Lots of people on this board (myself included) have criticised the owners for our flash sale of players every time there is a transfer window. Bury being thrown out tonight and a few of the other clubs being close has made me think.... maybe it’s not the end of the world if our best player gets sold for peanuts or if we sign a striker no one has heard off? At least there will always be an Oakwell, you reds!
I think the fact there’s about £30m in transfer fees gone missing in the last 3 seasons alone, which makes our plight slightly different to Bolton and Bury
Having read what a poster put on here about how our owners bought and then sold Nice, the first thought i had, was oh god please tell me we wernt funding the French club.
Very interesting thing to say as “our owners” took out a loan at OCG Nice for 20 million costing 30 million to pay back over 3 years and which cannot be paid back early leaving the club in debt for many years to come Which they tried to hide in the accounts but a journalist noticed the anomaly and investigated it. They did this Because they “Needed” there money back they bought the club for. One of the bizarre terms of the loan was if the dropped to 14 place the full amount had to be payed back in a week as the loan was based on there TV money and dropping out of the league would mean losing the TV money . At one stage they were in 12th position if a couple of results had gone the wrong way the loan would have been called in and the club would have gone bankrupt as there was no money in the coffers to pay the loan. The owners then went about selling 30 million worth of players ripping the squad apart to cover the loan.
£30 million gone missing?!? I’d like to see where you get that figure from. How much do you think it costs to run a club for 3 years?
You dont just have to be football profit academy, which we are at the minute, seemingly a vehicle for extremely rich people to become even richer or the alternative is Bury or Bolton. There is somewhere in between. Everytime there is a mention of us buying players a bit further down the developmental path but cost more, we get warned about not wanting to be the next Bury. We still havent broken our transfer record from over 20 years ago, weve got multi billionaire owners, we regularly sell players for over £3m, and replacing them with 750k div 1 players, we must be Sh!ting money.
Well said. Nobody wants to be in the Bury/ Bolton position, but these owners are very savvy and know they have even more license to do what they want under the threat of us ‘doing a Bolton’. Like there are no other options.
The policies that are being used by our new owners are little different to the policies used by Chairman Joe Richards, more than 60 years ago. What Mr Richards found was that selling your best players in order to cover trading losses leads to a slow, but inevitable decline. You see, it leads to a cycle of promotion followed by relegation. The club constantly has to adjust to big fluctuations in income. It loses money more heavily whilst in League 2, and a larger proportion of the profit from player sales has go towards covering those losses. Eventually, the club is unlucky with a cycle of acquisitions of young players. They do not mature into saleable assets as had been hoped, and the cycle of promotion and relegation is interrupted. The club has to tighten its belt, overheads have to be cut and the current policies become unworkable as a result. Rather than being a policy geared towards slow improvement, I would suggest that the policy is one of managing a slow decline. That is what happened under Joe Richards, although I accept that that was in a different era, when the football business was far different. The club has been very quick to justify the current policy by pointing towards the problems of Bury and of Bolton Wanderers, and there is no doubt that they have a point. In the past when I have pointed towards the need for financial prudence, there have been many on the BBS who have pointed towards club X or club Y and held them up as a potential model for the financial management of Barnsley FC. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that commercial loans are not the right way for football clubs to try to finance the step up to a higher playing level, and higher annual turnover. If the shareholders are unwilling to finance the step up, then realistically, there no nowhere else to turn. However, as I have outlined above, I am not convinced that given patience on the part of all Barnsley Football Club stakeholders, the current policy inevitably leads to a successful football club. On the contrary, I think that it leads to a slow decline. Part of the problem is expectations. The fans have been lead to expect something different. They had their expectations boosted when we were taken over, and no amount of dampening of those expectations could quash them. Some fans point enviously at other clubs that have risen from similar situations to ours, and they say why not us. It is not expectation fueled by ambition, because that would require a plan, instead it is expectation fueled by envy. It is an expectation that can never be satiated. It is an expectation that is totally unwarranted unless the club is not owned by an individual with deep pockets and a pre-existing love for the area, the sport and the football club. A love that drives that individual on to spend ridiculous amounts of cash on his love. But having rejecting the spend, spend, spend formula as an answer, and having rejected the buy young, improve and sell on formula as an answer for different reasons, what is the right formula? The honest answer is, I do not know. The new shareholders must be allowed the time to play their chosen hand to its conclusion. They still believe that they are right, and they are unlikely to believe otherwise until they see it for themselves. Frankly, it could take 5 years, 10 years, 15 years or longer to convince them. I doubt it though, because I think that they will want to realise their investment and be gone before then. But what will happen if their policy is shown to be flawed. What will they do then? Well, I have no answer to that question either. Honestly, the involvement of foreign investors with Barnsley FC never made any sense to me from the start. I could never see how they could earn a financial reward for their investment that would pay them an adequate financial reward for their time. The whole thing has been shrouded in mystery from day 1. They believe that they have a strategy that gives them a return, and I believe otherwise. Only time will give us the answer, but Joe Richards was ultimately proven wrong, and I believe that our current owners will be as well.
