It’s been a terrible start to 2025 for Swansea City. On the road we’ve been humiliated in three away games and conceded twelve goals in the process and witnessed the worst South Wales derby in living memory.
This can’t go on, I have sympathy for Luke Williams but I just can’t see him turning this around, he appears to have lost the dressing room.
If I look back I wonder if it started to go wrong for him when he criticised the players publicly after we surrendered a 2-0 lead to lose at home to Sunderland. As disappointing as that was, his public criticism was harsh. It should’ve been kept in house, lambasting your players doesn’t usually end well and should only be done very rarely.
He’s since repeated that feat after recent losses yet has failed to take any responsibility himself, and is increasingly looking like a man out of his depth.
The West Brom debacle certainly didn’t help either, he was shown to be naive with his comments to the press on the issue and should have said something like “it’s a good job, but fortunately I’m already in a good job”. He lost a lot of fans over that and with recent form there’s no chance he’ll win them back.
We should strongly consider a change, but the problem is can we have any faith in Andy Coleman and co to get it right?
Under his tenure we’ve appointed Paul Watson, Michael Duff and Luke Williams and none of them have worked out well.
Twenty five players have been signed over the last three transfer windows who’ve made a first team appearance. How many of them have even been close to being successful?
You can count them on one hand, and quite a few of the others have already departed or are completely out of the first team picture which says it all. Is there another club in the country who’ve done business as badly as us in the last eighteen months? Surely not.
Even signings who’ve previously been praised like Josh Key and Josh Tymon are currently looking like average acquisitions at best right now with both woefully out of form, yet are unlikely to be dropped with the back up being an ageing Kyle Naughton, an overweight Cyrus Christie and the utterly useless Nathan Tjoe-A-On.
The even more baffling thing is despite signing so many players we’ve still been left short in some positions! The transfer window has been open over three weeks, we knew our only centre half’s Ben Cabango and Harry Darling were both doubts for Cardiff away and didn’t act, we’ve only now brought one in since the latter is banned for three games, this is so amateurish it’s ridiculous. This is why I do have some sympathy for the manager, he shouldn’t have had to deal with issues like this.
We seem to have been more focused on things like the Welsh League Cup rather than the here and now.
Year on year this club is regressing, the side that Russell Martin had wasn’t great, but it would beat this current crop. And at least there were some assets that could be sold during that time, as we did with Flynn Downes and Joel Piroe.
It doesn’t feel like anyone in our squad right now will fetch decent money, certainly not at this stage anyway. That will have a knock on effect with financial fair play as we keep needing money to keep the lights on and will be unable to invest in the team because our losses are so high. Although given our awful business maybe not being able to spend isn’t so bad after all!
There’s been no accountability for any of this either, it will soon be a year since the last fans forum was held at the stadium, and after recent form there’s no chance Coleman and co are going to face the fans for the foreseeable, they’ll continue to hide.
We badly need someone running this club with in depth knowledge of the game. Trevor Birch and Julian Winter were both experienced football men, neither would have overseen so many bad decisions if they were calling the shots.
Coleman needs to be replaced with someone like this to arrest our slide. They can then make a decision on the manager rather than him who would most likely replace with Williams with someone who’s also not up to the job.
Now more than ever is the time to wake up, if we fail to sort this mess out our club will be relegated in the near future and will most likely stay there.
