|
quote:Will plantini except they are debt free? Hold me closer, Tony Cantolar.
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2009 21:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:58 |
|
|
I think the only way to do it is to buy low and sell high. If you got in big for United when they first floated and then sold to the Glazers, you'd have come out with a ridiculous amount of money. Which is why people assumed, and may still assume, that the Glazers have some kind of meaningful strategy for increasing revenues. This is how a lot of business works. Beg or borrow money to buy a firm at its face value, increase revenues and make it worth more than what you paid for it. There are three strategies apparent. Either you increase traditional revenues (merchandise, tickets, anything Malaysians buy), you break the television agreement, or you break away from the league altogether. The trouble with forming a superleague is exactly that issue. You'll have three or four years of profits, and then after that most of the extra money will just go to the players. You're in a competitive market, it's in the interest of teams to pay players as much as they can. The only way to make supernormal profits in that of market is to be making significantly more than everyone else. Which means that the smartest money would be to break up the common bargaining agreement. Which would be difficult. And require a preponderance of lawyers. And everyone else would hate you and possibly make rules to spite you. I've said before, though, they could just do something if Sky tries to lowball the next rights bid. But that's probably less likely now ESPN have made a commitment to the market, as opposed to it simply being a choice between Sky and free-to-air terrestrial providers.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2009 21:00
|
|
|
Naturally, they made such assumptions since they're still operating under the hilarious Ron Paul fallacy that people who are able to lay their hands on $1.5bn worth of equity are somehow intelligent enough to use it in a way that doesn't involve trying to lick one's own elbow and poo poo one's own pants. I think I realised aged fourteen that I was smarter than literally anybody who did anything, but even I fall for it sometimes. If United goes to poo poo, the Glazers still lose something like £250-300m of their own money, IIRC. Plus, banks don't really tend to let you gently caress up like that twice.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2009 21:53
|
|
|
TyChan posted:I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work that way, right? Yeah, people are only talking about Portsmouth's results being erased if they literally cease to exist before the end of the season.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2010 05:11
|
|
|
The reason Madrid have done what they've done is hardly confusing. The team they had last year was a pile of poo poo. They were signing players out West Ham's reserves, which was insane. They got raped domestically by Barca, and then Benitez made them look like clowns in Europe, which was a big deal for the Spanish press. There's also the fact that the European Cup final will be held at the Bernabeu, and they want to be there. That doesn't change the fact that ultimately they're borrowing money to do this. €200m is hardly going to cripple them, but they haven't just got money to burn forever and ever. We now have a great silly season mechanic where you can link any player to Madrid for €100m, and if that fails, link them to Man City. Madrid can probably afford a couple more players, and then they'll have to work with what they've got. And nobody wants to go to City.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2010 22:22
|
|
|
MoPZiG posted:Would the top clubs really revolt if the FA cup winner was given an automatic champions league berth? All that effort for £2 million is ridiculous frankly. UEFA wouldn't allow it, currently. Besides, they'd just do an Everton and go out of Europe altogether in four games, losing money in the process.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2010 11:54
|
|
|
Lyric Proof Vest posted:Yes but they are going to have to be willing to throw away the lions share of a billion pounds and it's going to have to be cash. That was the price before Glazer, though.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2010 19:05
|
|
|
Adnar posted:I wonder if some ways Leeds were saved by the "living the dream" poo poo happening 10 years ago rather than say 3-5. They probably could have gotten themselves in a lot deeper and it seems like they bottomed out (welched) cleared their debt and if they come up in 5 years will probably be better off financially than any of the big clubs. Administration is administration. Football clubs get away with going bankrupt time and time again, because they have no physical value whatsoever. That means you can do what Americans would call "Chapter 11" and end up paying pennies on the pound of a debt, which is what Leeds did. If you firesale all the players at United, you make no more than £100m in transfer fees. You won't get Ronaldo money for players you need to sell. Then Old Trafford and Carrington are essentially worthless except as land. Land in loving Salford, no less. Arsenal were at least able to knock down Highbury and build relatively pricey apartments (which they then couldn't sell), but it would probably cost more to knock down Old Trafford than it would be worth to sell houses there. I'm not sure the clubs even own the majority of their own video libraries, certainly not past the start of the Premier League era. I also think the club is still actually secured against the bank debts, which would mean they wouldn't even go into administration in the first place, they'd just default and