David

All part of the fun of being a football fan I guess.

Also worth considering what we'd term "succeeding". For me, it's at least being in the race for top six and playing the kind of football that makes Motherwell worth watching.

I think it's a mistake to assume that failing to meet expectations at Rosenborg tells us much about how Johansson will do with us. Rosenborg operate in a completely different footballing environment. They play in a 20,000 seat stadium, regularly spend millions of euros on players, have won a record 26 Norwegian league titles, have huge domestic support and have played more European matches than any other Norwegian club. Their expectation isn't simply to be competitive. It's to challenge for titles, qualify for Europe and play a recognisable brand of football while doing it. Our reality is almost the opposite. We work with a fraction of that budget, constantly rebuild squads, develop players, sell them on and try to outperform clubs with greater resources. Success at Motherwell isn't measured by whether you win the league. It's about organising a team properly, improving players, recruiting intelligently, competing consistently and maximising limited resources. That's why I don't think you can simply take Johansson's Rosenborg record and transpose it onto Motherwell. In fact, some of the things Rosenborg themselves credited him with - improving training standards, introducing stronger structure and methodology, developing young players and creating value from them, are potentially much more relevant to the job here than whether he was capable of satisfying the expectations of Norway's biggest club. Of course, there are questions about how his spell ended, particularly around adaptability and leadership when results got away from him. Those are worth discussing. But Rosenborg and Motherwell are two very different jobs, with very different expectations, resources and definitions of success. Another thing worth considering is Jens. Flip his career around for a second. Imagine we'd never had him at Motherwell and he was coming to us now from Toulouse. We'd look at his record there and see a manager sitting near the bottom of Ligue 1 without a win in his first four league games. If we applied the same logic being applied to Johansson, plenty of people would immediately conclude that Askou wasn't good enough. But we know that's bollocks because we've already seen Askou manage Motherwell. We know he was capable of coming into our particular environment, working with our budget and players, and being successful. That's the point. Managers don't operate in a vacuum. The club, expectations, budget, squad, league and the actual job they're being asked to do matter enormously. In the end, Alfred didn't meet Rosenborg's expectations, and they were entitled to sack him. But we're not asking him to do the Rosenborg job. We're asking him to organise and improve players, develop young talent, operate within a restricted budget, create value in the squad and make us competitive against clubs with greater resources. Askou is probably the perfect demonstration of why judging a manager purely on what happened at a completely different type of football club can be completely misleading.

100%. I always believed the idea was that we wanted to see some more progressive football while trying to achieve the goals that a club like ours should have, which, in case anyone has forgotten, is always to secure safety first and foremost, then push for the top six. Last season was an anomaly in more ways than one. The entire league was crazy, with Hearts almost winning it. We need to accept that along with the way we play will come spells where we don't look great and we don't win. But that doesn't mean we throw out the entire playbook and revert to the traditional Scottish approach, does it?

100%! Surely he must know that football players only understand chat like "running their socks off" and ensuring they're a "bunch of good, honest lads" and chat like that? Who does he think he's dealing with? Professionals? Down with that sort of thing!

I always love the analysis that consists of downplaying the wins and positives, but absolutely playing up the losses and negatives. Can't beat it.

He's been in the door for 18 days.

If there's an exact opposite of papering over the cracks, what you've posted is exactly it. Hibs away "decent enough." I disagree there, you're not giving us enough credit for a very good away win. This is the same Hibs that went on to beat Rangers at Ibrox in their next game, and didn't lose in the league until they played Hearts. So that was a good performance and win, especially away from home. Falkirk at home "struggled." I don't know if I'd agree with that. We did okay, and Falkirk are a decent enough side. They'll take points off other teams this season. Stenhousemuir was a game that fell victim to our European run. We chose the side based on other competitions, unfortunately. It is what it was. Not ideal, but again, we have to pick and choose our battles at that stage of the season. Dundee United was a very good, comprehensive win. Them being down to 10 men is neither here nor there. We won 3-0. St Mirren. "Could have conceded five" but we could very easily have scored five as well! It was one of those games. Rangers, we lost to the better side fair and square. No issues there. Same with Aberdeen. I'm certainly not going to be proclaiming us as finishing top four this season, but we've been fine so far. We're fifth in the league, we've won two, drawn two, lost two, and our goal difference is close to neutral. Oh, and for those saying we're not scoring enough? Only Hearts and Celtic have scored more in the league so far. So yeah, not amazing. Not terrible.

