Marwan Koukash wants Billy Slater and Sonny Bill Williams!

Quote: Magic Superbeetle "You can buy improvement, and you can buy short term success, but you can't buy prolonged time at the top, it's takes long hard work to grind out the things needed to stay at the very top, and money is no replacement for that.

The most obvious example is the Manchester football clubs. Man City have spent ridiculous amounts of money chasing success, and arguably not very successfully, but have won a premiership which they couldn't dream of before. But are they as successful as united? Not even close, city are at the start of the very long path to build a club capable of sustaining the level of success that was achieved by United, with the things like the training facility's and the youth development etc but they have a long way to go. Whether they achieve that or not no one can say.

Personally, I don't like koukash, I admire his ambition and think he's great for Salford, but, he's only chasing the stars, the names that will get him in the papers, I get the feels half the signings they made this season wouldn't of happens if noble hadn't had to remind him you need to build a team, and I think that obsession with star names will be the undoing.

Given the squad you had, with 2 highly rated young halfbacks, in Fages and Sneyd, it provided the perfect opportunity to build a successful team around them, recognising success doesn't come over night and letting the 2 halfbacks grow and succeed with the club, as Richie Myler has done with Warrington (and Salford should be looking at the Warrington example of sustaining growth in my opinion) - instead koukash throws his cash around and signs two "names" because he can with no long term thought

Whether he gets the two people above or not, or any other lot of "names" until a cohesive long term plan is in place, I can't see Salford having any long period of success.'"

I'm not sure that using Manchester United and Warrington as examples of how to build long term success in a way that is different to what Marwan is doing really strengthens your argument. Manchester United were already building a culture of buying big before Ferguson took over, but he took things to the next level, buying anyone and everyone he could get his hands on until he finally lucked in to building a squad that could acquire trophies. Thereafter, having bought the core of the squad, he was able to go into tick-over mode, just making expensive signings here and there to replace players he was disposing of. Long term success built on a massive initial outlay.

Using Richie Myler as an example of a Warrington signing and then, by extension, using Warrington as an example of how to build long term success is just North Korean style revisionist history, because you've airbrushed out the signings of Langer, Johns, Morley, Hodgson, Solomona, etc....., players in the twilight of their autumns brought in to provide a short term boost to the squad. You can add Asotasi to that list too. That's exactly what Salford are doing: signing older players on short term deals, plus a few players whose off field activities might make other clubs think twice about signing them (Warrington have a three-quarter whose caninophilia saw him laughed out of the NRL, for example) with a view to better signings further down the line. As far as I can see, there are few differences between what Salford are doing now and what Warrington did five years or so ago, just that Salford are doing it more quickly, and signing slightly younger, slightly better (IMO) players than the ones Warrington were signing.