OT - Club For Sale

No, not us. Aston Villa. Randy Lerner's pulling out, so it'll be interesting to see what happens at Villa Park. Not a dissimilar club, slightly richer history but slightly smaller fan base, but the fact they're actively for sale will give us some idea of whether there are actually any buyers out there or not.

Likely asking price of £200m - considerably less than Lerner's total investment to the tune of around £100m. Mike Ashley, take note.

 

Smaller fan base? Or more of a fan base that is untapped?

Both us and you lot have fantastic followings but when you consider that you could fit the entire population fo County Durham into one London borough, it puts things into perspective. Northumberland is sparsely populated and Tyne and Wear isn'tt very big compared to the Black Country. Aston Villa should really be massive.

If a sheiky jakey comes and buys them I think that potential could be realised. Hopefully it'll be another nutter from Laos, or Thailand.

 

Fair play to Randy Lerner, not everyone can overcome their ego to admit a project or anything at all is a little out of their depth.

 

Pipe down Wolves are bigger than you

 

Consrtuctive.

 

Totally agree.

Untapped sleeping giant comes to mind with Villa.
Second largest City in the UK, been held back by successive regimes.
Definitely not a smaller fan base than NUFC or SAFC.

 

Alright, smaller captive fan base. Birmingham City, West Brom, Wolverhampton Wanderers all share the same 'catchment' as Aston Villa, do they not?

Who do Newcastle share with?

 

Sunderland.

 

You're probably right with a smaller captive fan base, but, that could be put down to similar issues as here, lack of investment in particular together with the capacity of Villa Park as it stands.
The catchment area in that part of Midlands is suffocated with clubs, but I would have thought Villa are at the top of the tree.
That said Wolverhampton is a city in own right with a population in excess of 250,000.

Newcastle does benefit from being a one club City, but will always be reliant on the whole Tyneside area particularly North Tyneside, Gateshead and neighbouring Northumberland / Durham to boost support.
The only sharing is with SAFC for fans to some extent.

Anyway, if Lerner sells Villa for £200m, its a good marker for what NUFC should be worth for a club of similar standing, and not what MA seems to think it is.

 

Newcastle only has a pop of 279,000. So Wolverhapmton has 250,000. Newcaslte is actually a small big city. West Bromwich is in itself own town.

So what if there are a lot of clubs around, the area they are in is much much larger than that of either of the two NE PL clubs.

 

Tyneside, thus avoiding the mackems, has a population of 879,000, though. That's the catchment. And all I said was "slightly smaller fan base", I don't believe that's a false statement? Maybe it's too hard to quantify. And to be fair I did bow down to your superior history. To be really fair, I should say a "far" superior history.

 

Not a marker at all, club has posted a £51.8 million loss in the last accounts published in February of this year and Lerner converted £90.1 million of loans into equity last year, they have as pointed out a smaller fan base and despite all the issues at NUFC we have a stronger fan base, better accounts, bigger ground and I would say higher global awareness.

 

But you share a catchment area with Sunderland. Many of our supporters are Tynesiders just like plenty of yours are from Durham. The city of Birmingham itself has a pop of over a million, then factor in the metropolitan area around Birmingham.

 

What someone's willing to pay, I s'pose. We took £78.8m, apparently. £300k ahead of So'ton among "the rest" (as in, our Premier League starts at 8th).

Thing about football clubs as opposed to other businesses is they are largely unproductive in their own right - it tends to cost more than you can earn just to keep a team afloat, there's not big money available in profits, hence why the only ones "investing" are those with advertising needs or public relations needs.

 

No, Tyne & Wear is 1.6m. The 879,000 is purely Tyneside, all of which can be considered a captive audience. Leeds have a similar number, maybe slightly larger.

 

?

Of which many are Sunderland supporters.

 

Tyne Wear population 1.1m.

 

Hang on, that figure of 879,000 is from the 2001 census which classed Hetton, Houghton, Chester le Street, and Washington as Tyneside. It currently includes Cleadon, which is 100% NUFC.

 

But Indy, in the Midlands there is:

Villa
Birmingham
Wolves
Walsall
Coventry

Just off the top of my head.

I don't think their fan base is that big to be honest. Even when they had MON and were in the higher places of the Prem they couldn't fill their ground.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out...