“We Need Serious, Serious Change”: This Championship Club Is Spiralling, And Fans Are Not Happy

"Excluding administered Sheffield Wednesday, we are bottom of the league.”

Once a yo-yo's string has snapped, there’s very little you can do to resurrect it.

Norwich City are reputable ‘nearly men’ in the modern era of the English game. Bouncing between the Premier League and Championship for what felt like an eternity.

Their fans have had to endure a roulette wheel of emotions, replacing the black and red pockets with shades of promise and disappointment.

This campaign is materialising to be the biggest loss yet for all who call Carrow Road their home, but it wasn’t intended to be. This should’ve been the moment The Canaries finally got it right.

A first full campaign under new American ownership, over £25 million spent this summer, and a shiny new manager in Liam Manning, the first-ever Norwich-born man to take the head coach title. Norwich City fans should’ve been laughing their way to a promotion push, yet the only joke filling Norfolk right now is their sole Football League outfit’s form. To try and cure their suffering, Football Park spoke to a handful of match-going individuals, and the outcome revealed some bleak truths.

Norwich City have lost all seven of their home games this season - six in the league and one in the EFL Cup. pic.twitter.com/1qqV7KezEu

— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) November 1, 2025

MLB Owners Have Swung And Missed

American owners. Love or hate them, 23 of the 72 EFL clubs (32%) are run from across the pond, a number that will only continue to grow.

Norwich hopped on the trend back in 2022, when Mark Attanasio became a minority shareholder of the club. Just over a year ago, the Milwaukee Brewers' owner took over from Delia Smith and Michael Wynn-Jones, increasing his ownership to 85%. It's safe to say that Norwich have hardly got a bang for their buck so far.

“The initial excitement and buzz around having very wealthy owners has very quickly disappeared with results on the pitch,” said James Collins, a lifelong Norwich City fan who drives miles weekly to follow The Canaries. “We’re sat in the relegation zone a year later, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered.”

The shift from sterling to dollars in the English game has raised plenty of questions surrounding how serious American investors are. After all, clubs like Barnsley and Huddersfield are far from the 'Major League' franchises that they’re used to.

Liam Burt, another travelling Canary, put it plainly: “It makes it difficult because they don’t seem to be that bothered, or haven’t been that bothered. They’re happy to just throw the money at it and hope for the best.”

I like Mark Attanasio. I think he is a man with good intentions and clearly wants to succeed with Norwich.

The problem is he knows NOTHING about English football.

And what makes it worse is he has completely incompetent people advising him.

We are going down this year.#ncfc pic.twitter.com/Cx7qUd94JY

— All About Opinions (@OpinionFest1) October 29, 2025

Season ticket holder Charley Fox added, “We’ve spent £55 million over the past two seasons, a lot of that being funded by them (Attanasio) or player sales. Considering the terrible form we’re in, now is the time for them to put their feet forward and make the team theirs.”

Mediocre Manning

It was an autumnal Saturday afternoon, almost a year ago to this day, when Liam Manning returned to Carrow Road for the second time since taking the Bristol City job. The then 39-year-old led The Robins to a 2-0 away victory, ending Norwich City’s 21-game unbeaten run at home, dating back almost a year.

And he’d done it with ease.

Manning knows the city of Norwich like the back of his hand; he spent almost his entire career playing in the East Anglian non-league scene. The £800,000 compensation fee The Canaries paid for his services earlier this year seemed like a romantic no-brainer.

So far, the former Ipswich Town academy kid’s stint as head coach has looked more like a sabotage mission.

Fans are already calling for his head, including Collins, who said, “Manning is potentially walking on a very thin tightrope at the minute. There are a vast, vast majority of fans that want him gone and rightfully so… We don’t really look like scoring any more than two goals a game; well, we never look like scoring more than one, so I think he probably does have to go.”

On the other end of the spectrum, the optimistic fans continue to believe that Manning is the man 15 games into his City spell. “You can see why Norwich wanted him… I do think he will get it right eventually. I think a lot of the signings he made this summer weren’t his signings.”

