Simon Wilson

It’s been a different and a new summer for us at Stockport, because probably for the last few years of windows we’ve been always building. Last year we finished third in League one, five points off automatic promotion and we missed out after losing in the semi-finals of the play-offs against Leyton Orient, so we were close.

We’ve obviously got good players and good staff that are hungry to go to the next level. We didn’t get there. So of course other clubs look at them and think they’re good players, good staff, that might want to come and join their clubs. So we’ve probably been paying a little bit more defence this summer, which is the first time.

But we were able to trade for the biggest numbers that we’ve done at Stockport whilst I’ve been here, making a record signing and very close to getting our record sale as well. But a good challenge for us to go through.

Overall, sports people, competitive people, move on quite quickly. I think they’re used to disappointment and having to come back and compete again. And the fact you go off straight into a summer – I mean me personally, I was back to work the next day because the close season is really important to get things moving for the next season.

So in some ways you just get back into the next cycle and you move on quite quickly. But I do know that for supporters it would be hard to reflect on that, when the fixtures come out and you see the promoted teams and the opponents that they’re playing versus knowing you’re still in the same division.

But I always think about it like a relationship – a little bit of heartbreak is sometimes good, isn’t it? It reinforces your commitment and just makes you want it even more. We love that challenge of trying to find that extra percent.

Football’s so random and some of the stuff is out of your control. You don’t know how the other teams are going to do and how they were going to react.

We certainly expect that this year, that some big teams will react in a big way. Even when we win, we’re constantly talking about trying to create better versions of ourselves – that’s a bit of a mantra for us and underpins our success a little bit. It’s not just the end result, it’s every day we’re trying to improve, one way or another.

When Mark (Stott) bought the club as a National League team, (the seven-year plan) was to get to the Championship. We were promoted into the league within the first two, promoted out of League Two within the next two, so in theory we’re in League One with three years to get to the Championship. We’ve just completed a year.

Business people like putting timelines and stuff like that. Sports people hate it, because it created an unnecessary pressure. But it’s about giving the whole organisation momentum and showing that it’s on a journey. And the fact that we’ve been able to move through that so far and be almost ahead, or on track, with the plan, it makes us an attractive organisation to work for and hopefully for other people to want to come and join.

The trick is when it doesn’t work, right? So if you’re still in the National League after five years, what do you do? But in essence it’s a statement of intent, isn’t it?

And what that allows you to do is organise your thoughts, your infrastructure, your cash flow against that plan in order to enable it. It’s like an aligning principle that gets everybody together to say, ‘Okay, if that’s what our intention is, what do we need to do to get there and make sure the plans at every stage reflect that ambition?’

Bumping into other people that have brought investment in from outside, or new ownership groups that have come in, everyone’s doing a version of that – benchmarking salaries and so forth. We were fortunate to work with 21st Group at the time, who through their world super league ranking system could show what that budget bought you in terms of a quality level.

Now it wasn’t specific in terms of exactly what qualities, but it gives you a feeling of, ‘You need to find a way to be 25% better.’ Even that language and that objective – to challenge the staff to say, ‘Well, can you even find the 25% in your department?’

Or is it the aggregation of those 5% across five departments? And whichever way you cut it up, it’s arbitrary, but it’s a mindset really, of just saying, ‘Look, we need to make a significant step. Where do we think that step could be found?’

He (Mark Stott) is not passive in any way. He’s disciplined. I would say I feel the benefit of his trust. He allows me and the team I’ve got here to crack on and do what we think we’re experts in.

He will wade in sometimes with a point of view and a thought, which is really healthy sometime. This quote sticks in my head all the time, I can’t remember who said it – all progress relies on the unreasonable man. Sometimes, when you’re in the room and you think, ‘What the hell is that? That doesn’t seem logical or fair.’

But actually it’s such a big challenge to you that you have to find a response to it. And that is often the occasions, at least in my experience, you really lift your thinking or you see something you couldn’t see ordinarily. Mark’s really good for that.

He’s challenging, but it comes in the right spirit. As long as I take it in the right way, I think collectively we have found some good solutions along the way.

