Swansea City Thread

[davidge]

Goalkeeping coach Tony Roberts has left the club to join Chris Coleman in China.

 

Swans gave rejected an £8m bid from Fulham for Jordan Ayew.

[davidge]

Fabianski gone to West Ham for £7 million.

[davidge]

Swansea City's 2018-19 Championship fixtures

 

04/08/2018 17:30 Sheffield United v Swansea City

11/08/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Preston North End

18/08/2018 15:00 Birmingham City v Swansea City

22/08/2018 19:45 Swansea City v Leeds United

25/08/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Bristol City

01/09/2018 15:00 Millwall v Swansea City

15/09/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Nottingham Forest

18/09/2018 20:00 Stoke City v Swansea City

22/09/2018 15:00 Middlesbrough v Swansea City

29/09/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Queens Park Rangers

02/10/2018 19:45 Wigan Athletic v Swansea City

06/10/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Ipswich Town

20/10/2018 15:00 Aston Villa v Swansea City

23/10/2018 19:45 Swansea City v Blackburn Rovers

27/10/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Reading

03/11/2018 15:00 Rotherham United v Swansea City

10/11/2018 15:00 Bolton Wanderers v Swansea City

24/11/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Norwich City

28/11/2018 19:45 Swansea City v West Bromwich Albion

01/12/2018 15:00 Derby County v Swansea City

08/12/2018 15:00 Brentford v Swansea City

15/12/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Sheffield Wednesday

22/12/2018 15:00 Hull City v Swansea City

26/12/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Aston Villa

29/12/2018 15:00 Swansea City v Wigan Athletic

01/01/2019 15:00 Reading v Swansea City

12/01/2019 15:00 Preston North End v Swansea City

19/01/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Sheffield United

26/01/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Birmingham City

02/02/2019 15:00 Bristol City v Swansea City

09/02/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Millwall

13/02/2019 19:45 Leeds United v Swansea City

16/02/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Brentford

23/02/2019 15:00 Sheffield Wednesday v Swansea City

02/03/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Bolton Wanderers

09/03/2019 15:00 Norwich City v Swansea City

13/03/2019 20:00 West Bromwich Albion v Swansea City

16/03/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Derby County

30/03/2019 15:00 Nottingham Forest v Swansea City

06/04/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Middlesbrough

09/04/2019 19:45 Swansea City v Stoke City

13/04/2019 15:00 Queens Park Rangers v Swansea City

19/04/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Rotherham United

22/04/2019 15:00 Ipswich Town v Swansea City

27/04/2019 15:00 Swansea City v Hull City

05/05/2019 12:30 Blackburn Rovers v Swansea City

[davidge]

The entire scouting & recruitment team have been sacked.

The new manager and his 2 assistants will be responsible from now on.

 

No definite news about any transfer activity, other than Fabianski having gone to West Ham and Mesa to Seville.

Looks like Bony, Narsingh, Fernandez and both Ayews will all be leaving - and probably some others.

Swans meant to be talking to Oostende about signing a Belgian striker for around £2.5m - though Stoke also interested.

[davidge]

Ki has joined Newcastle.

He was a free agent having run down his contract with the Swans.

[davidge]

Swansea have had a bid accepted for 19-year-old Sunderland winger Joel Asoro.

The Sweden Under-21 player has one year left on his current deal and it is believed a fee of around £2m is the price for the Black Cats to let him go.

Asoro joined Sunderland from Swedish side IF Brommapojkarna in 2015.

New Swansea manager Graham Potter is a long-time admirer of the player from his time in charge of Ostersunds FK and Asoro would be his first signing since becoming boss at the Liberty Stadium.

Asoro made 29 appearances for the Black Cats last season, scoring three goals.

[davidge]

He wants out.

 

#Swans defender Federico Fernandez says Russian Premier League club Krasnodar would like to sign him.

 

[davidge]

Sat in the Liberty awaiting first home game of new season.

Fans pessimistic & angry with owners. They are asset stripping.

Just got to hope youngsters step up and make us competitive this season.

[davidge]

Hard fought win today.

It’s clear that under Potter we are back to playing the passing & possession game that we used to play. We had a lot of possession in the first half, though most of it was in our defensive third. We should have been more than one up at half time. We were overrun by a Preston in the second half but fought hard and kept them out.

We clearly need to strengthen the squad, though only loans are possible now. At a minimum, we need a centre half, holding midfielder, full back and centre forward.

