Who would want to buy Bradford City? This is one often used comment seen on social media any time anyone dare suggest that Stefan Rupp should sell the club because since his arrival at Bradford City we have gone from a football club with a genuine chance of being in the EFL Championship, to one that is a bang average League Two club. Not only that, it has seen its league position decline year on year, and been a meat grinder for managers. Well, thanks to an interview with Simon Parker from the Telegraph & Argus we now have an answer from the horses mouth. Unfortunately in terms of any actual revealing or useful information, not for the first time, Simon Parker served up questions that a chairman of a football club would probably expect from a Q & A session at a school.
The one answer he did get of any real use was the one posed in the first sentence of this article. It is yes there are plenty. How good the offers are, and of course many will be low ball offers or people who are unequipped to run a football club, and how many were serious and substantial we don’t know for sure. He didn’t ask.
Either way, it still proves the argument that nobody would want to buy a League Two football club that doesn’t own its own stadium wrong.
How many offers does Stefan Rupp get? In his own words “I can tell you that over the last two years, we’ve had contact and requests asking if we want to sell the club. We probably get three to five per month but I’m experienced enough to know what to follow up and not. The majority of them are little more than very loose expressions of interest”. And this is an acceptable explanation that few can argue with, most will be no more than a loose expression of interest and not worth following up, but as I have argued time and again on social media, others will be down to his expectations of how much money he wants for the club, considering he has overseen a shit show of epic proportions that has made his investment worth far less than it was when he bought it. Does he sit tight and make sure Bradford City just ticks over organically, or does he push yet more of his money into re-establishing the place in League One the club occupied before he took over? The former seems to be the case if we look at the fact that the playing budget was cut two seasons ago and having looked at the players coming in and those going out, it is clear that managers have since had to work with what they’ve got and nothing more. Maybe Simon Parker could at least have bothered to ask if Rupp had any plans on backing Mark Hughes by increasing the playing budget for the 2022/23 season, but he didn’t. The question would have been a useful one because it would tell us whether the vague “competitive budget” he gets away with time and time again really is going to be competitive in real terms. Or whether we’ve just hired a big name manager to take the heat off of Rupp and Ryan Sparks, more out of luck that Hughes emailed us, than out of design. But no, we don’t know the answers to that either, because nobody bothered to ask any questions that would give any clues on that.
If the approach to the budget and managers remains exactly the same as previous seasons, it doesn’t matter if we have Mark Hughes as manager or Pep Guardiola, we simply have too many players contracted to our club that first have to leave to make room in the wage budget for players who can cope with the demands of playing for a club like Bradford City. The problem with sacking a manager every time the going gets tough is there’s always enough time for certain players to raise their game and improve their attitudes just long enough to get themselves yet another new contract, and thus the cycle is destined to continue. Hiring Mark Hughes is a good way to distract supporters from the fact that we have more fundamental problems at the club that start at the very top.
Stefan Rupp and Ryan Sparks can talk about “competitive budgets” all they like, but if the budget is already mainly taken up with players we cannot move on because they are under contract, signed because the last manager didn’t have enough money from the playing budget left over to get their first option players, the budget isn’t competitive. It just looks that way on paper. It’s maths! That simple.
Let’s put it another way. If you have a budget of £100 to spend on food, and someone before you has spent £95 of that budget on food and most has gone past its use by date, you’ve only got £5 left to spend on food. So your actual budget isn’t all that competitive after all. Put back into football terms, we have a lot of players that are getting a decent wage at Bradford City, who are only good enough to play in the bottom half of the EFL or the National League, but few of those clubs have the money to pay the wages we’ve wasted on them, so we have to wait until their contracts expire before we can get rid. The only way we can get out of this situation is if Stefan Rupp is willing to risk more of his own money on increasing the wage budget by a significant amount to give Mark Hughes a fair chance, and as the contracts expire on the players we cannot shift, he will then be able to reduce the wage budget back down to what it is now.
But the problem is also with the high turnover of managers. The sacked manager will have already had the time to work out who is the dead wood that needs getting rid of. In comes a new manager and these players are able to be at their best for the short months required to convince the new manager that they’re the real deal. Only to revert to type once the new contract has been signed. We have seen this happen year in year out.
As it stands, now is the moment Stefan Rupp needs to decide whether he wants to own a football club or whether he wants to get out. If he wants to own a football club he needs to back Mark Hughes with both time, and a significant increase in the playing budget out of his own pocket. It’s risk vs reward, that’s business. If he doesn’t want to own a football club, he needs to accept that he isn’t going to get anywhere near what he paid for it and sell it to someone who does want to own a football club (now we’ve at least established that there are actually people out there that exist that want to buy Bradford City). He can’t have it both ways and maintain the support of the Bradford City supporters. And it is very unfair the criticism levelled at those supporters who point the finger of blame for our decline at Stefan Rupp, until he does one of those two things.
Stefan Rupp must have felt relief that it was only Simon Parker asking simple questions, because he’s told us nothing about his realistic ambitions and what really happened with WAGMI United. It is definitely proof that a paid subscription to the Telegraph & Argus is a waste of money. There were so many important and eye opening questions that he could have asked Stefan Rupp, but unfortunately, once again, he didn’t. Just like with his approach with speaking to Edin Rahic, it’s only after the fact you’ll ever read anything that Bradford City supporters might have found useful to know during, and supporters will rightly ask Parker, why didn’t you fucking tell us that at the time!
Look out for Part Two when I will examine some of the things that could have been asked.