u/_Walt_Jabsco_

This is the front page of the Wolves website today. Someone at Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club read that quote, decided it captured something worth sharing, placed it on the front page of the official website, and published it as the headline communication to the fanbase in the final week of a relegated season.

Nobody in the chain said "perhaps we find a different quote?." "Perhaps we paraphrase? Perhaps we do not lead with a player expressing a desire to attempt to play adequately as the primary message to supporters who have just watched their team finish bottom of the Premier League for the third time."

That is not Bellegarde's failure. English is not his first language, the sentiment is genuine, the intent is clear. Benefit of the doubt entirely warranted. What this is is an institution so comprehensively hollowed out that basic editorial judgement has also been relegated. The quote is almost philosophical in its accidental honesty. After everything this finding-new-levels-below-rock-bottom-season has vomited up, this is the final painful dry wretchings. A Haitian midfielder who wants to try to play good. For the fans.

https://preview.redd.it/wcfolcgyaf1h1.png?width=1121&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecac461aaff5df4652d06e3ae487282a8ecbaa02

I didn't manage to snag a ticket, so what I was planning to read out will have to go here instead. If someone wants to read it for me that's going that would be great:

"First of all, it's acknowledged that you were under no obligation to provide this forum. However, at the end of a season where the bare minimum has proved well beyond your capabilities as custodians of this great football club, it is also acknowledged that this is the least you could have done.

I will be brief, because the situation does not require elaboration.

Fosun's relationship with this football club is over in all but legal formality. There is no goodwill left, no patience remaining, and no path back to any form of acceptance. What remains is a question of how you choose to leave, and whether you do so with any remnant of credibility intact.

We know why you came. The Chinese Communist Party identified football as a strategic global soft power vehicle. Wolverhampton Wanderers was identified as an opportunity to acquire a heritage badge and exploit its intellectual property commercially and please the Beijing Politburo in doing so. That was the plan, Jeff Shi said so. “To be honest, one of the reasons why we bought Wolves is the logo. .... And if you like the logo, maybe some content, no matter if it's football or something else – if you like the brand, I'm happy.” he admitted in 2022. It was never a football plan. It was a brand plan.

The evidence of that intent is your own miserable record. A record label loudly launched and quietly abandoned. A high-end fashion line unveiled at a rooftop runway show on a Shanghai skyscraper, similarly abandoned. A megastore opened in 2019 with fanfare and Steve Bull cutting the ribbon, now long gone as Chinese football interest evaporated. And completing the set, a failed football club. Because that is what Wolverhampton Wanderers is now. Relegated. Rudderless. Unable to recruit coherently, plan strategically, or even identify what a functioning football operation looks like. The one asset you were supposed to be custodians of has been reduced to a laughingstock.

But the incompetence and neglect evidenced at Wolves is not isolated. It is a pattern. Fosun acquired Lanvin, one of the oldest couture houses in the world, a name that had defined Parisian fashion for over a century. It is now in active financial collapse, its assets being liquidated, its brands unsellable. You did not build it. You destroyed it. The formula is the same everywhere you have operated. Acquire a heritage asset. Extract value from the name. Neglect the substance. Move on. Wolverhampton Wanderers is simply the latest entry on that list.

The modicum of football success this club achieved during your tenure was built almost entirely on one relationship: Jorge Mendes. It was a borrowed strategy, not a vision. When the money and the agents dried up, the football did too.

We are also aware of the broader context. The Chinese Communist Party is no longer pursuing football as a strategic priority. The evidence is visible across Europe. Chinese owned clubs have been abandoned, most of them in materially worse condition than when they were acquired. Fosun are the last remaining and following the trajectory of every other unfortunate club that was acquired to appease the CCP.

Let us also be clear about what we will not accept today. We will not accept apologies. We will not accept promises. In 2016, we were told that Wolverhampton Wanderers would be challenging Manchester City within ten years. Now, 10 years later we are in fact on a par with Lincoln City, marooned in the Championship with the same, single aim as the Imps of hoping to avoid a return to the third tier. That promise was not a football commitment. It was a sales pitch delivered to justify a commercial acquisition, and the distance between that claim and our current reality is the most honest summary of this ownership's record that anyone could offer.

Look at what is achievable. Look at Brentford. Look at Brighton. Two clubs, neither with Wolves' history or supporter base, built into genuine, sustainable forces in the top flight through coherent thinking, intelligent recruitment, and an unrelenting focus on football as the product. No fashion lines. No record labels. No esports divisions. No megastores in Shanghai. Just football, planned and executed by people who understood what they were doing and why. That is what this club deserves. That is the standard we are measuring against. There is not a single shred of evidence you are capable of putting any kind of plan in place that even partly emulates what they have shown is possible.

So we say this clearly: we are not interested in further promises. We are not interested in rebranding exercises or carefully managed PR communications. We want Fosun to exit this football club. We want that exit structured to protect the institution, not to extract final commercial value from it.

Our demands are straightforward. End the esports operation. Take OUR badge off YOUR property. End the IP exploitation. Return this club to ownership whose sole focus is football, regardless of where in the football pyramid that leaves it. This is our love and it knows no division."

We want to try to play good. For the fans

Fosun Fans Forum