CITY joint-owner Stefan Rupp explains in his own words why it was the right time to replace Stuart McCall:

IT HAS been difficult to know what to say in the first couple of days after Stuart went because you only end up hurting yourselves. Emotions are running so high.

But now it’s time for us to come out and comment based on facts not emotions.

I can honestly say that we were not waiting for Stuart to fail. That’s unfair. I’m not a crazy guy.

I like Stuart as a person very much and if he fails, we also fail. It hurts everyone, the club and the fans.

When Stuart lost, so did we. We win and lose as a team and as a club.

Everybody is always suggesting there is a hidden agenda. It was our decision to employ Stuart after Phil Parkinson left and it was the right decision.

There was and still is no agenda. Facts speak for themselves. We’ve lost six in a row and eight out of ten and Stuart himself told the public before we played Oldham that we had to get four points from the next two games.

He had to turn this round but it didn’t happen.

Edin and I sat down and thought: ‘What should we do? We can still go for promotion, but we have to change something right now and quickly.’ We were not confident that Stuart was able to turn this series of negative results around. We considered the risk was too high to do nothing.

So then you have to pull the emergency brake really hard and this is what’s happened.

Of course, it was a very difficult decision because Stuart McCall is a Bradford City hero. If it was any other manager would they survive such a bad run?

I respect Stuart, he is a real gentleman and it was not a decision we took lightly. We felt we had to do something in the best interests of the club and our plans for the season.

We all know what Stuart means to the club and what he has done in the past. We don’t want to damage any idol.

This was the last thing I wanted to do but we are in a business where only results count. He had said that himself.

We are running out of games. If we had waited for the next five or six, all of a sudden we could have been out of the play-off places in 11th or 12th place.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy for us because we knew what was coming.

If it hadn’t been Stuart but another manager, then the emotions wouldn’t have been so high.

But it doesn’t help us. We must look forward and couldn’t afford to sit and wait and hope that maybe he would have turned things round.

That would not have been good for Stuart or for us.

It was hard and we knew the earthquake it would start.

We have 15 games to go and I think we still have a chance of promotion via the play-offs.

We are now looking for Stuart’s replacement.

Whether it is in the next days or the next two weeks, the crucial thing is we need the right one.

We need someone who walks in and simply starts straight away because he knows how to do it.

I won’t comment on names but we have our profile we are looking for and hopefully we will get somebody in like that.

I said on the DVD that the average shelf life of a manager in League One is something like 11 months. But that is a general statement.

Things can change quickly over the course of the season.

People are very critical at the moment and say that Edin is the “micromanager” who selects the players and this is not the truth.

It’s the job of the manager to pick the team and if you know Stuart you will know he would never accept the involvement of anyone in picking his team and that’s right as a manager.

It is the same if we are after a certain player. We might ask what our ceiling is with the fee or wages but it’s not that we always have the last say.

It was the transfer committee of Stuart, Greg Abbott and Edin and then, when it came to very high investment, it was also me. Stuart was never out of the discussion.

It was never like Edin had chosen the player and told Stuart he had to play that guy. It was always a combined effort.

Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes not.

The last transfer window was a bad situation for us. We had certain targets as well as the money but if other clubs from the Championship sneak in and pay stupid prices, then we have to quit.

We have invested a lot over the course of the last one-and-a-half years for players, the development squad, youth department and I can also assure you that since day one, neither Edin or I have taken out any money from the club.

The opposite is the case – I’m still investing. No money has gone back to Germany.

People talk about these windfalls, but we also had two awful cup runs. Two years in a row we haven’t had any reasonable income stream from the cup competitions and that has hurt us because that can go a long way in League One.

You need to find that money from somewhere, whether it’s a cup run or by transferring one of your talented players.

But I’ve not taken any away and we still have nothing to hide.

We still have the same passion and strategy. We are still here to stay and we haven’t given up on the season.

People might say that we totally failed in the window and let Stuart down by not signing any players. That’s not true.

Go to the training ground and we have 22-25 healthy guys running around all wanting to be selected for Saturday.

People are predicting Armageddon now that Stuart has gone and everything will go downhill. That’s not true.

Most of those players were in the team who had a very good first half of the season when we were up to third or fourth position.

We all want to know what the trigger point was that changed everything. Why, all of a sudden, have we stopped playing football?

We asked this question and didn’t get the answers. That is not very convincing for the owners. If your key personnel can’t tell you, then I’m sorry to say but you lose confidence.

All I ask now is that you support the staff in charge of taking the team over the next few days and support the players.

As told to Simon Parker, Chief Sports Writer