Nigel Pearson disagrees with chairman Jon Lansdown’s assessment that Bristol City are under-performing this season, referencing the “bonkers” model the club previously lived by, and has been surprised at how chaotic life has been since taking charge a year ago.
On Wednesday, during the announcement of Bristol Sport’s new sponsorship deal with Huboo, Lansdown stated that the Robins, who lie 17th in the Championship after 32 games, should be, “competitively better than we are doing at the moment in the league”.
Although league position is the ultimate determiner of success for a football club and by extension the man at the helm, Pearson believes a more nuanced look needs to be made in analysing City’s progress on his watch.
The 58-year-old, who took over on February 22 last year following Dean Holden’s dismissal, has overseen considerable change in the playing squad and coaching staff, amid severe financial restrictions, with the requirement of accelerating the development of academy players, which, by its very nature, will lead to inconsistencies in performance.
He said it with a smile, but Pearson made a point of noting the chairman's comments in his press conference ahead of the visit of Middlesbrough on Saturday, even though he wasn’t directly asked about it.
“I’ve been here a year, and I’ve aged probably five,” said Pearson, when asked how he reflects on his first year in charge. “It’s not an easy job, let’s put it like that, but I didn’t expect it to be. I probably didn’t expect it to be as chaotic as it is, or has been. There’s a lot to do.
“It would have been nice to have got more wins and certainly been more difficult to beat, that irritates me so much. That instead of losing games, we can scrap a draw out of it, but we’ve been unable to do that because at the moment we don’t have that balance right in the squad, or the players that I’ve had available.
“I don’t overthink that. I heard a comment that Jon said in the media that we’re ‘under-performing’, and he’s the chairman so he’s allowed to have that opinion, but I don’t agree with him, personally, quite frankly.
“We haven’t won the number of games that we should have done. We haven’t got the number of points that we should have. But we’re not under-performing. In fact, a lot of our players are over-performing.
“As far as I’m concerned… progression and progress… I would love it to be about results, and ultimately people in my job lose their jobs because you don’t get enough wins, but this job is a bit more complex.
“So I think, yes, we’ve made really good progress in some areas and we’re unfortunately back-pedalling in other areas, and I think the club - and I’m not talking about the team now, I’m talking about the club - is still struggling to find the identity that it really wants.
“In my eyes, it’s always about: let’s produce a team which works hard and people hate playing against, but we have talent as well.
“That’s what I really want but we’re a long way away from that at the moment. But the group of people that we have now, compared to what it was a year ago - big difference, in a positive way.
“How people look at it? Like I say, he’s the chairman so he can say what he thinks, but I don’t agree with him.”
Due to the changes, and a need for a different culture, this season has always been viewed as one of transition but what has proved to be an underlying obstacle has been City’s financial position.
The club posted record losses of £38.4million for the financial year ending 2021, following the pandemic and the loss of gate revenue and the collapse of the transfer market, a process so vital to City’s business model under the Lansdowns.
When City make their Profit & Sustainability submission to the EFL by the end of this month, they will include an estimate they’ve lost around £30m in transfer revenue, through no fault of their own, which would, of course, have helped them break even.
That policy of “player trading” encouraged by the Lansdowns’ ownership, and driven by former CEO Mark Ashton, led to the considerable sales of Adam Webster, Lloyd Kelly, Bobby Reid and Josh Brownhill but also left Lee Johnson needing to regenerate his squad virtually every season, following the loss of key players.
As a result, City posted profits for 2018/19 but constantly found the play-offs a glass ceiling they were unable to crack, all the while with the wage bill increasingly creeping past the £30m mark and representing more than 100 per cent of the club's overall turnover.
Pearson took a pretty dim of view of that process and even referenced the Ashton Gate Eight, with the 40th anniversary to be marked on Saturday before and during the visit of Middlesbrough.
"We've got ourselves into a mess, as a football club, by having a previous strategy to build a squad, and that is spending too much money and then having to sell to stay viable, which is bonkers," Pearson added. "Who does that?
"Now, hopefully we'll get to a point where our wage bill is manageable and we'll still create players who will be great for us and we will at some point (have to sell), and I'll never intend to stop a player's long-term ambitions to play in the Premier League, but our aim is still to get there.
"It might take longer than we hope but what's really important is you get the foundations right, because the foundations haven't been right.
"I'm not a control freak, I'm a part of the football club. Richard (Gould), who's now the CEO; we're trying to work very hard and collaborate so we can find the right way to go. We don't agree on everything, and I wouldn't want to agree on everything, but what we have to do is make sure that firstly, our immediate future is okay.
"And then outside of that, what is vital for us , as a football club is that we don't put our... we've talked about the Ashton Gate Eight and how the club were nearly into liquidation and we are very heavily in debt at the moment.
"We have to be very, very mindful of what our future looks like in terms of the progression and the steps that we take to make sure we can keep a successful team, and a successful club, because that's what we all want to do."
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