Investment

Who was joking?

 

Spurs prioritised the cups after Christmas because of their injury list. Then when the players were fit. They were nursed for the remainder of the season and the Europa League became the main priority.

 

If all that I read in this thread is true and it takes owners to subsidise losses to the tune of several million a season. I wonder how long it can last?
Football clubs are looked upon as some kind of sacred institution because of their community value. If an epidemic of common sense were to break out and they become evaluated as a business proposition, there could be an equal epidemic of club closures and not just of small clubs.

 

The clubs that are most at risk are those that have reached their ceiling. Bournemouth and Brentford spring to mind. They'll never be big clubs no matter what they do.

 

Ah, I see. You were.

 

There are only a limited number of clubs who can have success every season. There are only so many billionaires willing to throw away their money. Look at all the clubs who enjoyed huge losses being subsidised and are now in league one having been restructured yet doing the same thing again.

It's all well and good wanting some random to throw away their fortune on a folly, it's when the music stops that you have the problem.

Look how many millions the likes of Leicester and Leeds spent, and they are yoyoing. How much money do Birmingham throw at it next year? Wrexham? On top of the 3 teams that came down and the nearly rans of 2025. Only 3 can go up. What happens when the sugar daddy realises throwing millions at it, with a dozen other clubs, doesn't guarantee success?

Look at us. We're generating £8-10m loss a season that has to be subsidised by equity injection and transfer profits. Parekh has spaffed around £20m on literally nothing to stand still. It's utter lunacy. If he were to stop doing that and not restructure costs we'd be in big trouble. Of course somebody might buy us. And somebody might be a gazzillionaire. I doubt it would happen, but you never know.

But the bottom line is the more clubs that do this, the more saturation of product, the higher the debt bubble, the harder the landing when a hint of reality dawns. And what you really don't want to hear at some stage is "clubs like Barnsley"... Being used to describe clubs that never survived footballs financial reckoning when it came.

 

I can see the day where sky simply haven't got the means to retain the chunk of games it has, its viewing figures have dropped off massively due to piracy and a general lack of interest.
The Premier League will either go to a large foreign broadcaster or set its own platform, where that will leave the EFL I've no idea, if I was a billionaire I certainly wouldn't be jumping at the chance to takeover an EFL club pumping in tens of millions in the current climate.

 

It'll head same way as darts. Eventually there will be two leagues. One a global one and the other (the original one). The big clubs will set up their own Champions League and Cup competitions in their break away league.

One day Barnsley might get back to the "old first division" or "Premiership". However, the big clubs will have long since gone.

 

I'd happily be owned by a consortium of Idi Amin, Charles Bronson, Maggie Thatcher and Chris Whitty if it meant we bought promotion.

 

You'd have to conduct a séance to interview Thatcher and Bronson.

 

This is exactly why I suspect that the overwhelming sentiment among the fanbase has been apathy, given all the frustrations of our last two seasons.

Many fans, myself included, are realising that the finances of football in general are becoming increasingly ridiculous, and are getting worse year on year. They have effectively eliminated the ability for most clubs to compete and challenge for the Premier League and, as the last two seasons have shown, even those who do make it there are becoming increasingly uncompetitive within it, including previously 'established' Premier League teams such as Leicester and Southampton.

Clubs have to operate currently by sustaining losses and being funded by their respective owners. That's a fact of life, and a bit of research of the finances of football will confirm this to anyone who thinks our situation is unique in this regard. Those are the rules that the Premier League now apply to the lower pyramid, and they ultimately control how much of the Sky billions are distributed to it. They've chosen to widen the gap and increase the barriers for clubs to be competitive, and the entire football pyramid is worse off as a result.

I want my club to be able to be competitive on a small budget, as it historically has been at the second tier level, often competing and achieving beyond it's means within that environment. With each passing season, those running football have widened the gap to make that an increasingly distant prospect, to the extent that there's no realistic ability for the club to even maintain its current position in League One without incurring huge losses. Without that hope to rely on, people will eventually start to question the point of why they are bothering paying increasing ticket prices to attend English football games at all, particularly when Sky seem determined to put all of them on TV anyway, regardless of the negative impact this has on fans, attendances, atmosphere, kick-off times, etc.

