STATEMENT FROM LEVEIN & KAPLAN

There comes a time when every football club has to be honest with itself and take the kind of tough decisions that secure its future. – Any business should be doing that on a daily basis.

That’s the point Swansea City has reached. – We have reached this point after two years of your ownership which has seen us tumble from mid table in the Premier League to a Championship side with a “wafer thin” squad

The decisions taken since relegation was confirmed have not been easy ones or ones necessarily supported by the fans. But they are ones designed to safeguard the long-term health of the club.- No one said it was going to be easy. Relegation is always a possibility in sport and a well run organisation would have had a planned exit strategy to deal with it thus negating the “requirement” for a firesale

After seven years in the Premier League, relegation was a bitter pill to swallow. - True

Revenues decline dramatically - even when you factor in parachute payments - Correct, revenues decline dramatically. We are all aware of that and again, that is something you should have planned for.

and you are inevitably left with players determined to leave the club. You are left with SOME players determined to leave the Club. Stoke and WBA have not had similar firesales.

In our case, matters were made worse by transfer mistakes we made in an attempt to survive in the Premier League. We are quite literally paying for these now. – Yes, YOU have made mistakes. You have royally ****** up because you have got ivolved in a business in which you only have a superficial knowledge.

But we cannot afford to feel sorry for ourselves because that will be be perceived as a point of weakness that other clubs will try to leverage against us. – Only you are feeling sorry for yourselves. We want you as far away from Swansea City Football Club as possible.

Relegation has to be seen as a rebirth for Swansea - a chance to press the reset button. – Does it? Are you telling s what to think?

Instead of constantly being on the back foot fighting for survival, we want to be rebuild our club on a strong financial footing with an exciting brand of passing football and players who are eager to improve and hungry to achieve.- That could be achieved if you didn’t constantly make the mistakes you mentioned earlier.

In Graham Potter, we have an innovative coach who has already shown an ability to play an exciting style of high-quality football with players determined to be successful. Graham and Kyle Macaulay have done a tremendous job bringing in young and talented footballers. -So what did you do to support Graham Potter this week? You failed to sign his main transfer target.

We understand fans have expressed disappointment and frustration with the transfer window but there had to be a cultural change. – Correct. There has to be a cultural change. We need people who understand football to run the Club. We need owners who are involved in the Club on a daily basis so decisions can be made quickly and effectively.

The squad was in need of an overhaul because we had players who simply were not going to be part of Graham’s plans and players who made it clear they did not want to play for Swansea City in the Championship. To try to keep those players has a corrosive effect on the club as a whole. – The fact that the squad needed an overhaul was due to your own ineffective transfer dealings and incompetence. To maintain any sort of playing stability at a Club you do not want to get to a point where you decimate the squad and rebuild it on one go. You have taken us to that point. I have never known a Club sell four centre halves in one transfer window.

We had to make hard decisions and we did. Every decision taken, though, was for a strategic reason as part of our restructuring. – That’s called common sense.

As a result of this window we have improved our financial footing and have positioned ourselves for a stronger and more secure future. – That may be the case, but at this stage we don’t have a squad to deal with a full campaign in the Championship.

There is still work to be done because the loan market is still open and we will do everything we can to support Graham and Kyle in the immediate weeks before the market closes.- That is and always been your role. The main issue is how competent you are in doing it.

In terms of recruiting players, again we had to be disciplined as we could not - and would not - put the club in a position where, in our view, the fees and wages demanded were not in the best interests of Swansea City. – By not being proactive in the transfer market at an early stage you left things to the last minute and allowed yourselves to be put in a position where people/Clubs could change their demands.

All money received from player sales has gone back into the club.- No **** Sherlock. How are you going to spend it?

We have brought in young players who want to be part of Swansea’s future and we believe there is a nucleus of talent and desire here now.- You have taken us from the Premier League and you have now assembled a young, cheap squad to try and stay in the Championship.

We don’t expect everyone to appreciate these words or the decisions taken and there will be negative views out there. – Correct. Not everyone appreciates your words or the decisions you take. There will be negative views, but there are also plenty of realistic views who express their disdain at your attempts at running a professional football Club.

We understand this has been a hugely painful time for everybody associated with Swansea City and there can be no denying that. – You understand you have F****d up.

Our response is to fight and try to build for the future. – Unless there is a cultural change, your response is to continue f*****g up the Club

Graham asks his players to be brave, to rise above the culture of fear of mistakes and to work hard to constantly improve. We must ask nothing less of ourselves. – You are already used to the culture of having no fear of making mistakes, in fact you are masters of it.

Stephen Kaplan & Jason Levien/PGF

 

A fair interpretation of what they said / wrote.

Business men feeling that had to say something, not being specific and hoping it would be seen in the positive. Unfortunately for them, people like yourself will fill the gaps in a more realistic way. Interesting to see their assessment as to the intellectual capacity of a football fan. I think they have misjudged the situation and their statement is more likely to exacerbate it than mitigate it.

 

Looking further forward, who do you think might buy the club off the yanks or take it on out of receivership, if it got that far. Some have already said that HJ may be driving you down to pick you back up again. Would that be welcomed? Can a fans group work?

 

Huw can **** off, if that happened then that would be me finished with the club and I’ll start following non league football.

