Who knows but i would guarantee its not in ME's pocket. I should imagine he gets nothing from us and is losing money hand over fist!! Come on warky, you cant honestly think he is making money from us?
Holloway is the sort of manager who can turn water into wine - McCarthy is different, a good honest grafter but he has no magic wand. But let's remember he knows very well he is working for Marcus Evans and that a steady ship is far more important to Evans than setting the club on fire. I reckon our flirts with relegation really put the ****s up him.
Maybe Mick thinks the money will get better value if he sits on it and waits for the right deal or even he wants to use it in the wage budget to attract better out of contract players ......just because you get money in you don't have to spend it straight away....look at the Andy Carroll to Liverpool panic buy wahoo we have a thirty million pound striker....erm no.
He has stopped charging interest on the debt. It's frustrating to see other clubs spending on transfer fees but I think we are going about things the right way.....for now. It will be interesting to see who gets done for breaching FFP.
Warky, i know your frustrated and i can see why uou are laying into Evans but can you seriously sayyou think he is taking money out of the club? The club was in serious debt when he took overand tbh i would say he saved us, not many would have taken that debt on!! Also, i do feel he has been badly advised in the past but has learnt from it!!
everyone knows my thoughts on the ME debt so I wont go over it again - suffice to say for me he wasnt acting in the clubs best interests. Onto the new debate. His Evening Star interview basically said that he came in, thought it would be easy and he appointed two managers who basically said 'we need 2 or 3 quality player to acheive your dream' That failed and since then he has get money firmly in pocket. Now I dont want us to wildly spend and buy promotion and I like the idea of living within a realistic budget (even without FFP). I just have two problems The first is... He gave lots of money to two people who couldnt spent it. I basically agree that when he took over we needed 2 or 3 quality players to add to that team to get at least to the play offs. We were doing well in the league and had a good squad unity. we just brought wrong player after wrong player. Jewells budget was greatly reduced and MM's is basically non - existant. It shouldnt the case of boom or bust. It should be the case of giving the money to the right manager. The second is... If it is a lack of budget rather than MM choice not to spend any cash - how are we in such a bad way? If we havent got a transfer budget, and in context we are a fairly large club, how to clubs in league 1 and 2 even survive? Our stadium may be half empty but our half empty is some smaller clubs 'dream' we have decent facilities, a decent ground, decent history, a fairly decent location given the 'dream' proximity to London all players deem to bang on about. Surely we should be able to scrap together 500k - 1m a season before player sales are taken into account
My thoughts on ME very much mirror those on MM.Both dug us out of very bad situations and have steadied the ship,but not sure either of them is the best to take us to the next level.
I just think that Evans has gone too far down the road of cutting! Staff have lost their jobs, Match Day Tickets are way over priced and yet the product hasn't much improved. I agree with TB when he says that Evans gave the cash to the wrong managers and now that we have a decent manager he is not allowing money to be spent! This approach is ok for maybe a couple of seasons but the longer this goes on the further we shall fall behind! Im not for one moment suggesting that ME should start throwing his money around again but there is a reasonable balance to be made and a couple of million is not an unreasonable amount to be spending on players! What I think is unreasonable is to keep picking up freebies and expecting them to perform to the level we want them to over the course of a season. The Crawley game was a real eye opener and should be a stark wake up call to the management and owners. Coaching average players to get better is all well and good, having a decent youth academy is all well and good BUT the here and now demands a sprinkling of quality players! Sorry for the rant by Im getting steadily disillusioned with what is happening and although Mick is a wonderful manager even he will soon realise that you need to spend money on quality.
What other choice does Evans have Warky espeically with FFP on the way? Yes I'm frustrated Jewell and keane threw millions down the pan, yes I'm ridiculously annoyed McCarthy is getting sod all to spend but our current spending was unsustainable Warky. We've gone from £36 mill in debt when Evans took over ( mainly due to the two stands, George, and Sereni )to £80 mill. We're currently ( or have been ) losing over £10 MILLION A YEAR!!!!!! The wage bill had to get cut, and frustratingly we won't be spending much on transfers either. Then we're expected by supporters to compete with the likes of Blackburn paying Rhodes £40k a week plus, Reading paying Pobreniak over £35k, Forest spending £5.5 mill on one player, then the three relegated clubs on HUGE parachute payments. It's going to be a damn struggle!
I agree you need quality Warky but you can get that quality without spending millions likewise you can spend millions and end up with cack( Lee Martin).....players should be rated on their talent and not their price tag IMO....
