Player Contracts

I'm sorry, but if you and Conan claim to be experts, then you really need to know the basics of what you are talking about. For days, Conan has been spouting on about Barnsley FC being badly run. He has based his evidence mainly on the fact that Burton lost less money than we did last season. Now that I have found their accounts, I can say with certainty that he got their profit figure wrong. He probably based his figures on what something someone else said. When I challenged his assertion that Barnsley lost £950k, he could not substantiate his assertion. Instead, he was relying on something that I said, without really understanding what the figures meant. He is a collector of information which he uses to push a case that I passionately disagree with. He uses that information out of context as a blunt instrument. He damages my football club.

Frankly, I am fed up of all the ill informed nonsense that gets spouted on here by some, and I decided in a split second to illustrate that by showing up Conan for what he is. You just joined in and got caught up in the sting.

 

Neither has claimed to be an expert. There is only one of them in this thread. The one that said we lost £950k. The one that we all believe given his posting at length in great detail about these things hence being considered an expert.

Sigh and try and explain it all again for us. We mere mortals don't understand how a £950k loss is actually a £550k one.

 

It shows someone who has complexes about their intellect and who believes their argument to be weak and poorly substantiated to continually attack those who disagree with you. Shall you and I compare academic qualifications? Or perhaps you would like to supply us with some of the economic research papers you have written over the last few years.

I have shown you that the plan is flawed. Peterborough's financial results show you that as does their league position. Because you have boxed yourself into a corner there is no need to personalise things. The fact that Peterborough, Brentford and Crewe have tried a similar moneyball based philosophy and have had varying degrees of success and failure does not necessarily mean that our attempt will succeed or fail. To think we have no lessons from others is illogical to use your favour word Dr Spock and ridiculous. We should like all business review our practices and look what works well and what doesn't. Our recruitment strategies are good, the support of our owner is excellent, our manager is good. We have not been particularly good with contracts. There are other ways to do them I'm sure that unlike you the club is keen to improve on that area.

 

Got it from here:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/37551803

Unlike you, I don't have time to sit and trawl through other club's accounts. I have taken a BBC article at face value. If I take your figures at face value (as I have neither the time nor the inclination to check) you are claiming that they lost less than £11,000, which is a damn site better than whatever figure you are plucking from our accounts to suit your argument in this particular thread. Last week it suited you better to say we lost close to £1m. Now you're saying it's less than £600k. So which is it?

While we're showing people up, you have been tying yourself in knots all week and you've been put in your place on a few threads. What you seem to do is use 1,000 words when 200 will suffice but you think it gives your posts gravitas. When people correct you, you either ignore them or you say you can't "engage" with them, much you like you did when you were wrong about the separation of the land under Doyle, which you brought up but claimed was not relevant once you were given an unappreciated history lesson.

I would imagine any reasonable debate is nigh on impossible with you. If you do decid to "engage" do not act condescending with me purely because you have more spare time to respond.

Btw - that bit about me damaging your club blows any remaining credibility you have. I give the club twice as much money as you do. You won't forego your discount though.

 

I knew I hadn't imagined it - I just can't find the bloody thread.

 

And our strategies are limited by the size of our supporter base, because our strategies are limited by the amounts of cash that we can generate. Smaller clubs such as those you have listed have to gain an edge in order to compete. They have to perform better than those with more cash. They have to have a business plan that gives them a chance. I get extremely frustrated when people ignore the obvious. It is the, "they do not want to go up syndrome", and that syndrome currently grips the BBS, even though some of us have tried every way that we can to show the logic of the steps that the board took in January, and the difficulty of signing players on longer term contracts.

 

You have been chasing me around for the last two weeks. I cannot believe that you do not have the time to research an accurate fact, given that I told you the name that Burton was using in the Companies register. I decided not to respond to you because of your insistence on making personal insult your stock response. Proper debate challenges facts, not motives and not self interest. It is just another example of laziness. And yet you continued to chase me around with irrelevant and spurious challenges. You have a mind that focuses solely on point scoring, and seem to have no interest in getting to the truth. Hence you assume that I am wrong about when I insist that the land was separated from the club earlier than you suggest. You have no interest in the truth, only in the score. You are shallow and hollow.

