CEO QUESTIONS & ANSWERS...NIGHT

No Helen but his contract is , the one he was happy to sign in the first place .

 

Precisely why we should hang on to such as Kane , we paid top dollar for him & todays market will not recover any where near our outlay therefore we need to get a return off him off the pitch , the only real way we are going to recover our inevitable losses is to get back a.s,a,p to the championship.

 

I think it will come down to who we get offers for. If Kane gets offers we have to listen to them until our peril is lessened.

 

But if we need to bring money in, we’ll struggle to turn money down. Given he’s probably on a reasonably high salary, in relation to our wage structure, if an offer comes in that matches what we paid for him then hands will be snatched off.

 

In reality he has no power to stop anything the owners wish to do as Barnsley Football is a 100% owned subsidiary of BFC investments.

The statement he has 99.9% autonomy is, along with many of his previous statements, poorly phrased.

 

If we cannot recover enough money off our championship class players then we are in big trouble , but in my opinion you cannot sell everyone & anyone other wise clubs will just have our pants down , we have to hang on to our mid range players, get rid of the deadwood & get the true market value for our top players , we have current internationals on our books & we should deal accordingly , if we hang on to our mid range talent & some promising youth , bring in a few proven players at this level then we have the green shoots to start to progress again.

 

I suspect he was talking about things we would see throughout the season, such as which players are brought in, sold, or coaching appointments. But yes, ambiguous at best.

 

I think we can add his claim to have 99.9% autonomy to the same box as as his desire to sell 11000 season tickets........it's an aspirational target, rather than a realistic one.

 

We are in trouble. Income will plummet, and there’s no money in the bank. Or at least, not as much money in the bank as we already owe out.

So, we have to sell to bring money in and reduce the wage bill. The players you mentioned will probably have release clauses, so probably looking at somewhere between 1 and 2 million if we’re lucky. Might even be less. But they won’t shave too much off the wage bill either, because it’s spread amongst so many players. Our top earner is probably on a shade over 500k / year. And I suspect the most saleable players won’t be on that.

We might get lucky and be able to sell one player for 3m. But in the meantime, turning down any seven figure bids for anybody would be either ballsy or reckless depending on how you look at it.

Id like to see Kane in a Barnsley shirt next season as well btw.

 

Harry? That’s a bit ambitious.

 

In keeping with this thread, I’m going to call it an aspirational target.

 

I assumed he meant this is the budget and the owners would leave him to run the club as he sees fit.

 

Crikey, quite a thread. I was at the meeting and overall I wasn't that impressed. It was nice to get a couple of free drinks, so thanks for that, but most of the meeting was shambolic. At first Khaled thought it would be cool to wander around the room with his mic, rather than stand at the front. He soon realised this meant people had to keep twisting around to see and hear him. Those asking questions were given a mic, but then Khaled allowed them to make follow up comments without the mic, so these became like private conversations as you couldn't hear what was being said. Things only improved when YT took control of handing the mic round. It needed a more firm structure imo and too many contributors were allowed to carry on speaking for too long. Khaled was weak in taking control of the meeting.

The aim of 11000 ST sales is pie in the sky and not a big issue for me tbh. The best speaker all night was a guy sat on the front left. He spoke about the club needing a long term strategy and then having short term strategies that fed into the longer term goal. He said the club had missed a trick. After a dreadful season, both on and off the pitch, relations between the club and the fans have hit a real low point. Something major needed to be done to show the fan base that the club really cared. The fans are the club's key asset and as such a gesture to keep them on board in the short term, which may be financially difficult, would pay dividends in the long term. He made suggestions such as rewarding those ST holders during last season, when the stadium was shut, being offered a big discount for next season as a gesture of thanks. Or giving all current ST holders a significant discount for next season. The offer as it stands only seems to have worsened the relationship with some fans. He made other points too, all of which were sensible and well expressed.

Overall on the night I wasn't that impressed by Khaled, even though he's clearly working in very challenging circumstances. His answers about the West Stand were pretty vague and he refused to even comment when asked if there were any other FL clubs who supported Barnsley in their request that Reading be fully punished for their breaches of FFP. He didn't need to name specific clubs but could have given some idea if other clubs felt the same way.

He's trying his best and clearly working very hard, but didn't seem to understand why fans might have a problem with multi club ownership, or why the owners defaulting on their payments to the Crynes and ending up in court affects the level of trust fans might have in the current ownership of the club. Their lack of transparency about the court case, the 750k etc are major issues and fans rightly will think twice about giving them ST money if they feel they can't be trusted.

 

Why would he have a problem with Multi club ownership. He was part of the parent company before joining Barnsley.

Also we've seen good things come from it. Charlie Winfield was spoken about by Brian Howard in November. Also, Wolfe spoken about Esbjerg on Ifollow.

People speak about it negatively, I see it as a plus.

 

The clubs owned by these owners don't seem to be having any great success right now and when their is little or no investment in your own club, some will find it galling to see the owners investing money elsewhere. I'm sure there are positives though...

 

Lommel SK are 6 out of 8 in the league below Oostende.
Troyes FC are 15 out of 20.

For example. Very few Multi club owned teams do well every year.

 

As I say it was a conversation so no way anyone could know. I live in hope though virtually zero expectation that they may even have taken my point on board and extended it to four payments over three months (or even be thinking about extending the early bird deadline)!

The unfortunate thing is that nobody knows for definite the final details of the Klarna offering and can't buy via it as it's still not an option for payment on the ST renewal checkout page! (Same with the interest bearing ten month option).

I guess the club will say it's some technicality or Ticketmaster issue but why do they advertise things before they are actually able to deliver on them?!

The reality is that if the Klarna isn't up tomorrow it's unlikely to be up until Tuesday meaning it will only have been available for 10 of the 23 days early bird window.

And what I find mildly offensive is that whilst KEA is sat there smiling away boasting about giving refunds to early renewers the fact is that someone wanting to renew on day 1 via Klarna has not been able to physically do so and so through no fault of their own whatsoever they would not be included in the refund draws and not have had an equal and fair opportunity to win one of the refunds.

 

You're spot on.

Whoever is CEO has little sway if the owner/directors push in a certain direction. The only choice someone has if they are put in such a position is do they swallow it and remain, or contest it and be sacked, or show morality and decency and resign.

Let's hope we never get to a position where we find out the answer.

 

Agree.
The month deadline should be extended to at least notifications of renewal. Via letter or email. That doesn't appear to have been the case. As many have not recieved notifications as yet. Most relying on word of mouth or social media. I know many that don't visit the club website. Imagine only finding out A few days before deadline.