Rich Tea Wellin wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2026 10:48 am
BiggsyMalone wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2026 10:07 am
Great interview. Clowns booing the team off against Sheffield Wednesday, people think Orient should be winning the league. RW can’t account for individual errors on the pitch.
This is all on the owners. The investment isn’t there. They have poorly managed this squad for years. You can’t sell your best players in the same window as you need to replace 8 or 9 players because they’re out of contract. They want the fans to foot the bill and use their own money as little as possible.
As he said ‘give me another £5m and I’ll get you up there’, he’s not wrong.
You make some good points.
Still frustrated with the Ballard thing. It’s good money and it’s tough if the player wants to go. But unlike Galbraith who only had a year left, Ballard had a long contract and we could have said, we’ve got too much turnover, we need you to play 3 months. If you get your head down and score ten goals we’ll get better bids (and teams are more desperate in Jan) and you’ll get better wages. We could have brought in Kabia and eased him in to take over.
That said, I don’t want Orient to be frivolous but if you get 5m for a player why not spend £2m (less than half) on a real statement signing? Or a couple of £1m signings. Rather than reinvesting less than a 5th?
Don’t really have an issue with selling Ballard. If you’re a bottom half L1 club and a decent sized Championship club comes in for your top scorer there isn’t much you can do. It’s the natural way of things. We’ve basically done the same to Grimsby with Kabia.
The thing about spending (relatively) big at this level is that it’s not like you’re buying world class. Chucking 6 figures at a player for L1 is always a gamble and let’s be honest, when you’ve got the likes of Leicester, Sheff Wed and in recent seasons Cardiff + Birmingham in the division Orient are hardly a big name club at this level.
Look at the likes of Ballard, Galbraith and Kelman. None of those were marquee signings. They were excellent bits of scouting.
I’d honesty rather the club reinvest the money they get for selling players into new training facilities. It’s well known that what we currently have is sub-standard and it’s not outrageous to suggest that if may well be playing a role in our terrible injury record.
This is the problem I have with the ownership at the moment. There isn’t any clear direction or strategy beyond a generic “do well”. I’d much rather those in charge came out and said that over the next few years they are focusing on investing and building behind the scenes infrastructure at the club (e.g. training facilities, youth academy, scouting, medical, sports science staff) for long term success. I’d be much more forgiving of a few fallow seasons if this was clearly the case. At the moment the unreasonable season ticket deadlines, the constant pushing of super fan memberships and new merchandise to purchase, surveys about how much you’d pay for a ticket in a new 30,000 seater Thunderdome, feels a bit jarring when there’s no clear direction what the club wants to do with these revenue streams. In all honesty it feels like the club are treading water in survival mode financially (which is understandable) while trying to fob the fanbase off (who I can only presume they think are gullible mugs) with fantasies about progression.
Travis and Teague bought a conference club with the ambition to stabilise it in League 1 within a few years. They were successful. They don’t have the capital to go any further. Thats fine. But bringing in snake oil salesmen like this Gandler bloke isn’t the way forward in my opinion.
