If you look at the 3 who came up… between the three owners you’re talking £10’s of billion in net worth… as a Charlton fan… I think we’ll stay up… the difference is that I think there’s a real appetite to push on… for Oxford I just don’t think the money to do that is there.
Excellent article George. We feel your pain. It's inevitable isn't it in a system where only a small number of clubs stay perpetually near the top of the top league (ie Premiership) that every other club will go up and down the leagues. And their habitat is determined largely by their financial clout. Hence the modern focus on footballing business success, as that has a big say in likelihood of footballing success.
I'd like to see a more sympathetic approach applied to clubs and managers facing this financial issue, not just Oxford United. The 'circling the plughole' comment for example is IMHO rather dismissive/disrespectful. And special credit to managers/clubs/teams that defy gravity.
Lo and behold, half the comments entirely miss the point of this article. Even if OUFC didn’t have a terrible stadium which no one wants to visit (and that’s not because it’s a partisan fortress) and had even if they possessed an average following - which they certainly do not - the owners cannot countenance the loss of £10-15 million per annum incurred by even also-ran championship teams. Complaining about the effectiveness of recruitment or the quality of the attainable players is just blind ignorance.
A clever man who lived on these shores (grudgingly I have to admit it was in Copenhagen) once wrote: 'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced' and another thing he said also feels resonant with the piece: 'The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have'.
Fantastic piece George. I was there on Tuesday supporting my beloved Norwich but I felt in Oxford the sadness of a club and supporters seemingly caught in a downward spiral that they are unable to control. All those empty seats in a ground that you do not own has a melancholic feeling. While I inevitably hope that Norwich make it back to the Premier League it does seem appealing to remain a competitive fish in the less exalted waters of the Championship.
FYI - I failed to get a season ticket for the past 2 years so as I am separated I have to try and get tickets for me and my son last minute when I know he’ll be with me. VERY rarely are there 2 adjacent seats available to buy yet when watching there are invariably swathes of empty seats. Clearly there is a very low take up for ST holders reselling their tickets.
Also FFP is anything but fair to all but the clubs who are already established as the biggest.
Finally I think we could have had what it takes to survive until the new stadium but recruitment has been beyond poor. Ed Waldron does not have the experience or track record for such a critical role and needs to go with immediate effect
Thanks for reading Paul, but that last point is kind of exactly the fan thinking that I’m trying to show is massive over-indexed.
Wasn’t Waldron in charge of recruitment for the promotion season and then our survival? Isn’t that a track record? Like the Hallett example, why does that get forgotten when a club set up to struggle,
My pleasure - there’s not enough OUFC content considering we are by far the greatest football team the world has ever seen!
Waldron was appointed head of recruitment in March 2023, so he had little influence over the promotion squad. They were largely already onboard, recruited under Mark Thomas’s stewardship. Look how Derby and Wrexham (admittedly with a much higher budget) have fared with him! We survived the first Championship season mostly with players from the promotion squad, as Waldrons new recruits weren’t up to it.
The Championship is next level and has proven beyond Waldron’s competence. Whilst our spend on individuals has been low we have been competitive on total transfer spend for the bottom half of the Championship, but his hit rate is extraordinarily low. His tactic seems to be quantity over quality, throwing enough at the wall hoping some stick.
Some of the January signings definitely show promise, but it’s too early to judge and perhaps too late for meaningful impact now (although survival isn’t totally impossible given the form of other teams around us and the March fixtures). Tellingly of Waldrons recruits arguably only BDK might draw established Championship interest if we’re relegated and his form has dipped recently.
I absolutely agree that we’re punching, but it’s much harder when poor recruitment ties both hands behind our back. Waldron comes across as full of his own self importance yet lacks the KPIs to back it up.
Arguably the recruitment role is more critical than the transient coach role in modern football so with such a poor record why is he still trusted? If we let him go I doubt any other Championship clubs would offer him such a senior & influential position. Sadly I think his promotion was the easy and cheap option at the time. It came too soon for him and at a great cost to the club.
That seems a very harsh version of events to me. From what I know his first major act in the senior role was a big part in bringing Liam Manning to the club at a time when a return to League Two looked possible.