Personally, I don't feel I can place too much criticism at our owner. There are many things he has done poorly and could have been handled better, but in terms of the money pumped into the club I think he has acted as almost everyone else would have done. He made his mistakes early on with Keane and tried to adjust accordingly and quite rightly has cut the supply of endless money. I think anyone would do the same. £X million pounds wasted and an investment going down the pan, of course he was going to tighten his belt and start to run the business accordingly, he is after all a businessman and not an endless supply of money that some fans think he is, he does have to balance the books and after the first few years the scales were well and truly crocked in that regard. The main frustration, in fact the only real bugbear is (as most have said) he has wasted money at the wrong time on the wrong people. It is a cruel twist of fate that we didn't have the manager when the money was available and I'm sure that ME wishes things would have worked out differently and would act differently given his time again, more so than anyone else, but it is what it is. We have an owner that has invested millions on the playing staff, it hasn't worked and rightly he isn't willing to keep pissing money up a wall
Going back to my old favourite issue, if his debt interest calculated on the true figure then we would be in a better position. Whilst everyone says its a tax fiddle to stop a huge ME tax bill it does sod all to help us as a club. Our losses are high but so are those at a number of clubs. There has to be something diproportionately wrong that means we are unable to compete financially. Whether that is the interest/ existing wages or something else is up for debate but our size does not seem to add up to our spending capabilities.
Isn't it pretty worrying to think that we cant even compete with the likes of Bournemouth, Brighton, Middlesborough, Charlton for players out of contract! There have been plenty in this window that have gone out to clubs who are smaller than us! Believe me I was at the Crawley game and it was one of the worst most inept displays I have seen from a Town side we were that poor! We have no strength in depth and you cant simply just coach your way out of this! We should be inversting the Cresswell money to strengthen because believe me we are thin on quality and with injuries and suspensions we will not cope with the demands of the season. Mid Table mediocrity for the umpteenth season! Sorry but Im just bored with this bollox now!
How do we know Mick wants all these players they want Warky!? Brighton are selling and reducing their wage bill dramatically, they are another us after splashing the dosh. Goes to show if we were " so poor " people calling for Henshall / Marriott/ Taylor / Bru are a little off the mark For what it's worth, I think we'll be snapping up another striker, and cheapy signing somewhere, and perhaps two on loan. Bournemouth may be competing right now, but that won't last. Charlton have got themselves into a right old mess. Boro will have a decent season though me thinks!
Warky I know exactly where you are coming from and it really fecks me off too but saying that, who vis to say Mick would not spunk it away like the others, after all, his purchases aint really set the world alight, look at Nouble!!! He has done better in the freebie market!! The good times will come back one day, give it a few seasons!! Then Ollie will come and take us to the promised land
Everything wrong is MEs fault, everything right is MMs Magic. That is how I'm reading a lot of these posts. And obviously that is a naive black and white view of the situation. Where has the Cresswell money gone? Into the clubs bank account. We don't need to spend it right away, We brought in Parr and Mick seems more than happy with Mings that covers LB. Stewart was brought in to supply, but unfortunately joined the long list of players who come to us and get injured. Henshall is 'one for the future' Bru and Bajner - To me this shows a widening of the net. It all goes back a point, already mentioned in this thread, that has been doing the rounds since Mick first came in. Are these the players he wants? Judging by Taylor, Loach, JET among others, Mick seems to know what he wants. None of these players have been forced on him, particularly Bru and Bajner. Would he buy any different with money to spend? It's been repeatedly claimed (PR, Propaganda maybe, but claimed none the less) Money is available to him so it seems to me he's getting what he wants. The Crawley game. - Every individual 90 minutes is Micks direct responsibility. He could have played the first team to 'ensure' a victory but instead he used the game to bring through some youth and play the fringe players we, as fans, consistantly demand, they proved they're not ready, certainly not playing as a 2nd 11. How to fix our depth is down to philosophy, do we go out and bring in 1st team players with 1st team wages just to have 22 players allowing us to get to the next round of a competition we're unlikely to win anyway. Or do we invest in getting the youth production line going again and leave space in Mick's 22 for them when they're ready. The answer is somewhere in the middle, we need to make sure we have the players to cover injuries, as is the case now, but if were going to have the youth come through and make 50% of our first team we cant be denying them the opportunities to play and Mick the opportunity directly manage them. It is a very long term project to fix years of naivety, and because of those years it unfortunately means this re-transformation is more dramatic and 'obvious' than any of us would ideally like, but I'm confident we will reap the rewards.
Good post Mike...bags of sense. If, and its a big If, we grab a home win Saturday, with Dids & Murph starting, as well as Henshall who has to start firing them across...all will be well on here and the sweet mood music will be playing!