I do actually. I really like the squad. We’ve challenged ourselves to take a little bit of money off the budget and we’re working towards – I wouldn’t say sustainability. because what does that mean in today’s world, where we’re all losing money – but in terms of where we believe our resources can be.

We’ve been able to take money off the budget, but actually improve the team, which isn’t easy. We’re really happy with it. Normal stuff – we have some injuries and when you’re in performance sport, you take your budget so close to the line that sometimes injuries can really rock the situation.

Either if you need to replace those players, you go over a little bit where you need to be, or you lose some quality from your first 11.

But we’ll ride through that and I’m really hopeful for the season and I’m curious to see what we can go and do.

We’d competed with Wrexham since we bought the club, so we knew each other very well. We finished five points behind them, which was the first time we’d finished behind them in the league, but credit to them, they’ve done an incredible job.

And Birmingham was like a Championship team placed in League One, that was brilliantly put together, a brilliant side, but, a complete juggernaut financially that no-one could compete with 

So no surprise to see them run away with the division, but some good sides outside of that. The timing was good for us last year, with a couple of teams perhaps underperforming as well.

We know we’re up against it (this season). We expect a response from those teams. I don’t think there’s a juggernaut like Birmingham in the division this year, although there are some very strongly-backed clubs.

I actually look forward to the division this year, I think it’s going to be a good division. There are a lot of teams that I think could be in the mix and, certainly, I think all of us will lose games and it’s going to be how we all respond to different situations along the way.

I learned so much in my short time there. You have to realise that for 11 years prior to that I was at Manchester City in the City Football Group that, bar the first couple of years, did everything nearly perfect in terms of a football operation.

And so, wrongly or rightly, when you’re in that system you that’s what the world looks like. It doesn’t. Actually, Sunderland in that moment, was more akin to what most football clubs look like.

Sunderland was an extreme version. I think there were seven managers in five years, six of them had been changed mid-season, a lot of player churn. So by the time David and myself were there, the squad didn’t really make sense. It was a mix of strategies, a mix of age profiles, mix of wages and contracts.

That’s what happens when you change a lot – you literally work on a year-to-year survival mechanism. You have to say, in that time, they stayed in the Premier League when Newcastle didn’t. So was it successful, was it unsuccessful? That for different people’s point of view.

But there is a consequence of consistent changes to your plan. Going in there and being there in that moment and also at the point when Ellis Short was looking to sell the club as well, gave me insight into stuff that’s so useful to me today.

It was difficult at the time, but what I really did appreciate was the size of that football club and the passion of the supporters. What attracted there in the first instance was just the potential of it and how exciting that could be.

I feel like I got Sunderland and I was frustrated at not being able to help more, but that’s the way it is.

At the end of that season, I had a very straightforward conversation with. With Martin Bain, their CEO at the time. I was on a good salary there and a big inflated title, but the club had just gone through a load of redundancies and it didn’t quite sit right with me in terms of what the club needed and what I was able to maybe contribute at the time.

So I had that conversation with Martin. I think Martin would have been open to either keeping myself on or changing to another Director of Football, and they did utilise different people in that space, but I think it was a moment financially in the club’s history where they had to be careful with what they were spending.

The history books show that it wasn’t successful on the pitch, but it was a really challenging environment off the pitch. So it’s great to see them bounce back, but sometimes clubs need to do that, to have a reset moment and come back and get aligned; take the pain to help them build a stronger and a better club.

With documentaries, the story is better when you tell an extreme version of it. I think they did a good job of highlighting some of that narrative. I wouldn’t say it was a false narrative, because I saw some bits like that, but I also appreciate that a lot of it would be the extreme areas of that. There were a lot of good people there that are good practitioners trying to do a good job.

Lots of clubs go through those kind of chaotic moments, which is sometimes what’s quite lovable about football. I wasn’t there when they were doing the filming, but I was there when we sat around as a group of directors and agreed to do it. And I think that was the right decision, even though potentially it made Sunderland look for a moment in time like a chaotic club.

