Wolves - where did it all go wrong? Part 2: Leadership

The team that Nuno Espirito Santo built at Wolves had it all.

With five at the back and pace in attack, the former head coach took Wolves from the Championship to consecutive seventh-placed finishes in the Premier League, a Europa League quarter-final and an FA Cup semi-final.

Alongside the effective influence of agent Jorge Mendes, stars such as Ruben Neves, Diogo Jota and Raul Jimenez lit up Molineux and made Wolves a force to be reckoned with.

Owners Fosun were incredibly popular and former chairman Jeff Shi could do no wrong.

Seemingly the ambition was there, which led Shi to say in an interview in September 2018 that Wolves were capable overtaking Manchester City one day.

He said: "In the future? Yes, why not?

"I do hope we can be the top club in the world. But it's not so useful to talk too much about that now.

"It's step by step. If you ask me the long-term goal, of course, we want to be as good as Man City, even better than them in the future."

He added: "We know how much Man City have invested into their squads and personally I don't think if you give me 10 years or 30 years, it's not impossible to match. Football is not all about money.

"We can learn from them and maybe we can do better than them, with the people, the team, the coach, the players.

"If combine that, maybe you can do something sooner than them or invest less and achieve the same goals."

Those comments haunted Shi for years to come and, in hindsight, they look incredibly ill-judged.

At this stage, before Covid, Wolves were spending to match their ambition and the team was benefitting from it.

Years later, after several seasons of circling the drain following Nuno’s sacking, it is ironic that the former head coach sent Wolves down with a point against Crystal Palace as West Ham boss.

Shi’s decision to move Nuno on in 2021 came as a surprise to many and it was announced in time to give him a send-off in the final games of the season.

That decision, it is understood, came from Shi’s feeling that Nuno believed the club needed him more than he needed the club.

In reality, that call was the start of Wolves’ downfall as they chopped and changed manager, led by a chairman that consistently made bad decisions and dismantled the team that Nuno had built.

Bruno Lage’s appointment worked for a season but quickly backfired, before Julen Lopetegui eventually took the job.

He helped keep Wolves in the Premier League in the second half of the 2022/23 season but the mess that followed was completely of Shi’s own making.

The club spent big on six players in January to bolster Lopetegui’s squad, including the £43million signing of Matheus Cunha, but broke the squad up in the summer.

Neves and Jimenez were sold, Adama Traore left on a free, and only Matt Doherty signed on a free until Lopetegui walked away.

Wolves were under severe restrictions with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules that summer, but Lopetegui felt he was misled by Shi on the club’s spending power.

That belief was shared by others at the club at the time, the Express & Star understands, and Lopetegui left his role feeling he could not continue to work with Shi.

Wolves were well and truly in the cycle of circling the drain and Gary O’Neil came and went -while Shi also attempted to bring him back before appointing Rob Edwards, but was turned down.

O’Neil is a good coach, he is proving that at Strasbourg, but the Wolves fans would not have accepted his return. The fact Shi could not see that - or did not care - says a lot.

As discussed in part one of this four-part relegation series, Shi played an instrumental role in Wolves’ poor recruitment as he struggled to keep Wolves afloat in recent years.

The former chairman also hired and fired several sporting directors during his time, all with differing levels of influence, but he remained the sole decision maker at the top.

However, director of football operations and administration Matt Wild has been a constant figure behind the scenes since he returned to the club in 2017.

With a key role in several football-related decisions - and perhaps an excessive role at times - he often goes under the radar when it comes to criticism, but he also deserves to be named among those that have not pulled their weight at Wolves.

But Shi was the biggest problem for some time, before he left the football club in December.

His inability to listen to advice, his tendency to make rash and poor decisions, and his inability to communicate effectively with supporters eventually caught up to him.

In the summer of 2024, Wolves fans were disgusted at the huge price hikes in season tickets, which led to organised protests and meetings between the fans and hierarchy.

Shi was advised by people inside the club that the price rises were excessive and he was warned not to do it, but he went ahead with his ‘benchmarking’ strategy anyway.

Those meetings with fans eventually led to him rowing back on under-14 prices and promising to freeze adult prices the following year. In fact, he froze all prices last summer and went above his promise, but the prices fans were paying was far and above what the product on the pitch was worth.

This season, unsurprisingly, protests from fans began as Wolves hurtled towards relegation.

Banners calling for Shi to leave the football club were regularly displayed, while a number of supporters boycotted the opening 15 minutes of the Molineux clash against Manchester United in December.

There were more protests at home to Brentford, which came the day after it was exclusively revealed by the Express & Star that Shi had left the football club.

In the end, Shi departed having failed to fully grasp what it means to be from Wolverhampton and support Wolves, despite spending almost 10 years of his life in the city.

His interview with BBC WM not long before he left the club was met with intense criticism and it showed Shi’s inability to effectively communicate with the supporters.

That communication is improving under interim chairman Nathan Shi and he has made some good early decisions that will buy him some time, but he has to get it right to give Wolves a prosperous future under Fosun.

We will explore what comes next in the fourth instalment of this series later this week, but do not miss part 3 tomorrow, where we look at Wolves’ churn of managers since Nuno departed.