Randy Lerner’s Passion Under Question in UK
Written By: Scott | Category: Cleveland Browns | Comments: 17
My, how quickly the tables turn. It was just months ago that Browns fans were giving team owner Randy Lerner a wag of the finger due to all of the time he has spent overseas with his Premier League soccer club Aston Villa. Now, with his NFL franchise struggling mightily in America – and requiring much of Lerner’s focus back home – Villa fans are starting to wonder where Randy’s head and heart actually are.
In a recent United Kingdom report, Aston Villa team manager Martin O’Neill has come to Lerner’s defense, assuring fans that the “American businessman” is as invested into the EPL team as he has been since day one.
“He has seen less games this season live with us than he has done before,” the Villa manager told the Daily Mirror. He is committed to making Villa better, improving the stadium at Villa Park – and those are things he wants to do here at the football club.”
It is no secret that Randy Lerner had been idolized over in the UK for the work he has done with Aston Villa. However, with all of the successes that he has had overseas – complete with YouTube worship – his status over here has been not as good. In September, Lerner was ranked 28th out of 32 NFL owners citing primarily his absence in his home country.
Since then, his NFL team has proceeded to win one game in 11 weeks. He has relieved his recently-hired general manager of his responsibilities with the team. And has gone on record with wanting to bring in a top football mind to run the ship. Supposedly.
Since this statement, there has not been much mentioned by Lerner or his media face Mike Kennan. Mike Holmgren has expressed interest, but Seattle could be his destination. Bernie Kosar and Jim Brown are now actively involved with the team (and specifically Lerner).
It goes without saying that had Lerner made the right decisions since the team returned in 1999, both groups of fans would be able to live happily. Unfortunately, that has not been the case and the pendulum has had to swing to the extremes on both fronts.
With a 1-1 draw this weekend against Tottenham, Aston Villa remains in sixth place among the English Premier League, 13 points behind leader Chelsea. Until they start putting up one-win seasons, Villa fans may not be getting much sympathy from their northern-Ohio counterparts.
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(h/t The OBR)
Author: Scott
Scott is a co-founder/editor of Waiting For Next Year who resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Feel free to follow him on Twitter or email him at scott@waitingfornextyear.com.Scott has written 1701 articles for Waiting for Next Year.
If Lerner can actually manage to hire a competent football person to run the Browns’ operations then I couldn’t care less if he ever stepped foot in America again. The less he’s in the news the less likely I’ll have to look at the picture again. It freaks me out and angers me all at once.
The primary difference in the two situations: EPL does not have a salary cap. If an EPL club doesn’t have a high payroll, it has NO CHANCE of winning and success is measured in remaining in the EPL and not getting relegated to a lower league. Aston Villa fans love Lerner because he is willing to open his wallet, unlike the previous owner.
This is just hilarious to me. 6th place out of 20 teams sounds like heaven. EPL is so skewed to big-spending teams, it’s absurd. It’s worse than MLB. The NFL exposes poorly run teams; the Browns are now equivilant to Pee Wee Herman in a XXX Theatre.
AV fans only need to watch one Browns game and even they would sympathize
@3
Soccer fans are used to low scoring, boring contests. They would love the Browns.
Who cares about soccer?
No team in any sport in any country on any continent will get sympathy from me for not having a “winning” team. It’s been 45 years here for any sport in our town (unless you are, in fact, a soccer fan) to win a title. Go cry some other place.
If you’re an owner of a team NOT named Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, or Liverpool, you have NO PRESSURE TO WIN. Every other club who plays in the Premier League is only trying to do as well as they can – knowing full well they can’t win the league because they can’t match up financially with the big boys. That’s why they’re called the “Big Four” and everyone else is just playing for 5th place.
That’s not good enough over here. By the way – GO ZIPS!!!
@6 That’s not necessarily true. Teams in the EPL not in the “big four” do have something to play for. They try not to finish in the bottom 3. If they finish in the bottom 3 they are demoted to the second division. Imagine if the NFL did that. The Browns would be demoted to the UFL or something and not be able to come back unless they finish in the top two of the secondary league.
good point, crobarred #7 – I guess I was specifically speaking to Aston Villa, who don’t have to worry about relegation.
Also, in the EPL, teams can steal players away from other teams DURING THE SEASON just by paying a lot of money to the current team for a transfer fee.
can’t we just give Indianapolis $100 million for Manning?
I, for one, welcome our new UFL overlords.
Seriously, we might be able to win there for a bit.
Does that mean we can get an Aston Villa report as part of this blog? It would give us something to be happy about, at least.
im pleasantly surprised with the knowledge of the EPL on this site…with that being said..come on fulham come on fulham
The Premiership is probably the most boring league on the planet — not for the quality of play (which is the best or second-best in the world), but for the aforementioned fact that only 4 (maaaybe 5) fanbases go into the season having a chance to win the championship.
The Browns — while horrible — at least go into the season knowing there’s a chance (no matter how remote) that they can make the playoffs, and then anything can happen.
Salary caps and playoffs are good things, people. Consider yourselves lucky that you weren’t born a Fulham fan (sorry #11) — they may be plucky and have some Americans on the squad, but they cannot win the title. They just can’t. It’s just beyond belief to think that they would, because they don’t have the money. Whereas — in the NFL and NBA — any team with a shrewd GM and draft luck can theoretically win.
Oh, and hurry back Fernando Torres.
#12-
The domestic cups are proof enough that playoffs lead to some crazy things. Lately the top clubs have rarely seen an FA Cup final. Or the Carling Cup for that matter. Wasn’t it just two season ago that a Championship League team won the FA?
Portsmouth maybe…
Wasn’t it Millwall or some random team like that (Everybody Hates Us!) that got pretty far awhile back?
Used to live not far from Stamford Bridge and Craven Cottage, HUUUUGE difference. Kinda like the difference between Browns Stadium and Fawcett! But hey, why not root for the underdog in Fulham!
“It goes without saying that had Lerner made the right decisions since the team returned in 1999…”
This doesn’t seem right. You can blame a lot on this poor guy, but not anything that happened before the 2003 season.
But beyond that, letting it ride on Davis for a couple seasons was the only practicable course of action after ‘02. He made the Wolf move to keep Davis under control, and it didn’t work, so he fired the guy pretty much as soon as anybody can fire an NFL coach after the playoffs. Then he followed it up with the Savage hire, which everybody in Football thought was a very shrewd decision. The first really bad call was leaving Collins upstairs, though it obviously seemed like a completely inconsequential omission at the time. The guy wasn’t even in football operations, you know? In any event, you’d be hard-pressed to say that that business cost us any wins.
Suffice it to say, if you restart the clock at the 2003 season then add at least two years of perfectly reasonable (and arguably pretty good) decision-making, that’s when the damage done by Randy Lerner starts to accrue. By my count, he’s been wasting our time since about the end of 2006.
[The '07 season was just a mean joke God played on Browns fans--it's like somebody's throwing Browns coaches a few extra wins exactly when they ought to be getting fired, ensuring that they get to rain awfulness on Cleveland for another couple years.]