Darren Eales

[thomas]

"I wonder if Saudi ownership has changed me?" I think to myself as I post a transfer window inspired, borderline-deaththreat meme featuring my club's directors to Facebook.

[toon25]

3 minutes ago, Ronaldo said:

Are you alright? That’s twice you’ve agreed with me.

 

Must be the new meds!

Still, a good point made is a good point forever.

[WilliamPS]

AS did great things but you can’t have two CEO’s, if she didn’t want to do it ultimately she was always going to have to take a backseat. Can’t have two pairs of hands on the steering wheel.

 

Within the set up the transfer strategy probably isn’t really the CEOs job, beyond agreeing the budgets and squad salary cap. Going all in on Guehi for example doesn’t sound like that’s a decision from Eales, they will have been taken by the committee but those decisions must come from the football side of the operation.

 

Eales job is to sort the club as a business, that’s the metric to judge him on. Revenue, commercial success, stadium, infrastructure etc.

[TheBrownBottle]

2 hours ago, timeEd32 said:

The most concerning part of these articles is that we seemed surprised in both January and June at the position we were in regarding PSR.

Definitely - not at all a great look for any of the current nor former leadership of the club. 

[TRon]

28 minutes ago, toon25 said:

 

This is it for me. Can't think Isak and Bruno - who were most likely sold the longer term vision of the club - would have signed in the knowledge that 18 months down the line Jacob Murphy would still be playing RW and we'd bring in absolutely nobody in a summer transfer window having missed out on European qualification.

 

Pretty sure Bruno said somewhere down the line that we needed to be back in the CL, and I would have thought that meant qualifying at the end of this campaign. The squad we have now is going to get top 6-8 I would have thought, and that's being generous.

[WilliamPS]

1 minute ago, TheBrownBottle said:

Definitely - not at all a great look for any of the current nor former leadership of the club. 

Probably expected to drop into the EL instead of coming 4th in the CL group and so having a lot more revenue and to finish higher in the league, gaining more prize money 

[TheBrownBottle]

2 hours ago, Wallace said:

 Longstaff has talked about PSR and how the players had seen the news and that it seemed everyone had their price.  I guess that would have been unsettling for the players as well.

That’s true at any club in fairness - they probably need to grow up a wee bit on that front.  You could sign Haaland from Man City - provided you stump up the cash. 

[TheBrownBottle]

1 minute ago, WilliamPS said:

Probably expected to drop into the EL instead of coming 4th in the CL group and so having a lot more revenue and to finish higher in the league, gaining more prize money 

While I agree that dropping out in the groups would have caused a dip in projections, we were so far short (£60m) of meeting the regs that winning the Champions League wouldn’t have brought in the additional revenues required

 

This was outright negligence tbh

[PauloGeordio]

2 minutes ago, TheBrownBottle said:

Definitely - not at all a great look for any of the current nor former leadership of the club. 

Hopefully part of a learning curve. Must do better yes. Didn’t get burnt (points deduction) thankfully. Onwards and hopefully upwards 

[ohmelads]

4 hours ago, Abacus said:

I'm not really convinced by him yet.

 

This is from the i when he was appointed;

 

Eales recounted to the Jed Hughes podcast earlier this year that he built Atlanta United’s fanbase “pub crawl by pub crawl” – drinking with supporter groups and applying the personal touch to the issue of fan engagement.

 

Indeed, he was so regularly pictured out drinking with supporters that when the club ended up looking for a picture of Eales for an MLS presentation, they ended up having to Photoshop the pint glass out of his hand.

 

This may well be unfair and a hit job from them, but I didn't like that at the time and think he was doing a different job at Atlanta, which was to build fan engagement, yet he's already got that here.

 

And that he also built them into a "commercial juggernaut", which we're yet to see here, maybe because he's working in an altogether different environment compared to the MLS.

 

Then there were the comments about letting Eddie concentrate on what he's good at, which I don't imagine would have gone down well for someone previously involved in everything. Cloth eared at best, if this was really sprung on Howe.

 

All complete and utter speculation and time will tell, I suppose.

 

A cursory look at his CV shows he's inexperienced in such a high profile role at such a high level. The Premier League is a totally different world to the MLS.

 

Boozing with fans at the Stack gives massive Mike Ashley vibes, given Mike Ashley started exactly the same way.

[TRon]

Just now, TheBrownBottle said:

While I agree that dropping out in the groups would have caused a dip in projections, we were so far short (£60m) of meeting the regs that winning the Champions League wouldn’t have brought in the additional revenues required

 

This was outright negligence tbh

 

I know it's not a popular thought, but I do think it was Amanada and Meherdad who were probably living in dreamland. Eales was the one who first talked about selling Bruno if we had to, and how we would have to get used to the idea of selling stars to comply with PSR. I daresay it was him who set up the Gordon deal before we ended up selling Minteh and Anderson.

 

These sort of deals will make you the matinee arch villain, but someone has to do it unless we want points deducted. That's not an endorsement of Eales by any stretch of the imagination, for all I know he might be more incompetent than the rest. I'm just following the timeline.

[TheBrownBottle]

2 minutes ago, TRon said:

 

I know it's not a popular thought, but I do think it was Amanada and Meherdad who were probably living in dreamland. Eales was the one who first talked about selling Bruno if we had to, and how we would have to get used to the idea of selling stars to comply with PSR. I daresay it was him who set up the Gordon deal before we ended up selling Minteh and Anderson.