 

[davidge]

Starting XI today with ages:

 

Kristofer Nordfeldt - 29

Martin Olsson - 30

Van Der Hoorn - 25

Joe Rodon - 20

Connor Roberts - 22

Jay Fulton - 24

Tom Carroll - 26

Bersant Celina - 21

Barrie McKay - 23

Joel Asoro - 19

Oliver McBurnie - 22

 

[davidge]

Haven’t posted on here in a while because we’re in a mess.

The transfer window again showed what’s been clear for a while. The American owners are only interested in taking as much money out of the club as possible. We offloaded 3 players and tried to sell more. Never any chance we were going to sign anyone.

Tonight, the Chairman Huw Jenkins has resigned - basically saying the yanks are wrecking the club. A bit late now as it was his, and other Directors’, greed I selling to them in order to line their own pockets that brought us here in the first place.

The Manager is trying his best and has promise but he has no squad to work with. We’ll probably stay up this year - 41 points now. 44 stayed up last year but 51 went down the year before. Little hope for next season though. We’ll sell more players in the summer.

Renewed season ticket for next season, but only for my Mum. She started watching the Swans in 1946, is 88 now, and is determined to go as long as she can (in a wheelchair nowadays). I’m a newcomer. Got my first season ticket in 1978.

Division 1 beckons.

[vimto66]

You`re always pretty downbeat about your team Davidge, i realise you watch them and live locally so you`ll know whats going on etc. Before a ball was kicked i thought Swansea would adjust to life in the championship pretty well, and possibly even have sniff of the playoffs, by and large they`ve done the first bit, but as you`re no doubt aware consistency has been your problem.

Fans look from afar at other clubs and make unfair judgements, they dont know half of it with all the club politics and goings on behind the scenes, as a neutral i certainly dont think relegation is a threat, but as a fan we naturally always look on the dark side.

[davidge]

The youngsters have done well so we should be ok this season. Next season could be a different matter. The owners are plundering the club, will sell anyone they can get a price for in the summer, and won’t spend a penny. Arrangements had been in place to buy the stadium from the council. First thing owners did was drop the deal and get a lease agreement instead. Means the cash comes out of club each year so no need for them to put anything in. It’s continued from there. I can guarantee that cash is going out of the club and into their pockets on a regular basis. They installed one of their chums as Chief Exec to do this.

No indication they’ll change so only one way we can go sadly.

 

[blue1878]

15 hours ago, davidge said:

The youngsters have done well so we should be ok this season. Next season could be a different matter. The owners are plundering the club, will sell anyone they can get a price for in the summer, and won’t spend a penny. Arrangements had been in place to buy the stadium from the council. First thing owners did was drop the deal and get a lease agreement instead. Means the cash comes out of club each year so no need for them to put anything in. It’s continued from there. I can guarantee that cash is going out of the club and into their pockets on a regular basis. They installed one of their chums as Chief Exec to do this.

No indication they’ll change so only one way we can go sadly.

 

davidge it doesnt sound good at all

[davidge]

THE JOURNEYMAN | GREGOR ROBERTSON

february 11 2019, 12:01am, the times

Swansea City: a model club’s descent into bitterness

What the hell has happened to Swansea City? It feels like a pertinent question after the events of the past ten days in south Wales. A club who a few years ago were held up as an example of co-operative, supporter-led ownership and intelligent leadership have become riven with bitterness, mistrust and resentment and, on Saturday, supporter protests.

“No ambition, no investment, sold out,” one banner read and Swansea’s transfer deadline day, which swiftly took on the appearance of a desperate fire sale of the club’s most valuable assets, will certainly go down as one of the more perplexing in recent memory. It was followed, 48 hours later, by the resignation of Huw Jenkins, the club’s chairman of 17 years.

The result of last season’s relegation was always going to be chastening for Swansea who, according to Chris Pearlman, the chief operating officer writing in the match-day programme, had their annual income drop by £60 million. That is a daunting sum for a club the size of Swansea to cope with and so the departures of Jefferson Montero, Tom Carroll and Wilfried Bony on loan to West Bromwich Albion, Aston Villa and Al-Arabi respectively took the number of exits to slash the club’s post-Premier League wage bill to 19 across two transfer windows.

