Kieran Maguire on City's finances

While I felt Steve Bruce was fantastic for the club I'll never forgive him for sabotaging our campaign in Europe

 

I agree Peter, that one he got wrong, but we all make mistakes.

 

'Flogged to death enough' by who? I was responding to your post in which you were flogging it to death!!

The old boy was,as you rightly say,throwing money at Steve Bruce but in the process he was notching up sizeable debt.It (the feel good factor)was good at the time,we all enjoyed it,we were witnessing some of the best football we'd seen in decades.The old boy had to step back through Ill-health and Ehab Allam took over the reigns...He clearly(rightly or wrongly) didn't like what he saw in the accounts and reeled in the big spending.He was a businessman and ran the business on a far tighter budget,that's clear to us all.

He's gone now,we've moved on,we'll see how far the new owner wants to take us and how deep his pockets are when push comes to shove but I'd urge caution in expecting him to splash his personal wealth on appeasing us all by decreasing his bank balance on an annual basis...He too is a businessman.

 

When I said flogged to death I meant in the past, this has been debated to death over time.

 

One big difference is that our current owner knows how to bring in revenue and how to attract media attention (though he is let down by the local RL centric rag and Radio Station). He won’t think something daft like changing the name will have people flocking to invest in us (a daft idea which brought about a vague promise of £ 1 million when we were getting £100million + from the PL and caused far more bad feeling than any of our even worse owners managed.)

 

I agree,it has.

As I've said,the new owner has a far better grasp on marketing the Club.Hopefully it will see us reap the benefits of additional revenue in terms of a serious push for promotion.A huge crowd expected today which very importantly points to us having a sizeable fan base on tap(albeit he's reduced match ticket prices and is giving away tickets) but that's no bad thing ,getting local kids interested in their local Club.

I had planned to go today but industrial action was proposed this weekend which was subsequently withdrawn but by then the fares had jumped substantially

 

I'll make clear...I absolutely disagreed to the name change madness and of course it caused bad feeling.I didn't like the badge change either and I don't buy the merchandise due to that.

 

Wasn’t saying you did, Ric. Proper supporters disagreed. Just some PL supporters there to see the opposition rather than City who did not care what we called or what we played in as long as it was in the PL thought it OK. Talking of badges, I would like to see a badge with a more ferocious tiger on than the one we have. There are plenty of better ones out there.

 

I think the big difference is Acun is a fan at heart, total opposite to Ehab. Which might actually be a bad thing if you consider he might throw caution to the wind financially to try get us achieving. There’s positives/negatives to each of them.

I know which I’d rather have as our owner though!

 

For now..

While you don't want the other extreme, you do want some moderation when required. If as some say, the F23 accounts make for grim reading then it's a worry.

 

Pity that Ric, would have been a good game to be present at.

 

That's not my recollection but I wouldn't argue the point.

 

I wish he didn't do that, but to honest I think any manager would've done. It's not a Steve Bruce thing, just a modern football thing. In the Premier League particularly, we convince ourselves that every cup competition pales into insignificance against the league. Matchgoing fans generally don't agree with it but we're the minority. It comes up every so often at various clubs.

 

No different to Spurs rotating in the FA Cup to protect them for a league game which they then lost.

 

The difference is they will be in the cup again next season, and the one after etc etc. It took us 110 years to have a go at European football and unless Acun's dream really takes off in the next few years, none of us will have a chance to see it again

 

And how many have they won? Reckon their supporters were just as annoyed with that rotation.

 

I know they do it but did he really think starting a couple of our best players would have messed up our chances of Premier League survival?

 

Yes he did. He said he needed to rest the players so they were ready for such a huge game against Stoke at home at the weekend. We then drew that game at home with Stoke, and he was gushing in the radio about how good a point it was, how it could be the difference between staying up and going down, and how we probably wouldn’t have held on to it if the team has played 90 minutes in the Europa League.

And we still went down anyway.

 

Didn’t we have a man sent off after half an hour and held on for over an hour with ten men?