Do we need a manager or do we need leadership?

Is the solution to Bradford City’s problems in a new manager?

Someone has to pick the team, train the players and so on but first and foremost perhaps we need some leadership at the club.

At the moment, I am embarrassed. The last six weeks are no way to recruit a new manager and the process will leave no one either satisfied, or with the reputations they came into it with intact.

Mark Lawn and the Bradford City board look weak and indecisive. Why take so long to pick someone for a role which seems to have such a limited shelf life? Why spend half a season appointing a manager when the last one (who was also appointed after such a process) was done away with after six months? The public perception is one of a board good at procrastination.

Peter Jackson can’t really make his mark on the job or the club until he has the job officially, so is only going to end up doing poorly and setting the message boards alight with impolite requests for his dismissal – if it can even be called that – from a role he can hardly get started in. Jackson cannot provide the leadership when he might be back on the streets at the end of the week.

This weakness in leadership is in evidence throughout the club. We, the supporters, are fed snippets by the club but none of these bits of information which suggest improvement is ever followed up. What does Omar Khan an associate director of City do? I’d like to know if he organises events so that I can go to them. What does Roger Owen do at the club? They were both lauded when they joined up, but we’ve heard little from them since and seen no evidence of any success that has derived from their presence.

Why do I receive email updates from Leeds United and Huddersfield Town, but not from City? Email is a simple, cheap form of communication. Every man and his dog has a blog these days, but not Bradford City.

The club is poorly managed and will only continue to deteriorate unless drastic changes are made. We have a hopelessly outdated website, no regular communication (I don’t even receive my season ticket in the post, I have to go and collect it!) and no spokesperson. The players talk and are hauled up before the manager, the manager issues comments and the board comment on the manager, and then board say nothing. In BfB interview with Mark Lawn the chairman admitted that he had withdrawn from talking to supporters.

News, both good and bad is spread via rumour on the message boards, meaning that much of what we are told is completely fictitious, even malicious at times. False rumours gain currency, the the true rumours are then picked up a day or so later by the T&A and appear often to ‘clarify’ misconceptions.

All of this happens and the idea persists that the new manager will solve the problems, and that he will be able to solve the problems, when increasingly it seems his job is marginalised to the point of being a lesser appointment. The manager becomes a a Lieutenant without a Major.

Sort that out first, then worry about appointing a new manager.