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United fans seemed fine with it all when they were selling their souls, becoming a PLC and removing Football Club from their badge in return for endless trophies.
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Mar 24, 2010 15:32
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Absolutely. Also, we hear very little about the fact that the Glazers probably wouldn't have been able to take over if not Mr Ferguson hadn't pissed of Magner and McManus back then.
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Mar 24, 2010 15:40
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United fans are all plastic.  Get hosed. When we became a PLC nobody else had done it before. There was a LOT of uncertainty about the whole process which was naturally assuaged because prior to the Glazers' takeover we were one of the most financially stable clubs in the world. Of course the fans would be happy with that, who the gently caress wouldn't be? Is your average football fan now expected to be perfectly legally aware of all the possible takeover ramifications of their club's ownership hierarchy?
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Mar 24, 2010 16:09
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Maybe so, but if the fans/club were more than happy to take all the money from being on the stock market, they should have been aware that it left them open to a takeover down the line.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:24
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Mickolution posted:Maybe so, but if the fans/club were more than happy to take all the money from being on the stock market, they should have been aware that it left them open to a takeover down the line. I agree with you for the most part, but to be fair, I don't think it's unreasonable for fans to have believed that most, if not all, of the board members and/or shareholders responsible for turning Man-U into a PLC would be less profit-driven and would have had the club's long-term interests more in mind when faced with the Glazers' takeover offer. A takeover still requires someone to be willing to sell the shares and, from what I understand, the implications of the Glazers' way of acquiring the club and running it were pretty obvious to everyone from day 1.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:39
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So an understanding of leveraged buyouts is a pre-requisite of being a football fan? And of course if the fans were against it for some non-specific reason then the owners at the time wouldn't have floated it on the market? The schadenfraude at our current situation is to be expected but to suggest we have no right to even complain about the Glazers is completely idiotic, nobody who knew about what was going on at the time wanted them taking over and now we've been proved right we just want them out of here as fast as possible to start recovering from the debt.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:39
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You're going to have to a hell of a lot better than a veiled "it's United and they deserve it". There WERE a lot of fans who were concerned in 1991. Do you really think they would still have realistic cause for concern fifteen years of financial stability later? It's pretty rich for a Liverpool fan to be arguing that United fans should be aware of the legal ins and outs of their club ownership even as there's a movement against your own to get H&G replaced by a consortium who are potentially even worse.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:40
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TyChan posted:I agree with you for the most part, but to be fair, I don't think it's unreasonable for fans to have believed that most, if not all, of the board members and/or shareholders responsible for turning Man-U into a PLC would be less profit-driven and would have had the club's long-term interests more in mind when faced with the Glazers' takeover offer. A takeover still requires someone to be willing to sell the shares and, from what I understand, the implications of the Glazers' way of acquiring the club and running it were pretty obvious to everyone from day 1. I assume the shareholders did have the club's best interest at heart before Mr Ferguson decided to try and dick them over a horse.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:44
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duggimon posted:So an understanding of leveraged buyouts is a pre-requisite of being a football fan? And of course if the fans were against it for some non-specific reason then the owners at the time wouldn't have floated it on the market? I think that being a PLC was a smart thing to do as long as you have good people in the club who aren't just chasing after money. I don't blame Man-U fans for thinking, even without any concrete reason, that those in the club or those investing in the club would be interested in keeping the club in a sustainable situation conducive to good results on the pitch, even if it meant not getting as much profit as possible. I probably mentioned this before, but a lot of Liverpool's troubles go right back to the Moores-era board, who did not take advantage of the club's high profile to develop its business side during the 80s and 90s and who basically accepted all of the dubious promises of Hicks & Gillett because selling to the two Americans made for a faster transaction and a quicker payout. Mickolution posted:I assume the shareholders did have the club's best interest at heart before Mr Ferguson decided to try and dick them over a horse. What exactly is the story with that?
