Also agree with your last paragraph by the way. I’m not sure the fans on the whole ever got too big, rather just wanted to continue to see progress. But I completely see where you’re coming from.
One other thing on Ange, we truly don’t know whether he would have done well enough in the league this season. But I would have been interested to see his communication and motivation applied to this season as a new context. Because it was clear from the doc the club put out that the ‘theme’ of last season was that we have all stuck together, and we are going to be winners at the end of it. You are going to get your faces on the walls of the stadium to live on forevermore, and you’re going to send Sonny on his way with the trophy he more than deserves. He clearly repeated that message over and over again so much that it stuck, and the players believed it.
Season 3 would have had a different message. Something along the lines of ‘now you’re winners, you need to push on, the club is different now to what it was and you made it happen, get more of that success’. My biggest concern is seeing how the league shook out in terms of direct play and duels whether the profile Ange likes in players would have been ideally suited, and whether he would have struggled for that reason. Because he’s prided himself on always learning new things and taking in new perspectives, but clearly absolutely abhors the long throw. So would he just have a mental block that would not let him fully adapt as needed? But otherwise, all else being equal I would have loved to see him create different messaging for season 3, and build on winning something.
