Did Maurice Watkins say...

Yer trying the wingeing / offended tack.
It doesn't work on me cocker.
It's a southern phenomenon that's crept into the north recently- and I'm of an age where it just doesn't work.
Argue and debate the point - play the ball - NOT the player !!!

Personally- I've got a lot of time for Patrick Cryne - he did a great job saving the club and we will forever be in his debt for that.
But he's held the club for far longer than he wanted to and more importantly for far longer than what is good for the club.
And he knows it.
It's extremely frustrating and annoying that he hasn't found someone yet to take control of the club.
So the sooner he foooks off and sells the club the better it will be for all concerned.

 

I'm not wingeing. I genuinely feel that your choice of words were/are "unfortunate"Nudger. You are entitled to your opinion the same way as I have every right ( without falling out over it) to disagree with you.
It's my opinion and I hold to it the same way as I take onboard your opinion. Surely the skill comes into attempting to change minds using debate and not by name calling, threats of violence or insults as some in our society seem to employ.
It's not a southern phenomenon by the way.
I'm from a mining community in South Yorkshire and very proud of it. Like any true Yorkshire man I say what I mean and
mean what I say, a virtue I dare say you too would agree with.
I believe Patrick Cryne when he said he's tried to find a buyer but unfortunately they appear not to have met the best interest
criteria he has set for the Club.
I've often thought if Patrick Cryne and/or his family looked at this site (or the other one I look at ) and took the view "you know if that's how some of them feel I can't be bothered any more, I'm pulling out" it's us the fans who would be well and truly
up the proverbial creek without a paddle.!!
We are who we are. We are Barnsley Football Club. We have apart from the one season in the Premiership never had real money in the 30 years I've supported them. Patrick will sell when the time and circumstances suit him not " he needs to f*ck off and sells the Club the better it will be for all concerned" please. That's not a sentiment I would put my name to.

 

What a wonderful human being.

 

Against my better judgement I tend to agree with Nudger. I wish Patrick a speedy and total recovery, but I also hope he sells us to someone with the brass/ambition to allow us to compete in this league.

 

Listen knobhead, if you want a slanging match, I suggest you return to the playground because you have picked on the wrong bloke here. Please do not refer me to as a fooker or think that I am trying to gain the higher ground & if you find a few truths sickening, well go & throw your personel insults around on another fans forum. I found what you originally said & the way you said it extremely distasteful, plus you referring to brain cells, I suggest you have a good look in the mirror.

 

I have no problem with that. It's just that like many others on this site I don't agree with that opinion CT.
I would love to live in a big detached house and drive a top of the range motor but I don't have the brass to support that lifestyle so I have to deal with the reality of my situation. Some 27 years ago I was invited by a member of the Barnsley FC board to apply for the vacancy as Commercial Manager because through my job I had access at board level to a lot of blue chip companies in the UK.

As part of the process I put together a SWOT analysis re- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats why any major company should want to inject money into a relatively small under supported Football Club . It would be interesting to have a go at putting together a SWOT analysis now to see if the reasons a sponsor/ prospective new owner would want to buy Barnsley FC and see how closely they match up to my analysis all those years ago. I also prepared a diagnostic and mission statement ( that part became true in 1997.) Our average home gates were around
7,600 so from that time to today we've attracted more fans but hardly enough to keep pace with development, wages , policing , matchday security, travelling, hotel, academy , food and subsistence , Coach costs , insurance , and other sundry costs that as a Club we face.

I didn't apply for the Job in the end because naively with a mortgage and three kids to support and a well paid job I wanted to do it part time and the Director concerned said they were looking for someone full time. Be interested to hear everyone's/someone's views on why a major sponsor would want to pump money in or why a consortium or new owner would want to buy the Club. ? Unlike when I prepared mine remember BMBC now own 50% of the ground and Patrick has the right to recover his investment from any funds that have been generated from transfer fees and pick up the tab for any debt if we have any when the 2016/17 Accounts are available. ( usually end of May when they're signed off.)
In short " Why is Barnsley FC an attractive proposition for anyone wanting to buy it". ( with the hard facts that we have without seeing the books of course)

 

Its possibly not worth what Patrick would need to sell it for to get back out of it what he would want without the assets 100% - however with the current cuts to local council budgets, BMBC would maybe come to the party in regards to selling their share of the assets as part of a deal as it would bring them in some income.

