Norwich City Fan View: Refusal to sack Alex Neil leaves the board at risk of undoing 7 years of progress
Monday afternoon saw BBC Sport journalist Pat Murphy tweet the line that all Norwich City fans have been fearing most: “Norwich City are standing by manager Alex Neil.” All of the signals that the City board have been giving off in recent weeks – through the AGM and Jez Moxey’s interview in late December – suggested that this bewildering pro-Neil attitude may well be pursued. However, after 9 defeats in 13 games, including Saturday’s deserved defeat to the league’s bottom club, City supporters – perhaps optimistically – have been desperately hoping that the board will change their stance and hand the Scot his P45. Clearly, if Pat Murphy is to believed, then we have been misguided in our hope that the City board will do what is best for the club and we will have to get used to the painstaking reality that Alex Neil is not going to be sacked any time soon.
In January 2015, Alex Neil arrived in Norfolk with Norwich City a mid-table Championship club. Two years later, with £50 million spent on transfers and a whole lot more on wages, we remain a mid-table (at best) Championship club – in the midst of one of the worst spells of form that City have ever experienced in the second tier. Not only this, but the divide between the City fan-base and the grossly out-of-touch top brass at the club is arguably at the largest that it has been since the days of Neil Doncaster as he presided over our relegation to League One.
In refusing to sack Alex Neil, the City board are at risk of undoing all of the good work that has been achieved in the last seven years. Good work that took City from a debt-ridden club propping up League One, to a debt-free, financially stable club that was on course to establish itself as a Premier League regular. A combination of poor transfer business and incompetent management in the last eighteen months has left City at great risk of returning to the side that we became following our failure to return back to the Premiership after relegation in 2005. A mediocre, unambitious club that was always one poor season away from slipping into League One.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of bouncing-back to the Premier League at the first time of asking. It is a well-known fact that the best opportunity to return to the top flight upon relegation is within your first season back down. After this, season by season, the prospects of promotion gradually become slimmer and slimmer as your best players begin to depart, parachute payments cease, the wage-bill is trimmed and mediocrity begins to be accepted. It only takes a brief look at the likes of Championship strugglers Wigan Athletic, Queens Park Rangers, Blackburn Rovers and Cardiff City to prove how quickly a side can deteriorate following relegation from the Premier League.
With this in mind, the City board should have done everything in their power to ensure that promotion was achieved this season. They failed to do this in the summer transfer window and in refusing to sack Alex Neil they are all but accepting we will not be getting promoted this season. Either that, or they genuinely believe that he is capable of turning things around – something which would which show disillusionment of the largest scale. Accepting of failure or simply clueless, which is worse?
There is nothing dramatic in saying that these are hugely concerning times for our football club. To say that the Norwich City supporters and the Norwich City board are not on the same page would be the understatement of 2017; we are not even reading the same book. While the board see Alex Neil as a long-term project, a good, young manager worth persevering with, the fans see him as a woefully under-performing manager who is far, far out of his depth. When the visions held by the two most important groups of people at a football club are so vastly opposing, the prospects of a positive future are minimal. I don’t know where we go from here.