Each individual supporter has their own tolerance level for when 'enough is enough'. Some might never reach that point. However, the evidence of the last couple of seasons at least is that we're seeing an increasing number of people reaching this level and simply choosing to walk away. They may feel anger/frustration towards how their own club is run, but the wider issue is that the way that football in general is being run provides little prospect for anything to change. Without the ability to effect any change, then that anger just dissipates into apathy, and people choose to walk away.

 

Top post.

 

They won’t ‘sell cheap’ They don’t buy cheap.

 

Not for me. We may be In the third tier, but as a club we shouldn’t need the level of investment that both of those have had/are getting.

I just want better than losing money being bang average. I’m not really bothered about the premier league, just making us worth watching and making oakwell a place teams don’t like coming to.

 

Someone mis-read the memo and read 'teams' as 'home fans' on this.

 

I think you've hit the nail on the head with a very accurate hammer there. That's certainly been a part of my gradual disillusionment. There is a gradual feeling of hopelessness for me that we are simply millions of miles away from having anything like a top, competitive club. We are historically a solid tier 2 team but we aren't anymore and the prospect of competing at PL level again looks, for now, laughable. Couple that with the bad running of the club and the lack of excitement watching L1 football and I've had enough. I only attend a handful of games out of choice. Football is dispiriting these days. Its not the same for the majority of fans as it was 30+ years ago. It simply isn't.
In some ways its a mirror of the rest of society. Resources have been sucked away from the majority and distributed unequally so that the richest succeed. The poorest and weakest have the life sucked out of them by corporatism and capitalism fuelled by PL structure, greed and Sky-directed money. But, this current set-up, as some have eloquently said, will not sustain. There is a bubble building, and there has been for a long time. At some point, and it may still be years away, there will be some kind of reset akin to the Wall St. Crash of 1929. There will then be some big casualties and a restructuring of the leagues, clubs, financial rules, funding, sponsorship etc. I just hope when that happens that my club, in some form manages to survive and bounce back and that football generally re-connects with millions of fans like me who are disillusioned.

 

I think the Premier League now has 11 majority American-owned clubs. I could be wrong.

Arsenal, Villa, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Palace, Man Utd, Burnley, Everton, Fulham, Liverpool, Leeds.

As a block when it comes to voting things through, they could seriously alter the landscape of our top flight. As you say, no relegation etc.

If one of Birmingham or Wrexham get promoted again next season, or Ipswich go back up, it’ll only increase.

The sport is crazy. I still love it, I still love BFC, but it’s not the same game that most of us fell in love with.

 

I'm not sure its just football either that's suffering.

My love of sport has massively diminished and I'm not sure when it started.

I used to love world cups, but I've not watched them since South Africa. Champions League was easy to forget once it went behind obscure pay walls.

Premier League, I might watch part of a handful of games a year, not really bothered who it is and certainly never purposefully creating time to watch. MotD I'd watch every weekend. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a single minute.

I used to watch Wimbledon every year, F1, Olympics, winter especially, athletics and a bit of rugby league and always 6 nations and rugby World cups. But I couldn't tell you the last time I watched any of those to any degree.

And cricket, I'd watch as much as I could, hardly ever missing a session of a test, but for a few years I've hardly bothered at all, just bored with skill less sloggers who come undone at the merest hint of bowling quality or bowler friendly conditions.

Maybe alongside the overt overselling of product and the vast amounts flooded onto our screens, there's just a serious lack of quality, or maybe better described as character. Technology has made some sports less about skill and more about equipment. Improved fitness and uniformity of coaching in many sports makes maverick geniuses all the rarer and sport is poorer for it.

Sport felt like it used to matter. It doesn't feel like it often does anymore.

 

I think that’s just an age thing. When you are young sport is a massive part of your life, as we get older families and responsibilities take over.

I think this is now magnified by money having a much bigger influence and creating a wider gap between the haves and have nots.

 

I thought that initially myself. But with self analysis, I don't think it's as easy to explain as just getting older, though I suspect that may form part of the mix as contrast of past with current and future will play a part in current perception.

I think it's partly that I'm viewing sports and seeing minimal style differences. If you edited out the colour of shirts in the top flight and had to view their tactics without bias, I don't think there is much variance, maybe Liverpool aside and it makes for a really boring watch. And I think it's that lack of character of style and individuals that makes sport feel more tedious.

As you rightly say, its exacerbated by massive funding discrepancies that takes romance and hope out of the equation more often too, but I suspect there are multiple nuances at play.