I think it showed the world how real it was and how real the supporters were. When I went there, we were asking the question, ‘What’s the identity of Sunderland?’ We were going to work through a process to find that out. Even though it was quite chaotic in the way it came through, it showed a very real honest football club, passionate supporters, and for them to come back now, I think they take a little bit of that now in a much more polished and more successful version.

I was a young player, in the youth teams of Peterborough United and Norwich City. I ended up trying to continue my career going into America, but decided quite quickly that I probably wasn’t going to go have the success you needed to make it a sustainable long-term career. 

So I started to think about coaching. At the time, sports science was quite new, as was sports science’s integration into football. Because I had followed a football pathway – I hadn’t done A Levels and that kind of thing – going to America and using the scholarship route allowed me a pathway into a UK University.

Just at the time, John Moore’s was setting up their first degree called science and football, which was a sports science degree, but using football as all the examples.

I was really excited to get onto that course, which was the first iteration of it. There were some brilliant people there who have become lifelong friends, like John Murtough, Mike Ford, John Iga.

The lecturers and professors were influential in getting sports science off the ground in this country into football. I continued to play outside of it and actually at the end of the degree had an opportunity to go and play again in Scandinavia.

But at the same time, just about two weeks before me leaving and getting on the plane to go out there, I had an interview for a company that was almost a start-up, called Prozone. Prozone had started up maybe a year before that moment, but had had some investment at the time that sold the technology into ITV.

This was when ITV took Match of the Day off the BBC for a short period of time and were looking to innovate. They used the Prozone technology to do Andy Townsend’s Tactics Truck, which was a bit of a bit naff, but off the back of that investment Prozone were able to go out and re-recruit and build their analysts who were going to go out to clubs and try and grow the use of the software in the market.

So I was just about to sign for this Finnish club and got an email to say that they would offer me a job. That was a moment where I had to go, ‘Am I going to keep chasing this dream on year-to-year contracts and see where I go, or take what could be a super-exciting opportunity to work in the Premier League immediately.

I took that and was very fortunate in terms of being in that group of people at that moment, as analysis was just starting to lift off into the UK football scene.

In the year that group that went in (to Prozone), I lived in a house with Tim Jenkins, who ended up becoming Assistant Manager at Wolves; Dave Fallows lived in the house just around the corner from us, as did Mike Ford and Lee Darnbrough.

They were really good people, I would absolutely stand up for their quality, but the fact we came into the game at a time when there weren’t other people already there, meant we were almost the first ancestors of that.

That allowed us to all be influential to one degree or another.

I was posted to Preston North End, who were in the Championship trying to get into the Premier League, and a young David Moyes was the Manager. So that was good. And David left to go to Everton in the end of the first summer there and I stayed for a little bit while longer, but then there was an opportunity to go down to Southampton, who had just taken the product on and went to work down there with Gordon Strachan.

That was a brilliant. They were almost like Southampton of the more recent times. It’s always been a club that produced youth players and tried to outperform its wage bill by being innovative. It was a lovely area to live in and a nice time to be with the club.

We went to the FA Cup final off the back of that and ended up still getting into Europe the next season. We also did well in the league, finishing eighth, ninth, and over-performing against its wage bill.

But also at the end it got relegated as well and had to live like so many Premier League clubs that sit outside that top (level). From my point of view that was a really valuable experience, because it just gives you context.

The typical model was that clubs would engage Prozone for the software and as part of that they would get a consultant to go and work with them. In the early rollout of the product, that was the model. This would have been like 2004. I think Dave Fallows would have been the first one at Bolton and did an amazing job. He ended up as Head of Recruitment at Liverpool.

Bolton were the scene-setters in many ways around sports science and analysis, psychology, just the integration of it all. They had probably the biggest backroom team you would have seen and played on that. Southampton wanted to go down a similar route and start to build things in-house.

This wasn’t typical at the time and I would have been the second analyst to come out and be full-time employed by a club, which then allowed to start thinking about departments and so on.

It was the Clive Woodward era. So, again, an incredible experience to be part of. Unfortunately that didn’t go well with natural results onto the pitch immediately, but to be around a guy like that and to see how his brain works – and there was a lot of really, really interesting stuff that was going on at the time but probably wasn’t the right time and place to really execute it.