That summer the club brought in Beadle, Harris, Rodrigues, Leigh and Stevens, all of who were all big players for us. Only injuries prevented Mills and Edwards from having a bigger impact, as both were very good when fit.
Bennett then came in, which was a bit of a masterstroke, followed by Dale and Cumming. There was some bad too like Goodwin, Perkins and Burey) but that’s par for the course.
That’s half of the Wembley team signed after March 23, and the two managers appointed to get us out of the relegation scrap and then up into the Championship. I don’t see how you can argue he had little influence over the promotion squad.
This is kind of what I was getting at, searching for conclusions around a perceived failure can massively overstate the negative impact of individuals when the driving force is just our place in the food chain.
There is a pipeline with recruitment so it’s likely many of those signings were waves Waldron rode to the shore from Mark Thomas’s time - possibly one of the reasons he was appointed.
The issues around Karl Robinsons last season are well known. We had a squad that should have been competing for a play off spot. So whilst Manning did an outstanding job we were in a false position when KR left.
As I said, the Championship is next level and Waldrons record in it has been poor.
I absolutely agree that objectively we are where we are expected to be in the Championship given our revenue and the last 20 years.
However with Sheffield Wednesdays & Blackburns situations, Leicesters point deduction and other clubs also struggling this is perhaps the perfect season for a ‘club like Oxford’ to survive but we are being unnecessarily handicapped by persisting with someone who has been promoted above his competences level and should clearly still be working within a recruitment team, learning his trade
But, and I don’t mean any disrespect by this, there you’ve made assumptions about his previous performance and basically stripped him of any credit to justify your opinion on the job he’s doing now? It’s this need-to-blame culture that breeds the toxicity I’m talking about. Is it not possible to see our recruitment as falling short, while also acknowledging that it’s a difficult task in our circumstances, and without demanding the immediate dismissal of people who helped get us here in the first place?
Don’t worry about disrespect - it’s been a respectful discussion of opinions. Whilst our opinions mostly align they obviously differ re EW but we both want the best for OUFC.
100% our recruitment is a challenging job as we are not competing on a level playing field which is exactly why an inexperienced (@ this level) EW is hampering our efforts to survive.
I hardly think calling out a fairly obvious shortcoming is ‘toxic’.
Have we overachieved to get here? Maybe in the timescale. Have we overachieved to survive? Quiet possibly. Have we optimised the resources available? Absolutely not. Of the controllables recruitment is where we’ve fallen the shortest in our Championship campaign.
Football is a meritocracy. EW has had more than enough strikes to justify OUFC going in a different direction now, it’d hardly be knee jerk.
2 managers have already lost their jobs with us in the Championship, one with a growing CV and the other with a solid one. With recruitment being such a critical role EW should not be exempt from scrutiny or accountability from both fans and the board.
True words. And unlike minnows having one season in the Premier League before relegation, it's not as if there's a big financial windfall for being in the Championship. Any extra income goes on transfer fees and wages, just to be competitive.
There is a natural pecking order in football. However good they might be this season, it's hard not to think that Lincoln would struggle in the Championship next season more than say Bolton.
It’s a good point, Michael. As well as a jump in revenue, players costs generally rise sharply in the Championship, and keep rising the longer you’re there, which generally just means the losses get bigger.
Owners and investors in clubs just have to put hand deeper in their pocket, and if gravity (and/or poor decisions) takes a team back to L1, it’s not simple to just cut costs back to the level they were before.
Nice balanced piece. Despite our new found riches and talk of top six revenue on promotion, as a Birmingham fan I've no great desire to be in the premier league and the inevitable scrap for points at the bottom. Sometimes it's enough to be at the right level amongst similar size clubs, enjoying relative success.
I feel your pain, arguably the new ground is more important than staying up, in the long term. It's worth remembering too, that everyone outside the club, and I mean EVERYONE, had us nailed on for relegation last season. We were only in the relegation zone for ten days just before Christmas (iirc) and finished in seventeenth. Small crumb of comfort though. I still have a little glimmer of hope.
