Or... the money put in by FPP is still in the club. It was put in as share capital, but between the two companies that Donald owns, I'd say it's highly likely that circumstances exist where he can remove that money from the club in order to pay off FPP. In fact, as amply demonstrated by the last few weeks, they could even create a loan between the two companies (again) and write it off as an exceptional operating expense again. Whatever the mechanism, I think it's very likely that Donald can pay it back using the club's cash.
Just had a chuckle looking at RTG. The same people who were recently calling me a liar for saying FPP wanted to take over ... ... are now attacking anyone saying they didn't want to buy the club. Absolutely brilliant
Thanks Bob. It is difficult for an average fan when the same figures can be described in different ways with vastly different meanings. Something has been bugging me. What about the competitors to Donald's group at the time of their takeover? Short got £37 million, and Donald paid £12 million. Is it possible that other bids would have seen Short get less but the club would have been better off?
I am sure there is an effort to sell the club - ideally not at a big loss. As far as I can tell, they need to sell the club for £28m debt-free not to lose money.
A As I understand it, there were marginally higher bids on the table but Ellis didn’t trust the buyers. He gave Madrox the chance to gazump the others.
The Athletic piece is ready there for us to read.....just need a subscriber to paste the whole article for us https://theathletic.co.uk/1820492/2...ce-short-kirchhoff-borini-cattermole-coleman/
Sam Allardyce ripped aside his jacket and beat his chest like King Kong. 46,000 inside the Stadium of Light roared their approval. Sunderland’s players danced along during a lap of honour. They had just beaten Everton 3-0 to stay in the Premier League for a 10th consecutive season and their victory helped to relegate neighbours Newcastle United. There was joy on Wearside and a surge of optimism. Had the Netflix cameras been rolling, they would have captured a champagne dressing room, where owner Ellis Short joined the revelry; the next day, they would have caught Penshaw Monument lit up in red and white by Sunderland City Council. “It’s hard to beat that feeling,” Allardyce tells The Athletic. “I’ve won promotions with different clubs and it’s special but so is the feeling you get when you and your staff have managed to save a club. It’s relief but it’s also satisfaction. You know how much it means to Sunderland fans and everyone at the club. You could sense the relief.” The club and its wider fanbase felt it was a moment of opportunity. Allardyce had only been there for eight months and he sensed it, too. It was May 2016 and it felt like Sunderland had bottomed out. The club had been teetering on the brink of relegation for seasons and had become known for acts of dramatic escapology. But Allardyce, Sunderland’s eighth permanent manager in seven erratic years, had taken a sluggish squad that scraped 12 points from the first half of the 2015-16 season — and looked certainties to go down — and galvanised them into a streamlined team. Jan Kirchhoff had arrived in January from Bayern Munich and had made a huge impact. “We all felt like we’d created something we could build upon,” he tells The Athletic. “That we were able to stay in the Premier League, perform in it, and might even be able to attack the top-10 teams. All of us felt like we had a great future.” In the second half of that season, Sunderland’s record was P19 W6 D9 L4. Three of those defeats were to clubs in the top four. Against Everton, Allardyce named the same starting XI for the seventh game in a row. The previous match had been a stirring 3-2 victory over Chelsea. At last, Sunderland had a solid foundation. Allardyce felt three high-calibre signings that summer would turn them into a team that could look forwards with optimism, rather than with the familiar sense of dread or confusion. “We have to move away from the fact that we’re all so happy at being heroes for surviving,” he said the next day. “We have to think much bigger, have much more ambition.” And yet, within two years, Sunderland were in League One. Back-to-back relegations ripped the heart and soul out of the club, much of it caught on camera in Neflix’s Sunderland ‘Til I Die. No one foresaw that on the night of Sunderland 3-0 Everton. Then, "Sunderland ‘Til I Die" was still a chant, an expression of pride, rather than a soundtrack to decline. Then, Sunderland were still a big football club with possibilities, rather than a box set. It had provided a glimpse of the club it could be. This was only four years ago this month. Even three years ago, Sunderland were still in the richest league in the world. Today, they feel like a Premier League memory. Sunderland stand uncertain in seventh place in the third tier and, if the season ends now, it will be the lowest finishing position in their 141-year history. Today, talk is not about potential, about “a great future” — it is about flawed ownership, creditors, parachute payments, loans and regression. Talk is about Sunderland unravelling. It is about Sunderland dying. Nobody is dancing.
My thoughts too, nothing new in that piece. If I was the editor of the Athletic I would be pulling the reporters in!
if you look at the link I posted it suggests cattermole and coleman so there must be more to come...I take it you copied that from RTG @Larza ? the lad who posted it said that he doesnt get the full lot not been a full subscriber yet
It's like me getting together with a new lass and saying let's put our money together love and get a joint account. She says 'ok fine, but do you owe anyone money'? I say no I'm debt free me (when really I owe 25k to a dodgy loan shark). So she trusts me and we pool our cash. She then gets 25k inheritance in when her poor Mam dies so I pay the lot straight to the dodgy loan shark. She finds out and goes nuts. I say haway man love it was a debt we owed and now it's settled with our money but don't worry I'll pay it back. I then write that money off a couple of years later. It's not confused it's underhand, deceitful and down right twattish behaviour.
Last spring, Sunderland were almost sold to Mark Campbell, a businessman. The process reached such an advanced point that Ross was being consulted by the prospective new owners. “It was astonishing,” a senior club source tells The Athletic. “Jack was on holiday, getting messages about signings from the new people. He had to ask Stewart whether he was OK to talk to them. ‘Yeah, yeah, crack on’ he was told. “There would be all these mixed signals. Jack would hear from the current owners that they were going to offer a certain player a contract. Why? Couldn’t they sell the club after all? Then Jack would hear again from the new guys — they would be at the club, inside the training ground, going for dinner with him, as if they had already bought it. “Through the summer, we had no idea who was going to own the club. And then it just disappeared. Honestly, it was mental.” In terms of infrastructure, Sunderland still thought of itself as a Premier League outfit. But a broken lift at the training ground was not fixed and behind the scenes, Donald and Methven were chopping a “ruinously high” £40 million wage bill down to £15 million. “They were people who genuinely wanted to do a good job but I’m not too sure they knew how to do it,” another source at the club says. “On recruitment, it was ****ing horrendous. They were so far out of their depth. I don’t think the chairman realised what a big job it was and didn’t really have the funds to do it. They were always chasing.”
I just got sent that by text, just been over there and found another bit that I’ve copied in, it doesn’t make good reading but not a surprise.
“On the face of it, Sunderland should be an easy sell,” one person involved in a consortium which attempted to buy the club last year, tells The Athletic. “They’ve got the stadium, the fanbase and a good academy but behind the scenes, it’s a mess. For the money they’re asking, you could buy a Championship club, with fewer nasty issues.”
Why? It's just the Mags at the athletic sticking the boot in because they're still sour we sent them down and ****ed them 6 times
