Leaderboard

McMahon has been chairman for over a decade, clubs our size don't have professional directors or chairman. Weir has been involved for a similar period, has been on the SPL board and is overqualified for the job he has been doing on a part time basis. Neither of the two could be described as amateurs by anyone who isn't a moron. You see wee buzzwords emerge in our support then idiots keep on parroting them because they see other idiots getting social media likes. Ask them to explain in detail and it will just be vague nonsense like that reply.

Obviously I've made my feelings clear on the quality of Scottish football for a while now. I think it's worth noting though that the number of Scottish players in our league is now less than 40%. About 38% the last time I looked which is an absolute disgrace. Secondly the number of U21 Scottish players that are getting even semi regular football was something like 4. 4 in the whole league. We need to stop importing garbage and start actually focusing on youth development. It's not like the standard of the league prohibits it.

Absolutely agree, but the stakes are too high to give youngsters the chance to learn (and make inevitable mistakes and form dips). A sixteen or eighteen team division might though. In my lifetime (which is a long fuckin' time by the way) every change that has been made to Scottish football has made things worse. The move away from Div 1 and 2 in 1975 was supposed to 'make football more competitive and improve the international team' and all the reincarnations of the 10/12 team top division since have literally made things worse, although, for me, the biggest and potentially fatal blow is TV, which ploughs BILLIONS into the EPL, which trickles to the championship and below but not to Scotland. I said in an earlier post that English Sky money is the very reason we're compteting financially with Tier 4/5/6 sides for players. I'd much rather see a league set up with proper financial sustainability rules, that stops the likes of Rangers only existing because of constant shareholder and investor 'soft loans' and teams, while free to buy and atract players, have to breed their own and crucially, can't build up debt year after year after year. I could go on all night about this, but basically, finance has fucked Scottish football, whether it be Celtic and Rangers spunking money to try to compete in Europe, or the rest of the SPL teams spending money they don't have to try and compete with Celtic and Rangers or stay in top league to keep the income the SPL gets from TV. Lets get rid of Celtic and Rangers out the league, make teams live within their means and that will ensure a more competitive league.

This is my greatest worry at the moment. I fully expect us to head into January in a bit of a panic and proceed to throw a lot of shite against the wall in the hope that some of it sticks. If some does, and we stay up, then the same system will remain in place for the foreseeable future I'd imagine. I fear that we will only look to really change the way we do things when this current system fails and we finally go down, at which point it may very well be too late. Oh, they could be implemented at minimal cost for sure. The costs involved would be very small in comparison to the money we need to keep spending every January to try to rectify the issues we create for ourselves in the summer. Ideally, any business we do in January would be to cover for injuries or if a really good deal comes across the manager's desk. We don't want to be in the position of trying to fix our season every January. I'm certainly not from a footballing background, but I work extensively with analytics and datasets, and many of the strategies employed can be implemented across various industries. I don't expect to hear anything though. I just hope the club have the people in-house to look into the improvements that are needed. Much the same as other winter windows I'd imagine. We'll look for some bargain-basement loan deals with clubs who are maybe willing to share some of the expenditure just to get a player out the door for experience or to get him away from his parent club. On the plus side, we do have Pape Souaré likely leaving in January when his six-month contract is up. If we could somehow send Oli Shaw back despite his loan deal running to the end of the season that would free up a wage. The big problem for me is that we signed both Conor Wilkinson and Theo Bair to two-year deals. Bair and Wilkinson will likely be going nowhere any time soon unless a club is daft enough to take them off our hands. One thing I would say is that we've been down this road before and it has worked for us. But when you roll the dice and don't really seem to have much of a plan you're going to lose eventually.

Oh, I'm not suggesting we continue to do the same thing. Far from it. Recruitment and structure wise, I think it is quite clear I am disappointed with how we have performed and it needs to change for the better. But to my reading some on here are getting hung up on history and not addressing the present. We've signed Josh Morris, Theo Bair etc and that was poor. But that is done we need to let that go, learn, adjust our approach and sort the present. On and off the pitch. My concern is that because of the previous direction, we are not in a good position to address the current deficiencies on the pitch. My question to Steelboy was to ask him how we are to fund the player recruitment everybody agrees is required. It is a valid question. I am not convinced funds are available for what we require......hopefully I am wrong in that.....and I have heard nothing from the Club this season that suggests otherwise. The only practical solution I can come up with is to sell Kelly and Miller, if that is even possible looking to injury and form. Dickie's panic press release was pretty vague, waffle in fact. You have come up with several innovative, workable proposals which I wish the Club would get in touch with you to discuss. And it may be that those suggestions could be implemented at minimal cost. Certainly worth exploring as soon as possible. But as for player recruitment, how do we fund actual player purchases in January whilst we are burdened with existing contracts and little income? It is ok saying bring in a striker, a midfielder, wingers but how to we do that....urgently? Other changes hopefully will be implemented, but our form and league position makes on field performance the priority. On and off field go hand in hand I agree but we desperately need to rescue our season in the here and now.. And keep on typing those essays. I enjoy reading a lot of the sense you bring to the table. You clearly care about our Club and looking for solutions.