I know it doesn't fit with the reactions, but the truth is, it happens. We've seen this kind of thing happen to teams in this division all the time. Outside of the Old Firm and whichever Edinburgh/big city club happens to be having a good season most of the other clubs can easily do this to each other on any given week. This time it was our turn. I'm sure we'll see over-reactions, doomsday chat and all sorts, then we'll even out and be challenging for top six by the end of the year.

Absolutely not true, btw.

Lengthy rambling post incoming, btw... I think there are two different lines of thought being discussed here. The first is whether the Society should ever use some of its money to invest in the club rather than continuing indefinitely to put everything into the reserve. On that, I can see a strong argument for change. The second is whether this particular structure is the right way to do it. I’m less certain about that. One thing I wouldn’t underestimate is the risk of doing nothing. As a club, we are competing against clubs where private owners or investors can put additional capital into training facilities, stadium improvements, commercial infrastructure, recruitment systems and sometimes simply provide financial headroom when it’s needed. That doesn’t guarantee success, and badly spent money can obviously achieve very little, but over a number of years that investment can compound. Better infrastructure can help develop players. Better commercial operations can generate more revenue. Better facilities can improve recruitment. Those things can eventually feed back into the playing budget. So if Motherwell cannot generate enough surplus internally to fund that type of long-term investment, and also decides not to access Society or external capital, there is a genuine risk of falling behind structurally. For me, that is probably the strongest argument in favour of the principle behind Active Investment. Where I think we need to be careful is making the jump from: “Motherwell needs access to investment” to: “therefore this particular annual rolling-loan model is the answer.” They aren’t quite the same thing in my opinion. The £1.5m reserve is still the first thing I would want clarified. If £1.5m represents the amount the Society believes it prudently needs to protect the club against relegation and an unforeseen event, I still struggle slightly with the logic of diverting half of the default subscription income elsewhere before getting there. If £1.5m is simply a longer-term target rather than a minimum safety level, that's a different matter. But I think members need to understand which it is. I also don’t think simply inflation-adjusting an old £1.5m number necessarily gives us the answer. The correct reserve in 2026 should be based on the risks facing Motherwell in 2026, not just what £1.5m from years ago is worth today. The consultation explains that around £1m could be required in a relegation scenario, plus another £500k for an unexpected loss of income. That sounds reasonable as a starting point, but I’d be interested in how far the downside scenario goes. For example, what happens if we spend two seasons in the Championship rather than one? What happens if relegation also affects transfer income? The consultation itself acknowledges the importance of recent player sales in covering potential shortfalls while the underlying operating deficit is reduced. If we were relegated, there is at least a possibility that player valuations fall, buyers know we are in a weaker negotiating position, some players want to leave, commercial income drops further, and the timing of sales becomes less favourable. That doesn’t mean £1.5m is wrong, by the way. It just means fans might like to know that those risks have been considered together rather than relegation being treated as a single isolated £1m event. I also agree with the point made above about the difference between productive investment and plugging ordinary losses. If the Society lends £200k for a project that has a credible business case and will save the club £60k a year, increase commercial income, improve an asset or otherwise produce measurable long-term value, I can see the logic. If the money gradually starts disappearing into normal annual operating expenditure, that is a very different proposition. The answer there could be a pretty firm rule that Active Investment is for identifiable investment projects, not simply another source of working capital to reduce the club’s normal deficit. That also brings me to the loan structure. Calling the scheme “Active Investment” is understandable, but what is currently proposed, from what I can see, is essentially an ongoing shareholder-loan arrangement. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Private football club owners use shareholder loans all the time. The difference is that a private owner is normally risking their own capital and may ultimately extend the loan indefinitely, convert it into shares or write it off. The Society is deploying money accumulated from thousands of supporters, so I think the terms deserve more scrutiny. When the consultation says the investment will be “protected”, what exactly does that mean? Is the loan secured? Does it earn interest? Where would it rank against other creditors? What happens if the club cannot repay after the stated period? Is rolling the loan expected to be the normal outcome? If loans keep being rolled for ten or fifteen years, is the Society effectively providing permanent capital anyway, and if so, would equity sometimes be a more appropriate structure? I don’t have a predetermined answer to those questions. I just think they are fundamental rather than technical details. There is also a broader point about how the projects are generated. I’d much rather the sequence was: “Here is a project the club believes is worth £250k. Here is what it costs, what it saves or generates, the payback period and why Society finance is the best funding source.” rather than: “We have £200k of Society money available every year. What can we spend it on?” That distinction is important, I think, because otherwise the existence of an annual funding pot can eventually start driving the spending decision. That is something private owners also have to guard against. Access to easy capital can be useful, but it can also reduce financial discipline. So I’d probably be somewhere in the middle on the whole thing. I don’t think continuing forever with every penny going into a bank account is necessarily the best use of the Society’s position as majority shareholder. If other Scottish clubs are investing significantly in their businesses and Motherwell refuses to access any additional capital, there is a legitimate risk that we fall behind over time. But equally, being the majority shareholder should mean more than simply being the easiest source of finance available to the club. It should mean deploying capital selectively, independently and with a clear understanding of both the upside and the downside. That’s why I keep coming back to what seems like an obvious compromise. Agree the Active Investment framework now if members support the principle. Put the project appraisal process, loan terms and safeguards in place. But unless there is an urgent investment opportunity that makes waiting genuinely disadvantageous, why not maintain the existing default until the reserve reaches whatever level is finally agreed to be prudent? At that point you have both sides of the model in place: a properly funded safety net and a mechanism for investing in growth. For me, the question isn’t really whether the Society should invest in Motherwell. The answer is that It probably should. The more important question is how it does that without weakening the very financial protection that supporter ownership was designed to provide.

