FAO Dane Murphy, Paul Conway.

excellent post which perfectly sums up the matter. I just wish that more on here would read it and digest its content fully.

 

And then, if we come up again, half our best players will get flogged for championship peanuts like this summer and here we go again.
It’s all a bit of a pointless exercise and one I’ll not buy into sadly and I’ll wager several thousand folk are like me on this, much as I used to love watching us at the well.
Football is an entertainment business and not purely an exercise in financial book balancing and profiteering at the expense of success on the pitch.
No point having a fan base when they( the owners) clearly don’t give a monkeys about anyone but themselves.
There is an emotional connection following a football team and when that emotion just seems to be just despair and sadness then the connection starts to erode, certainly in my case. These owners just don’t seem to be connected, only in profiteering. Good luck to them but I won’t line their pockets till there’s a significant paradigm shift from this nonsense plan their pedalling.

 

The last season that we played in the Championship was 2017/18. If you want to read a comparison of our results for that year you have only to look at my last Minority Report. I accept that it is very long, but it should put you in a much better position to judge these things. That season, without player sales, the club would have lost over £1m. I think that is normal for us in the Championship now, but many clubs in the Championship lost far more than that. Indeed 3 clubs had to cheat the FFP rules (which allow clubs to lose £39m over 3 years) in order to avoid sanction. We are trying to compete against the odds, but even those odds are heavily stacked against us. The level playing field is not level.

The losses that I quote are not just some meaningless number. In most cases, the loss means that the company has to be re-financed. The company has to borrow money or it does not have the money to do things like pay the players. That money would come from a bank in the past, but frankly the banks had their fingers burned in the past, and they are unwilling to risk large sums again. In practice, that money has to come from the owners. They have to dip into their own pockets. Our owners stated on day 1 that they would not do this. They insisted that it was a sign of how badly run the majority of teams in our league are. In that case there are 2 alternatives. Either they sell a player or the fans must pay more. So in order to follow your plan, that is, the club does not attempt to balance the books, the fans must pay more. Our Match Day Income was £3.6m the last time we were in the Championship, so presumably, doubling the price of entry would earn the club an extra £3.6m. Would you be willing to pay double for your season ticket if it meant that we did not have to sell a player every season to balance the books?

Frankly, with the sums being spent by other clubs and other owners, £3.6m is but a drop in the ocean. It would probably not be enough to make much difference in the final analysis. We would still be one of the lowest spenders in the league, and as we know, the level of spending is the best indicator of final outcomes. However, it would at least put we fans in the same boat as the club's last owner who subsidised the club and still found that made no difference. The owners are not lining their pockets, as I pointed out in my analysis of the accounts. Their reward from ownership comes only when they are able to sell the club at a profit, and that is unlikely to happen unless they can improve it. We are on the same side as our owners. We want the same things, albeit for different reasons. There is no them and us situation here.

 

Where’s the international promotion and subsequent investment the owners spoke of in the same breath 2 years ago? Answer me that RR?
The plan is massively flawed, that is a given, the owners are burying their heads, another given, and the team assembled is far worse than the one promoted, another given. For all the book balancing, that’s poor business acumen however you care to dress it up to mitigate the current owners running of this club.
Yes you make reasoned arguments but nowhere have I said I want them to spunk loads of money as inferred in ‘my plan’ as you put it. Let’s just clear that up shall we.

 

Expectations v what is possible. Life is short!

 

And what do you do if those investment opportunities really are not there?

If you have a business or a product, you want to associate that business or product with a proven winner. At the minute, we are not a proven winner, so no-one wants their product linked to us. The example you quote is yet another example of something that may come later, once we have a better profile. Your opening remark suggesting that the plan is massively flawed suggests to me that you have an alternative. I would tell you mine but I do not have one, so of course I would be interested in your alternative.

 

You’ve just gone to detailed length to explain a simple chicken and egg scenario.

If there’s no interest internationally from all the owners initial gesticulations then they should clearly state that to the fans rather than rolling a load of flannel out initially without any substance backing that up whatsoever then retreating to silence when we’re getting humped in the championship most weeks since our return with seemingly no hope of improvement.

An ounce of championship savvy in recruiting players would surely have not resulted in this horrific start. There isn’t just one way to skin a cat is what I’m alluding to. It’s been stated a thousand times already on here and it’s all getting a bit tiresome now.
Still no replacement for our hold up man, Moore, shocking bit of business that all-round.

These owners have unfathomably set us up to fail this season by the players they sold for championship pittance to rival clubs and the inexperienced youth they’ve sanctioned to come in to replace those sold off. Bottom line being, if success on the pitch was the aim, they had no need to dissemble a promotion winning side, the players were under contract and regardless of wanting elsewhere they could have been held to contract. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have underperformed as then they wouldn’t get the transfer they desired anyway

I reiterate, football is an entertainment business, what’s happening at oakwell this season is about as far from that as I’d care to imagine.

