Wolves executive chairman Jeff Shi: Playing the long game is the way to build success

Sometimes people are serious to know the answers and sometimes they are trying to find a random topic to start a conversation. But recently, I was asked two questions by a friend from an opposite direction: ‘What was the most difficult thing to manage after you joined the club?’ and ‘What’s the most positive thing that you have at Wolves?’

I thought it over, took maybe one minute to make sure I was answering sincerely, and said: “The most difficult thing might be how I manage my mood and actions after we lose, since losing games is a reality in the Premier League if you are not a ‘Big X’ team. The most positive is, in Wolverhampton, there is no need to go anywhere else. I can get to know and learn from all the young and talented people from different countries and continents, which opens my mind so much, not only to a variety of cultures but also to catching up with the fast tempo of the world and feeling younger and better educated”.

My solution for the aforementioned disappointment after losing games is to always look, think and work with a long-term view.

If we take this competition as a very long game, we can afford a lot of time to prepare everything, no matter how big or small, to improve ourselves until we are strong enough to win again.

Commercial and finance are important, people are so crucial, the academy is the future, strategy should be logical and evolving, our effort should be consistent and steady, we should change when we need to and be resilient when we feel tough. All these elements take time to bear fruit.

However, this kind of philosophy is totally against the common phenomenon we witness every day from TV, radio, social media, newspapers and forums, which are also a mirror of a typical mood of fans.

The game in the media industry is only targeting today. ‘Yesterday? Who cares. Tomorrow? It doesn’t matter. Sorry, are you talking about something that may happen in three years? Is it a joke? What, you are saying today’s win is partly a consequence tracing back to something you did three years ago? How can that be possible?’.

Whatever the media says, however fans react to a win or a loss, our job is just to continue doing those things we think are right. We are clearly aware that there are two different games to play inside and outside the club, and the only time when they merge is the day we win, so let’s try to make that day come.

One of the long games Wolves are playing, is to connect the club with the world. The best way for connection in this generation is through mobile internet. The Wolves App is becoming the core platform for communication and engagement with all Wolves fans no matter where they are. It can become another spiritual home.

Besides football, I’m also a fan of video games. Recently I have been playing a game called Baldur’s Gate 3, which is a turn-based role-play game.

In the game there are different ways to win a battle, but all those ways take a long time to finish. You must think, analyse, prepare, fight, fail, fight again and fail again, until you win at last. It may be the longest video game I’ve ever played.

Compared with real life, the most precious design in video games is you always can save and load. You can try hundreds of times for the same mission. In football, when you buy or sell a player, when you make a key decision, you can’t save before or load after. There are unlimited ‘ifs’ in virtual games but absolutely zero ‘ifs’ in our universe.

Therefore, I think looking back has not much use in our daily job. Emotionally it’s in the nature of human beings, but practically, looking forward is always the formula to be happier and can give you a better chance.

History is great, good or bad, right or wrong, for interesting and entertaining stories that our descendants may read, however history is not able to tell us what to do in the near future, because everything around us evolves extremely fast and the chance of repeating history doesn’t exist at all.

Today I bought a mug from the Wolves Megastore. There were plenty of different mug choices on the shelves. I chose that one only because I like how the logo is printed with a perfect size in the middle and the beautiful old gold background colour.

I remember, when we took over the club in 2016, I joked with somebody that the logo might be worth a bit by itself. At that time, our only focus was to promote Wolves to the Premier League as soon as possible, I couldn’t imagine the logo would mean anything else beyond this nearly 150-year-old football club based on the pitch and stadium at the centre of an industrial West Midlands city that was known, maybe, mainly because of a strong English football heritage.

Now, Wolves is indeed beyond this city, beyond this country and beyond football. Traditional fans may be shocked to see our logo appear in ‘strange’ occasions and places, also surprised to see so many young girls and boys across the world loving the logo for a ‘strange’ reason.

Just like I bought that mug only for my aesthetic sense, sometimes, football can be more than football, Wolves can be more than Wolves. Ultimately, the bigger the pack is, the stronger and better we shall be.

I like the new Beatles song, the name is perfect: ‘Now and Then’. I’m not a huge fan of The Beatles because I missed the decades when they were active. The first time I started to listen to rock music, it was the ‘90s: Nirvana, Radiohead, Guns N’ Roses, Oasis, Queen, etc.

In China, then, there was no official channel to buy any music of those bands. In my university, there existed a small black market, where students shared and sold each other ‘cracked cassettes’, which were literally cassette tapes that had been damaged on purpose by US labels to prevent resale, and were then imported as waste to China, but amazingly found their way back to the Walkman in each student’s pocket.

Just as what The Beatles achieved to create a brand-new era for music, these cracked cassettes tenaciously squeezed into a distant country at the other end of Eurasia, like we do today. We create fresh but good things, and give them to more and more friends who support and watch Wolves, all over the globe, and it is the meaning of our job every day, for every staff member and every fan.