I think that's a fair point, and probably an important distinction from the Major Votes question. Whether the project required a formal ballot is one issue. Whether members should have been properly informed about something of this scale is another, and I think the case for the latter is much stronger. If supporters first became aware of the plans because somebody happened to spot the planning application on the Council website, then regardless of what the Major Votes Policy says, that doesn't feel like particularly good communication from either the club or the Society. You wouldn't expect members to be consulted on every planning application or piece of capital expenditure, but this isn't a replacement boiler or some minor work at Fir Park. It's a potentially significant, multi-phase development of the club's training infrastructure and, presumably, one of the larger capital commitments the club has made for some time. There also shouldn't really be anything commercially sensitive about saying, in broad terms, that the club intends to develop new training facilities at Dalziel, why it believes Dalziel is the right long-term option, what the broad scope of the project is and how it fits into the club's overall infrastructure strategy. In fact, as you say, it's positive news. Under normal circumstances you'd expect the club to want to talk about it. For me this gets to a wider point about fan ownership. Member involvement doesn't have to mean a vote on everything. In most cases it should mean something much simpler: members are kept informed about major developments, given enough information to understand the reasoning behind them, and are not finding out about strategically important decisions by accident. The Club Board should absolutely be allowed to get on with running the club. But the quid pro quo for that operational freedom should be a reasonable level of transparency, particularly when decisions involve substantial sums of money or shape the club's infrastructure for years to come. So even if the conclusion is that Dalziel never warranted a Major Vote, I think there is still a legitimate question about why there wasn't proactive communication much earlier in the process. And arguably that is the easier thing to fix. It doesn't require changing governance structures or putting every decision to a ballot. It just requires a better understanding of what members should reasonably expect to be told, and when. That's exactly the sort of information I'd like to see clarified if I'm being honest. I don't know the answer on the length of the lease or agreement, and I've not been able to find it in anything that's publicly available, although that doesn't mean it isn't out there. The club has described Dalziel as the best long-term site, which presumably means fairly substantial protections have been negotiated, but it would be useful for members to know what those protections actually are. The comparison with residential leasehold problems in England isn't quite like-for-like I don't think, because we're dealing with a Scottish commercial/property arrangement here, but I think the underlying point is absolutely valid. A landlord couldn't simply decide halfway through a properly agreed fixed-term arrangement that they fancy completely different terms because the people running the Trust have changed. The contract stands. The more important questions are what happens at rent reviews, whether there are break clauses, what happens if the land changes ownership and, crucially, what happens when the existing term eventually expires. There's another issue I'd probably put ahead of all of those as well: who ultimately owns what the club is paying to build? From what I can see, and I stand to be corrected by someone more in the know, under Scots property law, substantial buildings and improvements on leased land can become part of the land itself unless the agreement provides protections to the contrary. If we're spending millions on a training building, pitches and associated infrastructure, I'd therefore want to know exactly what economic interest the club retains in that investment. So rather than simply asking "how long is the lease?", I'd like to understand the whole package: the length of the agreement, renewal rights, rent and rent-review provisions, break clauses, protection if ownership of the land changes, who owns the building and pitch, what happens to those improvements when the agreement ends, and whether Motherwell has any right to compensation for the value it has created. If the answer is that we've secured the site for, say, several decades on favourable terms with strong renewal and property protections, then that removes a large part of the concern. If the security is considerably shorter or dependent on goodwill when it comes up for renewal, that's a very different proposition when you're talking about this level of capital investment I'd reckon. And that's really why I think greater disclosure around Dalziel would be useful. Nobody needs commercially sensitive clauses or the full legal agreement published, but there should be enough information available for members to understand what the club is actually acquiring or securing in return for the money being spent.

