I once heard a story from someone who’d worked on the 2012 Olympics. A delegation from the games’ organising committee went to Beijing to see if they could learn any lessons from China’s hosting in 2008. 

On visiting the Bird’s Nest Stadium, one of the British delegates asked how they’d managed the local residents, some of whom had been displaced during the construction. Did they have any tips about managing the residents’ expectations?

The Chinese stared blankly, they’d needed space for a stadium, so they simply made space by clearing the people out of the way. If they didn’t move, that was their problem.

For a change to be successful, the text books tell you, you have to take people with you on the journey, engage with them, sell them the vision and make them part of the solution. This is usually taken to mean; tell them all the good stuff and avoid the bad bits. But, there’s always a painful element to change which will manifest itself eventually, when it appears, it can feel like a betrayal. So, perhaps the Chinese got it right, if the fluffy wuffy stuff isn’t going to work anyway, why bother?

The club has been transforming for a few years – there was the investment in the training ground, the management team, in the players and now the stadium. We’ve lapped this up as fans and demanded more, hankering for a new utopian future.

But for it to happen, you need someone to be very rich, and you don’t get very rich by mucking about. These changes are not simply for the benefit of Alan in Banbury or Clare in Eynsham, they need to secure a financial return.

This sounds more sinister than it’s meant to, the point is, if you’re about to plough £100m into a new stadium complex, some or all of that will need to be repaid somehow.

It’s only been a year since the wheels fell off Karl Robinson’s clown car; his wild gambles, his filibustering interviews and his belief in spirit over science. It worked for a bit, it was highly entertaining at times and I thank him for that. But, when it fell short and you could see through the facade, it all felt a bit silly.

The new owners and management have brought a colder rationality; stadium progress – the club’s greatest challenge – has got further than under any previous owner, so you have to say the approach is working. But, there’s a cost and it might be that we’re  beginning to see what that is. 

The departure of Chris Williams last week has been treated like the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Another strand to the past severed, who will be able to WhatsApp Harry Worley to come and do the half-time draw now? 

It’s worth saying, I don’t wholly subscribe to the idea that this is a sign of terminal decline or gross mismanagement. Williams has another job and plenty of agency in this, he hasn’t been sacked; people’s lives change, businesses change, people get tired of seeing the same mistakes, particularly if you’ve watched them for 23 years. Sometimes these tectonic plates realign, opportunities appear and life re-orders into a different form. 

But, it was probably the clearest reminder that in order for things to change, they have to change. The club may come to regret Williams’ departure, his tendrils extended into the fanbase, current and former players, the media and even into our history. With some creative thought, those qualities perhaps could have been used better. But, equally, when the cold realities of what it really means to be a Championship-ready club dawn, would Williams want to be just left as a lovable stooge? An Olly The Ox for the grown-ups? Perhaps these splits are inevitable.

Nobody really expected us to beat Portsmouth on Saturday, so a narrow defeat and a half-decent performance is not to be sniffed at despite conceding inside 90 seconds. Did that feel like progress? The jury is out on Des Buckingham, but at least he still has a lot of good will behind him. If we are to succeed, I think we’d all prefer it to be someone with Buckingham’s profile than a ruthless automaton.

Talking of which, those who pine for Liam Manning and think that he would have taken us all the way to promotion, might want to check out the response from Bristol City fans to their latest defeat. The Oxford board picked Manning because he fitted their new model, but the monotone talk of behaviours wears thin eventually.

Grant Ferguson was interviewed by Jerome Sale last week and he rightly pointed out we are significantly further forward than we were this time last season. Progress is about getting things done, which is about focus, which is about not being distracted by things which are unimportant. What the club are looking to do is build a machinery that succeeds, on the pitch and, as importantly, off it financially. In theory at least, we as fans will kowtow to that, trade the warm fuzzy glow of the club we once were for promotions and titles.

And this is, in some ways, the nub of the problem that’s played on my mind over the years. Our ultimate goal is to throw ourselves into a fiery furnace. The more successful we become, the more detached the club will be from its supporters. It has to be, to get a return on their substantial investment the owners need to control a narrative and be an attractive risk-free promotional platform to corporate sponsors and investors.

As fans we will hopefully get some benefit from better performances and a new stadium to enjoy that in, but whether we stay as fans or morph into customers is open to some debate. At one level, it’s not what I want, but I fear it’s an inevitable consequence of success.

It reminds me of the first of Tim Minchin’s nine life lessons in a speech he made at The University of Western Australia: 

“It’s something to do with your time, chasing a dream. And if it’s a big enough one it’ll take you most of your life to achieve so by the time you get to it and are staring into the abyss of the meaningless of your achievement you’ll be almost dead so it won’t matter.”

His solution to this is to be micro-ambitious and dedicate yourself to short-term goals. So, as the big picture unfolds, maybe we should be a little less obsessed with it and work on our micro ambitions – like enjoying going to football and laughing at its absurdities. All football fans are masochists, we invest heavily in something which has a high chance of making us miserable. People outside that bubble laugh at us. In the end it’s all a pantomime, perhaps we need to find a way to enjoy the lows as much as we enjoy the highs.