The Championship 2020-21

Why would any club consult their fans on plans to change their training ground?

 

Slightly related to that Blackburn story, I appreciate that a lot of it is theoretical money based on the value of businesses etc, but according to this the Pozzos are still amongst the poorest owners even in the championship:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_owners_of_English_football_clubs

Why is it still that so many Championship clubs still continue just to tread water in that league, FFP? And it begs the question why do these owners even own the clubs, are they all just fans of each one?

 

For many the clubs are just a small part of a portfolio and they have limited active involvement beyond the responsibilities of a shareholder. Think of us under Ashcroft.

Even for those that are active, money is no qualification at all to run a football club.

 

Are they even profitable though? We got £9m match day revenue in the Prem, so the bigger clubs in the championship must get no more than £15m at a push, if that. The TV deal is worth £5m so we’re taking about £20m max revenue.

 

I imagine most football clubs have heads barely above water. There are far better ways to invest money.

 

Agree. Which begs the question unless you are going to throw loads of money at it as a football fan why bother having it in the investment portfolio.

 

I suppose there's a bit of logic in thinking it's good for increasing a person's profile in the UK, networking in general and frankly if they're a football fan to get that 'behind the scenes' matchday experience that it turns out money can buy. I'm sure there's cheaper ways of doing all of those things but that's where ego and/or greed probably comes in.

 

The debt is loaded on to the club so these owners aren't going to go under if the club does. Of course there are some owners that are so rich that wasting money on a football club is just a hobby for them. Then there are clubs owned by countries where money is no issue.

 

This. No-one in their right mind would buy a football club expecting to make money in day to day trade. The only real route would be to hold on until you make it to the prem and then immediatly sell to someone who wants to be in that exclusive club. I'm sure the Pozzos bought us as a cheap way to showcase their peripheral players who weren't getting game time in Italy in a high profile league to up their market value.

 

If I was a billionaire I would look to buy a football club, probably a smaller one, just because I like football and it would be fun.

I wouldn't be doing it to turn a profit though.

 

If I was a billionaire, I would buy Watford. Then spend my time on this forum trolling you all.

 

Hi, Gino.

 

He said if he was a billionaire, not if he opened a new bank account.

 

Not quite the Championship, but it looks like Ipswich are on the verge of a takeover with another American consortium finally putting Tractor Boys' fans out of their misery of the awful Marcus Evans/Paul Lambert era. Supposedly the consortium have lined up Paul Cook to come in as manager. Cook would (as many on this forum have argued) be an excellent appointment for almost any Championship club, so a truly exceptional appointment at L1 level. https://theathletic.com/2413249/202...pswich-takeover-with-cook-to-replace-lambert/

 

All fine and dandy but do their fans regret their treatment of Mick McCarthy I wonder?

 

Ipswich dropped out of the Championship in 18/19 season having got to the play off semi finals when we went up in 14/15 ( our game v them was our only loss in those last 14 games under Joka). I always saw them as a reasonably well established club who had survived for 16 previous seasons in the Championship after falling out of PL in 01/02.

Now its reported the owner who has put c £100m of his money in, is selling to a USA investor for £17.5m and writing the rest of his debt off. This American must presumably think there are prospects for a club that averaged c18,000 in that relegation season.

https://www.eadt.co.uk/sport/ipswich-town/ipswich-town-takeover-report-7793832

 

To be fair Ipswich had totally stagnated under McCarthy and they parted ways at the end of the season with a plan to appoint an ostensibly promising young manager who could help them make the next step. They got that appointment wrong and I don't really understood how Lambert has remained in situ for so long.

Now I think it is clear, certainly in retrospect, that their stagnation was in spite of McCarthy rather than because of him. But without the hierarchy selling up, the only way they can deliver (the illusion of) clear change is to remove the manager. We've been there too as a fanbase - whether it's laying the blame for all sorts fairly arbitrarily at Giraldi's door, or calling for various managers to go despite it being clear that certain players are more significant though more intractable problems.

Edit: Apologies he resigned a handful of games before the end of 2017-18 season, several games after it had been announced he would leave at the end of the season. But they finished 14th, 9th, 6th and 7th in his first four seasons. Then 16th and 12th. You can totally see why they parted ways.