For some players a move simply doesn't work out. It could be for a whole bunch of reasons, often many of them not even football-related. As a club, we've seen our fair share of successful player moves, so when one doesn't go as well as we'd hoped, we just need to accept it and move on.

Reading the exchange between @Goggles & Flippers & @Speedie85 I think there are really two separate questions being conflated here. The first is whether the Dalziel Park project falls within one of the mandatory triggers in the Major Votes Policy. On the wording as it stands, I don't think it does. The policy is quite specific about the circumstances in which a ballot must take place, and capital investment in a training facility is not one of them. On that narrow point, Speedie's interpretation is difficult to argue with. The second question is different though, and I think this is where the discussion becomes more interesting. The policy also gives the Society Board discretion to call a vote on matters outside the listed criteria where there may be an impact on the club's structure, financial stability, governance or identity. That doesn't mean every large decision has to be put to the membership, and nor should it. The Club Board has to be able to operate and make significant commercial decisions without everything becoming a referendum. But equally, the discretionary clause has to mean something. If the figures being discussed around Dalziel are broadly accurate, and the club is committing several million pounds to a long-term infrastructure project on land it does not own outright, then I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether the Society Board considered that discretionary provision and, if so, what led it to conclude that a membership vote was not appropriate. That is not the same as saying the policy has been breached. For me, that is the important distinction. The mandatory criteria create certainty. If one of them is triggered, the Board has no choice about whether members get a vote. The discretionary provision exists for significant situations which fall outside those criteria, where the Board still thinks the implications are serious enough to justify wider member involvement. Acknowledging that discretion does not make the specific criteria redundant. It simply means the policy has two levels, mandatory matters and exceptional matters requiring judgement. Where I think the argument in favour of scrutiny is strongest is not around the semantics of whether "selling a training ground" should somehow also mean "developing a training ground". I don't think the current wording supports that. The stronger issue is the nature and scale of the investment itself. If the club is ultimately putting £3m, £5m, or whatever the final figure turns out to be into Dalziel, members are entitled to understand what the club is receiving in return. What are the tenure arrangements? How long are they secured for? Who owns the improvements? What happens at the end of the lease or agreement? What protections exist around the money being invested? What alternatives were considered? Those are proper governance questions. The same applies to the financing point. It is obviously positive that the club is in a position where it may not need to borrow to fund major projects, but the absence of debt does not automatically make a capital allocation decision a good one. Equally, debt is not automatically bad. What matters is the cost, the security, the repayment profile, the risks and what asset or long-term value is being created. That is particularly relevant if there is a wider stadium discussion taking place at the same time. There is an opportunity-cost question around committing several million pounds to Dalziel now versus retaining some of that capital as part of a future stadium or combined infrastructure solution. That doesn't mean one option is right and the other is wrong, but it is a strategic question worth understanding. I also think it is worth being precise about what fan ownership means here. The Society is the majority shareholder, but that does not mean members should be approving day-to-day or even every major operational decision. The Club Board still has a proper governance role and has to be able to exercise judgement independently. Fan ownership does, however, mean there should be clarity around which decisions sit with the Club Board, which sit with the Society Board, and which are significant enough to go back to the membership. So for me the fair position is this: Dalziel does not appear to trigger an automatic Major Vote under the policy as currently drafted. But that does not make the discretionary clause irrelevant. Given the potential scale and unusual nature of the investment, I think it is entirely reasonable to ask whether the Society Board considered exercising that discretion, and if it did not believe a vote was necessary, to explain why. That is a governance question rather than an accusation of procedural breach. If anything, the debate probably shows one area the Society may want to tighten when the policy is reviewed. The current wording is clear around ownership changes, debt, asset sales and relocation, but much less clear around very large capital commitments. A future version could distinguish more explicitly between mandatory reserved matters, discretionary major matters and ordinary delegated Club Board decisions. That would probably prevent exactly this kind of argument next time.