 

These sort of deals will make you the matinee arch villain, but someone has to do it unless we want points deducted. That's not an endorsement of Eales by any stretch of the imagination, for all I know he might be more incompetent than the rest. I'm just following the timeline.

Yeah I’m afraid I completely agree - even Hope’s sympathetic piece (in terms of AS & MG) pretty much states that they got carried away and blew past what they could / had agreed to spend in each window, and then didn’t follow up with any sales.  
 

Eales doesn’t come across well, but Hope’s piece in particular feels like a hit piece against someone who probably has tried to be the adult in the room with some of this.   If Eales has understood the numbers, then he’s known for some time we’re in bother.  AS was the voice of the club - she should’ve been the one in January talking about us needing to shift players out.  Doing the nice and easy stuff is … easy.

[The Bonk]

38 minutes ago, thomas said:

"I wonder if Saudi ownership has changed me?" I think to myself as I post a transfer window inspired, borderline-deaththreat meme featuring my club's directors to Facebook.

 is the meme AI generated or simply regurgitated from another meme previously witnessed?

[Myleftboot]

So, I’ve been dipping in and dipping out of the forum the past couple of days. Is Darren Eales the cunt or is it Paul Mitchell or Eddie?

[TheBrownBottle]

1 minute ago, Myleftboot said:

So, I’ve been dipping in and dipping out of the forum the past couple of days. Is Darren Eales the cunt or is it Paul Mitchell or Eddie?

Craig Hope is the cunt.  The others have been varying degrees of responsible for a mess. 

[Parsley]

Eales, Mitchell and Howe should do a three-way press conference, Q&A or something - show that everyone's on the same page (which, by the way, I think they ultimately are - Howe's been way more diplomatic than Benitez would've been) and put all the tabloid gossip to bed. Would be an obvious olive branch to the fans also. 

[GEFAFWISP]

2 minutes ago, Parsley said:

Eales, Mitchell and Howe should do a three-way press conference, Q&A or something - show that everyone's on the same page (which, by the way, I think they ultimately are - Howe's been way more diplomatic than Benitez would've been) and put all the tabloid gossip to bed. Would be an obvious olive branch to the fans also. 

If they did that it would probably fuel further speculation and feel like a PR stunt tbh.

 

A win tomorrow sorts a lot of the chatter out...until January or a bad run of form at least.

[WilliamPS]

1 minute ago, TheBrownBottle said:

While I agree that dropping out in the groups would have caused a dip in projections, we were so far short (£60m) of meeting the regs that winning the Champions League wouldn’t have brought in the additional revenues required

 

This was outright negligence tbh

Fair point, however progressing a few more stages and winning games would have made it a lot closer.

 

I think a CL win is £2m prize money alone. Having a few more games with gate receipts, tv money etc may have made it so it was only Anderson or whatever.

[The Bonk]

Just now, Myleftboot said:

So, I’ve been dipping in and dipping out of the forum the past couple of days. Is Darren Eales the cunt or is it Paul Mitchell or Eddie?

They’re the triangle of cunts that are ruining the hard work of Staveley & Ghodoussi, our respective Lord and Saviour’s. Rueben is a Tory cunt, on Tory cunt island and PIF will be shot of us when we don’t get a CL spot this year.
 

1 minute ago, Parsley said:

Eales, Mitchell and Howe should do a three-way press conference, Q&A or something - show that everyone's on the same page (which, by the way, I think they ultimately are - Howe's been way more diplomatic than Benitez would've been) and put all the tabloid gossip to bed. Would be an obvious olive branch to the fans also. 

I think this might come, but don’t expect some sort of revelation other than what has been mentioned by Howe at his presser. 

[Stal]

#ealesout

[WilliamPS]

They absolutely shouldn’t do some joint press conference to explain a transfer window. That would be crazy, it’s a football club not a reality TV show. 
 

Reviews should be internal, and talking done on the pitch

[Jackie Broon]

4 minutes ago, WilliamPS said:

Fair point, however progressing a few more stages and winning games would have made it a lot closer.

 

I think a CL win is £2m prize money alone. Having a few more games with gate receipts, tv money etc may have made it so it was only Anderson or whatever.

 

Yeah, but we knew that wasn't a possibility by the middle of December.

[Scoot]

Be nice to get some answers after the spurs game and then for everyone to draw a line under it and move on. We need to move on from the negativity because as we've seen many times before at Newcastle, the negativity will reflect on the pitch. Nobody wants that.

 

I'm sure big NUFC fan Craig Hope and the rest of them will revel in it though...

[Kid Icarus]

That would absolutely ruin me if I was an Everton fan like.  Just like our match at home to them last season did.

[ohmelads]

If you've fucked up massively, the less you say the better. They'd be smart to lay low and hope Howe can overperform in the short term and deflect the heat.

 

I'm just amazed Eales has had such an easy ride until now. Since his arrival, the transfer policy has been hard to understand. All our best signings post-takeover were sorted before his tenure. I couldn't imagine any other club with serious ambitions in the Premier League taking someone as inexperienced as Eales as their CEO. It looked a brave/risky appointment at the time.