Sorry but that's nonsense. If you have a machine that's worth £1m but costs £1m per year to run is, according to you, worthless? Even though it generates income of £2m? It's worth £1m mate.
And the properties are football properties for use by a football club so they are worth much more than what you'd get from demolishing and building houses. Without the stadium, no gate receipts. Without the academy, we spend more on transferring players in and receive less when we sell the players we develop.
Put it another way, how much would it cost FPP to get newly created Kittenmittens FC to the position Sunderland is in now with its squad, stadium and academy? A hell of a lot more than the £15m bandied about on here.
It literally doesn't matter. All of that is entirely logical, I understood all of what you were saying first time around, but you are missing the biggest, most fundamental point: People do not evaluate price based only on assets. They do so based on revenue, costs, and potential. How much is it going to cost to get us up to where they believe we can be?
So you might believe, we have a £13m squad, but upkeep of that offsets the benefit, particularly if all or part of that squad is redundant at this level and achieving the £13m value at any stage is next to impossible. The asset is there, but the cost of ukeep far outweighs it. It is not a net benefit to someone purchasing the club because even with success, they will all need replacing. Apart from player contracts running out, we have high earning, under-performing big chunks of that like Grigg who we would struggle to recoup cash for.
So when you say that it would cost £15m, the problem is that someone looks at the books and sees:
1: cost base of £28m vs revenue of £20m = £-8m per annum (roughly based on Methven etc)
2: Squad with potential value of £13m
3: Fixed assets (Stadium, academy etc) = ££m?
4: Cost of renovating football side of club over next 5 years in league one and the championship: ££m?
5: Potential upturn in revenue commensurate with achieving goals on pitch : ££m?
The point is that when you tot it all up, because we're a loss-making business, people know that in theory, to fund the next 5 years at the current situation, they'd need £40m to cover the operating costs. That's the assumption they have to make.
They'd then need to spend money on top of that to get up and stay up, let's say £2-3m in league one, maybe £30m minimum in Championship over that time just to have an outside shot at the playoffs. Let's say £35m. That means that you're buying the obligation to spend £75m over the next 5 years just to keep progressing in the right direction, with no guarantees that it will actually pay off with a Premier League spot. There are clubs spending double that in a single season right now, so I'm being extremely conservative. You could potentially double that if you wanted to look at worst case scenarios.
So offsetting that £75m is the £13m squad, and the stadium + AOL, and the intangible value of the opportunity. I don't know what your valuation of the fixed assets would be, but realistically, because of the difficulty in selling those fixed assets, you could make the case for anything between £50m-100m imo.
I think we're of nominal value now. The question is not whether someone values us at £15m or £40m, it's 'who will be willing to take the risk associated with a company this big, convoluted, loss-making, and in competition with dozens of other companies?'
You seriously saying some bloke is blaming Smug for the takeover failing? 