Only six players have arrived in the opposite direction, and none of them joined last month. That in itself was asking a lot of Graham Potter, the manager, but when Leroy Fer, the club captain, appeared to be on the verge of joining Carroll at Villa, and Daniel James, an exciting 21-year-old winger, came perilously close to joining Leeds United for £8.5 million, only for the plug to be pulled in the final hour, it felt to many as though the club’s American owners, Jason Levien and Steve Kaplan, were cutting much farther and deeper than the squad could be expected to bear. “There’s just a complete breakdown of trust really,” Steven Carroll, editor of the Swansea Oh Swansea fanzine, says.

Potter is the former Östersunds manager who masterminded the Swedish minnows’ rise from the country’s fourth tier to top flight, as well as last season’s Europa League adventures. He replaced Carlos Carvalhal at the Liberty Stadium in the summer and led Swansea to a hard-fought but deserved 1-0 win against Millwall on Saturday. The 43-year-old deserves great credit for keeping Swansea, 11th in the Sky Bet Championship, within six points and touching distance of the play-offs in the straightened and increasingly strained environment that he has inherited in his first job in the EFL.

Jenkins’s parting gift, it appears, was to veto the deals for Fer and James. And, while his part in Swansea’s remarkable ascent from the foot of the Football League to the top flight between 2005 and 2011 was a topic of discussion around the Liberty, so too was his part in the club’s decline over the past three years. In 2002 Jenkins, along with a group of long-standing supporters, raised £1 million to save the stricken club and the supporters’ trust raised £200,000 for a 21 per cent stake and an elected member on the club’s board.

In the next decade Swansea left the decrepit Vetch Field for the £27 million Liberty Stadium, funded by Swansea council, and with a sense of unity and ambition and the adroit appointments of Kenny Jackett, Roberto Martínez and Brendan Rodgers as managers they moved into the Premier League.

Michael Laudrup and Gary Monk led the club to League Cup success in 2013 and an eighth-place Premier League finish two years later. More recently, though, the hiring and firing of Francesco Guidolin, Bob Bradley, Paul Clement and Carvahal in the space of two years, and some calamitous dealings in the transfer market, led Swansea to surrender their top-flight status meekly in May.

“We were the model club, I suppose. For any club that isn’t the biggest, to get themselves into the top flight, to gradually build every year. We had a philosophy, ‘The Swansea Way’, but we’ve lost our way,” Steven Carroll says.

However, it is the effects of the decision of Jenkins and his fellow investors to exclude the trust from negotiations to sell a majority stake in the club, in 2016, to Levien, the managing general partner of the Major League Soccer side DC United, and Kaplan, principal of Oaktree Capital investment fund, and vice-chairman of the Memphis Grizzlies basketball franchise, and their US-based consortium that may have the most lasting impact on Swansea.

“Everything we worked for — as a group of people, not just the trust, all shareholders aligned, trying to do the best for the football club — one decision to sell the club behind the trust’s back took that ownership model and destroyed it overnight,” Phil Sumbler, the supporters’ trust chairman, says. “I think we probably became just another Premier League football club, struggling to survive on a season-by-season basis.”

The trust is in a period of arbitration with the club concerning the sale. Members may soon be balloted to determine whether or not legal action, for what they believe to have been unfair prejudice as 21 per cent stakeholders, is the necessary course of action. “The Americans bought roughly two-thirds of the football club,” Sumbler says. “They should have been buying two-thirds of everybody’s shares on a pro-rata basis. That would have put something in the region of £12 to £15 million in the trust’s coffers, sitting there, ready, for a rainy day, of which we have had too many over the years.”

Jenkins and his fellow investors, meanwhile, made millions — as much as 100 times their original investments. Many feel that Jenkins, who stayed on as chairman with a six-figure salary until last week, should have left some time ago, but he retained the support of Levien and Kaplan until last week, when some sharply worded statements suggested a breakdown in relations.

Frustratingly, there have been enough encouraging signs on the pitch to suggest that, with even modest investment to supplement a squad full of talented young players, Potter could be the man to bring back the slick, progressive, passing football with which Swansea were for so long synonymous, and spearhead a return to the Premier League which, after all, is the only way the owners will see a return on their investment.

James, the jewel in Swansea’s crown, was back to his effervescent best on Saturday after being left out for the defeat by Bristol City last weekend, two days after spending the evening at Leeds’ Thorp Arch training ground waiting for confirmation of a transfer that never came. He is not, however, the only young player to have risen to the task this season.

