Time For Change

IF Nigel Doughty wishes to keep the club, first and foremost we need a total change of senior management, a team of people who can deliver a club that stands for unity from the board to playing staff but most importantly to supporter.

You cannot put £60m into any business and be as unpopular as Doughty is yet still sit idly by and watch the club lurch from one crisis to the next.

The hatred for the club`s owner and board is now simply too much for our club to ever provide success under the current structure.

We will continue to go round in circles whilst more money than is healthy for the club is pumped in and £60m will become £65m will become £70m but success will become an ever distant pipe dream.

Nigel Doughty you have to act, we have to make him act, the fans must act with restraint but apply pressure on the owner to face the questions that so obviously need answering.

It is high time Doughty put someone in the club who is not attached to him by an umbilical cord who can negotiate a fair budget one which Doughty is comfortable with and one that with good management can be accepted by the manager and the rest of the financial team in the business as a whole.

We must look to drive external revenue, the whole club needs short, medium and long term strategies.

We need to bottom out the ground issue we either own the land and create a long term asset at the current site or we wheel and deal to find a site where this can be turned into reality.

A business with no balance sheet is no business at all, this has to be addressed and if it is a 10 year plan then it`s a 10 year plan but I fail to accept that the council would not support a community stadium on brown field land that could create inward investment in an area screaming out for it whilst at the same time free up possibly the best real estate the council has in its portfolio.

In the medium term we must start to build revenues in anticipation for a move, we must look at stadium naming rights (no I don’t like it but I don’t like spiralling costs either) the FFP should not be about tomorrows wage bill it should be about income and maximising it to give you the biggest possible budget you can get away with.

The clubs who achieve this will be in the best position long term not the ones who start hatcheting cost at the first opportunity it is business suicide and proves to me that ND is not close enough to the club and has been engulfed in a cancer of yes men and wage takers.

In the short term Doughty must acknowledge that he is the one putting the money in not the senior management team, accountability is nonexistent for Christ’s sake. It is he who will be held accountable for what we have seen since the ref blew his whistle against Swansea, we must make him realise this to effect change.

No more can he sit idly by and watch a manager throwing punches at the club whilst he blindly backs a management team that is patently obvious to everyone bar him (although he knows, he`s just in bloody mindedness mode) cannot create working relationships with anyone.

Set clear unchangeable budgets, set clear goals of reducing debt through increased revenues reduced wages and squad sizes whilst at the same time increase the standard of a core set of players.

If we need to sell a ‘star’ to create room financially to build a team then bloody do it, show some balls, man up work in the face of the ‘playing management’ understand and develop a rapport with the manager so you can intimately understand the needs of the team and respond accordingly

Interestingly we think of Stoke Wigan Norwich and Swansea as models to follow which all have one thing in common bloody good relationships between Board, management and supporters.

So Mr. Doughty can you deliver?

If not sell up, sell up responsibly, find a buyer who you can work with over time ease ownership away from you and to a new regime. Set a new way of selling a club build a local network of investment and create a long lasting legacy for NFFC.

If the fans don’t deserve it then out of respect for the £60m you have pumped in at least leave with a lasting legacy.

ND if your reading this don’t bother trying to put the Nottingham back in Forest.

Don’t bother trying to compete for endless multi million pound players.

Don’t bother trying to hold on to players who will eventually leave for nothing.

All we want is a club to be proud of, a club that makes your hair stand on end as you walk over Trent Bridge.

Nigel we want our club back PLEASE.