 

I still cant believe Ben's thank you letter to everybody at Leeds, we didnt get anything at all from him did we!

 

Why would PC take him back after virtually saying he was only an administrator and not involved with decisions at the club?

 

That would leave the club wide open to a "speculator". Remember Ken Richardson at Doncaster Rovers in 1999.?
He was a board member and wanted to get his mitts on the ground and the land attached to the back that was an airfield.
He paid an ex-SAS guy to burn the Main Stand down so that the club would have to move and he could buy the land and sell it for development. I believe Patrick would sell his share to the right person/people but I can't see BMBC relinquishing their ownership to be honest. They've got rid of the housing stock ( Berneslai Homes), the Building and Architectural services are in private hands ( Norfolk Property Services) which leaves Education ( excluding self funding Academies), Street cleaning, Parks/ Cemeteries and Street Lighting and /Highways so there's hardly owt left.
In my opinion they'll sell buildings, land assets before they sell their part of Oakwell. To stop future unscrupulous speculators was one of the reasons they invested in the first place.

 

I believe BMBC got involved to help the buy out not because they wanted to own 50% of the assets.

 

I wonder why if they were only helping they ended up owning 50%.?
Must have been a decision ratified by a majority of the elected representatives.

 

It isn't a proposition for anyone other than a Barnsley fan with millions of pounds to speculate on us getting promoted. I despair when I see the word 'invest' - like money spent on a football club provides a profitable return. Unless you get into the Champions League and the ego massaging that goes along with that. Or you take the Blackpool ownership model ?

Without the land assets, it just isn't an attractive target.

 

That gets the ball rolling EN. Put those two down as Weaknesses.
There are more we can think of I'm sure. Are there any the Strengths, Opportunities and Threats that we can all come up with.?

I'll give you the Mission statement I put in the presentation I prepared in 1993.

"It is the vision of everyone connected with the Club to attempt to become an established member of the Premier Division.
To enable us to achieve that aim ways must be found to enhance the levels of quality sponsorship and the overall means of income generation. We will all strive to improve the Clubs image and heighten our profile in the hope we can get the full commitment of everyone concerned with the well being and ambitions of our Club.
By increasing and hopefully sustaining our consistency of performance at all levels and by harnessing our collective skills and enthusiasm we will build on our strengths and gains in the hope that our vision ultimately becomes reality."

 

I suppose it operates off a relatively low cost base when compared to other Championship clubs, and the academy infrastructure is a positive. So other than playing staff, initial costs to a new purchaser are quite low ?

 

I see the greatest weakness as the degree of risk we would carry by paying out wages and other costs at a level that we couldn't sustain if the gamble didn't pay off with promotion. The Championship is awash with clubs paying massive wages to players who perform for mediocre teams. Last time I looked, only 3 clubs taste success each year. Others who have spent massively, including those with "investment" have performed poorly. Extremely Northern has it right for me. Nobody invests in football, certainly not at our level, to get a return. Patrick Cryne has injected cash and as far as I'm aware, has only ever stated publicly that if/when he felt it was right to sell the club then all he wanted was his money back. That's not investment, just returning his deposit.

There is an opportunity for someone to inject cash if they wanted to, especially given our current relatively healthy financial state, but do we want to carry the risks of a rich owner who could walk away, leave us with devastating debt?

I struggle to see any benefit of spending way beyond our means. What happened in 2002 remains my benchmark.

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I've put risk of paying high wages in our Weakness column.
Rhetorical question MET would we feel confident that if Patrick took what he is owed back we would still be in the black.?
I remember when I first joined this forum I looked at some of the previous postings and one of the lads had published our Accounts saying they showed a loss. That meant the following season we had to carry that debt forward.
Is the reason we had the fire sale in January and the delay in appointing a new CEO behind speculation that Patrick is probably contemplating taking his money out and selling up.? Be very interesting to see what happens in the future.