 

On paper they have a fantastic squad for L1 and as you've said Cook is an exceptional manager, they're perfectly set for a late surge for the playoffs, will be an interesting one to keep an eye on! Also it's crazy the valuations on English teams, £17.5m for a L1 team when a Serie A team recently sold for the same price

 

Rarely do fans like MM's style of play,a Yorkist Jose I suppose.
Always careful what you wish for.

 

Yeah seemed very high indeed - they don't even own their stadium, it's owned by the Council - but Evans did wipe 100m of debt owed to him. Got to be some value in acquiring the club debt free. Sunderland's recent takeover seems to have valued them 25-30m (Kyril Louis-Dreyfus is alleged to have paid 22m for 85% of the club) but they own their significantly larger stadium, have a significantly larger fan base and a more appealing brand. Surely, especially with Covid, there must currently be a cheaper and more appealing route into owning a lower championship/upper L1 club than buying Ipswich for 17.5m?

 

Further to to my post above, still absolutely as clear as mud to me as to why anyone would buy a football club, other than being an absolute nutter of a fan of that particular club.

 

Sportswashing/reputation laundering.

 

A one off, but I read somewhere that Abramovich basically just bought Chelsea to stop him getting assassinated. He knew if he bought Chelsea he’d become a household name and therefore not worth the hassle for the Russian state to kill.

 

It was probably Matthew Syed's article in the Times from 2013.

 

As good a reasons as have been given so far.

 

Garner just scored his first senior goal....... for Forest

 

You mean like that 23 year old at Sunderland... He’ll get bored and then they’ll be screwed again..


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Teflon hands from Marshall, who's gone off injured or shamed,you decide.
Derby,sorry, Wayne Rooney's Derby,were looking sprightly but have fallen apart since the goal,which was shambolic all round.

 

That nasty little tic Knocked out has got his confidence back, we'll need to keep an eye on him and his Raddy antics.

 

There's more money in the Championship than there is is Serie A and the money in the Premier for 17th place is twice as much as 4th place in Serie A. The Pozzo's are not losing money owning us but they need the Prem and if they could find the right financial partner then we could push on. Certainly we all know they/we are a selling club but we always were, it's just that now it is a few levels up.

 

...but you lose money in the prem as the cost to maintain a prem squad exceeds the income no matter how high it is, unless you're prepared to just accept relegation as Norwich did. We had one of the lowest salary costs but still lost money over the last few years. People confuse income and profit.

 

Not really when you consider their aim was to be a long established top flight club like Fulham, Bolton or at least Charlton, even return to their glory years of the 1960s-80s. Certainly the model in the 1990s/2000s seemed flawless and something I was hoping our club would at least try to emulate - a middling club and the only professional one in their county, with a well coached team playing great passing football on limited resources with mostly British and Irish players, and the intention to grow with a bigger stadium. But it seems they let that amazing 5th place finish get to their heads and they didn't sufficiently strengthen their team, IIRC only adding two flair players, one of which didn't play that much, the other being an aging and overpriced luxury (hmm, does any of that sound familiar?) and their shock relegation coincided with the demise of ITV digital and they ended up being another has-been like Derby, QPR, Forest and Wednesday with just the occasional promotion push.

 

This is it, the money is irrelevant as it’s all relative. It doesn’t matter if you get £100m or £500m, as one of the non top four teams with huge grounds and CL revenue, you’ll always be competing against teams who also have this money. With the bosman ruling the absence of salary caps, any money will be sucked up by player wages and salaries. There are outliers, Burnley are a club who spring to mind as one who have managed to stay competitive without spending every single penny of each year, but much of that is down to Dyche and we don’t know how well Burnley will adjust when he eventually moves on. So you either do a Norwich and bank the cash, or try to spend every single penny as wisely as possible and hope you can out perform three other teams. For any of the smaller clubs like us whose owners try to siphon off some of the PL cash and actually make money, they’ll constantly be running the risk that they don’t invest enough in the playing squad and get relegated, which will absolutely shaft them financially.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure pre-pozzo we did a Norwich on our last couple of visits to the PL. Aidy and GT spent sod all, but then Aidy bought Ellington when we got relegated and obviously Vialli splurged all that money the season after we got relegated, but we spent barely anything to actually try and stay up the season before. We didn’t want to risk spending all the cash to end up relegated, but then wanted to spend all the cash to try and get back there.