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Mar 24, 2010 16:50
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Going to a plc makes no sense because you're then legally obligated to ensure only one thing, a profit to your shareholders. You want to raise money and not sell out? Do what Barca do.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:52
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I think most of us were naive that successful businessmen could be decent human beings. I sympathize with the FA in some regards because I dont think they thought and prepared for owners who would use football clubs in this way.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:53
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TyChan posted:What exactly is the story with that? From Wikipedia. quote:For much of his racing career, Rock of Gibraltar ran in the colours of Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who was named as a part-owner along with Susan Magnier, wife of Coolmore owner John Magnier. Upon Rock of Gibraltar's retirement, Ferguson and John Magnier were involved in a dispute over the exact nature of the ownership of the horse which was eventually settled out of court. Basically, if I remember right, Ferguson was good friends with Magnier and McManus, who were shareholders in the club. After this incident, they had no problems selling up when the Glazers came along.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:55
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ibroxmassive posted:Going to a plc makes no sense because you're then legally obligated to ensure only one thing, a profit to your shareholders. I know it's been a while since I've studied corporations in law school and maybe the laws in the UK are different, but a company board or an officer could still argue in the face of something like a derivative suit that by turning down an offer, you were helping sustain the longer-term health of the business and the longer-term, sustainable profit prospects for shareholders. I think the business judgment rule could also come into effect here? Yes, you're obligated to ensure a profit to shareholders, but that does not necessarily mean that you have to sell out the minute someone comes with a humongous offer unless the shareholders really want you to. As an officer or a board member, you can still argue against it and that happens all the time in takeover situations. MoPZig posted:I think most of us were naive that successful businessmen could be decent human beings. I sympathize with the FA in some regards because I dont think they thought and prepared for owners who would use football clubs in this way. I hate to sound like your typical Anglophile American, but at least with Liverpool and Manchester United, it really is like culture shock. This manner of acquiring and running businesses has been in vogue in American since the 1980s and is actually not too bad when you're dealing with conventional businesses or the American sports world, which is more like a bunch of cartels than the promotion/relegation cannibalizing free-for-all that you get in European soccer. Still, how anyone claiming to be a "fan" could sell a club to Hicks & Gillett after what they did to Corinthians is a forehead-slapper.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:05
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ibroxmassive posted:Going to a plc makes no sense because you're then legally obligated to ensure only one thing, a profit to your shareholders. Well, you're legally obligated to act in the best interests of your shareholders, that's usually but not necessarily the same thing, it could be argued that if the shareholders are fans then their best interests aren't simply a profit.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:17
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duggimon posted:Well, you're legally obligated to act in the best interests of your shareholders, that's usually but not necessarily the same thing, it could be argued that if the shareholders are fans then their best interests aren't simply a profit.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:36
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s0meb0dy0 posted:Which is great, except for those shareholders that disagree and will file suits over it. well yeah, that's the problem
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Mar 24, 2010 17:43
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TyChan posted:I hate to sound like your typical Anglophile American, but at least with Liverpool and Manchester United, it really is like culture shock. This manner of acquiring and running businesses has been in vogue in American since the 1980s and is actually not too bad when you're dealing with conventional businesses or the American sports world, which is more like a bunch of cartels than the promotion/relegation cannibalizing free-for-all that you get in European soccer. The whole leveraged-buyout and/or hostile takeover thing is not uniquely American, it's not particularly alien to the British market. Other countries it is, moreso. The Germans got pretty upset when Vodafone bought out Mannesmann in a hostile deal, because it was very unusual there. It's unusual to the football market, but that's because football has never really been valuable enough to warrant that sort of thing, up till recently. I've said before on this, though, it's a red herring. It's a nonsense. Particularly coming from Liverpool fans, who were privately owned, and ended up in probably a worse situation than United are right now through the exact same process. Yes, United were traded on the stock market, that doesn't just mean that they're continually for sale at market price x issued shares. Spurs are on the stock market, but you're going to have to buy out Daniel Levy if you want them. Ultimately, before the Glazers came in, United were owned by no more than eight or nine people, as a majority shareholding. The Glazers actually held a minority shareholding for a long time before they made an offer. There was a big pool of very small shareholders, and then about 10% was traded on the markets. But the Glazers realistically needed all of the major shareholders to accept in order for them to transfer the debt onto the club. I think