“He’s playing a completely different system with Norwich than he was at Bristol City, and I think that is going to take time because he's going to have to build his squad. We can’t just keep chopping and changing managers. We’ve had five managers in the last six years; it's just not a process that is sustainable… We have to understand that (reaching the) playoffs is always going to be difficult because everyone else is getting better.”

Burt then went on to explain the concerning relationship that's currently building between the players, coaches, and fans: “The manager seems distant from the players, the players seem distant from the fans. It just doesn’t seem to be clicking… I don’t think the players get enough stick as what they should, at the end of the day, Manning’s the one that prepares it and all that, but the players have to go out there and perform, and so far we’ve seen nothing but heartless performances, no fight, and no determination to turn this around.”

Norwich City's form since appointing Liam Manning#ncfc pic.twitter.com/wuLKLvPpFY

— 𝓓𝔂𝓵𝓪𝓷 𝓒𝓾𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓼 | #𝓴𝓷𝓪𝓹𝓹𝓮𝓻𝓸𝓾𝓽 (@DylanCurtis1902) October 27, 2025

Fox has struggled to see past the displays under Manning so far, describing them as performances with “no promise”. However, he points the blame at an area away from the pitch. “I feel like that's kind of why they're not firing him (Manning) at the moment, because if they do, that's Ben Knapper (Sporting Director) admitting that he doesn't know anything about hiring a coach. (Knapper) got in Thorup as his guy, fired Thorup, brings in Manning over Jack Wilshere, and if he fires Liam Manning, that's kind of him firing himself in a way, but in my opinion, I think the coach is the least of the issues, really.”

16 Years Down The Drain

For those unaware, Norwich and Ipswich are the only notable settlements in Norfolk and Suffolk, respectively. The rest of the land is, well, farmland and seaside towns…

The battle to become ‘The Pride of Anglia’ holds a similar weight to a cup final. Fox summarised the pain of Norwich’s first derby defeat in 16 years perfectly: “It's heartbreak, it's one of the things that we cling onto because of how mediocre we’ve been recently… and we don’t have that anymore.”

Collins sat in the Portman Road away end on that fateful day and recalled: “You can’t lose a derby in such embarrassing fashion as that, getting played off the park, no real fight, no intensity, it makes it really hard to then get behind the team to spear them on. When you’re 2-1 down away from home at Ipswich, you want a crunching tackle, and there just wasn’t anything.”

Ipswich points after 13 games 18/19 - 9
Norwich points after 13 games 25/26 - 8

Well well well!#itfc #ncfc pic.twitter.com/97Gz0uJP5m

— Anon (@Anon11551135) November 1, 2025

Getting mowed down by The Tractor Boys was simply the second instalment of a six-game losing streak The Canaries are currently on, which has seen them score two goals and concede 10. One of those losses was a narrow 1-0 defeat on a Tuesday night at Pride Park. Burt cites that evening as the lowest point of his season so far, saying: “Derby on a Tuesday night was our best performance of the season, we should’ve been 3-0 up inside the first ten minutes, and I walked away from that thinking how have we not got a point. Just a point.”

USA! USA! USA!

Josh Sargent’s story at Norwich has been one of heartwarming loyalty. Joining The Canaries four years ago as a 21-year-old, he has stuck by them through relegation, whilst continuing to score goals and turn down offers from top-flight clubs in Europe.

Josh Sargent has SNUBBED the chance to join Wolfsburg.

The Norwich striker decided he didn’t want to move back to Germany.

(Via: @paddyjdavitt)#NCFC pic.twitter.com/CnkJYIRQyT

— Second Tier podcast (@secondtierpod) July 23, 2025

The USMNT forward started the season scoring six goals in five straight competitive matches during August. With the club on a downward spiral, if he chose to depart now, it would be nothing less than detrimental.

