Typical

Mike Ashley is the poorest rich man I have ever seen.

If they wanted to spend the cabeye money which everybody knew was coming they would have. A whole month to prepare for this.

 

See, I always go on the principal that we're a first XI club; Ben Arfa in, Cabs out, strong first XI, bingo, job done.

 

Thanks to the legacy of Hall/Shepherd (who promised democracy, a team full of Geordies, blah blah blah), we now have a solitary owner/shareholder - so we have no power to change anything. All the fans can do is vote with our feet (like what kind of happened in 1978-82 and 1988-92), but do you want to see that happen again? Like most fans, I'm fed up with this regime but I don't see any benefit in boycotting matches. Ashley has resolved the financial mess left by Hall/Shepherd, but he clearly has NO ambition for the club other than to protect his investment with a minimum amount of effort and outlay and to use it as a vehicle to advertise his retail outfit.
We can but hope that an ideal buyer will purchase the club soon, but it's unlikely to happen soon. You'd have thought Everton would have been picked up by a billionaire years ago (been top 8 for years, little debt, great history and support), but no. What attraction does QPR hold as opposed to Everton or NUFC? None, unless they want to walk to the stadium. So, like it or not, we don't seem to be an attractive acquisition (largely due to geography).
As we've seen with Spurs, spending tens of millions on players each year doesn't guarantee a Champions League place (coz the clubs above them can spend just as much, if not more). ManC and Chelsea are the only clubs to have successful changed the status quo over the past 15 years, and that's only because they could spend ANY AMOUNT of money over many seasons. For now, our best hope is for Ashley to show a bit more enthusiasm/ambition and show much greater support for Carr and Pardew in the transfer market.

 

[video=youtube;Pl7BVr36bbs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl7BVr36bbs[/video]

 

Good video although I think it'd be Joke singing and performing on behalf of enormous mike... Cockney accent a' all in it...

 

Thing is, Mike Ashley is not a man who likes losing money. He could spend £10m's on transfers but we'd still be outspent by all the clubs above us (barring Everton) and probably only finish one place higher. The rewards for being in the Europa League are not great (always harms the league season) and finishing an extra place higher is only worth about £1m so why bother?

The only way we can really break into the rich part of the table is by investing at least £100m into the squad and raising our wage cap dramatically. Would it be worth it? No. We are looking for an idiot who doesn't mind losing large amounts of money and lets face it, those kinds of people don't get rich.

MA sees it best to run us as a Top8 club, investing enough to keep us away from relegation battles and hoping we can overachieve and get into the CL at some point in the future for a little payoff. It is not worth his time throwing money at 'chasing the dream' when there is such a massive financial gap, his aim is to create a financial gap between us and the bottom half of the table.

So unless we sell our soul and hope an uber rich man oil arab overlooks the better options (Everton, a number of London clubs, a cheap-to-buy sleeping giant) pumps money into us, we just need to get behind the players on the pitch and hope to overachieve, the same thing most other club fans do.

 

I remember one bloke (Chelsea fan) who rang the 3 Legends not long after Ashley took over. He said he felt sorry for Newcastle fans as he thought Ashley was the only billionaire who didn't want to spend any money.

Supermac gave him short shrift as he hates Chelsea, but how true his words have proved.

 

Mod Face I totally agree.

I guess the questions are a) what did we expect? b) what do we want?

a) this, totally this. Every fan must have been pretty sure that Cabaye was going and that we would mostly play lip service to a replacement but ultimately make up the first team with players we've had on the sidelines. Granted I would now expect a couple of budget buys in the summer (players out of contract or who we get for around £5m) to keep things ticking over. The loans are to obfuscate the situation, De Jong is a good player but what's to say we get him at the end of the loan - I assumed we'd have been getting Remy but that seems unlikely now.

b) I don't want to go bust chasing a dream. Ashley is no fool and will not bankroll the club, the best we can hope for - and I mean absolute best - under him is that once the debt to him has been repaid (if that ever happens and I'm not sure it will as why would he stop taking money once it has?) he lets us spend what we earn. I like the way the club has been breaking even and perhaps even making money, it means we'll still exist in the future.

 

It's a funny old world, Haslam, when we're happy just to exist. But I take your point - there are plenty of 'biggish' clubs (Brum, Leeds, Cov, Wolves, Portsmouth, Wednesday, Southampton) which have almost gone/could go bust due to financial profligacy.

So we had some great seasons during the Hall/Shepherd reign, but ultimately they jeopardized our future. Ashley appears to be the opposite - i.e. he's secured our future but without the ambition. Like many, I believe that finishing in about 8th position each season is just fine for Ashley. He'll probably never spend any more than he needs to. And just as Hall was lucky to stumble upon KK (his last role of the dice), so Ashley is lucky to have Graham Carr. As ever with United, take away one or two important cogs and the whole house is in danger of collapsing.

It's strange, but NUFC has NEVER been a rich club; while some clubs like Arsenal, Sunderland and Chelsea had wealthy owners in the 1930s and 1950s, we never did. Hall/Shepherd spent big money - but it was borrowed (and they rewarded themselves handsomely too). The irony is that the best of football times was when the club was financially raped and de-democratised.