the banks would repossess the club. There's so many re-financings that keep happening that that may change, but the key principles don't change. United are worth more in a day as an ongoing concern at a reasonably prudent level than they are in total as a set of liquidated assets. Of course, whether or not the Glazers are willing to simply default is another matter altogether. There's several things they could do. The sale-and-leaseback, I don't see as a bad idea at all (from their perspective). If you can knock £250m-400m off the debt in return for X amount per year, it cuts back on the amount of interest they're liable for. Of course, you'd have to be getting a better rate on that than on the loans for it to work. And then there are the more nuclear options, in increasing orders of unlikeliness. You can sell naming rights to the stadium, which is worth a hell of a lot of money. Doing it for an existing stadium like Old Trafford is more difficult, though. It's going to be the case for any new stadia built in this country for the next 50 years, but the publicity is less good when you're giving Mike Ashley money for his @StJames'Park poo poo. The second is to try and gently caress the collective bargaining agreement. They said when they came in that they were fully behind the CBA, but a bloo bloo bloo. You do that, United and Liverpool make enough money to pay off the debts, everyone else gets hosed raw. I've talked about it before. The silly option is to try and create a breakaway league. That's both risky and most big teams are unlikely to bite purely to pay off Glazer's debts. But I'd be surprised if they simply let the club fail, they're unlikely to sell it with the debt attached, and it's in their interests to keep it going for as long as they can.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2010 21:35
|
|
|
Jollzwhin posted:Well here it is - firm details of the anti-Manchester City rules. Discouraging, United will probably not be affected, but this is a big problem for us if we want to play in Europe. Does that just imply that City have to make a profit once every three years? *sells training ground to Arab investment bank* *buys back training ground following year*
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2010 12:33
|
|
|
Lyric Proof Vest posted:The three year cycle does allow a club to spend in one season to try and make the top four but will have to offset this in the next two years. The big winners are spurs, arsenal and liverpool if they get their new stadium as the debt is not as unasailable as utd's. Those extra millions from stadiums will be critical. Also this won't mean poo poo if its not back dated because chelsea and city will splurge massively in the summer if it doesn't count as part of the 3 year ting. The issue is still not what City and Chelsea spend, it's their wage bills. They could spend absolutely nothing on players and still record a loss. It's also very difficult to drive that down, because any players coming in will demand parity with players of a similar calibre, even if those players are on ridiculous and unsustainable wages. And yes, it basically is an anti-sugar daddy rule. You could make a rule saying that clubs aren't allowed to take out loans, if you really wanted, but that basically bans smaller clubs from competing at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2010 02:47
|
|
|
Scikar posted:I'm wondering what Liverpool would be like if Tom Hanks really did have a share in the ownership castaway from the top four
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2010 23:36
|
|
|
boom
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2010 23:36
|
|
|
Didn't Cardiff build a new, Premiership-standard stadium literally last summer? Perhaps that has something to do with why they have no money.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 09:54
|
|
|
Portsmouth are hardly a special case, just because they're in the Premiership. In fact, they're even less likely to be one. Administration will bleed them dry, but they'll come out the other side with a functioning football club with no debts. It might be in League One, but only United and Liverpool have a divine entitlement to be in the top flight.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 12:08
|
|
|
Jose posted:Portsmouth are going to be lucky to only suffer administration at this point. Well, what else can happen to them? Major football clubs do not get liquidated. Administration and liquidation are the same process. If the administrators walk in and see that there's more money to be made from shutting the club down, then that's the end of Portsmouth Football Club. But that simply never happens. They'll be relegated this year with or without a points deduction. If they go past a certain point, the points deduction applies next year, it may be better for them, in footballing terms, to do it now. They're not actually a big club. They're a poo poo club who get 20,000 fans and lucked an FA cup once. They can go hang out with Norwich and Charlton and Sheffield Wednesday, and have their derby back. That'll be nice for them. There's a strange thing where if you're a Bolton or a Wigan or a Middlesbrough, you spend three or four years in the top flight and then suddenly you're too big to go down and your collapse is a sign of the end of football, and not that a Championship club with some loan signings and tinsel went back from whence they came. Portsmouth Council have already come out and said that the land that Gaydamak and the club owns is earmarked for sports and leisure purposes, and was sold to them under that condition. If they wanted to knock the stadium down and build houses, they'd have to go through Westminster to do it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 12:31
|
|
|