 

Great question. Element of catch 22 I think, and I'm saying that with little knowledge of detail of wages or our infrastructure costs. More chance of being in the black/break-even in the Championship with the additional TV income etc, but not paying "Championship" wages arguably increases chances of relegation and loss of revenue. But relegation would potentially see wages trimmed to a manageable level too. Producing a million pound player every year unlikely.

Interesting times as you say, and in typical fence sitting fashion, whilst the dreamer in me would love us to have a go at the top six, the realist in me since 2002 can't criticise the plan the club have adopted.

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You echoed my thoughts exactly MET. We cannot go back to those very dark days when we didn't know from one day to another whether we would have a Club to support. We have to live within our means. As I've said in a previous posting some of the debts that some of the Clubs in our league are carrying are absolutely eye watering.

It only needs something to go wrong with the TV income or FA subsidies and quite a number of those clubs would go to the
wall. I personally think our current policy is working OK re- buy young promising talent from the lower leagues nurture and hopefully sell on later for a good fee. The days of the 30 plus journeymen are hopefully at an end. Apart from Jason Scotland are there many others that have really made an impact? I'm struggling to think of many.

I too would like another crack at the " big time". If we did come down the next season I wouldn't be too bothered because we'd have a right "wedge" to cement ourselves in the Championship. Middlesbrough are probably a fair example. They spent circa £50 million and yet were relegated. They'll recoup some of that if they sell the Chairmans nephew Ben Gibson of course.
He's rated at around £25 million I think.

At the moment I can't honestly think of a reason why a Consortium or prospective new owner would want to buy a football club
with a relatively modest customer base with a limited scope for growth given the fact also that I would only own 50% of said asset. Since I did the analysis for the CM role in around 1992/93 we've added around 4,000 extra fans. Apart from the Premiership season that's way short of the numbers required to sustain top flight football.

Of course I remain eternally optimistic that in the long run I'm proved wrong and someone with a similar mindset to Patrick
takes us on and takes us to the next step. The only other viable model and one Patrick has hinted at is a Supporters buy out.!!

 

I think this is the crux, we're not an attractive proposition to "invest" in. We're in a very dense population of football clubs, and our neighbourhood fringes west Yorkshire and is close to Manchester which can pull away our resident future potential fanbase.

Our scope to either a) increase ticket and merchandising prices markedly or b) generate sizeable increases in attendances from our local area is moderate to minimal. Sponsorship could be an area to generate better deals from local to national, but some form of success and increased profile would have to take place first, and as Sky rarely cover us, we're not close to that stage yet.

And lets confirm what invest means for a new owner. It means sinking millions with no chance of seeing it again and no more than £39m over 3 years.

And even if someone did who was morally fibrous and someone we could trust to stay the course, they are competing with at least a dozen other clubs who can fall back on parachute payments and/or a wealthy benefactor.

The year of our promotion (96/7), I was working for a big 4 accountancy firm and was briefly pulled into a project for a client who wanted to invest in a football club. Barnsley were on that list because of league position but was quickly ruled out because the town was too unglamorous, the attendance potential was below their requirement (min 25k) and the demographic of people who may be willing to spend more money fell below the national average.

Since then, the land has been disposed of and the ground is no longer on the balance sheet. I'm not saying someone would want to dispose of the land, but it becomes potentially more difficult depending on trust set ups, voting rights and covenants to develop it further, or look to relocate if that was ever the best option forward.

At this time, if I had billions and was a neutral, I wouldn't invest in Barnsley. There are some decent sized clubs lower in the pyramid that could be elevated.

Having said that, look at the Championship and see how many clubs now have had new owners in the last few years. And let's be fair, the reasons people seem to buy football clubs is one of tax efficiency (tax losses) and vanity. So as much as it doesn't make much sense to buy a football club, I'm sure there will be people sniffing around in some fashion.