It's interesting to see the figures, although (and I accept without having the financials it would be best impossible to say) I do wonder what a fair selling price would be. He spent £12m, and he says the £9m went in and hadn't been used (if we believe him). Then there's this extra £6m, but I wonder whether this genuinely increases the value or whether it's just him having to spend to cover his own mistakes (for example wasting money on Grigg, does that transfer fee and resultant high wages really add value to the club?). I don't see how he can reasonably expect to get the vast majority of what he put in back, seeing as we've made no progress on the pitch, have no parachute payments to come, no players worth anything significant etc. For the club to have anything like held it's value he'll have had to have done really well on the cost cutting side. You'd definitely hope he'd sell if he gets £25m (and the FPP loan is left for him to repay), from what we know until the accounts come out it sounds about right.
In terms of the asking price there's nothing official in terms of Stewart Donald being quoted as saying he wants £40m, but more than one consortium linked has mentioned that figure or thereabouts, whether to papers or others. The only stuff in the papers is things like this
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...id-to-seek-52-million-in-u-k-soccer-team-sale where the people stating it haven't wanted their identities made known but its accurate, according to more than one interested party
The value of something is whatever someone else is prepared to pay for it. That Bloomberg article says “up to £40m”. These deals are normally presented as a valuation range and it could easily mean £25m to £40m or £35m to £40m. Who knows - but saying that you are looking for a price of up to £40m is not the same as saying that you are asking for £40m.
Football clubs are very hard to value because most of them always lose money and other deal info is hard to find. As seen with SD purchase of SAFC the headline price, even if you know it, is less than half the real picture. How much debt, cash, length of key player contracts, etc. It’s not easy.
All we do know is that a £28m sale price is enough for FPP to be paid back and for SD to walk away with the original money that he put in. His £6m loan and then the initial equity.
Does he deserve not to make a loss? Well the club was losing a huge amount of money when he came in. Although cost-cutting is the easy bit, growing a business is not.
Personally I don’t see why anyone would offer over £30m given the situation and how much investment in the playing squad is needed. Even to offer that much would only be to get the deal done quickly by someone who had money to spare.
That is why FPP are happy to wait it out in my view. Their loan is not really at risk, time is on their side. I don’t know the exact terms of the loan and how it converts to equity, but at a guess it will be something like 51% with an option to buy the rest at the same value, ie £19m or something. Which leaves just enough for Madrox to pay back SD his loan and leave it with the same equity that it started with. So that is the worse case for SD, perhaps, to hand over the keys to FPP.
This is probably why SD can dig his heels in looking for another buyer. Any other buyer has to bid enough for the club to be able to pay back FPP as well. He probably doesn’t have to accept a bid that forces him to take a loss, as the FPP deal provides a floor for him. I might be wrong about the 51% though, so maybe it is lower than that, but there will be a floor valuation of some kind.
So all that is happening is that SD is looking for someone to outbid FPP, and clearly failing. What I don’t know is whether there is a timelimit for this and a point at which FPP have to be paid back or handed the club.