Put simply, we don't. We're not alone in that regard. Big English clubs are cherry-picking the top young talent from all over the world, including leagues with more resources than ours. It'll come down to what certain young players see as the way forward for them. Some will want to stay in their native country and get footballing experience, while others will want to move to England and enjoy the bump in salary and try to make a dent there.

Why would the Old Firm, or any other club for that matter (including us), want to ask those questions? Does any business really want to distribute income more equitably?

There's also a few other aspects that those in favour of the status quo can point to I think, such as attendances being as high, or higher than they have been in years, the excitement of the split/playoffs seeming to have captured the imagination of fans, and the fact there's very little by way of "dead rubber" games at the end of a season. If we're being completely honest, there's probably less evidence that a larger league is the answer than there has been in quite a while I'd think.

If the argument is that every member of the squad should be capable of genuinely challenging for a starting place, then I'd agree that's the ideal. I'm just not sure it's realistic for Motherwell. We're not Celtic or Rangers with the budget to have two established Premiership-quality players competing for virtually every position. There will always be levels within our squad. You'll have established first-team starters, players who are genuinely competing with them, experienced cover, younger/developing players and a few who are essentially there to provide depth when injuries, suspensions and fixture congestion hit. The question with someone like Wilson or Ross isn't "would I want him starting every week?" It's "is there value in having him as the 18th, 20th or 22nd member of a Motherwell squad?" Those are very different questions. But important questions. Because if we send Wilson packing, we'll need to find someone happy to be the 18th, 20th, or 22nd member of a Motherwell squad. And most likely it'll be someone on the same level as Wilson.

I mean, feel free to scroll right past if long posts aren't your thing. Or even if my particular posts aren't your thing. God knows I scroll past plenty on here without passing comment. It's a football internet forum. Discussion and opinions, arguments, debates, all that, is exactly what it's for.

As you know, I've never really been arguing that Wilson or Ross are going to become first-team regulars. They might, they might not. My point is that a club like Motherwell needs a squad, and not every player in that squad is going to be of the standard where we'd happily have them starting 30 Premiership games a season. If they were, they probably wouldn't be squad players at Motherwell for very long. Wilson is a decent example. He's 21 and already has a decent number of Premiership appearances. He made a chunk of them for us in 2024/25, got into the Scotland U21 squad and earned another contract. Then JBA arrived and brought in Longelo. Longelo hit the ground running from what I can recall, scored against Rangers and Hearts early on? And went on to have an excellent season, with nine goals in all competitions and a Player of the Year nomination. There's a reason why we're often talking about him potentially being sold on. Wilson went to Raith shortly after Longelo established himself, and JBA actually explained the thinking at the time. We'd added competition in Wilson's position and the club wanted him getting games elsewhere rather than sitting around waiting for the odd opportunity. Does Wilson's failure to completely nail down a place at Raith raise questions about how far he's progressed since that breakthrough season? Absolutely. I think that's fair. But there's quite a jump from that to saying he's clearly not good enough to be part of a Premiership squad. Those are two different standards. Luca Ross is even younger. He turned 20 last week. At 18, he went to Annan, made over 30 appearances, started 20 or so and played every minute of their four play-off matches. We considered that loan successful enough to give him another contract. Last season he made 14 appearances for us if I recall. Again, maybe he doesn't ultimately become a regular. Most academy players don't, sadly. But Motherwell aren't trying to assemble 22 players who are all established Premiership starters. We couldn't afford to do that even if we wanted to. You need your better players, then you need competition for places, experienced cover, younger players developing underneath them and players who can come into the team when injuries, suspensions and fixture congestion dictate it. That's particularly relevant now that we're trying to deal with European football on top of everything else. We've seen the chat of injuries mounting up and it's only mid-August. The obvious downside is that when you make eight changes at once, you're suddenly asking a lot of players who normally perform supporting roles to effectively become the team. That's completely different from Wilson coming into an established side because Longelo is injured, or Ross coming in alongside nine or ten regular starters. That's really all I was getting at about Sunday. Wilson and Ross were poor. So were plenty of others. Nobody is suggesting they should be immune from criticism because they're young. I just don't think a bad performance in a heavily rotated team establishes that they have no value as Premiership squad players. Maybe ultimately they won't be good enough even for that role. That's possible. But there's a fairly substantial gap between "I'm not convinced this guy will ever be a first-team regular" and "this guy has no business being in Motherwell's squad." For a club operating with our resources, that distinction is quite important I think. That's generally how it works from what I know. There would be no point in having all that technology, and the players running around with vests on under their shirts with weird boxes attached to them if we're not going to use them I guess. It truly is a backroom team I think. Expertise across the board. But the manager makes the final call, and the buck stops with him. So he is responsible for the loss, but there will be reasoning behind his choices I'd think.