If you look at the 3 who came up… between the three owners you’re talking £10’s of billion in net worth… as a Charlton fan… I think we’ll stay up… the difference is that I think there’s a real appetite to push on… for Oxford I just don’t think the money to do that is there.
Excellent article George. We feel your pain. It's inevitable isn't it in a system where only a small number of clubs stay perpetually near the top of the top league (ie Premiership) that every other club will go up and down the leagues. And their habitat is determined largely by their financial clout. Hence the modern focus on footballing business success, as that has a big say in likelihood of footballing success.
I'd like to see a more sympathetic approach applied to clubs and managers facing this financial issue, not just Oxford United. The 'circling the plughole' comment for example is IMHO rather dismissive/disrespectful. And special credit to managers/clubs/teams that defy gravity.
Lo and behold, half the comments entirely miss the point of this article. Even if OUFC didn’t have a terrible stadium which no one wants to visit (and that’s not because it’s a partisan fortress) and had even if they possessed an average following - which they certainly do not - the owners cannot countenance the loss of £10-15 million per annum incurred by even also-ran championship teams. Complaining about the effectiveness of recruitment or the quality of the attainable players is just blind ignorance.
A clever man who lived on these shores (grudgingly I have to admit it was in Copenhagen) once wrote: 'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced' and another thing he said also feels resonant with the piece: 'The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have'.
Fantastic piece George. I was there on Tuesday supporting my beloved Norwich but I felt in Oxford the sadness of a club and supporters seemingly caught in a downward spiral that they are unable to control. All those empty seats in a ground that you do not own has a melancholic feeling. While I inevitably hope that Norwich make it back to the Premier League it does seem appealing to remain a competitive fish in the less exalted waters of the Championship.
Joy breeds toxicity, I’m nicking that
FYI - I failed to get a season ticket for the past 2 years so as I am separated I have to try and get tickets for me and my son last minute when I know he’ll be with me. VERY rarely are there 2 adjacent seats available to buy yet when watching there are invariably swathes of empty seats. Clearly there is a very low take up for ST holders reselling their tickets.
Also FFP is anything but fair to all but the clubs who are already established as the biggest.
Finally I think we could have had what it takes to survive until the new stadium but recruitment has been beyond poor. Ed Waldron does not have the experience or track record for such a critical role and needs to go with immediate effect
Thanks for reading Paul, but that last point is kind of exactly the fan thinking that I’m trying to show is massive over-indexed.
Wasn’t Waldron in charge of recruitment for the promotion season and then our survival? Isn’t that a track record? Like the Hallett example, why does that get forgotten when a club set up to struggle,
struggles?
My pleasure - there’s not enough OUFC content considering we are by far the greatest football team the world has ever seen!
Waldron was appointed head of recruitment in March 2023, so he had little influence over the promotion squad. They were largely already onboard, recruited under Mark Thomas’s stewardship. Look how Derby and Wrexham (admittedly with a much higher budget) have fared with him! We survived the first Championship season mostly with players from the promotion squad, as Waldrons new recruits weren’t up to it.
The Championship is next level and has proven beyond Waldron’s competence. Whilst our spend on individuals has been low we have been competitive on total transfer spend for the bottom half of the Championship, but his hit rate is extraordinarily low. His tactic seems to be quantity over quality, throwing enough at the wall hoping some stick.
Some of the January signings definitely show promise, but it’s too early to judge and perhaps too late for meaningful impact now (although survival isn’t totally impossible given the form of other teams around us and the March fixtures). Tellingly of Waldrons recruits arguably only BDK might draw established Championship interest if we’re relegated and his form has dipped recently.
I absolutely agree that we’re punching, but it’s much harder when poor recruitment ties both hands behind our back. Waldron comes across as full of his own self importance yet lacks the KPIs to back it up.
Arguably the recruitment role is more critical than the transient coach role in modern football so with such a poor record why is he still trusted? If we let him go I doubt any other Championship clubs would offer him such a senior & influential position. Sadly I think his promotion was the easy and cheap option at the time. It came too soon for him and at a great cost to the club.