What was really interesting was that he would ask stupid questions. The way football was at that time, you’ve got to do well with an environment to make this fly and work.

But a lot of the stuff he would say, people would be sniggering in the background. But actually there were really good challenges in terms of, ‘Why do we all take goal kicks exactly the same? Why do we not have expertise around set pieces? What is your game model?

These types of things which are now commonplace at the time, football probably just wasn’t ready then.

It takes time to really influence and change behaviours, doesn’t it? But it was great for me as a young analyst to be around that and think, well actually there’s some good in that; I might, I might nick a bit of that.

So there was an Assistant to Gordon Strachan at Southampton called Steve Wigley.

People that listen to this will know Steve Wigley is brilliant with young players and had worked with England’s Under-21s with David Platt. At the time at Manchester City, Stuart Pearce had been Interim Manager after Kevin Keegan towards the back end of the 2005 season, done well and then got the job full-time.

And yeah, 2006/7 was going to be his first season in management. He brought Steve up as his Assistant. We’re talking about clubs that were the first to embrace analysis – I reckon City were one of the last in the Premier League. They had just about bought a MacBook Pro the year before and had just got some Sportscode and had a guy who might be able to utilise that.

When Steve came in, he recognised there was an opportunity to step that up and luckily I got the call and made the move. 

I was really excited to join City at the time in 2006. It felt like a big club, big city. It was an exciting time for me – my first bigger move if you like. But the club was owned by a local businessman and was kind of on hard times.

It was probably built on a budget to finish 16th and it was a party if we finished 15th type thing. Got to the January in that year and I think there were some financial troubles – so they’re looking to sell the club now. The first takeover was by the Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, which, again, felt exciting at the time.

It was new. We had a lot of players come through the doors and Sven-Goran Eriksson came in as our manager and that was exciting. But, again, controversy came about. The club had to be sold quite quickly. At that point, we were probably quite nervous of, ‘Oh, here we go again.’

My time at the back end of Southampton had been categorised by a lot of churn in terms of managers. I’d gone into Man City and within one year the manager had changed and the owner had changed and I was looking at that again. That’s really hard. Even as an analyst at the time, it’s like you’ve got to almost start again.

You’ve got to re-sell your ideas, you’ve got to build a new relationship and all that takes time. You just feel like you’re not progressing. 

So when that takeover was coming about, I was probably a little bit nervous thinking, ‘What’s this going to be?’ But it couldn’t have been better, could it? It was like the best owner that you could get, the best ownership group you could get.

Initially the nerves were probably justified, because it was going through on the final couple of days of the (summer) deadline, in the 2008/9 season. There was this mouthpiece for the the group (Sulaiman al-Fahim) that probably wasn’t fit for – and certainly wasn’t in line with – the tone that I got to know after that, that was quite showy.

We were linked with every player in the world. It was, we’re signing this superstar one minute and another superstar the next. I think we were in for everybody.

In the end Robinho signed. It was exciting, but it was chaotic. And I was thinking, from sports performance standards, what’s this going to be? But actually the day after Robinho signed, we had a presentation from Simon Pearce, who works very closely with Sheikh Mansour.

And the way that he delivered the first message was just perfect, in terms of, ‘This is the approach of Abu Dhabi. We have a 20-year vision as a country. This is a long-term plan. We don’t talk about what we’re going to do. We do it and then we tell people how we did it.’

That really professional, solid mentality was really inspiring.

The next thing that happened was Mark Hughes was the Manager at the time and had always complained about the environment being a bit run down and not having investment. 

Mark was able to express that to the ownership at the time. It was an international break and some of the players were off on internationals, but they asked everybody else to leave.

And it was like one of those BBC Changing Rooms episodes. Everyone went off, leaving the environment in one place, and came back seven days later and it had totally changed. There was another floor in the gym, there was artwork everywhere, new furniture, a real fresh feel.

And it was almost like, ‘Okay, this is a new standard. This is how we operate. We don’t talk about what we’re going to do, we get it done and then we show.’

And, again, I’ve taken that with me. That’s a really great mindset as a leadership group to install in your organisation.