If it's £250k net a year on top of whatever income the women's team bring in that's far too much on our turnover. If anyone outside the club feels differently let them pay for it.

As the bard of Avon wrote, “there’s the rub!” Like it or lump it, Derek Adams was correct. The standard of Scottish football is dreadful and every season it just gets worse. I’ve not heard any of his fellow managers say he was wrong. Consider what Livingston manager David Martindale said when asked about it “I had a conversation with someone else who has managed at that level in England and up here and that was the same comment I got from them.” He bemoaned the fact that for financial reasons he was forced to recruit players from the English National Leagues. He made a valid point that the size of the league puts too much pressure on clubs on the relegation front with dread of the consequential financial damages and that if enlarged, clubs might be inclined to take a different approach. A culture of hiring and firing managers has led to short-term thinking and decision making as clubs become more risk-averse and this is another factor contributing to the drop in the quality of our football. On top of that factor in clubs having to play each other up to 4 times in a season and an inane splitting of the league. I think if you’re being honest, you will agree with much of this. These points have been made before and continue to be made by fans of all clubs around the country. Yet those responsible for running the game seem oblivious. The only games that interest TV are those involving the OF who get the lion’s share of TV money and argue they are so entitled, as they are the only reason there IS a TV deal. The OF don’t give a jot about Scottish football. To them, it’s only a medium, their control and domination of which, allows them access to the vast sums of money offered by European football. They are, and always have been, solely interested in preserving their hegemony over Scottish football.

Fizoxy you will be right on the cost of recruitment on the women’s team and the first team, but it is the first team for me that is Motherwell, not the women’s team and as much of the funding as possible should, in my opinion be channeled to the men’s first and reserve team, otherwise there is no Motherwell FC. My reasoning on the community aspect is how many extra female fans on the back of having a women’s team costing x£ have we accumulated/added since fan ownership? Probably not a lot seeing as our average gates are more or less the same as before. For me the unnecessary, in the current climate “nicety” that is a women’s team seems to be, in much constrained budgets in teams like Motherwell something that should be re assessed. Any perceived, or actual loss of community spirit is for me worth it to allow us to survive in the SPL, any additional as a result available funds allowing the manager…whoever he may be, to try and recruit a better quality of player than the general dross that was brought in through the summer excluding a few exceptions like Mika n Gent. As for adversity we all know on this forum that adversity has been creeping around Fir Park for years, and now may be the time that serious and needed decisions need to be made by the half of the board that remain, again adversity may have caused our inability to attract a new CEO a Chairman and of course a few better quality team members.

I know it's not acceptable to say it but I don't care, women's footballs is pish. The goalkeeping is an utter embarrassment and undoes any slight good the outfield player have. I wouldn't waste any precious funds on a woman's team.

I reckon it's more than a "pet project" and is probably a requirement to obtain "funding" from various bodies, which without that Women's Team wouldn't be made available to the "club".

I think this is key. Fans have grown accustomed to Motherwell not just being a top-flight club, but being a top-flight club that has never really been in serious danger of relegation. Sure, we've flirted with it a few times, but often we're finishing top six or even top four. But the truth is, we're really not much bigger, if at all, than the likes of Dunfermline, Partick Thistle, and Falkirk. We're a fan-funded club not through choice, but because that's the only real option we have. It wasn't as if we were knocking back multi-million pound offers for the club to implement a fan model instead. It's where we're at. I'd rather we still had a club that the fanbase had a real say in the running of, even if it meant we eventually dropped down a division or so. When the alternative is most likely someone buying in who doesn't have the club's best interests at heart, I'll sacrifice our Premier League status to avoid that. I'd rather watch a team in the Championship or Division 1 that is populated by young local talent and owned by the fans than watch a team of middle-of-the-road top-flight journeymen under the ownership of some consortium or individual who's never really around.