We need a structure befitting a PL club. End of. The money I understand, the sponsorship in lieu of repayments I get. Lee Charnley? I'm at a complete loss. We need an actual board. We need a decent exec structure. The challenge is, who puts that in place? Rafa can't recruit his own bosses. Would he want to? So I don't know how it changes. It probably won't.
So if any club comes in for him, he can quit and they just have to stump up the 5 mil to cover his costs? Given the transfers that have been going around this window, £5m is loose change to most teams in the Prem....FFS Stoke paid £18m for a Spurs reserve and Spurs paid £23m for a 32 year old striker. Rafa for £5m would be the bargain of the transfer window. With the amount of teams that sack managers each season in the Prem these days, Rafa's gonna be in demand will be pretty much able to pick who he goes to.
What you term as transfer profit is trading revenue, this was offset by losses incurred by the club being relegated despite parachute payments.
Having a board would just be another cost burden with no reason, they would still have to do everything through Ashley anyway, the more exec's you have the less dynamic a business becomes as decision making gets bogged down, I've sat in too many meetings where decisions don't get made because people hedge and fight their own corner rather than take responsibility and get on with things.
I refuse to believe our dealings this summer have been at the absolute max of the available profit. Deals for the likes of Abraham, Cabalero, Reina etc would have been loans or free transfers with minimal expense, it's exactly what happened with Keegan in 2008 when Lambias overruled his requested transfers, this time Charnley's ****ed up Rafa's requests.
But if No Chance will be out by the end of September then who is going to update the prediction league? Mustyyyyyyyy! Where are you?
So much speculation. We have no idea what Rafa is thinking, what happened in the transfer talks or anything in-between. If Rafa goes, he goes. He has done alright, I like one or two or his signings, but if he isn't committed and he only came here thinking he would have an easy ride, he can go and find another club. Simple fact is, we should have enough to stay up. The bottom three are dire and we have some decent players.
/ So many press reports that Rafa is furious, Rafa is raging and so on, if it's so bad then I don't get why he hasn't gone, does he need the money? I doubt it, plenty of clubs would take him on as well.
Look guys, it could be worse - no matter how bad it gets, we could be the mackems. 19th in the Championship and facing the following fixtures in Sept Sheff Utd (H) Notts Forest (H) Hull (A) Cardiff (H) Ipswich (A) Preston (A) All 6 teams currently in the top 8...
He is not a moron. A leopard does not change its spots. He knew what Ashley was. He even had experience of it in January. I'm not blaming Rafa for us being ****, but I find it laughable that anybody can sit and say "oh I took the job and they promised me things had changed". If he believed that then he needs a new job licking windows. Nobody knows the ins and outs of Abraham, Townsend etc. Perhaps Rafa and Newcastle just didn't really interest them. Perhaps they saw the likes of Palace and Swansea as more progressive with younger more modern managers.
What profit? We just lost between £20m and £30m last season I would guestimate. If you want to say there was £30m trading surplus on transfers then remember that the £30m payments for Sissoko were to be paid in instalments so £18m of it hasn't come in yet. £40m parachute payments? How much do you think our wage bill and overheads came to last year? We have made a loss, and to the extent that Ashley put in £15m to keep the club from winding up. I'm guessing that there is some money in the bank now but not much over £10m (maybe £15m) and if we haven't started to receive Premier League revenues yet I'm sorry to report that we probably still have a bank balance that is reducing with each passing day due to high wages and overheads. We could have spent a bit more and the end of the window has been disappointing but we never had these vast amounts that people seem to think we had, and not because Ashley is taking money out of the business because he isn't.
Seems like a pretty accurate summary. Why didn't we spend as much as Brighton or Huddersfield? Probably the effect of last season's wage bill compared to theirs I guess the issue is the drip feed of the Sissoko money and the instalments from the PL - maybe on that basis, Jan will be a better window with a reduced wage bill and more money dropping into the account. I guess the only real criticism is - could we have borrowed from Ashley against these relatively guaranteed income - but if he is looking to sell, why invest more money and then put up the sale value as well.
Huddersfield have spent £40m net is that right? They are clearly spending money they haven't got yet. We could have done the same but Ashley doesn't seem to want to allow it. It's financially prudent, but pretty risky considering the squad we have to get through the season with. I'd say next summer if we stay up and aren't spending £50m plus there should be some alarm bells going off. The thing that will really propel us back to fighting for proper decent players is going to be having a star emerge in the squad and selling him off for silly money like Lukaku at Everton. Maybe two of them. Otherwise we are going to be spending the same sort of money as any other established EPL club each season.
But these days, that IS the business model. Ashley even quoted Southampton as the darlings to follow.
For most clubs it's the only way to get an external injection of cash beyond the usual revenue streams and get a leg up. Obviously our owner isn't going to donate anything and even if he did it would be added to the debt and make the club more expensive, so probably would mean he would be here longer.
We desperately need to survive this season. I'm not saying he's bulletproof, but under Rafa with a decent income stream we could finally get to a point of stability which would make us saleable. I'm not sure there's any other situation that sees the fatman fck off. To do it it's going to have to be in spite of a number of factors. Odds are heavily against us achieving it, history doesn't lie. Yet another window closes where it's not so much the manager staying that's surprising, more the fact Charnley's still employed. Again.
