You took over a football club that was destined for the EFL Championship and have turned it into a club that is destined to slip into EFL League Two if something doesn’t change now. Maybe it is already too late, but either way, it needs dealing with right away as there clearly is no depth to how much worse things can get with Edin running the show.
Stop Blaming The Fans
The Bradford City supporters welcomed you with open arms and the belief that you would be able to capitalise on what we had in place already, and provide the funds required to ensure Phil Parkinson would be able to use it to build on what he already had spent time building since he became manager in 2011.
The bad feeling, mainly directed at Edin has nothing to do with your country of origin. In fact, if anything that stereotype of “German efficiency” was part of why the takeover of the club was exciting at the time. In all walks of life you will find people who are xenophobic, but don’t use a tiny minority to turn the blame on us, the fans. We even bit our collective tongues when Parky walked, in the hope you had a plan. But it is evident, whatever that plan was/is, it isn’t working. If you don’t act now, it will be too late to save us from relegation, and that will mean you, Mr Rupp will be in an even worse position financially.
Loss Of Credibility
There is a saying about under promising and over delivering. You not only naively over promised, but the level of what has been delivered has put us, year on year, in a far worse position than we would have been had you not bought the club in the first place.
We had little choice but to support Edin and his vision. Of course you wanted to put your stamp on things, but you also said you wouldn’t be making any drastic changes to the fundamental things that were making us successful. Yet the club is almost unrecognisable from the one you inherited and is in free-fall. How are we supposed to believe in anything you say? Let alone anything you do. Edin, you have been the exact opposite of a King Midas.
Don’t Blame Phil Parkinson
Neither can you blame Phil Parkinson for taking his coaching staff and some players with him to Bolton Wanderers. It is evident now that he made the right decision, and that your hands on approach to signing players and everything else would have undermined everything he had built at the club. It was an early sign that perhaps Edin, you need a better understanding of humans, rather than numbers.
I don’t need to outline what Phil Parkinson had achieved at Bradford City because not only is it the stuff of legend around Bradford, but it is known on a national and even a world level. All he needed was someone to spend some cash and he would find the right type of player who fit with his ethos, and we, I have no doubts, would have taken an automatic promotion place to the EFL Championship in your first season as owners.
You Were Both Complacent
On to another massive sin of football, your complacency. When Stuart McCall got our weaker side to a Wembley Play-Off Final and lost to Millwall, you appeared to think this League One stuff was easy. You appeared to think reaching Wembley was the prize, it wasn’t, promotion to the Championship was. Naively you couldn’t see the failure of that season for the Wembley arch. Admittedly, many others were deceived by it too. But I firmly believe that had you simply done nothing and handed the cash to Phil Parkinson, we would have finished in the top 2.
But you got carried away by not realising that although Stuart McCall had indeed overachieved, the club as a whole had underachieved that season.
Matter Of Ripping Out The Heart
You then treated Stuart McCall badly. Not appreciating the massive job he had undertaken to get something out of an ever weakening squad. It is clear you wanted rid of McCall purely because your ego couldn’t handle his frank and honest approach to being Head Coach at Bradford City.
In Matter Of Heart the warning signs were there. You have since removed many of the dedicated members of staff that loved their jobs and the club, people who the playing staff and coaching staff had great relationships with too. When you lose personalities, you lose a big part of what makes a team stick together under difficult circumstances, and changing the Head Coach every few months isn’t going to change that, regardless of whether it is David Hopkin or Pep Guardiola. Pep knows the importance of togetherness from the coaching staff, player liaison, kit man to the shop staff.
Now you have lost the support of the fans. We don’t even recognise our club, and whilst you Edin, are still at the club, there is little hope of change. We have given you chance after chance after chance, and things have changed for the worse, not the better, even if they had stayed the same, that would have been something.
Understanding Leadership
Your whole approach to running the club has lacked the one important ingredient that makes for any sucesful football club, or business for that matter. It is the human element. The personalities. Recruiting people, especially footballers, who take responsibility for their own roles and not need anybody to micromanage them.
Bradford City made history!
I can reel a few off who optimise that. You may already be familiar with the names. Let’s start with Stephen Darby, James Meredith, Rory McArdle and even Luke Hendrie. Under Parkinson we had a whole “Band of Brothers” who made history in reaching the League Cup Final as a League Two club and are now also famous for possibly the biggest upset in the history of the F.A. Cup when we went to Stamford Bridge and beat Chelsea 4-2. What spoke volumes about the team spirit that day was how we were 2-0 down and came back to win. Now, when we go 1-0 down, we know more goals against us will follow and we will lose. And that’s to teams like Gillingham and Accrington Stanley.
Bradford City – Band Of Brothers
Solid Foundations
What the fans would give now for a team that showed half the pride of Gary Jones alone, and although he got his stick, James Hanson is a fond but distant memory. The latter is just another in a growing list of people at the club who became legends and were made to publicly look bad.
True leadership is about leading from the front. Ask Gary Jones, Stuart McCall and Stephen Darby. This is especially true when the going gets tough, much like when Bradford City, after being beaten 5-0 by Swansea City in the Capital One Cup Final. Our hopes of making it to the play-off’s looked like a bridge too far for that season. But out of nothing we clinched that final play-off place, and did to Northampton Town at Wembley, something similar to what Swansea City inflicted on us months before. Nobody shirked, nobody hid.
Talking about hiding and leading from the front Edin, you made this mess, but you are nowhere to be seen. Fans are leaving in their droves, the entertaining Vlogs are drying up, things are too depressing at Valley Parade. Soon attendances will slip back to what they were before Phil Parkinson transformed the fortunes of the club. They have already fallen back to levels before another man you treated badly, James Mason, performed another minor miracle by selling an unheard of 18,000 season tickets for this club in League One. But not satisfied with that, he followed it up with a promo that sold 20,000 season tickets.
At the time you both took over this club the supporters really did “believe” anything was possible. Because we had seen the proof.
To Stefan Rupp
The fans want honest answers, the fans are not to blame, this is your mess and the question is how are you going to get us out of it. Stefan Rupp, this is to you. I would suggest if you want to protect your investment you look no further than the liability that got you involved with buying a football club in the first place.
Yes, it looks like the money put in at the start has been badly spent, and you will have to plough more in just to catch up with where we were before Edin started fixing what wasn’t broken. Luckily we have a big and loyal fan base that will return.
But Edin has to go if you want to see the fans start to flow back through the turnstiles at Valley Parade. You now need to lead by example and step up. We accept people make mistakes, but just saying you have made a mistake and continuing to do the same regardless is not acceptable.
The time has come, don’t delay. Get Edin out of the club and get someone in who does actually understand football, and understands how to delegate properly. At the moment there are many people who only hold Edin responsible for the mess we are in, but by failing to communicate and act fast the majority of fans could be justified in feeling you are as much responsible for making a mess at our beloved club as him.