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There are no one-team cities of half a million people in the UK apart from Leeds.
Some sites quote misleading population figures based on metropolitan district populations (so some have Bradford over 500,000 but that includes a good few satellite towns).
Cardiff's population is around 340,000.
But with its bigger catchment area and capital city status it should be established in the Premier League regardless of city population.
In an ideal world the bullshitters who say they are proud to be welsh and have plenty of money would see what a successful football team does for a city and its region
But they are bullshitters
So we have had in the past local businessmen and now we have Vincent Tan
If my aunty had bollocks she would be my uncle
It is always thus
The way the club is run is an utter farce. The board of directors consists of Dalman, Ken, Borley, Datuk Caramella, Derek Chin and Abdul Rasheed. There are non-league clubs with more football nous and knowledge than that lot.
Competitor clubs must look on in amazement at the way the money the club has been given from VT, the Premier League and parachute payments has been squandered.
How is it even possible for a team of such utter awfulness to take the field on Sunday? Dubious agents, Neil and James Warnock and sundry other characters have exploited the weapons-grade levels of incompetence of the ludicrous ‘transfer committee’ reducing us to that. God knows where we go from here.
When Tan took over the club we had just lost a playoff final. In 7 of the 11 seasons since his takeover, we have failed to do as well as the season prior to that takeover.
I can't see that as being successful.
Ye....I realise I was a bit generous on the half a million.
My point is , if we had gone out of business 12 or 13 years ago and had to reform in non-league, it'd be highly unlikely that we'd be much lower than we are at present, given the amount of money that would be invested in a club with the fanbase and catchment area we have. That's not me being arrogant , I just think it's the most logical outcome. We are not Halifax, Wrexham or Southend.
People can talk about Tan saving us, but there is a reasonable likelihood that had he not saved us , we would be in a similar or even better situation now.
We would be better in that we would likely have more supporter involvement. We'd more likely have a team and a style of football that we'd all like to see.
We'd have missed a season in the EPL. We would have missed more than a decade in the top two tiers. These things were pipe dreams in the 1990s, and the idea that we would have marched through the non leagues back to our current spot is fanciful in the extreme. You talk about the potential for investment- were you around in the 1990s? We were a better buy back then, when everyone actually thought we would get crowds of 40k+ if we made it to what is now the championship.
I disagree with your statement.
Think the point he's making that no one locally is willing to invest in Cardiff to exploit the potential population of inner Cardiff and its surrounding area , therefore we must accept that Vincent is by far the only loyal business friend we have willing to support us with his own money .
Money is a very good starting point though and my point is that the owner has pumped enough in for any vaguely competent CEO and Chairman to have made a better job of running the club than ours have.
I’d like to believe that Tan, Dalman and Choo would finally see the light and accept that they don’t have the football knowledge collectively to tyrn us into, for example, a Burnley, Brighton, Palace, Brentford or even a Coventry, but City fans have been talking about the need for something like a Director of Football for five years and more and we’re still as far away as ever from appointing one.
I’m guessing and I may be wrong, but I think the Mackay/Moody incident deeply effected Vincent Tan and has left him with a deep distrust of “football people” - it’s as if he has an advisor he trusts who makes recommendations on things like managerial appointments based on the sort of person they think Tan could work with.
Four of our last five managers have been, basically, defensive, long ball merchants, hence we’ve ended with the current very limited technically squad of senior pros which are so much worse at retaining the ball than almost every team they play. This has been a gradual process which Tan, Dalman and Choo have done nothing to try to halt, so I can only conclude that it is a route they have been happy to go down - for me, given his public pronouncements on the game, it seems reasonable to believe that Vincent Tan likes us to be bigger and more physical than our opponents and has little patience with what he sees as messing about with the ball at the back, it’s entirely believable that he’d want us to lump it forward as soon as possible.