On Saturday the 26^th of April 2025, the inevitable was finally confirmed as Cardiff City were relegated from the Championship to League One. It’s the first time that the club have competed in the league since its rebrand from the Football League Second Division in the 2004-05 season. The lowest Cardiff have been in the Football Pyramid since Andy Campbell’s volley against QPR in the 2003 playoff final won the Bluebirds promotion to what is now known as the Championship. The 22-year stint of competing in the second tier or higher is over.

I’ve wanted to write a piece like this for a long time, and relegation feels like the perfect opportunity to do so. Now the dust has settled slightly and I’m not quite as melancholic or annoyed, I wanted to take a deeper look at how such an important club, the only club in the capital city of Wales, has managed to stoop to such a low ebb.

What happened this season is no fluke, it’s the furthest thing from it. This club has been circling disaster for years and this new low is a product of its own doing. In the 2024/25 campaign alone, City have gone through 3 managers, dropped points in over 60% of games where they were leading, got battered 5-0 and 7-0 away to Burnley and Leeds, only won back-to-back games once, and have only won three times in the League since January. The football on the pitch has been woeful, and the management of the club off it even worse.

Whilst many including myself were optimistic about what this season could bring given last year’s twelfth place finish, this won’t come as a jaw-dropping shock to anybody who’s been following the club closely over the last few years. We’ve been in a relegation battle for 3 of the last 4 seasons and haven’t really made any significant strides to try and improve. It’s a tale as old as time with a number of clubs in football, think of teams like Wigan in their last few years in the Championship, or Sunderland in their last few years in the Premier League. Always flirting with disaster but never quite relegated until their luck runs out. If you keep playing with fire you’re eventually going to get burnt, and not only have Cardiff burnt themselves this year but they’re completely scorched.

Albert Einstein never actually defined insanity as doing the same thing over again and expecting different results, but it’s the vision that the club has been run on since Vincent Tan bought his majority stake in 2010. Whilst there have been two promotions to the Premier League during his tenure those have been despite the board and ownership, not because of them. Malky Mackay had Cardiff playing the best football in the Championship in the 2012/13 season, and Neil Warnock dragged that team up against all odds to finish second in a league that had Wolverhampton Wanderers, Fulham, and Aston Villa. We were punching well above our weight on both occasions purely because of the management and players. The lack of anyone with a true understanding of the game on board level is terrifying, as is the lack of an executive presence on a day-to-day basis. Club COO Ken Choo and Chairman Mehmet Dalman are very rarely there, and nobody being present in the director’s box for the West Brom game when relegation was confirmed says it all.

You can’t argue that Tan hasn’t invested a lot of money in the club, because he has. But his inability to put ego aside and a want to have complete control over everything in regard to the running of the club is what’s costing us dearly and costing him millions. He wants to have the sole say over the entire operations of the club such as board matters, managerial appointments, even over who should be involved in the first team. This is something he can’t do, yet he can’t see it. Football clubs need to be run significantly different to any other business, and a team that has it managed it down to a T is Wrexham. Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought the club accepting that they had no idea about the footballing side, so hired Shaun Harvey as their Director of Football to make the big decisions that would impact the team on the field. These included getting Phil Parkinson as manager and making huge signings such as Paul Mullin and Elliot Lee whilst the team were still in the Conference. What was the result? Wrexham have become a team with enormous sponsorship, worldwide recognition, won three consecutive promotions from the Conference Premiership to the Championship in three years and will play in a higher league than Cardiff next season.

I’ve been thinking about a quote from Tan a lot over the last few days. It came in an interview with WalesOnline in 2022, and goes like this:

“I hear talk that we have no plan. Do you honestly think I would have put in so much of my money if I had no plan? Do you think we are idiots?”

In the nicest way possible, Vincent, no. I don’t think you’ve got a plan. At all. I don’t think you’ve ever had a plan. All we really hear from him or the board in terms of a vision is getting to the Premier League. Getting to the Premier League is not a plan, it’s a long-term goal. A plan would have a method to not only win promotion but sustaining the clubs’ long term future to solidify itself as a Premier League team. It’s a big ask, yes, but something that can be done. Look at the likes of Bournemouth, Brighton, Nottingham Forest, and Crystal Palace. These are teams that we’ve shared the league with in years gone by but have now far surpassed us. A plan to me isn’t employing 17 different managers (including interims) since taking over, with 8 of those coming in the last 4 years. To put that statistic into a scary perspective, this is a club that’s only had 50 managers including interims in its history. How can any supporter or player buy into a long-term vision when the personnel changes so often? How do you expect to achieve Premier League football with an overturn of management staff like that?

The board have taken a hammering from everyone, and rightly so, but they’re not the sole reason for this season going how it did. Multiple players have been incredibly poor, we failed to rise to the occasion in a number of big must-win games like Luton and Stoke at home and Oxford away to name a few, and had an inexperienced manager in Omer Riza for the majority of the season who never should’ve been in the position he was and changed the starting XI every week like it was going out of fashion. We looked like a team, ironically, without a plan or identity that have sleepwalked into relegation from the second half of the season. The club has the seventh highest wage budget in the league but look like they’ll finish bottom. Some way to celebrate the 125^th anniversary year. Man for man, this is probably (on paper) a better squad with more quality players than the Warnock 2017/18 team that won promotion. However, if those two sides played, I’m fully confident that the Warnock side would absolutely embarrass this current outfit. Every game this season where we played awful, dropped points, and failed to turn up made me miss that side just that bit more.

I don’t know what the future holds, maybe because I don’t want to think about it. Vincent Tan and the board have released statements to say that they do care about the club, and they’re about to go through a period of planning over the summer ahead of next year’s campaign. We’ve heard this as supporters time and time again from them, and unless it’s followed up with actual structural change then their words mean nothing. The only thing that is giving me some hope is the strong core of young players that we have coming down with us, and some decent academy talent. The absolute worst-case scenario would be that nothing changes because this team will get stuck in League One for a very long time if that ends up being the case. It’s happened to bigger clubs in the past, and for the future and maybe even existence of Cardiff City Football Club it’s an outcome that simply cannot happen.