Both of those brands are not based where they were in the 1990s either.

We are well off topic now, but since the discussion seems to have drifted yet again to aspects of the club where we believe there are issues, I would suggest there are three main problems;

1. Academy is not producing enough first team players.
This has been discussed at length before but I don't think we should underestimate it. Saints, Wigan, Leeds all have a very strong track record with their academies and I personally think it's just as important as our recruitment. With the departure of Harvey Livett, we now have a gap of 6 years where we have not produced a squad player (Philbin and King).

2. Our recruitment has been poor.
We have probably spent too much time bringing in expensive 'stars' to gain publicity rather than focussing on deficiencies in the squad eg it was a long time before we got some form of Briers replacement and more recently the two bench props that a blind man could have spotted. The Board, KFP and Price will all have an input in this area, but as KFP is in charge of the month to month financial running of the club I think he is probably the main culprit here.

3. The coach is underperforming.
We should be consistently top four and winning silverware with the money we spend on our squad, but it's not happening. It's difficult to pinpoint what has gone wrong here because we see so little of what Price does with the squad in training. But we do know he is relatively inexperienced and lacks a track record of success. Tactics, particularly close to the line have been poor. Defence as you might expect from an Aussie coach has been good. He is very risk averse, so we see little exposure of the academy kids and given the option he tends to play the same group of players from the squad. He doesn't seem to be able to lift the players and motivate them when the chips are down. Considering the long hours he works he just doesn't seem to have the talent for the job.

Good post and well summarised.

Does anyone actually know who identifies and signs the players? Obviously we have scouts and a recruitment team so who is actually identifying the player and does Price have the final decision? As someone who is a big critic of Price - to be fair to him our recruitment has been poor for a while now before he came in.

There's a lack of logic here. Not enough academy players and crap recruitment but we have a squad good enough to win trophies. Where are these players materialising from? Or does the coach get more out of them than we should expect?

We have a core group of players who are good enough who have been here a while, Ratchford, King, Charnley, Austin, Hill, Clark, Cooper, Currie.

But we’ve never really recruited well for the players around them. Gelling, Widdop, Davis, J Clark, Sita, Latu, Kibula.

Yes I agree on the point about lack of logic, some of our criticisms seem to face both ways and I'm not sure where I stand either.

Price seems to like Matty Ashton, he picked him up out of the championship and fast tracked him into the first team and he played him in his preferred position of fullback even when that meant favouring him ahead of one of the "established names" in Ratchford. Now you can criticise him for this and say Ashton should wait his turn till Ratchford leaves or be shoved out into an unfamiliar position - previous Wire coaches would have done this - but its not the same critique as Price doesn't give young players a shot. A lot of young players with pace burst on to the scene, then have a couple of rocky moments and get discarded, so if Price sticks by Ashton that's a pretty progressive attitude.

Then look at how Price has treated Ben Currie. He stuck by him for a long time when he was coming out of his injuries and was underperforming - previous Wire coaches would have kicked him to the kerb. Is this a good thing (he likes home grown players) or is it a bad thing (he picks players off past reputation rather than current form, some players are undroppable).

On the recruitment point I agree with Lord Tony Smith. From about 2010 to 2013 we had a top class squad, probably top 2 in the league (I preferred our squad to Wigan, but would have taken Leeds over ours because of their core of experienced match winners). From 2014 onwards it felt more like we had half or two-thirds of a top class squad. We had a number of top players leave around that time and in trying to replace them we've had a revolving door of players that haven't worked. Time has gone on and we've invested money but we haven't got the returns that we did on signings from about 2007 to 2012 when every year we were making a couple of signings that really worked out.

As a result, ever since 2014 we've been more like the 4th or 5th best squad in SL (not sure that reflects salary cap expenditure, but in terms of calibre of squad thats where I think we are). And the performances have basically reflected that. So with later TS (apart from the last horrible season) and Price, we've pretty much delivered to par. In terms of making finals we may have overachieved.

I'm not convinced about Price but I think the poor recruitment is a bigger priority to address than the coach, otherwise the same issues will arise. If this was the NFL, we'd be looking to recruit a new General Manager this year, and see how the coach works with him. We have a decent core of players, but need to fix this revolving door aspect, where we've never replaced the key retirements, and just keep cycling through high profile signings that don't work out. You can fix it from the Academy or from shrewd free agent/transfer signings, and the best teams like Wigan have been very good at both.

In 'bang for buck' terms I'd say we have under achieved and for quite a long time I don't know for a fact but would suggest that we aren't paying "4th or 5th best squad" money

Well, the academy and external recruitment are essentially both the same thing, a source of new / better talent. Clearly the academy production line has not been providing the number of squad players that we need, hence we have had to rely on external recruitment.

If you have a high quality coach then you can mitigate the lack of quality of the squad simply because he uses better tactics on the day, gets more from individual players, switches players to better positions, generates better team spirit etc etc. A good example of that would be Salford over the last two seasons where they even managed to get to a GF. I think most people would agree that SP is not in that category, indeed Salford have beaten us in all four games over the last two seasons.

In order to be successful we need a good quality squad and coach in combination. As LTS pointed out, we do have quality players in the squad but we have failed to recruit two decent bench props and brought in two poor replacements in Latu and Akauola. We also recruited Burrell, and whilst he would not have gone on the cap., he will still have been expensive. Similarly Blake Austin and Tyrone Roberts before him have been average,......but expensive. Our track record has simply not been good enough in recruitment. So that disadvantage combined with a pretty ordinary coach (who I suspect will also be very expensive) is probably the reason we have failed to challenge at the top table. We are cash rich but have made some poor decisions (JIMO)

I'd imagine that we are probably aligned with the spend of Wigan, Saints and Catalans. Wigan and Saints had the benefit of the reduced marquee spend cap allocation although Wigan have lost that with the recruitment of George Burgess and Bateman/Hastings. Catalans benefit from an Euro exchange rate not seen since before the Brexit Referendum.

You'll also have Leeds and Hull spending to the cap each year but probably not levering the marquee rule as much as we do for the full period it has been available though they appear to be catching up on that now. Then each year you'll have an outlier eg Koucash's Salford, and Huddersfield this year.

So next year there will likely be seven teams paying pretty much the same in salaries and historically over the last five years about five teams. On that basis I don't think we do that bad in respect of performance.

I would say a realistic minimum level of performance would be to win one of the three trophies every two years. On that basis Price needs to win one next year to be at the minimum acceptable level otherwise he goes. The issue we have is we've never won the premium one - Grand Final.

A fair assessment to my simplistic post my recent memories of our earlier success blighted by the Asotasi and Roberts years where we were top end spenders including forays into the transfer market (paying fees) but obviously going backwards.

A big year for all concerned coming up, we should be better than last season when we whimpered out although as you say we are in the same boat as half the division and yet the 'winning' teams come from a smaller list.

Perhaps our recruitment staff are dithering over signing decent players due to financial juggling . Recently we have been picking up left over overseas players that no other club wants & cast offs from our rivals.
One of the biggest changes we need to make is to our scouting set up & to decide what our best recruitment policy is.

Actually, playing devils advocate here, How would posters feel about price, if he'd took the grand final in 2018, but every thing else had been exactly the same for the following 2 seasons?

Would those of us wanting rid, still want rid, or would you be willing to put up with what we've had because of a GF win in the bank?

i'm intrigued to see if people would still want the board to be ruthless.