Those things are not sufficient to be financially stable. The parachute payments are no panacea; even with those, first-year revenue would fall by about 50%, dropping from there. If we managed to burn down much of the squad straightaway, we might be able to limit losses to £20-30m in the first season.
Which is what Kat and Gao said from the start. Its our recruitment thats got worse. If that doesn't improve then spending big will just put us in more debt and make relegation an even bigger problem.
We are not the only club to face that though I can't see us being that different to say a WBA. Last time we got relegated we had the new Stadium debt hanging over us.
We aren't the only club to face that. Those other clubs have done so through investment from their owners; revenue shortfalls for relegated clubs are nearly inevitable, but outside financial is strictly limited, which means that your owner needs to be writing cheques. Ours won't; ours might not be able to even if he wished.
Anyway this is all hypothetical stuff, i'm hoping for another 27 year stay in the top division when we were little Southampton from The Dell...
At an enormous loss, while owing considerably more on the team than he will recoup in sale. Which isn't something that normally happens overnight.
I have got £37.56p left in my post office account. I did have a little more but it went on two season tickets.
I would love to know how Saints manage to miss the genuine rich people who apparently queue up to own Premier League football clubs and went for someone with no money. I thought we'd managed to get on the gravy train with Marcus. But for his death he could have been the one. Instead, he could have been a very nice stepping stone to getting someone in who would shower us with enormous amounts of money and be a remarkable success story, which the media would have conveniently forgotten was bought just like every other successful club does it. Oh, Nicola, where is your business acumen now, when we need it? But no. Saints had to get someone in who appears to be little better than an international version of Southampton Leisure Holdings. What's so f****** brilliant about mediocrity in sport anyway?
I have mixed views about Nicola. It was great that he came in and got Markus involved...and fantastic that he got us into the PL, but I think it was about 50:50 whether he'd have had us shooting for the stars or in deep financial trouble. The Academy cost was going through the roof and we had borrowed money from a posher version of Wonga....a loan that Katharina sorted out so that Staplewood could be finished (or nearly so....I gather there's a further phase). Not minimising what NC did....he was fantastic for us, but he was by no means perfect.
I'll always be grateful to him for the mad ride that we went on that enabled us to go from League One to Europe and all of those special memories and special players but the club was starting to lose its soul and identity a bit at the end with all that nonsense with ex players IMO.
I cant believe that Southampton football club, would not be an attractive purchase to a wealthy millionaire. Instead we get a guy, "without a pot to piss in" I am so disappointed after reading that article. So essentially Ralph will be off in a season or two, when the bigger clubs come knocking, Southampton will gladly take the compensation money. Players will continue to be sold. We are a test factory for the rest of the football world!
TBF I think Ralph will be off in a couple of seasons anyway....the only reason that no one would try and lure him away would be if he was poor for us. Rather he had a couple of great seasons and left with our blessing. There's always a chance that he becomes a real Saints fan and stays here for the rest of his career and we erect a statue to him outside St Marys, but don't hold your breath.
If we get into the Champions League 5 seasons running I’d be happy for him to have a new adventure somewhere else...
Financially, we weren't in bad shape under Cortese. There were absolutely significant cost overruns in the Staplewood project, but that's not terribly uncommon. Our debts beyond that project were negligible; we ran a fairly significant operating profit in 2012-13, and that was before revenues exploded. On the Vibrac loan: while I have misgivings about taking loans from such companies, the narrative the club put out (suggesting that Cortese had done this of his own volition, and Liebherr was shocked into taking an active role) never made a lick of sense. That's not how things work. For one thing, any such loan requires a registration of charge with Companies House; a business can't take out a super secret multi-million GBP loan. And in fact, you can still see the full documentation of the loan on the Companies House site, including the bit where it was witnessed by Gareth Rogers, our CFO at the time, who was promoted to CEO when Cortese left. If your CFO is running around facilitating company-crushing secret loans without your foreknowledge, you generally aren't going to hand them greater control over the club. They were excuses for a plan in motion. We turned the page on that era for the same reason we were sold to Gao: Liebherr wanted to make as much money as humanly possible when the club was ultimately sold. Every decision from the time Cortese walked was in the furtherance of that goal, and on that score it was a massive success.
The club narrative was very much spin as I understand it, in order to soften the perception of the fan base when Nicola was moved along.
And remember it may not have been spin from the club at all....we are perfectly capable of engineering spurious rumours on our own.
Looks like the clubs only ambition is to make net profit in transfers then. When we are being outspent by small clubs like Bournemouth, it just takes the piss out of the fans.
That came direct from the club. Ironically, it was Rogers that we normally sent out to decry the profligacy of the Cortese era...despite his signature being on most of the documents.
