Why blame Rafa Benitez for the mismanagement of Parry, Hicks and Gillett?

POINT YOUR FINGERS THE OTHER WAY PLEASE

Do we have to be Chartered Accountants or Financial Experts to fully understand modern football?

With leveraged buy outs, stock floatation, commercial revenue as a percentage of turnover and all sorts of other inexplicable words, we find ourselves re-reading a sentence several times before finally deciding we still don’t have a clue how to pronounce the word let alone understand what it means, maybe the answer to the question is, should we really care?

Google is a god send

If you want to know exactly what the blonde presenter on Sky Sports News is actually saying when she casually speaks about amortisation of player registrations or the global credit crunch and its fundamental affects on investment, then yes, it can be.

However, Google can also reveal a Pandora’s Box of information of such an incredible size, that we wished we hadn’t bothered to open it in the first place and instead, choosing to have gone down the pub for a pint with like minded football loving friends.

As the internet and media now saturate every angle and aspect of the modern game, do we need to think about attending night school in order to maintain cohesion during the beer fuelled discussions with our mates down the local?

To some extent, I really think there has to be a balance between understanding what happens off the field and actually enjoying the game of football itself on the field.

What happens behind the scenes affects what happens on the pitch

Agreed, there are some who couldn’t care less as long as we are winning, but when things go wrong those same "supporters" can easily sit at their computer screens and accuse, complain and stir up trouble without realising sometimes their fingers are pointing in the wrong direction.

"Sack the manager, no trophies means he isn’t doing his job properly."

We can all win the league on our Xbox.

Maybe you want to build a house, would you want to build that house buying only 10 bricks a week or would you rather buy all the bricks you need in one go? We don’t want it to collapse in a few months when its hit by a storm, so you defiantly would want to take some time to build the foundations wouldn’t you?

Now let’s imagine you want to build a successful football squad, if you don’t have the money to buy the players you want, would you simply have to look at other options and ideas?

Off the field matters may not be the only deciding factor to success on the field but it can be one of the major influences to a team’s achievements come the end of the season, if one person does not do their job properly it makes it harder for someone else to do their job effectively, so in my opinion, what happens behind the scenes can affect what happens on the pitch.

A football club doesn’t rely on football players alone for success

The older we get the more we realise just how much hard work goes in to running a successful  household, so imagine what it would take to run a multi-million pound global business, which, whether we like it or not, is what our football clubs are turning in to.

Gone are the days of fags at half time and down The Stanford after the game for a bloody good piss up, gone are the days of not worrying about eating that third pie with your half a pound of chips or extra chilli sauce on that greasy "unknown meat" kebab after the club on a Friday night.

Instead we have macro diets, micro surgeries, protein injections, psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, agrostologists, confidence coaches, depression experts, lawyers, doctors, agents, commercial directors, investment funding chairmen, media liaison officers, it makes you wonder if there are any career opportunities a football club doesn’t offer in the modern era?

Do we really believe that our favourite players and managers are the only ones who win the titles and cups, we all spend 10 months a year praying to the football gods for?

Point your fingers the other way please

The suggestion here is not that managers and players are never at fault as you and I both know sometimes they can be, my point is a simple one, to highlight to some supporters that sometimes a football club as a collective can and should be held responsible when things don’t work out.

Supporters really don’t need to understand every word that’s mentioned by that financial expert on Sky Sports News or recite the job description of every trainer, director and chairmen who works for their beloved club, but there are some supporters who need to know that the success of their club does not solely rely on the work of the players and the manager alone.

Jamie John Ward.