That seems a very harsh version of events to me. From what I know his first major act in the senior role was a big part in bringing Liam Manning to the club at a time when a return to League Two looked possible.
That summer the club brought in Beadle, Harris, Rodrigues, Leigh and Stevens, all of who were all big players for us. Only injuries prevented Mills and Edwards from having a bigger impact, as both were very good when fit.
Bennett then came in, which was a bit of a masterstroke, followed by Dale and Cumming. There was some bad too like Goodwin, Perkins and Burey) but that’s par for the course.
That’s half of the Wembley team signed after March 23, and the two managers appointed to get us out of the relegation scrap and then up into the Championship. I don’t see how you can argue he had little influence over the promotion squad.
This is kind of what I was getting at, searching for conclusions around a perceived failure can massively overstate the negative impact of individuals when the driving force is just our place in the food chain.
There is a pipeline with recruitment so it’s likely many of those signings were waves Waldron rode to the shore from Mark Thomas’s time - possibly one of the reasons he was appointed.
The issues around Karl Robinsons last season are well known. We had a squad that should have been competing for a play off spot. So whilst Manning did an outstanding job we were in a false position when KR left.
As I said, the Championship is next level and Waldrons record in it has been poor.
I absolutely agree that objectively we are where we are expected to be in the Championship given our revenue and the last 20 years.
However with Sheffield Wednesdays & Blackburns situations, Leicesters point deduction and other clubs also struggling this is perhaps the perfect season for a ‘club like Oxford’ to survive but we are being unnecessarily handicapped by persisting with someone who has been promoted above his competences level and should clearly still be working within a recruitment team, learning his trade
But, and I don’t mean any disrespect by this, there you’ve made assumptions about his previous performance and basically stripped him of any credit to justify your opinion on the job he’s doing now? It’s this need-to-blame culture that breeds the toxicity I’m talking about. Is it not possible to see our recruitment as falling short, while also acknowledging that it’s a difficult task in our circumstances, and without demanding the immediate dismissal of people who helped get us here in the first place?
Don’t worry about disrespect - it’s been a respectful discussion of opinions. Whilst our opinions mostly align they obviously differ re EW but we both want the best for OUFC.
100% our recruitment is a challenging job as we are not competing on a level playing field which is exactly why an inexperienced (@ this level) EW is hampering our efforts to survive.
I hardly think calling out a fairly obvious shortcoming is ‘toxic’.
Have we overachieved to get here? Maybe in the timescale. Have we overachieved to survive? Quiet possibly. Have we optimised the resources available? Absolutely not. Of the controllables recruitment is where we’ve fallen the shortest in our Championship campaign.
Football is a meritocracy. EW has had more than enough strikes to justify OUFC going in a different direction now, it’d hardly be knee jerk.
2 managers have already lost their jobs with us in the Championship, one with a growing CV and the other with a solid one. With recruitment being such a critical role EW should not be exempt from scrutiny or accountability from both fans and the board.
True words. And unlike minnows having one season in the Premier League before relegation, it's not as if there's a big financial windfall for being in the Championship. Any extra income goes on transfer fees and wages, just to be competitive.
There is a natural pecking order in football. However good they might be this season, it's hard not to think that Lincoln would struggle in the Championship next season more than say Bolton.
It’s a good point, Michael. As well as a jump in revenue, players costs generally rise sharply in the Championship, and keep rising the longer you’re there, which generally just means the losses get bigger.
Owners and investors in clubs just have to put hand deeper in their pocket, and if gravity (and/or poor decisions) takes a team back to L1, it’s not simple to just cut costs back to the level they were before.
Nice balanced piece. Despite our new found riches and talk of top six revenue on promotion, as a Birmingham fan I've no great desire to be in the premier league and the inevitable scrap for points at the bottom. Sometimes it's enough to be at the right level amongst similar size clubs, enjoying relative success.
I feel your pain, arguably the new ground is more important than staying up, in the long term. It's worth remembering too, that everyone outside the club, and I mean EVERYONE, had us nailed on for relegation last season. We were only in the relegation zone for ten days just before Christmas (iirc) and finished in seventeenth. Small crumb of comfort though. I still have a little glimmer of hope.