Alternatively, peoples' perception is informed by his history (where he had to turn state's evidence to avoid the death penalty, and where he only came to own our club by a technicality), the bit where he had to spend months getting together the funds, or the bit where he hasn't demonstrated much involvement with the club over the past couple years beyond stating that we can't expect his largesse.
Er... you can’t just speak for people. I’d say my feelings on he “sounds dodgy” don’t correlate to any of the things you’ve listed. Always best not to assume NZ, it can make an ASS of U and ME
We have demonstrated that by coming 7th, 6th and 8th in consecutive seasons, whilst selling some of our better players. We then didn’t get it right for a couple of years, which emphasises something I’ve said many times in the past.... recruitment is 50:50 Bottom line Schad is that it appears you wanted lots more money spent. While it may increase the chance of getting things right, it certainly wouldn’t guarantee it - if you want a guarantee.... we’ll you know I can accept that a club the size of Saints had a strategy to make profits while trying to be self sustaining by selling and buying. Remembering also that lots of those players were wanting to be sold also. We differ on what we seemed ok for the club and the clubs owners to do.
That is absolutely not why I see him as dodgy and I absolutely would be complaining if he was pumping stupid money into the club.
Maybe not exactly the top 6 but there's certainly been mention of sugar daddies and TSS mentioned how of all the rich owners in football we get someone with no money so it all amounts to the same thing does it not that people are/were hoping for Gao to pump his own money in? I never mentioned us spending like City, I made the point that it's a tad hypocritical for people who have moaned about clubs like City to be hoping that we do something similar.
I’m going to take a slightly different tack here, which I accept is completely idealistic, but might, MIGHT, just happen. What if building a sustainable, completely self-financing business model is actually the most future-proof way? What if the football-supporting public, who after all pay for everything one way or another, tire of the big-6 bias in the media and, somehow, demand that FFP is finally fully implemented in an equitable way, and enforced? Wouldn’t a club which was already following the rules benefit from that?
Have no problem with us being self-sufficient and running a stable club....think that was always the intention from the moment Markus came in. We needed a financial injection at that point to sort us out and it was a decent amount for League 1, but there was no intention that we would be a runaway train financially. However, I can't see fans having enough power to demand much....that would involve organisation (and that would be like herding cats) and would also need to involve the large groups that follow the top clubs and can't see that happening either. The most likely scenario is that the big clubs form a European League and the rest of us would feed on scraps.
What I want, ultimately, is a situation where we have the ability to spend when it is necessary for us to spend, and to hold on to players when it is possible to hold on to players. If our model relies on us to have the best recruitment team in the league to keep our heads above water because we're operating under different constraints than the other 19 teams, that puts us at a disadvantage, but possibly a manageable one; however, if that disadvantage is compounded because we cannot spend because our owner lacks the liquidity to do so, that becomes an outright threat to the club's future. Thus my distaste for the high-minded talk of the previous regime. Being an oasis of sanity in an ocean of irrational spending is fine. Puffing yourself up as that when your real intention is to cash out and sell the club on to someone highly questionable is not fine.
Well said ^^ Plus, I am fed up to the back teeth that the best thing anyone can say about Saints is that they are 'a well run club'. That's not because Saints are not a well run club, but because there's f*** all else to say.
Ah..... all 19 other clubs eh?? And once again Schad I have not been discussing the new owner, despite you wanting to steer it that way. Let’s forget that for the time being, as it’s a separate discussion we could have been sold to a squeaky clean person who also didn’t want to spend). Ok, let’s switch this round. What would you have spent in the years below? 2014: £31.0m 2015. £12.3m 2016: £5.0m 2017 £34.1m 2018: £28.6m
I am reminded of a certain Rupert Lowe who spouted how pleased he was to get two Dutch managers for the price of one...
Because that's what the thread is about! I have been talking about that from the beginning because that is in fact the subject of the discussion!
Trouble is, in my view, you’re dealing with extreme hypotheticals about the past and the expectant future under Gao. Us fans don’t know how much it would have taken to have kept Pochettino or Koeman at the time(either personally or in Budgets) when faced against clubs with bigger stadia, stronger history and much larger resources. If we enjoy a bit of success under Ralph, then when does that tipping point come and how could you prevent the seemingly inevitable from happening again.
Our wage bill is a problem. Not necessarily its size -- we're right around the median in the league -- but how it's distributed, which is to say that an awful lot of it is going to players who are bad. It needs to be trimmed, but I wouldn't expect that we'll spend significantly even if we take 10m or more off of it (which is probably about as much as we can while still fielding a team). Mostly, we need to excise the bad contracts because i) they aren't really helping us anyway, and ii) they represent an existential threat if we get relegated.
Not when you first replied to my post... we were talking (you and I) about spending.. I asked about profits, you replied and you and I started discussing the spending. You kept bringing in the ownership part, which I hadn’t raised at the part of the conversation. I noticed you ignored my direct question on what you’d spend, but hey, don’t worry now. let’s leave it there.
The answer to the question of what I'd have spent is this: you cannot simply deduct X from that profit because spending is not zero-sum. Had we spent when we were sitting in the CL spots in late January (and ultimately missed CL by three points) it might have been a net financial benefit. Had we moved more swiftly to extend our better players (as we later did, though for some reason we expanded that to extending our lesser players as well), it might have been a net financial benefit when we ultimately sold them. If we didn't let the squad atrophy, resulting in drastically lowered revenues, it might have been a net financial benefit. The choices we have made have not only made us worse as a footballing side, but worse as a financial asset. Ultimately you're arguing against a position that exactly no one has made. Not a single person has suggested that we throw around enormous sums of money...not just in this thread, I'm not sure anyone has made that argument on this forum, period. Rather, I and others have argued that the club has wrapped itself in the mantra of being financially responsible while doing things that have endangered the club's financial footing. Because it has.
