Chris Dunlavy
A FRESH TAKE ON FOOTBALL
REFLECTING on his time as owner of Watford, Elton John recalled how the club felt like an extended family.
“Back then, you knew the name of everyone, the tea lady, the guy who did the pitch,” said the 76-year-old, whose legendary partnership with manager Graham Taylor saw the Hornets challenge for the First Division title in 1983. “I find a bit of this missing in football, now.”
It’s missing at Watford, alright. So quickly do folk pass through Vicarage Road these days that you’d struggle to name the players, let alone the person who cuts the grass.
Media attention tends to centre on the high turnover of managers. Watford have employed approximately 357 of them since the Pozzo family bought the club in 2012 - a figure that includes caretakers and interims, some of whom (and I’m being serious now) lasted longer than supposedly permanent appointments.
Valerien Ismael was the latest to go, and there’s frankly no point attempting to analyse the specifics of his departure. He worked for Watford, and that’s what happens. Tom Cleverley, his successor, will find out soon enough.
But forget the managerial churn. It’s a symptom, not a cause. The root of Watford’s stagnation lies in a deeply ingrained culture of transience, where upheaval has become so commonplace that nobody even notices anymore.
On the pitch, Watford are more like a cattle market than a football club. Players come. Players go. Nobody knows who they are, or why they are there.
Take Rey Manaj, the Albanian striker who was signed from Barcelona (a club he never played for), made six appearances, injured his hamstring and then had his contract cancelled - all in the space of six months.
Or Argentine Ignacio Pussetto, an £8m acquisition from Pozzo-owned Udinese who spent the vast majority of his 1,311 days at Watford hundreds of miles away from Vicarage Road, largely because successive managers had no interest in using him.
“We won’t be the first or last club who sign a player for a fee and it doesn’t work out,” said CEO Scott Duxbury. It’s absolutely true, but this sort of thing happens at Watford all the time.
Absurd
Are potential signings profiled for their compatibility? It feels more like Watford are simply playing the transfer market like old-fashioned prospectors, sifting through tonnes of worthless silt in the hope of one day turning up a solid nugget of pure Joao Pedro. And there has been a LOT of silt.
So far in 2023-24, 11 players have been signed on permanent deals, with a further five loaned in. Twenty-nine have been sold and another 19 loaned out. That’s a 64-player turnover in less than ten months.