 

Hmm. You have used the word patience quite a few times in your reply to me, yet I never mentioned the word once.

I'm older generation too I guess (41 years this season) so I don't class myself as rash or hasty, 41 years has given me a thick skin. But we simply got this summer wrong. Just that. And the proof is there for all to see.

 

Maybe the owners thought they had this 'soccer' lark sewn up when we got promoted last season?

Maybe last season's promotion gave them false hope that they've got the ball rolling and everything will fall into place?

Moore out since the Gillingham game, Woodrow missed the start of the season Potts allowed to leave, Dougal out for long spells, and we still got out of league one. They maybe thought the footballing gods were smiling on them?

I'd love to know that they think now.

 

Not one of the players that we sold during the summer was good enough to start this week end. You have merely associated two unrelated ideas together. We sold 4 players, we are in the bottom 3. We are therefore in the bottom 3 because we sold 4 of our players. There is no guarantee that the team that was promoted would have been good enough to stay up this season. My own opinion was that last year's team needed to be strengthened.

It would have been good to have acquired the right experience for our team, but that is by no means easy. It is easy to acquire experience, but frankly, most of that experience is not right. If the right experience knows what to do, but cannot do it because its legs have gone, it is worse than useless, and that is what is wrong with all these suggestions of players we could pick up from the not retained lists. They have not been re-signed for very good reasons. It is all well and good for amateurs like us to go shouting we should sign x or y on some social media site. It is an entirely different proposition to sign a player who will cost £ thousands in wages, and who will never play. It is easy on here, because no-one knows any more than you do. It is far more difficult in real life.

You are right. The club should have signed a replacement for Moore, and by all accounts, there were detailed plan to do so. In the end, we apparently missed out on our targets. Would you have had the club sign someone who would not have been right, and who would not have improved us, or should we wait and sign a long term replacement when we are sure?

You have avoided the questions that really matter. You have to be able to say where the cash was coming from in order to sign these players. If we lose £1m per annum in the Championship, the losses would have been much higher last year. The results will be available at the beginning of March and we will know then. However it is all speculation until then.

You are right. Football is entertainment. But that is not what you are saying, is it. I am sure that the games involving Barnsley have been entertaining because of the number of goals they have contained. The problem for us is that they have mostly been going into our goal. Let us not get confused here. You do not want to see entertainment, you want to see your team win and it is not doing so.

I repeat, this is not an us and them thing. The fans and the owners want the same thing. It is just that the owners have a long term plan and the fans do not.

 

It was not really just a reply to you. It was a statement of what is necessary at this time, because the alternative is panic.

 

But we don't sell one player to balance the books, we sell half the team. How about our billionaires after two years with us finally increase our advertising revenue? It's not fair on fans to be penalised by watching a side weakened because our board are incapable of increasing revenue streams to cover what would be made from a sale.

 

As I have said regularly, they can easily improve the revenue streams by £3.6m. They can double season ticket prices. Surely the loyal fans would pay more, wouldn't they.

 

You’d make a good politician I’ve avoided nothing simply you have a far different POV than myself. This however does not make your views correct nor mine. You don’t know the players sold would be good enough or not and neither do I but we had a magical spirit called momentum and players knew one another, now it’s a bunch of strangers attempting to know each other when there isn’t time or capacity to do it, hence the hidings and losses we’re getting. We are now a million miles from that down to the owners trying to make a quick buck as the transfer fees were bang average and that cannot be disputed.
At no point have I ever mentioned extra cash so stop making things up please as you are losing your long winded well-read credibility in every reply as you are now making things up that I never said, lol.

We should’ve kept Moore, end of conversation as he needn’t have been sold.

You know exactly what I’m trying to say but instead you attempt to twist my words and POV to what end I do not know but I’m finding it hilarious how you back the owners to the hilt when everything that’s happening goes against your staunch defence of them. Are you Conway in disguise? we’ll lose 6 million when we’re relegated because of the abortion brought about in the summers dealings, how’d you like those apples?
When sheff united came up they decided to hang onto most of their promotion winning side and guess what? They are now a premier league team having not put it all on red and gambled the clubs future away but instead spent wisely and kept a winning team together with additions.

I hope you have inside knowledge by the way and are not taking everything the owners say as gospel cos I fear you will be seriously disappointed old cocker if it’s the latter. Bet they said the same things at Nice when they took over there, we’re here for the long term etc etc however they pulled out of there pretty sharpish in the end. Delusional

 

I’d say the exact opposite is true the fans have long term affiliation and plans for BFC. The owners have nothing of the sort just see it as another business to turn a profit with on field performances and results irrelevant as they are not the point. Buying cheap and selling is the point. The very definition of short termism.

 

I’ would say this is as near to the truth as it is possible to get.

 

it's pointless keeping people who go not want to work for you. simple.
they have not set us up to fail. if it wasn't for them we wouldn't have a club.