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And before MM joined we had bad results when Bennett was in the side... Point is there were more factors that Bennett in our bad and good and bad again runs this season.
For his wages and the availability of other, cheaper and quicker, left back / left wing backs... I would let him go.
Dalman does remind me of Swiss Tony.
To a degree it seems to.
I was in a meeting with Mehmet Dalman in January 2015, during which he boldly stated he wasn't involved with Cardiff City when the club was rebranded. In truth, he joined the board in January 2012.
Dalman was appointed as City's Chairman seven years and nine months ago. If his latest claims are true and the club really has needed Vincent Tan to put in £3 million a month to keep it going, that's a damning indictment of the way in which he the board have been running the show. Premier League parachute payments, season ticket money and an additional £3 million a month to maintain a mid-table Championship club with a mediocre squad? Great work.
Assuming that you have spent time in his company, no doubt he speaks very highly of you as well. Also I would have no doubt that you would have spent the time touching your forelock, licking his arse and trying to get match tickets out of him because thats the kind of person you obviously are - say one thing and do the exact opposite.
You couldn't really have got this more wrong. I was invited to one meeting at the club which Dalman hosted. It lasted about an hour. I felt the whole thing was a bit nauseating - a daft PR exercise overflowing with bullshit on both sides from start to finish. Dalman came across as very smooth but more than a little oily. I turned down an invitation to speak to him one-to-one after the main meeting and also declined an offer of a free ticket to the next home game.
So what do you reckon regarding Dalman's apparent claim (which he intially made in January) that Vincent Tan has been putting in £3 million a month during the pandemic to keep the club afloat? £36 million a year in hand-outs from the owner on top of the Premier League parachute payments and your season ticket money to keep a mid-ranking Championship team going - do you reckon that's likely? If so, what do you think about the way the club is being managed in financial terms? After all, if Dalman and Co are spending so much money but achieving so little, it can't be healthy, can it?
Yes, I do believe it. I also believe that every single Championship club is in exactly the same position to different degrees. I don't understand why anyone would not believe it. What is there to be gained from making it up ? The accounts can easily be checked when they are filed. If the club has any ambitions at all to be successful then that is what it costs to run a club of our size. Instead of moaning all the time about anything they do, we should be bloody grateful that he is keeping us afloat, at the same time as backing the manager/team in still trying to get promotion.
I don't think that would be a valid comparison. One was the club owner, the other is the Chairman and they seem to be very different characters. Besides which, I've only spent an hour or so in Dalman's company, during which he was busily engaging in a cheesy PR exercise. I spent much more time in Hammam's company, often on a one-to-one basis, during which he talked about all manner of crap.
Perhaps a better comparison would be Peter Ridsdale, but again a direct comparison is difficult as I attended many meetings with him in a variety of settings and only one with Dalman which was staged by the club. I'll admit I always liked Ridsdale - he was entertaining company and I greatly admired how hard he worked and the phenomenal amount of hours he put in while he was Chairman. I reckon there's every chance the cub would have crashed in 2005 without him. However, he was obviously dodgy to put it mildly and could bullshit with the best of them. He had that down to an art form.
Indeed they can and it'll be interesting to do so when we finally get the chance. What is there to be gained from making the figure up? I don't know, but I'm confident it's exaggerated. After all, the club's Premier League wage bill in 2018/19 was £42.5 million. It's sure to have reduced significantly since then, so given the fact that the club has received large parachute payments for the last two years, where have these enormous sums Dalman referred to been going?
I wouldn't rule the idea out completely, though. After all, I firmly believe that the claims some fans have been making about the club being a well-run operation in recent years is fiction.