THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

I spent far too much time thinking about and researching plural possessions than I should have on this before concluding you were correct.

You can never spend too much time thinking about that.

Wherever the apostrophe does, or does not go, Pete was utterly cowardly to pander to the lowest common denominator.

The sort of person who would demand answers from a football chairman should automatically be barred from the club in question.

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When you make your music, do you think about the man in the street? No, I've met the man in the street. He's a Ladybit.

However his name is spelt

listen to yourself Gers. How dare fans question a club's owner.

Not that we are in anyway comparable to Blackpool, but you're saying that anyone demanding owners from the Oystons should be "automatically barred from the club"?

Fans care about their clubs, and the buck stops with the chairman. If you don't understand that then I question your own understanding of football, regardless of how many years you've been going.

Which nicely fits with the on-pitch activities

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Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment

A question........how do we know that Pete acted in response to fan power, we don’t actuslly know that, or have I missed something ?

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Read the MELTDOWN after every game, no bullshit, just giving it straight

Nobody is saying that Pete or others need to listen and act upon every single opinion presented by fans. We would be in an even greater mess than we are now if he did.

If Pete decides to respond them, then that is his decision. As I said earlier, people seem to think that whatever decisions he makes as chairman, so be it as he "knows how to run the club better". If he decides to respond, that's his years acting as a football chairman coming into play.

Not every opinion that fan(s) express is incorrect or wrong. Sometimes they are idiotic, sometimes they are ignorant, sometimes they are ill-founded or just plain wrong. But there are some fans who feel they know this club well, and can sense when things aren't quite right. Perhaps the lack of transparency lets the club down occasionally and leads to speculation e.g. the Lewie situation.

I'm really not sure what decisions you are getting at that you believe Pete back down on/changed? He was right to sack Neilson. He should have done it earlier, and he admitted as much. He did the same with Robinson. Fans calling for change of manager are generally only going on previous experiences, and on Pete's on words where he admits acting too late.

Is Pete really that weak to the point he would admit he acted too late, just to please a handful of outspoken fans? I hope not, otherwise the questions over his suitability are maybe justified if he lets a small group of fans affect him that much.

Fans are idiots.

Anyone involved in the running of a club who allows themselves to be swayed by the opinions of fans are greater idiots.

That’s about it.

Let's ask Peter Drucker:

"There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superflous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available".

Following on from that, I'd say football clubs (and Pete specifically) are getting two things wrong. The don't know 'their customer' - they only know the vocal few. They read Facebook and Twitter and so only get the views from a small subset of the fanbase. Arguably the least emotionally stable subset.

At the same time, they stop focussing on continually perfecting their product. Arsenal's approach seems to have been "4th? That'll do". Pete has been focused less on the football and more on the infrastructure. These approaches allow weaknesses in the product to continue longer than they should and allow things to slip into a death-cycle.

So, the answer, from a Marketing Management point of view? Pete needs to find ways to get back in touch with a much larger section of the fanbase. He should appoint someone to manage the infrastructure efforts, especially the training ground, just as he appoints someone to look after the football side of things. And then he should hold them to account, staying close to them and never losing his focus on the current product and the future development. Act quickly when things slip - that doesn't necessarily mean 'sack the manager' but it does mean quesioning, offering advice, asking if help is needed from outside.

Oh, and insider trading. Lots of that shit.

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.