So at the time of Abu Dhabi United Group coming in and buying Manchester City, Mike Rigg was the Technical Director. He’d come in with Mark Hughes. Mike was heavily leading the scouting and recruitment department and starting to link into the Academy. The Academy was strong at Manchester City.

Gary Cook came in as CEO at Manchester City. Gary had worked with Brian (Marwood) at Nike before and was building out his senior leadership team.

While Mike was in the detail of the scouting and recruitment team, the Academy, working closely with Mark, he wanted an overarching football leader, if you like. Brian was perfect for that in terms of being that really senior person; calm, very human and able to connect and work with people, but understood what Gary needed and how he wanted to build out the business and could connect that business and football element together.

After Brian had been in the building for a bit, he looked at a reorganisation and a restructure. I had been the Head of Performance Analysis and had been lucky enough to build out a team there at the time. Brian maybe saw something in me that he felt could benefit him and what he was trying to get done and promoted me into the role of Strategic Performance Manager, to work closely with Brian.

He had a million and one things to get done: build a team, build a training ground, reevaluate all the support teams, support the Academy and set out a new vision. He just wasn’t going to be able to get to everything.

It was a brilliant role for me because if Brian had 10 things on his list and was working on one, two and three, I would take over four, five, six, seven and eight and push them along, so that at the point that they were more mature, I could get Brian to take them on.

But as I now know as a Sporting Director, you’re never too far away from the first team in terms of supporting the Head Coach and recruiting, so some of the more strategic elements sometimes get left to the side.

That model, with Brian and myself there and the rest of the team, ran from 2009 through to 2013/14. In that time we were lucky enough to win the Premier League twice and go on a journey with FA Cups etc.

In 2013/14, there was a change in CEO. Gary Cook left, Ferran Soriano came in from Spanair, but prior to that Barcelona, and Ferran had always had this vision of a global club and a multi-club model and brought that philosophy and that thinking into City.

I remember really strongly the day that Brian told me that he was going to be coming out of his role and that he’d had a conversation with the ownership about this multi-club, global thing. I’ve been around football long enough that I thought both of us were getting sacked, basically.

I thought it was palming us off to the side, the slow letdown. Txiki Begiristain came in from Barcelona and became Sporting Director. Lovely guy, super talented, gone on to incredible success. You couldn’t like the guy more. Brian and I were relocated from the training ground to the stadium offices.

So again, I was thinking, ‘Right, this is just a foregone conclusion, we’re on our way out.’ It felt quite clunky to start off with, because we had no real understanding of what it was we were going to being going and doing. We’re starting to work in this office environment that was different. It was a bit more nine to fivey, but we were tasked with conceptualising what this group could be and what it would need in order to function.

There were a couple of reference points around at the time. Red Bull were a multi club, but we saw that as more of a talent pathway model. They would move through the clubs to the top and they’ve been successful with that. And then there were the partner club models with Chelsea and Vitesse and United with Antwerp.

So you’d seen a bit of this, where you think it could work from a talent movement point of view. But then we also were inspired by organisations like the EIS here, in terms of a centralised servicing department that could support multiple sports but with commonality around their practise.

So we looked at those couple of things and one of the Ferran’s big things was about building a methodology, a City methodology. We’d had success, but what was it about that way of doing it? How could we codify that, so that when we were acquiring clubs we could roll out that way of working to these other clubs?

So we spent, I would say, about six to nine months just working on that conceptually of what that would look like and trying to codify this methodology.

And then there was an opportunity to acquire the first club, which was Melbourne Heart in the A League. They got a rebrand to Melbourne City and that was almost our test case in terms of rolling out the way of work into a small club in another league. We knew that we were going to acquire the upcoming MLS licence in New York, it was probably two years away.

In the meantime, one of our partners, Nissan, who owned a club in Japan called Yokohama, we did a 80/20 split with them where we would provide services out to them. So we were up and running in terms of proving the concept, really, and then ready for New York, that was coming down the track.

