot from long distance more and wanted to show all these goals.
“He’d show you goals from Charlie Adam and David Beckham and we’re watching this in a room. That was one of the things players obviously found ridiculous but it felt like a lot of the weird things were left to managers to deal with.”
Tan is rarely seen in Cardiff nowadays. A short figure, once regularly in the directors’ box with replica shirt incongruously tucked into suit trousers, he does not visit often, entrusting the running of the club to his long-serving lieutenants Dalman and Choo.
The absence of football experience at the top of the club has become a bug-bear for Tan’s detractors. They cannot see a strategy or vision. Those to have worked within the club, who wished to remain anonymous to protect their relationships, have also told The Athletic of internal breakdowns in communication. They cite a lack of alignment between the football operations and those running the club.
The last 18 months, in particular, have made Cardiff appear muddled, unable to point the best way forward when switching from one manager’s methods to another.
The current hierarchy, largely unchanged since 2016, could be tolerated so long as Cardiff were chasing success but Tan, whose business interests are as wide as they are successful around the globe, is struggling to convince supporters this remains a club capable of competing for promotion.
Cardiff do not employ a director of football and there are concerns among some fans that Tan, Choo and Dalman are unable to devote themselves to reviving the club.
Choo juggles his role as Cardiff chief executive with the same position at HR Owen, the luxury car sales firm that Tan bought in 2013 after visiting a London showroom to find customer care was badly lacking. HR Owen, which cost Tan £43million, specialises in high-end brands like Ferrari, Bentley and Aston Martin, and Choo splits his time between their headquarters and a base in South Wales.
Choo had never worked in football or with cars before given new challenges in the UK, having previously been general manager of Tan’s Berjaya resorts and casino in the Seychelles.
Dalman, primarily an investment banker who does not draw a salary from Cardiff, also sits as a director at HR Owen alongside his non-executive duties at the Championship club, where he has become the most front-facing of the hierarchy. The 64-year-old’s country of residence is listed as Monaco and he chairs WMG, a private investment office he founded in 2004.
Dalman and Choo were responsible for interviewing Lamouchi — and other managers — and also sit on a transfer committee with Tan. This is the panel that ultimately sanctions signings.
Managers seek approval for targets based on financial and footballing reasons but Tan has warned that “stupid mistakes” will not be made again. The signings of Denmark striker Andreas Cornelius for £8million in 2014 and Josh Murphy for £11million five years ago continue to irritate the man who footed the bill.
One agent to speak anonymously with The Athletic to protect relationships recalled one set of negotiations over a transfer where the player in question was offered half of his current wages to join Cardiff. The tactic of Choo was described as irrational.
This season has seen playing budgets slashed, with Tan unprepared to throw further resources at the club’s problems. The bulk of Cardiff’s highest earners, including Murphy, Leandro Bacuna, Aden Flint, Marlon Pack and Alex Smithies, were all released at the end of last season, with long-serving midfielder Joe Ralls accepting reduced terms on the two-year deal he signed last summer. Sean Morrison, the former club captain, was also allowed to leave last month.
The summer overhaul was driven by Morison, weeks before he lost his job as manager, and included 11 free transfers and three loans. Callum Robinson’s arrival from West Brom for £1.5million was very much an exception in a squad that is now thought to be operating on a budget that would put them in the bottom half of the Championship. The play-offs, nevertheless, were outlined internally as the aim for this season.
A new-look squad has struggled to gel under three different managers. Not since November 5 have Cardiff won in the Championship and a return of only 21 goals makes them comfortably the division’s lowest scorers. They have failed to score in six of the last seven league games.
“It’s very hard to be a success when you’re cutting the budget and then chopping the manager,” says one former employee. “The understanding of the situation isn’t there.”
The greatest tragedy in Cardiff City’s modern history will always be Emiliano Sala. He was the striker signed from French club Nantes in January 2019 for a club-record fee of £15million, the goalscorer tasked with keeping Cardiff in the Premier League.
He never got the opportunity. Sala died in a plane crash over the English channel within two days of joining Cardiff. A subsequent report concluded that neither the plane — nor the pilot, David Ibbotson, who also died — had the necessary licences to have operated the flight.
“Remembering Emiliano,” wrote Cardiff via their Twitter account on the fourth anniversary of his death last month — it remains an impossible moment to forget as cold, clinical legal battles continue.
Nantes have always maintained they should be paid the first instalment of Sala’s transfer fee, £5.3million. That was endorsed by a FIFA tribunal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected Cardiff’s appeal against the ruling last year.
Cardiff remain of the belief that Sala was not officially their player at the time of his death and have now appealed the CAS hearing at a Swiss Federal Court. The latest verdict is due in the coming weeks.
The legal arguments continue but their impact has been felt on the ground this month. Cardiff were placed under a three-window transfer embargo by football’s world governing body FIFA in December owing to their refusal to pay Nantes. The English Football League also listed Cardiff among clubs under a transfer embargo.
Dalman initially told BBC Radio Wales that Cardiff had “no intention of paying” but within weeks they had relented by giving Nantes in the region of £7million to cover the fee and interest.
Both FIFA and the EFL have subsequently lifted those embargoes but Cardiff were limited to recruiting only loan players and free transfers in the final days of the January window. Three new players had been targeted by Lamouchi but only Sory Kaba, the forward loaned from Midtjylland, arrived on deadline day.
Lamouchi said ahead of the weekend that Kaba had been signed by the club’s recruitment team, not him. Attempts to also bring in an experienced centre-back and a left-back both came to nothing.
It leaves Cardiff with a squad struggling to convince they will keep the wolves from the door in a relegation fight.
Saturday’s 1-0 loss at Hull City brought a disjointed performance, with Robinson’s first-half penalty miss proving costly. Cardiff were functional enough in spells but the lack of attacking intent will have distressed Lamouchi as he plans for a first home game against in-form Middlesbrough this afternoon.
“It’s not my fault. It’s not the players’ fault, it’s our fault,” said the manager. “We are where we are. We don’t deserve to be where we are, but we’re in this shit position and we need to work together to get out of this position. All together.”
A shit position, indeed. The concern is whether it gets worse before it gets better.
“I understand the frustrations, I understand the disappointment and I understand the criticism. But we are in this very specific predicament and we’re doing everything that we can,” said Dalman, when approached by The Athletic for comment.
“We’ve brought in an experienced manager, we are paying our debts to Nantes but continuing to have our legal action intact, and we feel as though a turnaround will come in time. We realise that we are in a battle and we need the support to get behind the manager because our future right now is all on the football pitch.”