they needed 90% of the club, if I remember correctly, to legally do that, and what Shareholders United were actually doing was to try and get to 10% to block that. But that's £70m worth of shares, and they weren't able to do so. You're not significantly more likely to be bought out as a public company than you are as a private one. There are a few things Arsenal can do to stop Usmanov buying them out on the sly, but if he's willing and able to buy out the major members of the board, are they were willing to sell, then it would only be a matter of time. We talked about Rock Of Gibraltar, as well. It's not like Ferguson launched a spurious legal case because he was bored one day. He was probably entitled to anywhere up to £100m in stud rights from a horse that he supposedly co-owned. And he settled for a lot less than that, partially to put the case to bed and not disrupt the running of the football club. Not to mention that in all likelihood, Magnier and McManus would have taken the Glazer deal regardless, seeing as they made an awful lot of money doing so.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:45
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And yes, a company board will make an advisory statement to shareholders when an offer comes in, but that's purely based on the value of the offer. When Cadbury's board is talking about selling to Kraft, it's doing so on the basis of what it thinks the company is worth in relation to the offer, not whether or not Kraft chocolate brands taste like poop and their CEO smells and owns a poorly-fitting suit. And the shareholders there still make the final decision, either way, to accept an offer for their shares or not to do so.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:51
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FullLeatherJacket posted:The whole leveraged-buyout and/or hostile takeover thing is not uniquely American, it's not particularly alien to the British market. Other countries it is, moreso. The Germans got pretty upset when Vodafone bought out Mannesmann in a hostile deal, because it was very unusual there. It's unusual to the football market, but that's because football has never really been valuable enough to warrant that sort of thing, up till recently. Was the LBO model popular for acquiring teams in European sports as well, though? I admit that I have no idea. I just know that for decades, American team owners have been able to use things like the LBO and other sneaky ways of self-dealing to run franchises into the ground while still making tons of money off of them and foisting the ensuing liabilities on others or pushing them off to the future. Anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm disagreeing with FLJ or Duggimon here. I don't think anyone can blame Manchester United fans or Liverpool fans for what has happened to their clubs since it was either a small number of shareholders and/or board members who made the decisions that put their clubs in their current messes.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:51
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TyChan posted:Was the LBO model popular for acquiring teams in European sports as well, though? I admit that I have no idea. I just know that for decades, American team owners have been able to use things like the LBO and other sneaky ways of self-dealing to run franchises into the ground while still making tons of money off of them and foisting the ensuing liabilities on others or pushing them off to the future. Nobody ever really made much money running a football club until relatively recently so this is all a bit new to fans hence the shocked reactions and protests.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:58
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duggimon posted:Nobody ever really made much money running a football club until relatively recently so this is all a bit new to fans hence the shocked reactions and protests. Nobody makes money running a football club now. It's an industry so infested with people's own tax sinks and personal vanity projects, it's almost impossible to get out more than you put in, unless you do a Keith Haslam and use a club as your own personal cashcard. And Haslam didn't buy it with leverage, he bought it for a pound. I mean, United are cash negative, right now. Chelsea are massively cash negative. Arsenal, gently caress knows. Liverpool have no money and their owners are having to sell assets. Spurs are cash negative and being bankrolled by Levy. City are comically cash negative. Villa are about breaking even. Everton are about breaking even. Gold and Sullivan said they wouldn't buy West Ham if they weren't fuckwit cockneys. The supposedly "good" chairmen at Reading and Crystal Palace have basically upped and left and put them for sale. Mike Ashley has lost £200m or more from buying Newcastle, and the fans still harangue him because they're delusional and entitled. Real Madrid have just borrowed literally all the money existant in the world, and they will still fail to win anything again, spectacularly and hilariously. The LBO protects the Glazers. They don't have to tie up their assets. It won't reflect well on them if it fails, but they won't specifically lose anything or end up wandering the streets with a dog on a string. Manchester United are, for want of argument, the biggest club in the world. They could, theoretically, be profitable in a way that no-one else could be. Real Madrid are ahead right now, but remember that Spain doesn't have a collective bargaining agreement. If United could sell their own rights, they'd be in a hugely advantageous position. But the Glazers probably won't do that. They can, though, push ticket prices and merchandising and sponsorship, and whatever else. Whether or not that means they can be worthwhile as an investment, and not just £5-10m a year in "salary" until they collapse under their own weight, who knows.
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Mar 24, 2010 18:28
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Pretty sure Levy isnt bankrolling anything.
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Mar 24, 2010 18:31
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MrBling posted:Pretty sure Levy isnt bankrolling anything. Yeah, it's Joe Lewis.
