Frankly, if you're not prepared to spend money to be competitive in the division you're in, don't own a football club full-stop. Owning a football club, generally, is not a profitable venture. To make a small fortune with a football club, you need to start with a large fortune. The owners with the best relationships with their fans understand that the money they spend trying to make their club successful will not yield a return on their investment. They don't spend money to make money. If they wanted to make money, they'd invest in less-volatile industries. The Allams still don't understand this. They genuinely think you can run a football club just like Allam Marine.
I must say, I do wonder whether the Allams are in the financial position to just pay it back. Ehab's driving ban was embarrassing but it's pretty clear that they aren't in the same financial position they once were. I know people will say, well just sell the club then, but when it owes to £40m and is worth approximately half, I don't think they'd be willing to right off £20m
Money doesn't equal success though and it never has. We had our best recruitment last summer & only spent just over £1m. Throw in the Leo sale and the net spend was a few hundred grand and that's without going into the Bowen money. Spending little doesn't mean you can't be successful
All last night showed was how far away from a quality player they are when you saw an over the hill huddlestone trap control and pass a ball.
Again, I'm not expecting or asking us to spend ridiculous amounts of money in the Championship. However, being under a self-imposed embargo over £500,000, which is **** all for a Championship team, is pure stupidity. And for what? We've lost our only Championship-experienced centre-half and filled the gap with a kid from Man Utd's reserves. We have to wait for players to leave before we can sign another. We can't spend a fee, at all. I'm not expecting signings for millions of pounds but like I said earlier, Campbell went to Luton and they only had to pay a six-figure compensation fee. We can't make shrewd signings like that. That alone makes us less competitive in this division. And I don't want to hear about how taking the EFL grant was some astute bit of business due to the circumstances of the pandemic. Only us, Scunthorpe, Fleetwood, Gillingham, Oldham and Swindon took the monitored loan out of 48 EFL teams.
Also, do you expect us to do well by spending less money in the Championship than we did in League One?
The larger proportion of clubs in the Championship have spent zero which clearly is a sign of survival as against maybe a promotion challenge (may change in the next 2 weeks). The comment by Chaz is interesting,,,,I dont disagree, but when he came on he looked the best player from all 22, although most were very poor !
At last seasons end we were probably a far more attractive proposition for a sale than we are today...
This is an important point to make; when you consider that clubs like Harrogate, Barrow, Tranmere, Grimsby and Forest Green didn't need to take it out, but somehow we did, you start to question what's really going on behind the scenes. Our signings last year were excellent for the division we were in, but we have to mirror that moving forward and this self imposed burden we've placed upon ourselves makes even less sense when you consider what we paid for the likes of Wilks and Docherty. You're right, we don't have to spend vast sums but we do need the wiggle room to be able to pay a small fee if we need to, otherwise we're writing ourselves out of 90% of the transfer market. That being said, I stand by my earlier statement that we aren't going to see the Allams pay this back overnight; I certainly can't see it being paid before the end of the window and I imagine that's quite a source of frustration for the manager and LD. If, heaven forbid, we get an offer we can't refuse for KLP three days before the end of the window, we can't pay a fee to replace him unless the loan is paid back. Would Ehab then pay back the loan? Maybe. But there's always a danger he wouldn't and we end up with exactly the scenario we had last season.
They paid themselves a £3.8m dividend last year and we got £22m for Bowen and you wonder if they could manage to repay £500k?
They made a loss of £1.7m in the latest parent company annual accounts however the "free money" could still have been repaid/not taken,
They’re owed nothing. They’ve made money hand over fist out this football club in loan interest payments and consultancy fees. They need to just **** off NOW!
Yep, that's exactly the point I'm making about this embargo being self-sabotage. Like you mentioned, Docherty cost something like £300,000, wasn't it? A ****ing brilliant signing in League One. If you applied the conditions of the EFL loan last summer, we would've never been able to get Doc. We're now a division higher than last season, so we need to spend accordingly to remain competitive. That means we might have to spend £500,000 here and £750,000 there to get the players we need. I keep mentioning Allan Campbell because I'm certain he'd be the type of player on McCann's radar this summer were it not for this embargo and I reckon we could've beat Luton for his signature. But we couldn't because Motherwell were entitled to a six-figure compensation fee we couldn't pay. I'm not asking for us to spend £4,000,000 or £5,000,000 on a single player, but we can't rely solely on League One and League Two-standard free transfers and youth players on loan to keep us up.
The others factor missing here, even allowing for salary increased likely based on contract after promotion, is that we get something like £5.5 million from the EFL as a championship club, thats before any extra money for Sky appearances and last year I think the EFL money was £1.3 million...oh and last season we had ZERO gate receipts or commercial revenue..
Yeah, and that's what I don't get. Ehab said 'mid-table budget', despite not spending a single penny on a transfer fee. We've signed four free agents and four loans. I imagine the parent clubs of the loans are paying their full wages so really, we've only spent money on four new players' wages. Luton have signed 8 players, four for a transfer fee and four on a free transfer. What's their budget according to Ehab, title-contenders?
They've still put in way more than they've taken out. Precisely, they're clearly not doing too well. I've no idea what impact Covid has had on them.
In the words of Roy Keane, "that's their job". Football owners shouldn't be under the illusion that the money they put in will result in a return on their investment. It's a loss-making business. You don't buy a football club to make money. It's a status-symbol like buying an expensive sports car or watch.
