What has happened to Cardiff City AFC?

[Nobody's Rep]

I can't fault his financial input provided he doesn't eventually lump the debt onto the club but for someone who has built a business empire I cannot fathom why he doesn't take stock and decide how his investment can improve the club and make it more valuable to sell. He just keeps making bad decision after bad decision.

I can't understand why he can't appoint a Director of Football and set them a budget for the football side of the club along with various performance targets. The DoF could then report to him regularly on how the various football departments are performing.

I'd love see vinnie go into the dragons den and explain to them why they should invest in his business model

[goats]

I think that is the point. There’s a lot of nostalgic looking back at the past in this thread, but I’ll ask a question I asked in another thread yesterday - how did you feel when you first heard of Vincent Tan’s interest in the club? Maybe you were unhappy about the thought of all of that money being pumped into the club, but I doubt it very much. For myself, I was delighted, because it should have been the forerunner of a glorious decade for the club, but it hasn’t been. How on earth can hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment have led to a position where we get a woeful spectacle like last Saturday which culminated in yet another poor choice of manager being sacked?

Cardiff City have become a textbook example of how not to run a football club when it could and should have been on a par with teams like, say, Palace, Brighton and even Leicester (I’m not saying we should have won the Premier League mind!). If I was to pick one thing that we’ve been spectacularly bad at since Vincent Tan became our owner, it’s selling players at a profit - it has happened occasionally, but never remotely close to the extent that it should have done given the extent of our transfer spending under our current owner.

We have an owner about whom it was freely admitted he knew little about football when he first took over, but, given what’s happened over the past close to thirteen years, you have to ask has that situation changed? I’m not sure about the veracity of that story about him wanting goalkeepers to shoot more, but I can certainly believe that he wants our players to shoot once we get within about thirty and forty yards of the opponent’s goal - there’s a reason why the people who saw John Buchanan’s goal against Swansea all of those years ago - it’s unique, because you’re not supposed to beat a well positioned goalkeeper from that range solely by the power of your shot.

I think it’s safe to say that we’ve had the misfortune to have been run by a multi millionaire who has never got football and has, apparently convinced himself that he does. How else can you explain the failure to make a Director of Football type appointment as soon as it became clear that the Tan approach was not working as well as it should have been? As soon as Vincent Tan got his feet under the table at Cardiff City, he changed the club colours when an experienced football man working alongside him would have told him such a course of action would provoke exactly the reaction that it did.

Certainly since the Malky Mackay episode, it seems to me that our owner has been reluctant to make the sort of managerial appointments that he feels he cannot control (Warnock was the exception that proved the rule!) x this has led to a series of underwhelming choices with only Ole really being the sort of “big name” you’d expect all of that money to provide. Maybe the fact that Ole was a failure has influenced future choices, but none of them felt right to me at the time and, early Warnock apart, I’d say my initial reservations were justified.

City fans should have been said to have struck lucky when a then billionaire came on board, but we didn’t because we got the wrong billionaire = I’ll always have some sympathy with Vincent Tan because you cannot dispute his financial commitment to the club down the years, but he really has been his own worst enemy.

Spot on, can you imagine any other business where millions of pounds are at stake and a rich clueless (about that particular business) owner wouldn’t put someone who knows “the business” in charge? Begs belief….what’s the definition of madness again?