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Mar 24, 2010 18:42
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Spurs made £56.5m in FYE 2009 from player transfer activity alone (and £16m in 2008), and it's extremely unlikely in the approximately 10 months following that they've blown it all on players. Spurs' financials are very public and the money spent has nowhere to hide. Joe Lewis/ENIC may have put a ton of money in at one point but the club has been a very well-oiled machine for drat near a decade.
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Mar 24, 2010 19:00
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I can't imagine that Spurs are making profits on player sales, unless they've sold someone under the radar and fired Redknapp. It only really works if you count Keane and Defoe out and don't count them back in again. Other than that, they've bought multiple players for £10m+ (including Bentley and Palacios) and with the only major sale being Berbatov.
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Mar 24, 2010 19:08
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I can't imagine that Spurs are making profits on player sales, unless they've sold someone under the radar and fired Redknapp. OK now that I'm looking at their statement of cash flows correctly, they did spend a net of £21.5m for FYE 2009. Even so, with net income after taxes, etc. of £36.8m, there's nothing that shows Spurs aren't self-sustaining.
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Mar 24, 2010 19:16
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I can't imagine that Spurs are making profits on player sales, unless they've sold someone under the radar and fired Redknapp. Remember we spend 'only' ~£50m a season on wages compared to the £80m-£120m of the Big 4, which gives us a huge amount of extra money to play with every season. That 'saving' more than makes up for poor transfers. And in the last 5 years we've been very good at recouping money back in sales, just look at Carrick, Berbatov and Keane, plus things like the Portsmouth trio for £10m, and Bent for £10m. gently caress it, we got £6m for Mido. Spurs make a regular profit without resorting to any bankrolling. It seems like people don't want that to be true and keep thinking we're bankrolled, I hear it so often against all facts and figures from public documents. Fat Turkey fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Mar 24, 2010 |
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Mar 24, 2010 19:43
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in 10 years the EPL will look like la Liga with arsenal/spurs as barca/real
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Mar 24, 2010 19:44
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In 10 years, the EPL will look like the current EPL, but with Arsenal/Spurs playing the roles that Arsenal and Spurs do now.
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Mar 24, 2010 19:54
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Fat Turkey posted:Remember we spend 'only' ~£50m a season on wages compared to the £80m-£120m of the Big 4, which gives us a huge amount of extra money to play with every season. That 'saving' more than makes up for poor transfers. And in the last 5 years we've been very good at recouping money back in sales, just look at Carrick, Berbatov and Keane, plus things like the Portsmouth trio for £10m, and Bent for £10m. gently caress it, we got £6m for Mido. You remember that you lost money on Bent, right? And that you replaced him with £15m worth of Pavylchenko and £10m worth of Peter Crouch? Not to mention buying back Keane and Defoe. But yeah, I wouldn't suggest that ENIC are dumping hundreds of millions into Spurs, because they're clearly not, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Redknapp gets handed a significant chunk of money this summer (which will be spent poorly). ENIC certainly aren't making money out of them, and having them run at a loss isn't a big deal at all.
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Mar 24, 2010 19:59
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Spurs didn't actually pay £16.5m for Darren Bent, so I dont think any money was really lost there.
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Mar 24, 2010 20:19
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FullLeatherJacket posted:You remember that you lost money on Bent, right? And that you replaced him with £15m worth of Pavylchenko and £10m worth of Peter Crouch? Not to mention buying back Keane and Defoe. No FLJ, you're better than this, you're not woobi. You actually have an awareness of the bigger picture of things, right? That money we lost on Bent. Yeah, it was pretty rubbish, we lost around £6m (we'll ignore that he was a 1 goal in 3 striker within a good wagecap) on him. During the same period of time, we made £19m on Berbatov. We made £2m on Mido. So while there were players we lost money on, there are also players we made money on. Your choice of picking out Pavyl and Crouch is really odd, because they are assets at the club which we haven't lost money on. We could have got £12m for Pavyl even before his goal spree, and we could easily get £8m if not the full £10m for Crouch this summer if we wanted. But you're ignoring the players we've clearly made money on. Lennon and Kranjcar cost £3.5 between them, but are worth a lot more each (I wouldn't accept £15m for the pair). We made a profit on the collective selling and rebuying of Keane and Defoe. But you're still ignoring the point that Spurs revenue last financial year was 113m and we save 5-10x what you claim we lose on players a season on a lower wage bill. We're publicly recognised as making a profit in general year on year. You seem to think you know more about football club finance than Deloittre and HM Revenue Customs.
