Hello and welcome to the TIFO football podcast. I am your host, Joe Devine, and I am joined today by Seb Stafford Bloor.

Hi, Joe. Hello. And Alex Stewart. Hi. Hello to you. Everything well? Yep. Oh, good. Fine. Let's talk about wolves. Today we're talking about wolves. I'm quite excited about this one because there's

lots of interesting things to say. Let's start by saying of course, 2016, I believe it was. Wolves

were purchased by Fosun International, a big Chinese company. They've got one of the coolest

managers in the league. They're on the money to finish, what, sixth or seventh, probably a toss up between them and Watford? It's very congested in that part of the league. So depending when you listen to this, let's not commit to a position just for... Yeah, we won't commit to any of that, yeah. No, no. But they play exciting football, and as far as their ownership, structure and ambition goes, they wanted to become one of the biggest clubs in the world. And two years, three years down the line, it's not going so badly, is it? So we're going to talk about all of these things. I think we're also going to talk about George Mendez, because I'm fascinated by that situation, as I imagine listeners are too. I don't know how much we know about it. I know nothing. So I'm going to ask you, Seb. But we'll come to that later. So I suppose the first thing to do is, well, let's start with the football side of things. Have you seen them play this season, Seb? Yeah, I've seen a lot of them play. Actually, Joe, Money has probably become one of my favourite grounds in the league.

Wolverhampton's a great place to spend time, but it's just a, because of the atmosphere around the club and sort of how that feeds into the ground and the atmosphere.

It's just a, it's a great place to go to at the moment.

And what is your overall impression of, I mean, I'm assuming having seen them a few years ago,

seeing them now.

What is your overall impression of how the team has evolved over the last few years?

It's been quite a gentle evolution.

So sort of personal history, I went, I first went there last season because when it

became obvious that they were coming up I wanted to learn a little

bit more about the place and the town as I had a conversation with Thomas Bohr who um who runs the

wolves blog and we were talking about sort of how um what local attitudes were towards the team and

the ownership structure um and it was kind of, it was very revealing because I went down with some cynicism.

I think like everybody else, I thought, well, yeah, you know, I was wrong about this,

but I thought, okay, you got a lot of money, you bought a lot of players,

George Mendez's involved there.

This is kind of by the number of success.

But what it revealed is kind of, um,

what Thomas said was that sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, team are playing and there's a sort of, there's almost, there was at the time anyway, there's a sort of disbelief at the, not just the style of, of play at Mononu, but also, you know, some of the players that were there.

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