Why would..?.

Why would a consortium of billionaires and multi millionaires all successful business men and women buy our football club and then let it turnover a relatively small amount and make little to no profit, it just doesn't make any sense. They give up their time to attend games and I presume a billionaires time is valuable and takes up a lot of time travelling plus cost for little return either financial or enjoyment watching us lose the majority of the games.

I'm still expecting a decent financial push from them whether it brings success or not.

Any answers to this would help ease my brain.

 

It's early days, have patience.
Rome weren't built in a day..

 

I don't think they would.

But I think they believe they can make us a successful football club by an alternative method to pouring loads of money in. That's why we were the attraction. We'd identified young, cheap players with potential and formed a successful side without the need for huge financial backing. Alter that approach just slightly - get the players on longer contracts and only sell when you receive offers you simply can't refuse - and there's the potential to take us to the Premier League.

The problem with that is there isn't a never ending supply of Conor Hourihane's, Alfie Mawson's and Sam Winnall's out there who can be picked up on the cheap. Most talented young players are on the books of the big clubs and even the ones that don't make it, who aren't good enough, demand huge wages and large transfer fees to prize them away. Those who have slipped the net of the bigger clubs have a lot more clubs vying for their signature than us when they start showing some ability.

I'm not sure they've bought us to necessarily make a profit anyway. Owning a football club is a prestige thing. The Premier League is a global product and where better to entertain business associates than at the football club you own when you're hosting Chelsea, Man City or Man Utd? It's very fashionable.

But I don't think they're here to lose money either and the one sure way of doing that is throwing money at us, which I'm sure they're well aware. Get a relatively large consortium together, pay a little bit each to own the club and use a model that requires little extra investment to hopefully achieve success. If it doesn't, not much lost.

 

What worries me about the plan is what Billy beane himself said.


Billy Beane understood that Moneyball, someday, would reach an endgame: when all the richest teams in the sport were also the smartest.

“Eventually, it was going to happen,” Beane, the A’s executive vice president of baseball operations, said in an interview

“Fifteen years ago, we valued young players,” Beane said. “ ‘Well,’ you’d say, ‘everyone values young players.’ But no. The reason young players were important to the A’s is they were cheap. [Now], teams are valuing the same things. When the [New York] Yankees value their young players as much as the A’s or the [Tampa Bay] Rays do — wow. That’s what we have now.

“There was a time when we wanted young players, and big-market teams wanted proven players and could afford the cost. But now, we’re all valuing the same things.”


Translation : it only works short term until others copy you. If the guy who bought the club based on us using a moneyball system doesn't think its long term viable then what does that mean for us?

 

Housing estate. Oakwell view. Rimmington terrace. David Currie avenue.

 

Except they don't own the land.

 

Not yet .

 

OK so let's say that they paid millions just to knock the stadium down and build houses on it. Why didn't they just buy the huge plot of derelict land right next to the ground for a fraction of the cost?

 

There's a big gap between it not being successful (and by that I mean it not taking us to the Premier League) and us not being viable. We're a reasonably big side in League 1 capable of winning promotion without investment. We're a small side in the Championship, but we can operate there. We can work as a club without the need for rich benefactors chucking money at us.

Anyway, I might be completely wrong, just going on what has been said so far, but that's been very little. They might choose to put a lot of money in.

 

Conspiracy Crescent. Depressive Drive. Pessimist Place?

 

There is insufficient evidence at present to know what the new owners' intentions are beyond the vague aspirational statements made at their introduction. This will not matter to those who are committed to the club come what may. To the more fickle fans who demand some return in terms of entertainment, then they will presently be unenthused, and disinclined to invest their own hard-earned cash while they are unsure of what they are getting in return. The latter category are the potential extra 3-4,000 on the gate, but are not financially important to the owners. Thus some will have a sense of disconnection with the club in the present landscape. It's all choices.

In some respects we are in a worse position than we were at this time last year. We have no head coach or senior coaching team at the moment, and hence no real selling point for young talent with the potential for development, whether from the lower leagues or (via loan) from the bigger clubs. The majority of clubs have now cottoned on to the ('moneyball' variant) strategy of which we were early adopters, which erodes our competitive edge. And there is no evidence that the owners will invest any substantial amounts in a squad capable of returning to the Championship - although that may change. So it's all wait and see.

 

You can put me down for a 2 bed semi on pessimist place

 

When I asked exactly this question in the week of the takeover, all I got was abuse. Right question, wrong time I guess.

 

Its more a case of how you asked your questions

 

You can pop round for tea to mine at Brightside Buildings. The sun's always shining and everything in the garden is rosy.

 

I think the problem with the spreadsheet approach was its initial success. We hit the jackpot with the initial group of players and thought we could sell them and easily repeat the process. We didn't realise that initial crop was a statistical outlier rather than the norm and so we happily put all our eggs in that basket. We were the footballing equivalent of the bloke who has one good night at roulette and quits his job to take it up professionally.

 

I'd be curious to see this so called spreadsheet and the influence it had/has at various times. If you look at the crop of players who turned out to play such an integral part in promotion and that first 6 months in the Championship, they could easily have been scouted. Winnall, plundering goals, Hourihane, thunderous left foot, Mawson, player of the year at Wycombe, and Scowen, hugely popular for his combative style.

I don't know if that first flush of success emboldened the approach we had more or not. But certainly the current crop seems to be struggling and the yield is going to be nowhere near as abundant.

 

People need to listen to what they said about not going crazy & how the way the club was been run was what attracted them to us.

There will be very little player turnover this summer I’d imagine, there’s a plan to develop young players & we signed 16 of them last summer, many of which were on 3 & 4 year contracts. The plan will be to improve them & now they’ve had a year together & are going to be playing against weaker opposition I’m sure the hope will be that many of them will come good

 

No, that was Sheffield.

 

I bet you were a keep hecky fan as well.