Pissflaps posted:Middlesbrough, Wigan or Bolton getting relegated is not the 'end of football'. A premier league club going bust, or the others in that division and the ones below that follow it is not the end of football either. Why does it have to change, though? Not as a principle, but physicallly. People are still buying football clubs and throwing money at them. When that stops, they'll change the system or it'll change itself. *buys club, builds new stadium, offers players million-pound contracts, blames Premier League for debts*
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 13:48
|
|
|
It's the same thing as when I called out Gold & Sullivan for being cheap hypocritical bastards. They didn't have to buy that club with the debts attached or offer Ruud van Nistelrooy £3m for turning up for ten games. It's almost as if they're feeding the problem they complain about. Portsmouth or Liverpool fans complaining about owners loving them over is different. Fans expecting a club to be run properly is fine (note that none of this applies to Newcastle fans, who are all scum). Putting rules in place to enable that is fine. What would be ridiculous is if the Glazers came out and started complaining about the debt and how players demanding to be paid a market rate was something that had to be addressed right away, before more clubs like United went out of business. If Swindon Town borrow £100m in order to get into the Premier League, or someone comes in and shoves £50m into the club so he can be in the newspaper and on the telly and talk about how much he loves the club and how loving wonderful he is, and how they were born over the "frog & toad" and how it would just be loving terrible to live in a world where West Ham United weren't in the Premier League, and gee, they pissed all the money away, and now they're freefalling, and guess whose fault it is? Yup, it's the big mean rich clubs who forced them to do this. There are plenty of clubs who are doing just fine in all divisions without spunking massive amounts of money up the wall. Yes, it's harder to do it that way, but que sera loving sera. But no, here comes some Johnny Big Bollocks with some money he made selling chocolate digestives out of the back of a van, and he thinks he's the new Richard loving Branson and he's going to be the chairman that takes Port Vale into Europe. And so on until the end of recorded history.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 14:12
|
|
|
Destroy the state, nationalise football. Send Leeds to the gulags. Or the SPL, as it's otherwise known.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 14:46
|
|
|
Rawz posted:But seriously, liquidation? I don't know what I would do as an 11-year Pompey supporter Well, for somebody from Portsmouth, your best bet is probably to point at planes and then have a nap in the middle of Argos.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2010 17:30
|
|
|
Mickolution posted:That's the prize money, the TV money is the same for everyone isn't it? Isn't that the point of the Real/Barca thing? IIRC half of the money coming in goes toward prizes, and the other half is split equally.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2010 14:52
|
|
|
The likelihood is that those numbers aren't accurate, and even if they were there are so many bonuses and extras that mean that base numbers are fairly meaningless. On the other hand, if Deco actually makes more than Didier Drogba, then that's literally the funniest thing I've seen since Paul Scholes whiffed at a shot and then deflected it in with his standing leg.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2010 01:14
|
|
|
Jollzwhin posted:Yes cunts to accept a high salary offered to them... To be honest, I'd probably offer a mutual termination at this point and leave on a free. They were perfectly fine to accept it at the time, but since it's clear County were basically defrauded, sitting around draining them dry is pretty lovely, particularly when your dad's a millionaire and you could get a decent salary at any number of clubs. It's not the same as Winston Bogarde, it was hardly a matter of the club surviving or not, and he was entitled to claim the money the board offered him, whether they got a new manager or not.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2010 18:13
|
|
|
He's not a part-time brickie from the Unibond League who has lucked into a million-pound contract. It's not a binary between him being good enough to start as an EPL keeper, and being a fat poo poo clogger from Barnsley. He certainly looked passable for City. Not the starter that people were talking about him being, but good enough to play at that level and not embarrass himself. There's no reason he can't go back to Denmark and make £3,000-£4,000 a week, at least.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2010 18:43
|
|
|
Again, the Fit And Proper Persons test isn't a job interview. You don't get a questionnaire as to whether or not you like kittens and whether or not you like to expose yourself in public. You don't have to prove that you have money or that you're not mentally ill. It's a test of very specific things, as to whether or not you have a history of financial irregularities. LivYanks and ManYanks have a lot of money between them. They aren't bankrupts or convicted fraudsters. Yet. The only team that's really been let down in this is Notts County, where again it appears to be a series of shell companies representing a convicted fraudster, and with said companies offering worthless shareholdings in order to attract interest from people like Eriksson. The problem was that the FA had to chase an endless paper trail. It seemed to come out at the time because of a similar situation where they tried to buy Sauber F1, and they actually checked the poo poo before selling. Now, I've watched enough episodes of Hustle to know how to play the long con, and also to draw Jaime Murray from memory. I even remember the ones where the victims weren't horrible caricatures of Russ. But I can't actually figure out what they were aiming to accomplish. There's only so long you can go without paying people money. If they buy it for £1, and then sell it on, perhaps, but that seems a rather flimsy premise.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2010 13:15
