Mike Ashley will get Derby in my opinion, and he will do an excellent job with them too I think. They need someome who understands the ins and outs of operating football clubs and he has that. Plus Derby fans are a lot more realistic about what an owner can and cant do now.
ashley will play this one right to the line, if he has any shred of an idea that he might get them cheaper if it goes to the wire then he will be in no hurry...he did far better for the mags than they care to admit and he would sort derby out but he will not pay a penny over his own estimate of value.
I actually feel sorry for Derby, echoes of how we fell from grace, as always, its the fans that suffer
It’s nowt like the sport we started going to back in the day Clocky….mores the pity. At times I feel like chucking it all in then the lads get on an upward curve and it draws you right back in….we’re all bonkers really there should be a medication for it which is non alcoholic
Fans and clubs (same thing really), mean nothing in to-days money driven scramble, its a sad state of affairs it really is.
Yep. And once there, unless you get relegated quickly, the debts really start to mount! It is a mental paradox, caused by the greed of players, agents, sometimes club owners and the corrupt and incompetent Premier League.
I live amongst derby fans. I am gutted for them. Dont deserve this rubbish. I have real concerns for their future. Even if this deal goes through there isnt much confidence there is any money. They have survived this season by selling youngsters. More of that will be needed IMO. I have a horrible feeling they havent found the bottom of their fall just yet.
i have often thought it would be worth becoming a yo-yo club...promotion to premier league then get relegated with around 100M + parachute payments, rinse and repeat a few years while saving as much as possible before finally using the saved cash and making a good go of establishing the club as a top ten premier league club. of course, that process can never be realistically aimed for as never a guarantee of going up or down but i do wonder if any club has considered it or even based some long term strategy on it due to the end of season hand out...far too many variables i reckon and what happened to the likes of ourselves, leeds, derby etc can just as easily happen to any other club, remember, leeds were a regular european club at the time. really we just need to take the greed out of the game and get rid of 'agent power' and get back to lads getting a canny wage (not the silly money we are seeing now, of course) just for doing what they love.
Maybe Norwich and Watford? It could also be that their owners don't want to get into the sort of debt that can be involved in struggling along in the mid-to-lower reaches of the premiership and are happy to yo-yo until maybe they strike lucky with some of their youth players or cheapish transfers. Of course I maybe am being too kind and their yo-yoing could just be ineptitude!
Come on, let's be having you! In my opinion that was the most embarrassing scene on a football pitch since Milton Nunez!
Due to their importance to communities, I'd like to see the government introduce stronger legislation to protect football clubs from careless or negligent owners. Other cultural institutions and 'heritage assets' are protected through various forms of appropriate legislation and football clubs are an important part of our cultural heritage. I think part of the problem is that we still euphemistically call them 'clubs' when they are nothing of the sort in their current format. They are businesses and therefore the property of private individuals or shareholders. Most people missed it but it was a symbolic moment when Man Utd dropped the words 'Football Club' from their club badge. I'd like to see our clubs become true clubs again, perhaps in a system similar to the German 50+1 model or the socios model used by clubs like Barcelona. Everyone is against the TFT interest in our 'club' but fan ownership isn't necessarily a bad thing. Just not in their format.
