Audere est facere in theory, not in practice

You know what’s funny. A couple of months ago I wrote that the warning signs were there. That the appointment didn’t make sense. That the strategy felt like another holding pattern dressed up as a plan.

Now you’ve got Ange Postecoglou saying it, publicly, in that clip from the Overlap doing the rounds. Calm, measured, but basically confirming what most of us with eyes and a memory could already see. The culture, the direction, the lack of alignment. It wasn’t noise. It was structural.

And now Thomas Frank is gone.

Unsurprising. I said at the time he was not the right choice. Not because he’s useless, but because he’s pragmatic style and anti football is the complete polar opposite of everything we supposedly stand for. 

Timing matters. Profile matters. You don’t reset a club off the back of Europa League success and Champions League football by going safe and hoping coherence appears.

That wasn’t ambition. That was risk management, once again a failure by ENIC to embrace another latin phrase - Carpe Diem.

Frank inherited a squad that had just won a European Cup, with a manager they connected with, who was popular and who had done the impossible under incredibly difficult circumstances.  

Levy and ENIC once again demonstrated a lack of emotional intelligence. They destroyed the dressing rooms confidence, didn’t recognise that the squad had something to prove after an injury ravaged season and instead installed a manager who’d never won anything and lacked the personality and pedigree to inspire this team. 

It was obvious that Frank was never accepted and failed to win over the dressing room. Performances were flat and uninspiring. Recruitment still reactive and without quality. Injuries piled up again and there was a clear disconnect and instability.

The stadium got heavier by the week. It wasn’t just results. It was direction and the trigger should have been pulled following the Chelsea debacle, when Frank was publicly embarrassed by Van De Ven and Spence. For me that demonstrated everything. If I were the Chairman seeing that I would have raised a full investigation to what was going on.

And this is the bottom line. 

ENIC have and always will be the central issue.

Not because they haven’t built infrastructure. The stadium is elite. The training ground is elite. Commercial revenue is elite. But football clubs are not property portfolios. They are competitive organisms. Timing is everything. Windows close fast.

Every time we get close to a breakthrough moment, we hedge.

We nearly win the league, we tread water.

We reach a Champions League final, we shop late and cheap.

We win a European trophy, we reset conservatively.

That is not how serious clubs behave.

Our motto isn’t a marketing strapline. To dare is to do. It implies risk. Conviction. Front foot thinking. Instead it’s become something printed on the wall while we debate net spend spreadsheets.

You cannot operate like a cautious mid table asset manager and expect elite outcomes.

This is the bit nobody at board level seems to grasp. Perception matters. Top players have choices. Top managers have choices. If the industry believes you lack conviction, you are already second choice. It becomes self fulfilling.

Frank being sacked does not solve that. It just resets the cycle again.

Ange’s comments only amplify the point. When former managers start subtly pointing at cultural issues, you should listen. It is rarely about one man in the dugout. It is about structure, ambition and backing.

So where does this leave us?

At a crossroads we’ve pretended wasn’t there.

Either ENIC finally act like custodians of a genuinely elite football institution and invest properly, strategically and aggressively at the right moments, or they admit this isn’t what they want to be.

You cannot keep selling the idea of a big club while behaving like a cautious holding company.

Be serious. Or sell.

That is not emotion talking. It is pattern recognition over two decades.

The game is up now. There is nowhere left to hide behind infrastructure projects or PR lines about long term sustainability. We have the revenue. We have the platform. We have the fanbase.

What we do not have is decisive football ambition at board level.

And until that changes, we will keep cycling managers, cycling narratives and cycling hope.

At some point you either step forward and match the scale of the institution you own.

Or you move aside for someone who will.

It really is that simple.

TTID