|
|
|
I was always under the impression that it had something to do with when the EU said that they were looking at whether or not the entire contractual system breached employment law. Which would have rendered transfers essentially non-existent, and players could just give notice and switch clubs. How exactly this system combats that, I don't have an earthly idea, but I remember being informed that it does.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2010 16:31
|
|
|
Daniel posted:What do you do if the club you support simply stops existing. Obviously you don't just begin supporting your local rival. You have to support Coventry City.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2010 16:35
|
|
|
Does it list how much they're paying on the stadium, though?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2010 16:12
|
|
|
Lyric Proof Vest posted:yeah, read it. We are in a considerably better position then you, sorry to disappoint That's not hard. Or relevant. But see, that's why I don't read things. Everything comes back to the same Arsenal propaganda that they're just a couple of years from dominating all of football, and not a team that's slightly better than Aston Villa with it's two best players agitating and possibly looking for a transfer out. It doesn't seem to challenge what was said in here, that Arsenal needed to sell players and property in order to make a significant profit, despite continually raping their own fans for money.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2010 16:46
|
|
|
Mickolution posted:Who's the second? Arshavin. Well, in the sense that Arshavin hasn't been linked with a move away in the same way as Fabregas, but I can't remember him actually coming out and saying anything positive about Arsenal at all. When the two things he's said this year are "if I knew I'd be paying this much tax, I'd have stayed in Russia", and, "we don't have the class to be better than third, and we won't do so as long as I'm being played up front", it doesn't sound to me like he's going to sign a new deal out of any kind of love for the club.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2010 17:00
|
|
|
Jose posted:No they just wank on webcam for strangers. Thats loads better. Haters gonna hate. I'd imagine that being in Europe, particularly the Champions League, makes a huge difference as to how much money you can bring in from sponsorship. Plus having star players who are going to be put on billboards and in newspapers. If you're a company, £10m a year is a massive amount of your advertising budget. The value for money in terms of being with a title-winning club is exponentially higher than being with a mid-table one. Villa could totally be sponsored by COWS again, though. That'd be nice.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2010 21:26
|
|
|
Mickolution posted:Yeah, Leeds went into administration the day after being mathematically relegated from the championship a couple of years ago. The League then gave them the points deduction (14 I think?) the following season causing lots of trouble and resulting in Leeds programs not having a page 14 and printing the table without the reduction. In a way, they have a point, as I'm not sure there was anything official in place to stop them circumventing the rules like that, though maybe there was. Leeds got a 15-point deduction, but that was for basically still being in tax arrears and not actually meeting the criteria to start the season. By rights, they could have been told to take a hike, but a week and a half before the beginning of the season, the league didn't want to do that.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2010 13:17
|
|
|
MattWPBS posted:And yeah, I have the utmost sympathy for you Badgerman. Nobody should have to have something like this happen to their club. I don't know. It'd be quite funny if it happened to Leeds. Well, again.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2010 07:48
|
|
|
Luigi Thirty posted:So theoretically if Pompey are still in administration but operating and can't enter the Football League next year, where do they go? The Conference? Will they make an exception for a club being relegated from the EPL rather than promoted from the Conference? If we take Leeds as a precedent, they'll be admitted with a points penalty (and probably go down again). If they bounced out completely, they'd probably bounce all the way down to Tier 7. After which, I'd be very surprised if there was still a football club in place. I could see the Conference loving with their own rules to let them in, though, the conspiracy theory around Mansfield is that the Conference deliberately tries to keep us there as we're one of the biggest clubs (this is a complete lie, the real reason we don't get promoted is to do with us being poo poo).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2010 07:58
|
|
|
Yeah, if Liverpool miss out this season, it shouldn't change that much. They'll be pretty much guaranteed Europa League football at least, if United win tomorrow. They won't get anything like the same TV money, but they'll have multiple home games and an opportunity to protect their seeding coefficient. They'll increase their debt a bit and come back next year. Liverpool have far bigger revenue streams than Leeds did, so it's not as vital for them to be in the CL. Realistically, in the long term, they'd have to sell players, though. If purely to reduce the wage bill.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2010 18:55
