Sigh.
So, extrapolating this to its extreme, the team has a timespan of *decades* to actually win something - because we have been through decades of failure, and it's only fair that they get *decades* of patience to see if we can overcome that failure.
Of course, that's ridiculous. But I'd suggest that this sort of thing (long-term thinking on that scale) is also quixotic - because modern football doesn't work like that, and because every year we end up sitting on our hands watching everyone else happily canter to titles and trophies is another year we fall behind relative to everyone else.
Both points feed into this, though - nobody lasts that long now, and even a man who has won three league titles and seven FA Cups with a potential Europa League still to come is being shunted out because his fans aren't happy. That man has won almost as many major trophies as our *club* has - in its 136-year *history*. He took our lovely neighbors from being utterly detestable footballing troglodytes to being relative footballing aesthetes - he tried to give them an identity in the eyes of the world that once belonged exclusively to us. And he largely succeeded in that.
And, despite that, he is being pushed out.
That is modern football - and, equally, the players know that too. Success is what matters, success or money. Almost no player stays at a club for anything else these days. And players themselves grow tired of managers much, much quicker than they have any right to - an eventuality made even more certain, I'd suggest, if they never win anything despite being worked relentlessly at a level that other clubs wouldn't dream of touching.
So we don't have a decade, or decades, to sit and wait for this team and Poch to slowly, haltingly overcome their crippling fear of winning things and take that final step. Football moves fast, and this isn't possible. And every year we fail is another year we lose a Toby Alderweireld - a Danny Rose, and a Mousa Dembele. Either because of their unfulfilled ambitions, or because of their physical decline, or because we can't pay them the market rate for someone of their skill. So, every year will be a rebuilding job until we can either pay them enough to stay or win enough to convince them to stay.
But, if we can pay them enough to want them to stay, we can also pay other coaches and players better than them to come here. So then, what's the incentive in keeping them around in the first place?
Thus, we reach the reality that modern football foists upon us - if you want this group and this manager to build what you want them to build, they need to *win*. Not in ten years, not when they face League Two sides all the way to the final of a competition - now, or as soon as possible.
And if you don't like that, switch to another sport, because the old, more wholesome world of football died a long time ago. It died when clubs were wrenched from the hands of fans and placed into the waiting arms of financiers, gangsters and broadcasters - it died when twenty-two club chairmen in England sold themselves to create a commercial enterprise that traded sporting integrity for untold wealth.