Some of the thinking behind it was football was going through a real growth phase at that time in terms of the media rights. So looking at emerging markets that were starting to grow in media value and popularity and trying to make sure that we were in the market. So when I left, we had five clubs which were Melbourne, Yokohama, New York, Torque (Montevideo City) and Girona, who had just been acquired in a partnership.

But since then, you can see the movement into India, Brazil. We were constantly going out on on propositions, to see how we could collaborate and what the model would be.I think they’ve got 14, 15 clubs now.

They’ve refined their model in terms of being like more commercial and entertainment clubs and talent clubs and they’ve got that split around the two.

A talent club would be a pure kind of player trading or player development model. Lommel would be a really good example of that, in terms of like a really good registration platform first – you can come from a number of territories in the world and be able to have easy enough access into the league to then work together under the City coaches etc, but with the objective of moving those players through into other markets really.

So that would be the objective of that club. City would be the best example of an entertainment club – one of the biggest brands in the world playing in the biggest leagues, biggest competitions, and it’s about partnerships, it’s about filling the stadium, it’s about superstars.

One of the things that was fascinating about being in a global group is that it was so new; we would never have reference points in football or even sport. We’d speak to a lot more commercial organisations to say, ‘How does this feel?’ Like where you’re the regional office in this small market and you’ve got this kind of big brother-little brother type of situation.

I suppose we anticipated quite a lot of tension around that, but what we found – particularly like a Melbourne – they loved it. For them, they just were so inspired.

It was like being bought by Google or something like that. They just wanted more and more of your time and they wanted to know how it was being done and can you spend more time with this, because they’re just so ambitious and wanted to do things really, really well. 

We were in the central servicing department, so as long as we went out and we felt like we were adding value to them, it was always a really positive environment.

Where it does get tense sometimes is ‘the city style.’ We were always challenged with saying City style is beautiful football. Like, what is beautiful football? That’s different to different people. But I think people can close their eyes and understand what the City style is.

And when you’re trying to roll that out into emerging markets who might have a salary cap and might have players that they have to take that are on $40,000, that have just come out of College, that probably can’t execute the way that you want to do it, coaches would get frustrated with that.

In the end, we found a nice balance of trying to innovate within it, setting high standards and saying, ‘If that’s the objective, how do we get there?’ You don’t find a way unless you are forced to find a way. But at the same time, maybe tweaking a little bit to be more adaptable.

A cool thing about the group is that in theory, and in practice, as much as Man City will be pushing down the lessons to a small club like like a Melbourne, innovations Melbourne make by having to adapt can push up to Manchester City. At the City end of that scale you’re looking for one percenters all the time.

It can be medical. You think about globally, there are lots of different treatment methods and philosophies and if you encounter a particular problem with a particular player in one market, you might not have that set of expertise within that medical team, but when you expand it globally, you’ve got more chance of finding it.

If you’re smart with how you hire, you can make sure there’s a balanced set of skills across the group that allow you to network that really well. So yeah, across recruitment, medical, sports science, psychology, coaching, analysis, etc, there are hundreds of little things that if you are on top of it, you can connect and add value to all clubs in the group.

There’s been a lot of talent produced and sold outside the group. They’ve done fantastically well of that.

In terms of a talent pathway, it’s not the sole benefit.

Recruitment would be the biggest one. So for Manchester City, they will need coverage in all areas of the world in terms of trying to find the best talent.

But it might not make sense to beef up your scouting operation in Asia, let’s say. Because Yokohama will have to have a big operation in Asia, it means City get the benefit of that.

And if you work that right around all the regions in the world, there’s real efficiency in terms of everyone leveraging off each other’s market.

All your performance suppliers, you can get really good consistency across that, so everyone’s working on the same platforms. The numbers mean the same things in different markets. You’re not repeating the contract. So there’s efficiencies in terms of like that you say economies of scale.

New York, for example, will want to operate the best that they can. They’ll want to take a tracking provider, they want to take a GPS provider, they want to have psychology services support – they want to have all that. By buying it almost in bulk, it would cost them less than it ordinarily would have done. So it allows them to spend more of their available money on talent, really.

I was probably at the point where we were working so strategically and the central servicing team were working across the globe so remotely, that I really just missed that real sense and feel of being close to the action.