 

What are you saying here? That the land was split from the club by Doyle? It wasn't.

 

Do you know the truth, or do you just think that you know the truth?

 

I do not on the whole disagree with you in a lot of what you say.

At the same time it's not like we invented the moneyball approach to combat financial disadvantage. There are some excellent articles in American economic journals if you are interested. The teams I gave you as examples certainly do so with varying degrees of success. It has allowed Brentford for example to ' punch above their weight on the pitch' but not led to financial success of it.

I agree with the strategy It is the only one that makes sense for a club our size. I find your negativity about everything quite draining. Your attempts to think logically about an illogical thing lead you down blind alleys. From Mr Cryne's point of view there is little logic to his ownership. It costs him money he will never recoup his outlay. He deliberately chooses to lose money by funding the academy ( which I am happy about but which is an extravagance for a club our size). We all should support clubs that win things and are exciting to watch the very nature of who you support is illogical

You feel that the club is perfect that they have no lessons to learn from other parties ( they clearly think differently or wouldn't have adopted moneyball techniques in the first place) I find this far too negative. I think you should lighten upland not take it all so seriously. It's just daft blokes kicking small round. I

 

I know the truth and when i can be arsed I'll dig out the papers I still have somewhere on it.

Doyle took ownership of the club from the administrator. In order to fund the then potential CVA and ongoing football costs that had to be met (due to FL rules) he borrowed money against the land and assets that the club owned at that time. It was taken out in December 2002 and satisfied in November 2003. The holding company (Oakwell Holdings) which owns Oakwell Community Assets was not formed until Dec 2004 with OCA itself being formed in September 2003, after Cryne/Ridsdale had bought the club from Doyle and paid off said debts. The separation of club and land happened here in order to prevent the actions Doyle took being possible again.

 

If the facts are as you have stated, then I am wrong and I readily admit my error. My understanding was that Doyle could not afford the land so he just bought the club, which undoubtedly required a loan, but which was secured only against the club's limited footballing assets (player contracts and transfer debts etc) and not against the land & buildings, hence Doyle's choice of lender. When Cryne took over, I understood that he purchased the club from Doyle and paid off Doyle's debt to the lender. I further understood that he and BMBC bought the land from the Administrator and separated it from the football side as you suggest. My reluctance to get involved in any deep discussion was not because I was worried that I was wrong, I could well be, it was that the whole thing happened so long ago that it is irrelevant to the issues being discussed at the moment. I simply did not want to confuse the current issues by dragging up the distant past.

 

Let's leave it there.

All the best x

 

The club has been selling players for almost the whole time that I have been a fan. I know that it is not new and have readily acknowledged that fact on here.

As Orsen Khat has pointed out recently, with the player sales, there is now enough money within the club to repay all of Mr Cryne's balance sheet debt. Sadly he would have to pay tax if the club were to refund his donations. On Conan's rather narrow view on what constitutes a well run club, our next accounts will probably show us to be the best run club in the league, and probably the country. Nevertheless, I sincerely hope that he does not take the window of opportunity that will present itself and bugger off leaving the club and its loyal fans to their own devices.

I do not know whether the academy is a profit centre within the club, but I think that it should be. The club needs to know for definite whether it is a worth while use of its limited cash resources. The obvious problem is that its outgoings would be weekly, but its income would be erratic. In recent times we had Stones, Holgate and Bree, but before that very little. I likened the academy costs to outgoing transfer fees, paid years before a player steps out for the first team. But Mr Cryne believes in it, and providing he keeps footing the losses, how can I complain.

I entirely agree with your sentiments about the game. It is not the club, nor is it the game that frustrates me. It is the comments of the fans that really get my rag.

 

Cheers, and I am glad that we have not reached the point of falling out about it.

 

A note from the shallow end.

 

Let's just leave this alone now given tonight's devastating news.

 

Agreed, in fact I am signing off.

 

Just a bit of lighthearted fun, but it's wasted on someone as po faced as you. However, I will aspire to reach your levels of pseudo-intellectualism. No need to respond.