 

The Supporters Trust has a strong legal case and needs to now grab the initiative in taking the boardroom to task head on, it paid £30,000 for legal opinion that showed we had a very strong case in court, they could also be pro-active in finding a better consortium to take over the club from these yankee jokers we are saddled with at the minute.

 

Fans make me laugh with their no substance comments blaming the Americans for everything..........Put it this way then.....You buy a business and you spend a lot of your own money to do that and your intention is to lose money and lower the standards of your company.....You see that the past two years that your company is losing money over hand and fist .....Would you leave things as they are or would you make radical unpopular changes because nobody goes into business not to make a profit........The Americans who have been in business for a long time and are very successful in what they do and not in it to lose money....Somebody said and it did make me laugh that Swansea are funding Rooney's move to D C united... How dull is that for common sense.....If it was not for the Americans we may not have a club.....Don't get me wrong i too get frustrated but at the end of the day they have people working for them at high salaries and know what they are talking about better than me or anyone else......They are not here to throw money away and are here to make Swansea city a profitable company playing football at the highest level possible.......Big changes was needed and the Americans have started it and we should be backing them to the hilt...

 

So what you are saying then is really the Yanks have saved our club and been the route cause of its downfall, I am curious as to what money they have spent, I think you find it is next to **** all and made probably an awful lot back, lets not forget the other 27 or so so called owners/ investors.

 

You are not understanding trunds..

 

You said with out them we may not have a club, so we should be thanking them for saving us not criticising them for being the orchestras of our recent downturn, the club has been here for over a hundred years before they put their filthy hands in to the pot and it will be here for hundreds more after they have had their fill and ****ed off. the later being sooner rather than later.

 

You are obviously not a businessman Where would we be without them ? There was not anyone Interested and Huw had to work very hard to persuade them we were a good proposition and we were......Look it is their business and they want to make it successful and we are just customers who have a choice of supporting them or not.......They are not here to lose money and i am glad they are doing something for the long term future of the club....

 

I can imagine the response from Jock Stein or Bill Shankly if you told them that football supporters are "customers", but as you have debased supporters to that level then you may as well look at the product the company is selling. How has the company improved the product over the last two years?

 

Well that is the big question. They have reduced the cost for a start. Some of you guys would say they are happier now the club is winning more than losing. (I think I may well be in the latter group too from the reverse side, if you like). Their next trick must be to balance income (reduced drastically) with the costs (possibly not reducing fast enough). The proof of the pudding is in the eating. That is, how many will continue to buy the product as time goes by?

 

My long dead dog talks more sense than you .WUM

 

I see the tablets are no longer working , "up the dosage nurse"

 

I saw an article on the Beeb this morning which suggested that Premier league clubs would make a profit if there were no supporters at games at all. It's all about TV revenues these days. Owning a football club is just a high outlay/high risk business where supporters and their views are now just an irrelevance, so I have some sympathy with Dai's view (and Lib's).

 

Wonder how a match would look with an empty stadium...… there was a Man City game in Moscow that came close, I think.
Then, there'd have to be canned crowd noise.

 

Now this is utter garbage, Huw chose the Yanks because they were the only interest that would line his pocket, The Chinese consortium wanted to buy the club and invest in the club as a whole, with not so much emphasis on wasting money on Director Buyouts............

 

Looks like Levein is used to writing bollocks:

"Levien has served as a Democratic strategist and campaign consultant. He was credited as the speechwriter for the Keynote Speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles given by Congressman Harold Ford, Jr.Levien and Ford have also co-authored a policy essay on campaign finance reform published by the Harvard Journal on Legislation"

 

Leveins missus has got an interesting background....

"Levien was born Meredith Kopit and raised in metropolitan Richmond, Virginia,[1] the daughter of Carole and Marvin Kopit.[2] She has one sister, Barbara.[2] She graduated from the University of Virginia[3] where she majored in rhetoric and worked at the college newspaper, The Cavalier Daily.[4] After school, she worked at The Advisory Board Company, a think tank founded by David G. Bradley and then for the digital agency i33/AppNet. After Bradley bought Atlantic Media (publisher of The Atlantic magazine), he rehired her in 2003, and she sold advertising eventually working her way up to associate publisher.[4]

In April 2008, she joined Forbes Media where she ran the Forbes Life Magazine. After stemming losses at the magazine by ending the print edition to focus on the digital side of the magazine, C.E.O. Tim Forbes appointed her group publisher. She also introduced programmatic buying (where the purchase of advertisements are done through online media) and "Brandvoice" which allows advertisers to create their own content under the Forbes logo. This new method of advertising, denominated as native advertising, has been criticized for blurring the line between editorial and advertising. In 2012, she was named chief revenue officer at Forbes Media.[4]

In July 2013, she was appointed executive vice president at The New York Times Company by C.E.O. Mark Thompson. Levien refocused The New York Times toward digital content and sales, hiring 80 new employees with internet skills and offered severance packages to 40 older employees. (sound familiar?) She again introduced native advertising under the name "Paid Posts" (where New York Times writers write advertisements in conjunction with customers in the same writing style and format as New York Times news articles) to increase advertising revenue; working with Netflix, Chevron, Dell, MetLife, and others"

 

The 40 older employees certainly Kopped-it