|
|
|
The scarves (the official ones, at least) are sold by MUST at or close to cost price. Any profit they do make on MUST ventures goes back into MUST, regardless.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2010 00:55
|
|
|
TyChan posted:http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/mar/03/red-knights-manchester-united-david-gill This is massively unsurprising. In all honesty, I think the Red Knights thing was for no other purpose than to promote MUST and to keep the issue of the ownership in the news. And if it was, then it appears to have worked, if MUST are being genuine about getting 20,000 new members off the back of it. I also don't think it's a coincidence it came to prominence directly after MUST rolled out the Green & Gold campaign. In order for the Glazers to leave now, one of two things needs to happen. Either the fans would have to boycott the club en masse, causing a massive Portsmouth-esque implosion; or you'd have to start an active campaign of terrorist violence against the Glazers, their holdings and their loved ones. But people are apparently not keen on that idea. Most people are boring and miserable bastards when you cut to the chase. There is something of an elephant in the room here, though, in that the assumption has been pretty much a priori, all the way through, that the Glazers could not service the debt and keep United in a successful position. It was only a matter of time before the debts would be defaulted on, players would have to be sold, Old Trafford would be licensed off, and Colleen Rooney would have to turn tricks in the car park. It would be at that point that any takeover bid would come in, with the Glazers taking a nominal payoff to be free of the debt and from hearing the fail trumpet that you get if you lose at any one of a number of PC versions of Monopoly. You'd probably still have £600m+ worth of debt involved, of course, but that's a reasonable price to pay for a club like United. The MUST plan was always based around the idea of United going into administration and then being available to buy for around £100m, which I don't think is likely or practical at all. As it is, they have £3m, which is a huge amount for a supporters' trust, and would save a number of clubs, but is essentially nothing in this instance. It would mainly have to have relied on these 'Red Knights' types, and from the noises that came out of there, possibly that was always the intention. Whether or not the Red Knights would be happy to see us build Barcelona here on England's green and pleasant land, I don't know who knows. I doubt it, though. But I have a sneaking suspicion now, that by hook or crook, the Glazers may pull it off. If they can actually keep United on an even keel whilst paying down the debt, it's going to be extremely difficult to dislodge them without resorting to aforementioned tactics cribbed from Steven Segal movies.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2010 02:20
|
|
|
Adnar posted:apart from loss of Beer sales, how much would a boycott actually hurt the bottom line? Most of these tickets have been long sold as season tickets. Well, obviously, it'd have to involve non-renewal of season tickets. It's not the US, so people aren't signed up to 10-year tickets or anything like that. If you assume the average price for a ticket is £25, though, factoring in season tickets and concessions, that means you've got a matchday gate of £2m. You've then got the extras on top of that, plus all your corporate functions. So it could well be over £3m. But if you say the stadium is half-full, that's a loss of around a million pounds a game. Thirty or so home games, £30m loss a year. So it wouldn't be crippling in and of itself. But if you couple it with a cutback in merchandising then it could be a fair bit more than that. But 5,000 people staying away has little chance of being effective. In fact, from a purely business perspective, it would make more sense for the Glazers to increase prices until there were empty seats visible. 50,000 paying £60 makes more money than 75,000 paying £35.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2010 03:13
|
|
|
I still think using sovereign fund wealth to buy a foreign football club is worse, to be honest. Maybe we could build a university, or a cutting edge scientific programme that creates new technology and brings investment to Abu Dhabi. Or.... maybe we could spend the wealth of our people on buying Craig Bellamy and Roque Santa Cruz for £50m between them. It's horrendously gaudy and self serving. Yes, the Sultan of Brunei's brother spent the best part of a billion dollars on erotic jewellery, so buying Manchester City is only slightly the worst use of sovereign wealth, but still. Is spending £500m on a football club the best way to promote Abu Dhabi, in all honesty?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2010 01:52
|
|
|
Dudley posted:Indeed, and to be fair Chelsea's ticket prices are the same as they were 5 years ago. That's certainly not true at the clubs with profit-taking Americans. Ahahahaha. "Yes, our ticket prices are almost double what United's and Liverpool's are, but theirs are much worse, because they're going up"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2010 12:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:58 |
|
|
Chelsea were gouging fans before gouging fans was invented. When I was a kid, a United season ticket cost £300. A season ticket to Chelsea cost £600. And they were poo poo then. Like, more poo poo than now.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2010 12:36
|
|