Having now got the stadium it feels like any toxic legacy of SISU has finally been washed away.
The feel-good factor of Saturday has really made me wonder what on earth was going through their heads in the time they owned the club? I was obviously never a fan of them as owners and was emotional/angry during their reign in charge, but I also consider myself someone who believes in nuance and trying to understand another’s point of view.
I still struggle to really understand what their end goal was or what they were trying to achieve. I guess ultimately it was simply that they bought a club and realised that they did not have the proper money to invest too far down the line.
I’m sure underneath this post, there will be usual comments about them being money sucking ghouls, which I am not averse to as I went through the 15 years of hell like everyone else. Beyond that though, I would always want to know why they were poor with communication, what they hoped to achieve and what they think went wrong? Any comments that shed reasonable light on the above welcome. I appreciate that many will think I am just naive.
Part of me wants to just say who cares, it's over, but the other part of me is an opinionated prick who wants to put in his two pennorth.
I can understand why SISU were interested when they bought the club, given what their business MO is. The club was distressed, going out of business and they could get it for pretty much nothing. Remember everyone being told to give up their shares to SISU?
At the same time there was a huge pot of gold available if you could get promotion to the PL which meant they could flip the club for a massive profit in a short time frame if they could achieve it. And they thought they could do that with a modest investment in the squad and we bought the likes of Fox, Dann, Westwood, Eastwood etc. They never intended to 'run' the club long term, just sell it ASAP.
Trouble was Ranson got the managerial appointment completely and utterly wrong and that made the investment in the squad almost meaningless. At the same time they thought that their experience with business litigation could get them the stadium from the council etc. "They batter people in court". Of course they were entirely wrong and ended up looking silly, and eventually the saga made them bitter towards everyone and everyone bitter towards them.
So once we failed to get promotion quickly and they failed to get the stadium they were left in a situation they're not used to. They had a business they couldn't sell, without the expertise (or desire to hire the expertise) to run it, it was losing tons of money and cutting funding and expenditure (as is what they do in their world), just made it a lot worse and the club worth even less. In that scenario they'd normally just liquidate and move on, but they couldn't really do that partly due to the high profile and community nature of it and partly because they couldn't afford to take that kind of loss for their investors.
So they were basically left with putting no funds in while desperately seeking someone to take it off their hands. And eventually for whatever reason King came along and they were glad to be shot of it.
I understand their reasoning for buying. I also understand why they operated like they did give their industry. They just didn't understand it wouldn't work in football and hence why it went spectacularly wrong.
It was reported they were shocked how high the rent was so I suppose it could be assumed that they did none and fit into the stupid category.
