He did, over and over

Scary how quickly a club can deteriorate; costs more to attract players to a basket case club with no hope of trophies than to a club challenging.

Creates almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’ve actually done well to break out of the flat spin (granted we should never have been in that position in the first place).

Correct, add into this we completely fluffed the academy at one point too it just goes to show you if you take the proverbial eye off the ball, you'll get left behind.

Its all a learning experience I 'spose, we'd never known such consistent and sustained success like it and IMO anyway maybe made a few "soft" decisions when they needed to be harder.

There are two components to Academy success - one is the stuff you can control, the facilities, the coaches, infrastructure, the wages you will pay to younger lads etc. The other is the stuff you can't control, which is the outright supply of talent - and that comes in waves more often than not, partly because our player pool is relatively shallow.

We seemed to stuff up on both for a while because the pipe was dry. I think our failure was pretty complete and systemic to be honest - poor recruitment decisions made over a number of years, and a deep dark hole to climb out of.

On a wider point it is fascinating that you see this sort of pattern across all kinds of high achieving business and sports organisations. It's generally at the point of the peak of success that the focus on the things that have made you great slips. Often takes a few years to make itself apparent, but by then the damage is done.

Yeah you either take the view that every product or service has a natural life-cycle and milk it when you can, or you take the brave step of continually risking and re-inventing to stay current (while making sone mistakes along the way). Most investors and leaders don’t have the stomach for #2 so here we are.