Never fall in love with a Norwich City player, they’ll only break your heart.
Gabriel Sara and Jonathan Rowe have become the latest big name, big money departures. They are Ruel Fox and Chris Sutton for the TikTok generation.
From Kevin Reeves to Emi Buendia you can pinpoint how old a Norwich City supporter is by asking them about the first time they experienced the painful loss of a Carrow Road hero.
Every departing star brings familiar frustrations to the surface. Why does it happen every summer? Why do Norwich City always cash in on their best players? How can the club ever hope to succeed if its best talent never stays beyond a couple of seasons?
If summer 2024 has taught us anything it is that attempting to keep hold of these stellar players is an impossible job.
There is an entire industry built around moving footballers from club to club. The introduction of transfer windows has only added extra urgency to the process. Agents or, as they seem to be called now as if to further swell their sense of self-importance, advisors and representatives, have until the end of August to secure a new home for their charges. It’s their last chance until January to pocket their percentages of any deal that can be hammered out.
It’s important to remember too that footballers have a limited career and so maximising their earning potential isn’t always a sign of pure greed. Moving to a different team is sometimes genuinely in a player’s best interest.
When Norwich City turned down initial approaches for Jonathan Rowe a few weeks ago it should have been enough to secure his services for the first few games of the season. Instead Johannes Hoff Thorup, on the morning of his first match in charge, had his authority tested by a winger who didn’t want to play against Oxford United.
It took a fortnight but Rowe got his move to Marseille. Attempts to apologise on social media fell on stony ground judging by the colourful responses from City supporters.
Battles like this will always be a fact of life at Norwich City. Even if they did manage to establish themselves in the Premier League it wouldn’t necessarily help them keep their best players. When Leicester City won the title in 2016 even that wasn’t enough to improve their standing in football’s food chain. Within a couple of years N’Golo Kante, Danny Drinkwater and Riyad Mahrez had all been sold. It only took seven years for Leicester to be relegated from the top flight.
The only answer is to maintain the sort of pragmatic approach that Norwich City’s sporting director Ben Knapper has been preaching this summer. Players are going to leave and so the real route to betterment lies not in finding ways to keep them against their will but in having a plan to replace them.
One of the nagging concerns about City over the opening weeks of the season has been how the squad still seems to lack depth. It’s really no surprise that Sara, Rowe and even Adam Idah have left, but there was no sign of any replacements until they’d already gone. Perhaps that speaks volumes about the club’s financial position and that players couldn’t be signed until actual cash was on the table.
Getting north of £40m for the three players mentioned above has been widely applauded as sound business by City fans. There was criticism when Idah was handed a five-year contract by Knapper’s predecessor Stuart Webber last year. That ended up helping the Canaries demand a transfer fee which by all accounts was higher than Ipswich had to play Blackburn for Sammie Szmodics, the Championship’s top scorer last season.
Supporters don’t go to football to look at the club’s bank balance, though. A man in a suit counting piles of money in the centre circle wouldn’t even pass for half-time entertainment. Whether this transfer window has been good for Norwich City or not will only be clear in the months to come.
If new signings don’t deliver then Sara and Rowe in particular will be pined for. If recruits like Ante Crnac light up the league then Knapper will have to start painting the Forth Bridge again and work out how to get maximum value for the next generation of Canary heroes before replacing them.
It’s always tough but it’s best to appreciate your favourite City stars while you can.
Norwich City might not have won a league game yet but the performance against Sheffield United offered plenty of encouragement.
So instead of being concerned about the Canaries it might be time to focus on birds of a different kind at Carrow Road; pigeons.
Our coverage of the League Cup tie against Stevenage went a bit ‘Test Match Special’ when a pigeon joined us on the gantry for a few minutes of the first half. Some have suggested it could be the one that Jonny Howson rescued during a game at Upton Park a few years ago coming back to pay its dues.
It’s since become clear that the poor old cleaning staff at the ground are being kept rather busy between matches. I’ll spare you the details in a family publication but let’s just say these birds are making their presence felt at the ground. It’s almost as if they are trying to reclaim the days that Norwich City did play at The Nest.
Perhaps Tuesday night provides an opportunity to ask for help from Crystal Palace. Nicknamed The Eagles, Palace often have an actual eagle flying onto the Selhurst Park pitch before matches.
Could Ben Knapper sign it on loan? I don’t want our new feathered friends to come to any harm, but maybe its presence at Carrow Road until the next transfer window might encourage them to find a new roosting spot.
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