Watford sign 8 players from Udinese

Says OLM with his monopoly bets and his promise that Nigel wasnt leaving Hull. I have never heard such lunacy

He even pretended to ITK at Hull

 

Yeah I never really rated Wes Morgan, Anya made him look like a complete mug. He turned him inside and left him for dead countless times!

 

I think I now understand the Leicester fans problem - they are all accountants. They are happy that if we have a rich owner (we have) then we can buy whoever we can afford - but they just don't like our balance sheet. If it showed £15 million debt they would be happy as Larry ( or Harry?) with us as we would be a "normal" club with debt. That is probably about what we would have had to pay in an open market. Please correct me Leicester fans if I have misunderstood you on this.

Forget other clubs paying our wages - they didn't last year and won't this. So it is just about transfer values - and forget about another club having our debt - they don't it is our Owner's debt - just as some of you have eloquently explained with your own Owner's debt. If we had paid market value the Pozzos could at any time write off that debt - £15m is small beer to them - a lot less burdensome than the £100m I have heard spoken about Leicester.

I suspect most of our players values will only increase in the next year so if we sell them we will make a profit and we will have to pay tax on a larger gain than if we had not got them for free - boy - you guys should be happy - we are going to be paying the taxman a lot of money.

Last point for now - embargo was a lazy journalists' word for our transfer situation. We were never under any embargo - we just had to get the FA to review our transfers because our previous Owner screwed the club out of money which went into his bank not ours - they wanted to check that under the Pozzos we were back on the straight and narrow - which thankfully we are.

Look guys - Leicester supporters are generally a fair minded intelligent bunch in my experience and it may be that the last couple of games we had got to you - but in reality we have not done anything wrong - the Pozzos are entitled to put their debt into whichever club they choose and it will make precious little difference. They want a successful Watford and are prepared to bankroll it as it could be worth a lot of money to them in the long run - after all they are businessmen. But don't demonize Watford - we are a small club lucky enough to have rich owners for a while. After our recent owners I think we deserve to be cut a little slack don't we?

 

Out of interest how much are the Pozzo's worth?

Our owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was valued at $1.6B last week

No ones has a problem with you getting players from Udiense, its how your doing it that has got everyone's back up


Switch roles a minute and imagine you was a Udiense fan and the club was just giving players away and losing money doing it. It would piss you off. Do you really think the Udiense fans care about what happens at Watford?

 

What is so difficult for the watford fans to understand?

We have no problem with your club links.

We have no problem with the players you're buying.


The problem is that you're avoiding FFP regulations by buying these players for Udinese and then sending them on 'loan' (yes, I know it's not a loan technically but it's very similar) for nothing.

These players will never play for Granada/Udinese despite signing for them. They've only signed to play for Watford.

You'd obviously still have to pay these players their wages. It's just their transfer fees that won't be accounted for that isn't fair.

If you can't see that you're bypassing the FFP rules that everyone else has to abide by then I give up. As if last year wasn't enough of a shambles with your loans.

 

To be honest I have no idea how much they are worth - but they are Italian so that says a lot

I know it is the loan and now the free transfers that are getting people's backs up - but to be honest as I jokingly implied earlier these are really only accounting issues. The Pozzos could have sold them for market value - let's guess about £15m and Watford would now owe the Pozzos £15m - but debts to an owner are only a problem if he decides to leave. He could even convert that debt into shares if he chose so we could still be debt free. Udinese will be happy as Pozzo took them from obscurity to long term Champions League participants. Would you mind if your owner took surplus players - and this is what these ones are - they are not the cream and would not be in the first team - and gave them experience at another club - especially if you knew you would get them back if he wanted. Remember too that the loans were done because Pozzos took over Watford just before the start of last season and did not have time to transfer them - so they always said in time they would make them transfers - and now they have. (If I were being honest I would add that I suspect the Pozzos did not trust our former owner - rightly as it turns out - and did not want to give him assets to claim if they got into a fight with him. He screwed Watford over and wuld do the same to Portsmouth if he gets his way. Thanks to him we had that transfer review system( not embargo) this summer - he put our money from transferring Danny Graham into his personal bank account.

 

I wonder if Top owns any shares in Leicester City.

He could buy Hinckley United and buy players for us and just send them here on free transfer or Hinckley just buy academy players off us for 30M allowing us to carry on doing what we want to do while staying within FFP guildlines

The Watford fans would soon moan then

 

FFP is not yet in so we are bypassing no existing rules. FFP is designed to stop clubs getting into debt that they cannot repay and then going into liquidation owing OTHERS money. IN this instance the only ones who would be owed money are the Pozzos themselves - so FFP will not be breached. We are not getting into debt so have no issues. I think you are getting a bit too hung up on the FFp issue and not properly understanding what it is coming in for

 

No we would not I assure you

 

Why would we moan?

and as you said yourself ownership of more than one club in England is not permitted.

 

We dont know if Top has any shares. If he doesnt there is nothing stopping him. If he does he cant simple sign his shares over to his Dad (Vichai)

 

If your signing players on long term contracts off course it will effect FFP. Their contracts will run into when it starts

 

Arn't you the guy that predicted the Watford loans would not return? - you look pretty silly now

 

Your best 2 loans wont be returning though. Matej Vydra doesnt want to come back and I highly doubt Jose will let Chalobah go on loan to a championship team

 

What a load of complete and utter tosh.

The players will never play for Udinese/Granada? Take a look at their career stats for god's sake - they already have. Of course they have only signed to play for Watford - that's the way these things work, or hadn't you realised that?

We still have to pay their wages? Give that man a gold medal in stating the bleeding obvious - of course we have to. What he obviously doesn't - and can't possibly - know is how much the wages are that are being paid to player. All he needs to know is that our club don't actually pay inflated wages to under-performing 'stars' the way that certain others do, which is why we are not in financial trouble but most of those certain others are.

The transfer fees won't be accounted for? How, pray tell, can you possibly and unequivocally state something like that? Do you have unfettered access to sets of financial accounts for a year that has nowhere near ended yet, that haven't even been drawn up yet?

I suggest you do give up before you make a bigger idiot of yourself than you already have...

 

Vydra may actually come back but not sure he would get into the team due to the quality of the other signings

 

He would walk straight into your team and you know it

 

Perhaps we should loan him to you guys to even things up a bit, maybe you could stop the hoof ball then?

 

Dear god - another one

So Vydra is in regular communication with you is he? He hasn't actually made any public comment one way or the other, anything mentioned in the media has been straight from his agent, not him. Maybe you should speak to him tonight about his plans for next season - or maybe just wait for the announcement that's coming early next week...

As for Chalobah, I doubt too many expected him to return anyway - but he certainly wasn't our best loan last season, that honour went unanimously to The Professor.

 

Finally, some reasoned debate. I can understand your concerns, Leicester fans. I think this whole episode is another example of how football has been taken away from the fans, who are the only constant, and become a way of generating, and losing, a lot of money. Do I like the Pozzos business model? I prefer it to our club becoming the ego-driven play thing of a rich owner, a la Chelsea, but I pine for the old days of a local businessman running clubs.

The Pozzos model is to treat players as commodities. Move them around to wherever they will gain greatest value before selling them on. At the moment they are trying to get Watford up to speed. In the future we will be sending players on to other sides within the Pozzo orbit. I don't think it is cheating because the game is about making money. The football competition is a side issue.