Matt Grimes, an elegant midfielder who spent last season on loan at Northampton Town in League One; Connor Roberts, an industrious Wales right back; Ollie McBurnie, a languid, old-fashioned centre forward with 13 league goals; Bersant Celina, the Kosovan No 10 who joined from Manchester City for £3 million in the summer; and Joe Rodon, a home-grown centre back, have all flourished under Potter’s tutelage. All are 23 or younger.

George Byers, a 22-year-old midfielder, settled the game with a first-half volley that deflected beyond Jordan Archer, the Millwall goalkeeper, and after the trip to face Leeds United at Elland Road on Wednesday night there is the visit of Brentford for a place in the FA Cup quarter-final to look forward to next Sunday. Still, a cloud lingers over the Liberty.

“Trying to turn the environment into a more positive one was always the challenge,” Potter says. “We’re going through a process . . . I’ve always seen my role as working with the players, to help them, to carry on building a team that connects with supporters. That’s the most important thing at a football club.”

Perhaps Swansea’s owners would do well to remember that.

[davidge]

Wem-ber-ley, Wem-ber-ley,

Our name is Swansea City and we’re going to Wem-ber-ley!

 

 

(unless we draw Man City in the next round :-)

 

[vimto66]

3 hours ago, davidge said:

Wem-ber-ley, Wem-ber-ley,

Our name is Swansea City and we’re going to Wem-ber-ley!

 

 

(unless we draw Man City in the next round :-)

 

.......or man utd/chelsea, wolves, crystal Palace, brighton and watford, i`d be hoping for millwall at home next round, at this stage its all about gaining any advantage, an home draw against someone you have a better chance of beating, any of the other teams you`d still have chance, but the chances recede somewhat.

[davidge]

Oh well. No Wembley Trip means I’ll have more cash for my month in Pattaya.

[blue1878]

davidge I see Swansea are away to Shffield Wdnesday on Saturday. How do you think you'll get on??  I see the Wednesday are 2 places and 3 points behind you.  So it could be a close game

[davidge]

On 20/02/2019 at 09:33, blue1878 said:

davidge I see Swansea are away to Shffield Wdnesday on Saturday. How do you think you'll get on??  I see the Wednesday are 2 places and 3 points behind you.  So it could be a close game

Can never be sure what to expect. Youngsters have done better than anyone would have expected them to but we’re inconsistent. The Brentford cup game last weekend showed that perfectly. We were awful first half, didn’t compete, could easily gave been 3 down. Second half, with same players and formation, we were a totally different team. Too sharp for Brentford, ended up winning easily.

We beat Wednesday 2-1 at home, though we looked much better than them that day. Don’t know if Steve Bruce has had any effect yet but expect they’ll be well-organised and a bit defensive.

 

[davidge]

We made hard work of it today but got 3 points in the end.

Bolton comfortably the worst side I’ve seen at the Liberty this season. All very big players but no real pace and no creativity. They gave away 13 free kicks in the first half, and the ref played advantage 3 or 4 times as well. Whenever a Swans player was creating something, they just fouled him. Came to get a 0-0 and maybe hope to get something on break from a Swans mistake or set play. We did give them 2 or 3 chances.

Mc Burnie missed a penalty then Bolton had a player sent off just before half time. No doubt about the red. Already been booked for a blatant pull back that led to penalty then a very bad challenge that could have been a red in itself. Wheater then got sent off for tripping Routledge when he was clean through on goal. Took the ref ages to give red and a long conversation with linesman - obviously wasn’t sure which player it was!

We eventually managed to score then got a second late on. Overall though, we were just too slow moving the ball and took too many touches instead of playing it first time. Crowd not happy. Pissing with rain by the end of game and got soaked getting back to car. Still, 3 points.

Can’t see Bolton staying up.

Lowest number of away fans all season today as well:

[blue1878]

Well at 17:20 Swansea take on Manchester City in the FA Cup.  And as my mum comes from North Wales I will be supporting Swansea

[davidge]

Just now, blue1878 said:

Well at 17:20 Swansea take on Manchester City in the FA Cup.  And as my mum comes from North Wales I will be supporting Swansea

I have my abacus ready.

 

[blue1878]

1 minute ago, davidge said:

I have my abacus ready.

 

Why

Are you expecting Swansea to score a bagful lol

[johns game]

Poor decision making by officials saved Man City’s embarrassment.