Fox told Football Park: “I feel like Josh Sargent, our best striker, arguably best player, I don’t see why he wouldn’t leave in January if he gets an offer. He stayed after the transfer window initially because there was a lot of promise behind Liam Manning, we spent a lot of money and got a lot of players in, but it's just not good enough, and I think we’ll sell him for less than we could’ve. We had a £21 million offer from Wolfsburg that he declined because he wanted to stay, but if they were to come in again for £17/18 million, I don’t see why he wouldn’t go, and then once we lose him… I think there's a very good chance we’re in League One next season.”

Sargent might be a strength, but it’s not hard to complete a puzzle when there are only a few pieces to figure out. The forward hasn’t scored since August, and fans fear he’s finally been figured out.

“I think we need to be a lot more transparent with how we play. We’ve become quite one-dimensional at the moment. Everyone knows that we’re going to play into Sargent, and he is our threat; we need to try and integrate these younger lot into it as well and really get behind them now,” said a concerned Burt.

A Genuine Chance Of Relegation?

Norwich were relegated from the Premier League back in May 2005, and after four incredibly average seasons, they found themselves dropping down to League One for the first time in five decades.

There are unnerving parallels between that 2008/09 relegation campaign and this season, as once again, NCFC are four seasons deep into their current Championship spell. Collins lived through Norwich’s torrid 2025, which has seen them win four games in their last 24 league games.

In the last 28 EFL Championship games played, Norwich City have picked up the lowest points of any team in the Championship last season & this season, with only 22 accumulated out of a possible 84.

In those 28 games, Norwich City have only won 5, have drawn 7 and have lost 16.… pic.twitter.com/iIDx1lPjBK

— Norwich City Updates (@norwich_updates) November 3, 2025

“I think we were outside the relegation zone by maybe seven points last season, and that poor form that ended the season has carried over. I don’t think we have a lot of players in the squad that would be willing to or know how to deal with the pressures of a relegation battle, so there is a genuine chance that we do go down at the end of the season.”

Fox shared similar words to Collins: “It's easy for a lot of Norwich City fans to say, ‘we’ll just ride this out and eventually start getting wins,’ but we’re already a quarter of the way into the season and excluding administrated Sheffield Wednesday, we are bottom of the league.”

Burt, however, couldn’t fathom the idea of relegation, saying, “There's too much quality to not win enough games to stay up. I think it's just going to be that mediocre, boring season where we’re in a fight at the moment, but we will have that run of results that will put us in that midtable spot.”

Call For Change

There are a handful of approaches Knapper, Attanasio, and Zoe Webber (Executive Director) could take to ensure this campaign does not wither away any further. Burt kicked things off by suggesting that performances which garner results are more important than pretty football. “The main change to save the season is the performances, because you can play absolutely horrible and get three points. This is the Championship we’re talking about. This is the league where anyone could beat anyone.”

Collins offered an alternative option, proposing that City dip into the free agent market. He said: “I think it's worth taking a little stab just to sort of get Championship-ready players because we’ve got too many youngsters that are too inexperienced for this division, and if we are in a relegation dog fight at the end of the season, you will want these sort of Championship players with the know-how of potentially getting us out of a relegation battle.”

What the future holds is unknown, but Carrow Road could very well host the likes of Burton, Bolton, and Bradford next season if the club's officials aren’t careful. Tomorrow night, Norwich City travel to Sheffield Wednesday in what could be a season-defining fixture. Had The Owls not been hit with a 12-point deduction, a loss would result in The Canaries dropping to the foot of the Championship after an opening 14 fixtures that has echoed the form we were used to seeing in the top flight.

Remember when we went to a decent Sheffield Wednesday side and thrashed them 4-0 under Farke?

Now we’re going to a Sheffield Wednesday side who are in administration, expecting to lose.

☹️ #NCFC

pic.twitter.com/U9aV1LlLoh

— Max (@DanielFarkeEra) November 2, 2025

The only certainty surrounding the club as of now is that something within the system must be altered, or as Fox put it:

“We need serious, serious change.”