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Mar 24, 2010 21:35
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If you're bored... http://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/uploads/assets/docstore/2009_annual_report.pdf
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Mar 24, 2010 22:28
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Zip! posted:If you're bored... Literally no one is ever this bored
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Mar 24, 2010 23:22
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Leveraged buyouts, shares, profits, cunts. Either way, the clubs should be owned by the fans.
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Mar 25, 2010 00:41
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Fat Turkey posted:No FLJ, you're better than this, you're not woobi. You actually have an awareness of the bigger picture of things, right? I'm not arguing about the quality of the players, or the profits and losses on individual deals. The point is that overall Spurs spend a lot lot more than they make back. The point is that you can't talk about selling Bent if you go out and buy two new strikers for more than you sold Bent for. Juande Ramos didn't leave Spain because he thought Spurs were a sleeping giant, he left for what is, by most measures, a worse club, because you threw money at him. And then you gave him a big payoff, and Harry Redknapp turned up, again because you threw money at him. This is not a club with tight purse-strings. Zip! posted:If you're bored... So, in other words, before transfers, Spurs make around £20m a year. The year they sold Berbatov and Keane, they made £56m in fees and spent £38m on fees. Page 38. Never read the guff when you can read actual accounting poo poo. So, Spurs have £20m plus sales to spend on players, which is pretty much what they do. ENIC take little or nothing out of the club. So, yes, I was misrepresenting them slightly. They actually break about even, give or take. Or at least do right now. That doesn't change the wider point, that in terms of investment, ENIC might as well have bought timeshare. All the money they're making is going back into the football club. If you have hundreds of millions of pounds, why would you buy a football club?
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Mar 25, 2010 01:04
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c0burn posted:Literally no one is ever this bored Honestly as someone who designs and produces these documents for a living I couldn't agree more. For a casual glance all the information you need to know is in the key performance indicators on the 2nd page. The new training ground does look spiffy though and the artists impression of the new stadium looks a LOT like the Emirates.
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Mar 25, 2010 01:05
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The reason people keep buying football clubs doesn't seem that dissimilar from the reason people pay billions for websites that don't make any money: they see a huge market of people who are loyal users/fans -many of whom are loyal to the point of being obsessed- and figure there must be some way to get rich off them. And in both cases, it hasn't worked so far and nobody has any real concrete idea of how to make it work: there's just this deep-seated belief that if somebody really likes what you're offering, surely you can get them to give you lots of money. Obviously fans do make money for their clubs, but anytime a new owner gives a hint of their business plan it always seems to be based around the belief that they can make a lot more money out of armchair fans than they currently get either indirectly -from advertising or tv money- or by directly selling them the odd shirt or piece of tat with the club logo on it.
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Mar 25, 2010 01:41
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FullLeatherJacket posted:ENIC certainly aren't making money out of them, and having them run at a loss isn't a big deal at all. They aren't. They posted, per their audited financial statements (thanks Deloitte!), a profit of £23.1m.... FullLeatherJacket posted:So, Spurs have £20m plus sales to spend on players, which is pretty much what they do. ENIC take little or nothing out of the club. So, yes, I was misrepresenting them slightly. They actually break about even, give or take. Or at least do right now. That doesn't change the wider point, that in terms of investment, ENIC might as well have bought timeshare. All the money they're making is going back into the football club. If you have hundreds of millions of pounds, why would you buy a football club? ...this includes paying out stock dividends of £3.7m - the primary reason why ENIC owns Spurs - and posting EPS of 25p. If you have hundreds of millions of pounds, you'd buy a football club to make money off of it. ENIC are making money off it despite using a big portion of profits to reinvest in the club. Flaunting your cash does not necessarily mean you are relying on a sugar daddy. It usually does, but Spurs are proud to be an exception here. We've done well enough with our finances to afford the laundry list of blunders we make in the process.
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Mar 25, 2010 03:23
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Big Black Sock posted:Glazers are just feeding the green and gold campaign. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/mar/24/manchester-united-ticket-prices Also: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/3/8/1268046111504/AlBalmer2final.jpg haha
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Mar 25, 2010 03:59
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