We can’t afford the ongoing wage costs of a player commanding multi million pound transfers. We operate on probably the lowest income in the division, whenever you wonder why we have to sell our best players keep reminding yourself we cannot afford to pay them the salaries to stay at the club. That is the economic reality of the situation. Unless and until we start getting 15-20k fans through the turnstiles we cannot compete at this level for the same players.
Which we would if we kept a winning side together.... which, as we know, doesn't seem to happen at Barnsley. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot, but rather than this being accidental it is deliberate. THE PLAN, THE PLAN !!!!!
The Bolton / Bury comparisons on here are getting really tiresome. I know the first post is probably just about how bad it’d be to not have a club but it doesn’t justify our clubs bad decisions. I feel very sorry for both clubs, especially the staff & fans. I’d hate that to happen to us but we’re the complete opposite to these types of clubs. Bury had Tom Pope on £5k a week allegedly, they were taking Danny Rose & Kelvin Etuhu from us & paying them wages far above what a league two club should’ve been. These weren’t exceptions, they signed many players for fees & paid big wages. Bolton have spent recklessly for as long as I remember. All the time they were in the Prem they were overspending & in debt. They were always a ticking time bomb. Okocha, Hierro, Campo, Anelka, Djorkaeff etc at a club that struggled to get 20,000 through the gates. They carried on overspending even after relegation. It was only a season or two ago they had Jay Spearing on £15k a week. It’s very rare that I see a Barnsley fan advocating spending fortunes on players & even when it occasionally happens most of us put them straight. I imagine even if we trebled our wage budget we wouldn’t come close to the reckless overspending these clubs have done. Although frustrating I’ve not seen too many fans criticise losing Davies, Lindsay & Pinnock as they were understandable departures. Other clubs going bust is no excuse for flogging Brad Potts when battling for promotion who had 2 & a half years left on his deal, it’s also not an excuse to sell Kieffer Moore when he has 2 years left on his deal & even if you sell him there’s no excuse to start the season without a striker who can win headers or hold a ball up.
I get what your saying, but whats the financial difference in being in the championship and being in league 1, must be betweeen 6-8 million, so by filling our squad with 4k a week young players and risking going down all the time, could be false economy. If what your saying is the case, why on earth did our owners who are dripping with money want to buy us, just seems kind of pointless. If all they want is just to accept that were a Lg1 club and thats all we will ever amount to due to finances and just sell players as soon as they become decent to maintain being lg1 level. I love the club, but nothing so disheartening than constantly selling our best players and replacing them mainly with inferior players.
People would love to drive around in a Audi but at least they have a three wheeler mini instead of no car at all.
I suspect that the plan is we can gain s temporary edge over other teams by identifying under rated young players. We buy said players, get a couple of seasons out of them, sell them when their stock rises, coupled with getting more from the academy- another area of potential improvement. We then build up more money with which to widen the targets, sticking to the same plan. It makes more long term sense then our years of relying on loans - if they are crap we end up with duds in the team, if they’re any good they get recalled or sold on and we gain zip.
I'm okay with the general idea of signing and developing young players. But the shape of the team (ie balance of new young players with experienced players) needs to be decided by Stendel. If we had kept one of Pinnock, Lindsay or Jackson, it would have been easier for a new young centre back to slot in. With Woodrow out, we badly missed Kiefer on Saturday. I'm pinning my hopes on Kenny Dougall to steady the ship.
This season is only about staying up, nothing else. If we achieve that then the plan is on track, ie stabilise our place in the championship then push our way up the table with the end goal being promotion to the Premier League. Its too early to say we will be definitely be relegated as I think the owners, players and supporters all feel Stendel is the right man and that we have some decent young players in our squad and could finish above the relegation zone. Having a plan is better than not having one, having money in the bank from transfer sales is better than not having any, keeping wages within a structure is better than paying wages like Wednesday do. No one even keeping last seasons squad together and adding a few more players would have expected us to do anything more than stay up / mid table finish, if you did then thats not living in the real world or understanding what we are competing against. If we stay up we will get stronger slowly if we dont then the plan, spreadsheet, recruitment has failed. Its a big season for BFC, supporters need to get behind the players home and away, do not put too high expectations on the club and players at this point, that will come in the coming years if it looks like we are stagnating as a club but not yet.