There were, what? Eight changes to the team? When you change that many players at once, you're changing partnerships, movement, communication and most of the structure around them. A young/fringe player coming into a settled Motherwell side alongside nine or ten regulars is a very different proposition from several of them being thrown together at the same time. They can still be criticised for playing poorly, of course. That's football. But I think some perspective is maybe needed there.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're in danger of oversimplifying what goes into these types of decisions. It's not simply a case of looking at the fixture list and deciding to rest half the team because there's a European game coming up. From what I gather, the players are monitored pretty closely. The staff will have data on how far they've run, how much high-intensity running they've done, sprints, accelerations, training loads and how all of that compares to their normal levels. Then you've got the medical side. A player can be perfectly fit to play but still have a bit of tightness or be carrying a heavier workload than normal. The advice might be that he's fine for 30 minutes, fine for 60, or that another 90 minutes probably isn't a great idea. They'll also look at recovery, how the player has been training, how many minutes he's played recently and his own injury history. A 21-year-old who has hardly missed a game through injury might be treated differently from a 30-year-old with a history of hamstring problems. The opposition (and the playing surface, no matter how much some people like to dismiss it) comes into it as well. The coaching staff will have analysed them and worked out where they think they can afford to make changes without weakening the team too much. So the manager might effectively be getting told that Player A is absolutely fine, Player B has played a lot but isn't a concern, Player C is showing signs of fatigue and Player D is carrying a minor issue that could become a bigger problem. He then has to make the decision. That's particularly relevant for a club like ours when we're playing Thursday-Sunday-Thursday and have been doing that for several weeks. Some players could end up playing four or five games in a fortnight if you just keep putting out the strongest XI. That doesn't mean rotation is always the right decision. Managers can still get it wrong. You can change too many players, lose the rhythm of the team and end up going out of a competition you had a decent chance of progressing in. Teams far bigger with managers far more experienced than us have slipped on that banana peel before. But I do think it's worth remembering when we see a team selection we don't like that the manager isn't working with the same information we are. We're looking at the names on the teamsheet. He's looking at the teamsheet plus all the physical, medical, training and opposition information behind it. We can argue with the decision he eventually makes. But there's usually a lot more behind that decision than simply "Europe is more important, so we'll rest a few players."

I don't expect us to get anything from either tie, but hopefully we can give a good account of ourselves and at least make a game of it. Get a good result at home and who knows what can happen?

The manager, obviously. He's the guy who picks the team. 100% agree. I hold the Scottish Cup much higher than the League Cup for sure. The League Cup has been won by St Mirren, St Johnstone and Ross County over the past ten years or so. I honestly had to look that up. It's a competition that means next to nothing for me when we have a European run going. Wait, it wasn't getting to the League Cup final in 2017/18? Or in 2004/05? The Scottish Cup holds a special place in my heart that the League Cup simply doesn't. I value the Scottish Cup win alongside the European adventures far more than any League Cup adventures.

Well, it's quite clear that man who's in charge thinks differently, so there is that.