Kristjaan Speakman believes that the ownership issue at SAFC won’t stand in the way of the way of the club’s summer re-structuring. Hopefully the charlatans will be gone anyway…
OWNERSHIP ISSUE
"I do totally appreciate that the ownership question is one that keeps coming up. From my perspective, in all the time I've been here, everything has been as it was sold to me in terms of how we run. But I appreciate that some of that can't always be communicated externally and that then becomes frustrating."
BUDGETS
"We will finalise the budgets and the detail of that this week and it then becomes very important to manage expectation around what that is, and what we’re then trying to [achieve] next season. We really want that unity in terms of expectation internally and externally. We know how important it will be to get everyone in that picture. We still have some executive meetings this week and we will communicate with more clarity after those conversations. There is definitely a transition process.
AMBITION
"We're not going to try and put a halt on any ambition, say that we're going to try and finish 20th, 15th or 12th or whatever. We want to finish as high as possibly can and will give everything to do that, but we've also got to be respectful of the fact that it is a new league and we are taking a new team into it. We've got to get the blend right in our squad to give us the best chance. What we're not going to do is deviate from the strategy.
TWEAKS
"We're going to stick to what we're doing, tweak it where we need to and in doing so we're fairly sure we'll have a really competitive team. You've seen our team this season with new players and young players coming in who hadn't played in the league before, then can sometimes be a bit of adaptation. You've got to expect that, and naturally with a model like ours, the more time you spend in the Championship the stronger you become. Parachute payments make for a big disparity in the Championship, there is a big gap in the quartiles of expenditure.
CHAMPIONSHIP STRUCTURE
"We've been expanding our operations to get to a point where we feel we have a Championship structure, which we feel we have. We want to get out of the Championship as soon as possible, just like with League One, of course we do, but we need the right strategy to navigate it."
DELIVER
"There are teams who have finished in the play-offs of that league with bottom-half budgets. Finances can offer an indication of where you'll finish but there are some teams nearer the bottom with some of the biggest budgets. We've got to stick to our process, be tough with ourselves in terms of where we can improve, to deliver a team who can do really well in this league."
HISTORY
"History is a really good indicator of the future, if we go back to a situation where we spend over our limits and get some decisions wrong, we end up exactly where we just came from. We need to learn those lessons in terms of how we take the club forward. Everyone wants instant success and I get that. We've got understand the transition of moving into and then through the Championship, and what timeframe we think we can do it in. It's about how we make the best use of our resources."