And, honestly, I got a bit paranoid that I was de-training and becoming one of those waffly guys that is all theory and no practice. It had felt a long time from being really close to the action and feeling the punches a little bit, so I wanted to get back out there.

I did have conversations with a couple of other clubs at the time. Brian was supportive,, I spoke clearly with Brian. Where there were opportunities in the group, they were going to be international and that wasn’t quite right from a family perspective.

My energy comes a lot from growing things, fixing problems. If we’re really quite well performing and steady, I get bored. I’m actually a bit dangerous in that situation, because my brain’s going to want something to do and I’ll invent stuff that naturally doesn’t need inventing, if you know what I mean. 

So the fact that Sunderland were struggling and needed a bit of a turnaround, I was really energised by that. I really wanted to go in there and help. So I was motivated by that and, yeah, motivated to start leading and seeing how good I was. I think one of the frustrations with the Sunderland situation was that as much as I was able to see another situation, I probably wasn’t able to get my hands dirty as much as I’d have wanted to do.

And that’s why I ended up leaving.

Clubs spend a high proportion of their money on players. I’ve lived through the conversation of whether should there be salary caps in the EFL. Obviously there was a period while we were outside the EFL, but through Covid that there was (a salary cap). I understand the pushback from the PFA and the player side of things in terms of putting a limit on it.

In the end we do have free choice in terms of what we want to pay the players. But it is really, really hard when you’ve got the pressures of fans, sponsors, to really to accept not pushing and trying to get promoted and so on.

So it’s a very difficult operating landscape to make sustainable. Through football’s history, there’s tended to always be somebody that will take the problem off you at some stage. So when owners have been looking to sell, okay, they might have had to bear some negative financial consequence themselves, but there nearly always is somebody that will come and take it.

However, I don’t think we can rely on that forever. I’ve had conversations with people that are interested in sports clubs but just see it as ludicrous business which is just throwing money away year after year after year. So I think there are going to be some very big and healthy debates coming up in the next few years around it all and I think we have to be open to everything.

Tradition is a really powerful thing in football and brings so many great things – the heritage and the history and the stories. But it doesn’t mean the way we’ve been working has to be what the next 150 years looks like.

Because if we want another 150 years, it’s probably telling us we do need to change. That’s my take on it, that won’t be everybody’s take on it. And I think it’s gonna have to be a lot of discussion and a lot of open mindedness from a lot of people in order to make those changes.

But things are starting to move with the new regulator and I believe if we’ve all got the right mindset around it it can be a force for good.

I’m enjoying it. I’m still very involved on the football side. The main areas why clubs are losing money is around the talent. So I think it’s strange there aren’t more football people coming across – or at least CEOs with a really strong understanding of football.

Otherwise you end up getting two camps and it can’t be like that. It has to be aligned. I have to say I’m really well supported by a strong team. On the operational, commercial side of the club, we have a Chief Operating Officer who is a really, really top operator.

And I wouldn’t be able to do it without someone like that being able to support me. But my remit and my outlook is around the growth of the football club. So football is a big part of that. The brand and the marketing is another part of it. The people and the way that we lead, is another part of it.

And I’ll take more of a leading role in those aspects, whereas the commercial parts will be run by experts in those areas.

Well, I’d love there to be a new plan and maybe there will be. I’m very focused on doing what I said I’d do and that was to deliver the vision. And we’re not there yet, so that’s my whole focus. When we’re able to reach the Championship – and it might take eight years, nine years – at that point we’ll feel satisfied that was able to help lead the change and the progress of the club.

And then we’ll sit down and have another conversation and see if I’m the right man for the next part, if we’ve all got the energy and the skills to be able to do it. It’s been an amazing journey, I’m so thankful that my career has turned out in the way it has.

I’m really motivated to get the rest of the job done and then we’ll see what happens after that.

I am looking forward to Old Trafford – the Conference is always brilliant.

As you know, I’ve been to the last few and you play a really, really, valuable role in the system and it’s been amazing to see the journey that you guys have been on. From starting up the first couple of articles to what you are today – credit to you and to everyone that gets something out of it.