I suspect the debt and monies owned to others is quite high but least they have the money which Bassini and others didn't....
Agreed and the only reason they have pushed finances to the limit was to try to establish us as a prem club and achieved that for many years. Previous owners had just accepted relegation with little strengthening and banked the cash. Maybe they will do that this time but I can imagine there won’t be too many applauding if they do.
The point is they risk/invest little of their own money. They borrow against all our assets and revenue streams to fund their business model. Would they step in to plug any financial gaps/issue we had with their own cash? Who knows. They aren’t obligated to.
Weren't we weeks away from administration when they bought the club? I'm no expert on football finance but don't most owners do this (other than the obscenely wealthy owners)? Who knows indeed, but this is a hypothetical scenario to which we don't know the answer to, so we can't get mad over it until it happens and we find out the answer.
I think we were threatened by a £10m tax bill when they arrived which would have been administration if not settled. If we had been Bournemouth this season what would the financial situation have looked like compared to that? Doubt selling Sarr, Cucho, JP, Hughes and Chalobah would have covered it. Hopefully we now get to reset this season with a sensible window.
Why should they plough millions of family earnings into the club like a rich Arab prince would knowing they would probably never get it back ? They are business owners not billionaire owners using us a status/financial play thing.
Pretty sure Jumbo isn't arguing that they should, he's questioning whether they would. And that was in response to wfc4ever pointing out they have money compared to Bassini who obviously didn't. Arguably it doesn't matter if the owner's got 10p, £10m or £10bn in the bank, if their model revolves around leveraging the club's own assets and rarely putting your own cash on the line.
They shouldn’t, but equally why should they leverage the club up to the eyeballs to fund their player trading model and put us at risk?
That's 100m worth of players, again I'm not an expert in finance and have no idea what our balance sheet looks like, but 100m in sales + parachute payments surely would've eased any debt to very very manageable levels? How much is our debt?
I’d disagree that is £100m of players. Hughes and Chalobah in final year of contract and nobody was interested in Sarr for £40m. We owed £120m at end of cup final season. So after that you have another 2 years of running costs and wages (eg Deeney and Gray £8m a year) combined with lower prize money, Covid and relegation. And we will also owe a lot of money on Sarr not included in these numbers. Offset players sales Estupinan, Suarez, Doucs etc. (Probably a lot of that is not cash but money owed to us). We don’t know exact figure as the last accounts available are 2019, but it’s been a rough 2 years since then. No gate receipts plus relegation is a pretty nasty combination.
Anyhow, promotion has given us a bit of a clean slate so let’s see what happens. The players we are currently targeting seem sensible.
Don't they just My guess is that this whole relegation has made them far more risk averse, given we got the get out of jail free with immediate promotion
I think it'd be closer to the truth to say we got out of jail with our arseholes a bit sore but at least we weren't shanked like Bournemouth.
Muff are currently chained up in the basement, and a guy in a g1mp mask has just got out of the trunk.
Normal business practice. Pozzos are just using the businesses assets and income to pay for new assets and costs. You are confusing with the Glazer model where they are “leveraging” the club to generate the funds to cover the loans made to buy the club in the first place. They could put their hands in their own pockets and put additional funds but risking losing it. To the ultra rich that wouldn’t matter. As I said they could just not invest and keep the cash and accept relegation.
I would disagree it is normal business practice to borrow against almost every asset and every revenue stream after a cup final season and finishing mid table in premier league. There are different degrees but this bordered on reckless in my opinion. Obviously its nothing to do with the Glazers model (or what has now happened to Burnley). I think what is needed to reset now is exactly your last line which is minimal speculation and take premier league cash.
They have done what they could to sustain us a prem club. Yes they could have not financed the assets But in a normal situation relegation would be less of an issue. Always need a plan A and plan B in case of relegation that involves cutting costs to survive. I doubt they had a plan C that included impact of covid too. Easy option was to assume sustaining a prem club wasn't possible and just pocket the cash as we did in 2000 and 2006.
So what is your position? You want us to ramp up borrowing again now we have Premier League revenue streams? Even if a portion that goes on player trading ventures rather than first team squad additions? I think our squad is a long way off the pace. We'd need to gamble a lot to not be highly likely candidates for the drop.
The cutting of Deulofeu, Capoue, Doucoure, Pererya etc was stage 1 of cutting cloth for the Championship. Glad we dont have to go to stage 2. Last time we spent the money knowing we had to raise everything a notch. We now need to stop splurging money on squad players who have a small chance of being key 1st teamers. Then spend less money more wisely on our 1st XI. Baah, Scottish dude and Fletcher are decent movements on squad players that dont cost us 10m+ each. Like Success or Oulare.
Q to Pozzo-outers: Would you rather have owners without ambition and never have had the recent adventures, but instead owners prepared to give moderately of their personal wealth to maintain a position around the bottom of the championship) top of League one? Because unless you can by a miracle attract a billionaire owner prepared to offer unlimited funds, that is the realistic alternative.
No so sure. Aside from the 5 year deal for Fletch (as opposed to the signing itself) most of the rumours have positive posts in general (eg the two Scottish lads).
It’s not binary like that. Once you make it premier league and certainly after you grind a few years there other clubs are able to nurture their squads with more sensible financing than we did. I think our player trading and business model does us no favours. It benefits the owners, it probably benefits Udinese but our balance sheet was and likely still is in very poor shape. If you must make the question binary I’d go for the first option. Or ideally the Pozzo promotion model without the lack of restraint when we get there.
We have additional income which we can use to repair the unforeseen damage caused by Covid over and above relegation. We can't spend the sums required to guarantee we won't be relegated so limited strengthening without betting the house. We can't assume we won't be relegated so we need a plan B that shows how we clear down debt remaining at the end of the season. It was a terrible year to be relegated but a great season to bounce back (other than the fact we didn't get to see it in the flesh !).
£120M of promotion money That is 5 new players at £25M each, maybe 10 if we borrow against parachute payments COYHs
I think his son is available given that he sold Walsall a couple of years ago. I believe that he still own their ground.
