please log in to view this image Wolves v Leeds Utd Saturday 22nd October 2016 @ 3pm Streaming links to follow Good Morning Everyone, Leeds make the 117 mile journey south to the Molyneux to face an out of sorts Wolverhampton Wandereres. Garry Monks men will be looking to get back to winning ways having narrowly lost at Derby and drawn at home to Wigan courtesy of an injury time equaliser. Had Leeds held on to their lead, they would be sitting pretty in 9th place instead of 14th, one point ahead of Wolves. Stuart Dallas is expect to be out for a further fortnight with a calf injury, Bridcut is four weeks away from coming back and Berardi continues to train with the first team, but has 90 mins under his belt for the under 23's. To be fair our defence is fine, it does not need tampering with, its the midfield we need to worry about. I guess Monk will pick the same team that drew against Wigan midweek. He could start with Grimes or Viera, but unlikely.
Reminds me so much of GFH Nottingham Forest owner asked buyers for £1m salary plus player bonuses • Fawaz al-Hasawi’s series of extraordinary demands to potential buyers • Forest owner wants 20% of future profits please log in to view this image Nottingham Forest’s owner, Fawaz al-Hasawi, has been asking for £50m for 80% of the club, with him taking 20% of future profits. Fawaz al-Hasawi, the increasingly beleaguered owner of Nottingham Forest, has been asking potential buyers of the club for an annual salary that could rise above £1m and a series of financial demands that include an extraordinary clause entitling him to whatever the players earn in bonuses. Hasawi has also had to stave off a threatened revolt from the club’s players, the Guardian can reveal, because of the frequency with which they have been paid late or not received their bonuses. However, it is his financial conditions for selling the two-time European Cup winners, while insisting he remains as chairman with a 20% stake, that highlights Hasawi’s determination to negotiate a remarkable deal for himself only a few days after the Kuwaiti issued a public apology for the erratic way he had run the club and admitted whoever replaced him would be “more professional”. Hasawi has been asking for £50m to sell 80% of the club as well as being allowed to stay at the City Ground with a condition written into the deal that he no longer makes any financial contributions but takes 20% of future profits. Hasawi, in other words, has been trying to strike a deal whereby he would not contribute to helping the club tick over financially but stands to make millions of pounds if the new regime can halt Forest’s decline and re-establish them in the Premier League. Forest are 16th in the Championship after four years under Hasawi’s ownership in which the average attendance has plummeted, the league position has steadily got worse every season and the club have had to deal with a series of winding-up orders in the high court, a transfer embargo for breaching financial fair-play regulations and starting the season with a reduced capacity because the ground did not have a safety-certificate holder. Under the proposed terms, Hasawi’s salary would start at £480,000 a year but go up to £1.08m if Forest were ever promoted – the equivalent of around £21,000 a week at a club where the average player salary is currently £12,000 – and all the money he has put in would be paid back in three lump sums. On top of that, he would receive a promotion bonus of £480,000 and if Forest stayed in the top division the following season he would bank another one-off payment amounting to a year’s salary – meaning he would get £2.16m in one season, even discounting the players’ bonuses and any share of profits. Prospective buyers have also been informed that he would like the total sum of what the players earn in bonuses, a revelation that is unlikely to go down well in the dressing-room at a time when Hasawi’s erratic leadership is already being questioned within his own club. Forest’s players are becoming so frustrated by the frequency they have not been paid on time that when it happened again during the last international break some of the more aggrieved members of the first-team squad demanded a top-level meeting to air their grievances. Those players also discussed between themselves whether they would be within their rights not to train as a protest. They opted against taking such drastic action, deciding it would be better to maintain their professionalism, but it was not the first time it had been mooted and that indicates the strength of feeling inside the club. Hasawi is currently negotiating with an American consortium led by John Jay Moores, the former owner of the Major League Baseball franchise San Diego Padres. Moores, 72, has previously tried to initiate deals with Everton andSwansea City but talks with Forest are at an advanced stage and the relevant people have been regular visitors to the City Ground in recent weeks. What is not clear is whether Moores has accepted Hasawi’s demands or if the current owner has had to modify his expectations at a cost to himself. Yet it is understood the conditions attached to the takeover put off a group of Canadian investors earlier in the year. Red Bull also had serious aspirations of buying out Hasawi but did not like the idea of an 80-20 split. Forest have also attracted interest from China. please log in to view this image With this uncertainty as the backdrop, there are also concerns within the club that the notoriously trigger-happy Hasawi is contemplating removing the latest manager, Philippe Montanier, or that the new owners might want to bring in their own man. Montanier is the seventh permanent manager in the Hasawi era but his position has been weakened only three months into the job and his close ally, the director of football, Pedro Pereira, resigned this month. Pereira, previously the chief executive at Sporting Braga, is well regarded within the industry and his appointment was regarded as a coup when he arrived in June under the recommendation of Evangelos Marinakis, the Greek shipping magnate and Olympiakos owner who was planning his own takeover. Pereira first started considering his future towards the end of August in the aftermath of Oliver Burke’s £13m transfer to RB Leipzig, a deal Hasawi undertook against Montanier’s wishes. Forest received that payment in one sum and Hasawi promised it would be reinvested in the club before confirming last week he was close to confirming a takeover. “I tried my best,” he said. “It didn’t happen. I wish and I hope that it happens with whoever wants to buy the club. I’m sorry [for] the fans. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right. When it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen and you shouldn’t continue. Maybe the new people will do it better than me. I am sure they are more professional and I wish them all the best. All of them are professional.” Hasawi initially did not comment and the Guardian was told, by his solicitors, that the figures are not disputed. However, the 47-year-old later released a statement via the club’s website. “I am aware of reports recently published in the Guardian newspaper regarding investment in the club. I can confirm that the information published was inaccurate and my solicitors have confirmed that there has been no communication between them and the newspaper. The terms of any potential investment deal are, and will remain, confidential and the club will not be making any comment in relation to this issue. The matter has now been passed to my legal team, as such it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”
Leeds United will hold a minute's applause for Gary Sprake before next week's League Cup tie against Norwich City. please log in to view this image
morning ... can we move the Forest story to it's own thread please, great topic to discuss ... maybe also set up a Gary Sprake thread to talk about a Revie player in his own right Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Morning all and well done Forest you have another skint arab running your club. simple question really, when the FL can go after Cellino every few months, how the fook can these so called arab owners be allowed to buy clubs. Greed, thats the reason because Harvey thinks an arab owner is a billionaire from a royal family. harvey and he FL are not fit for purpose and the fans who suffer not the FL Lets hope Monk has got the team sorted for Wolves and a few fooks have been thrown into them. With luck we will be more relaxed down there and can turn it on. Lets hope for an early goal and sick of saying this, but if we score inside the frst 10 minutes we will go on and win easily. we havent scored earlier than 23 minutes and struggled all season so far and not scored 2 goals
can't see Monk changing the starting eleven, giving them a chance to redeem themselves after the heartbreak draw against Wigan ... we need to get something from the Wolves game and keep them behind us in the table ... they are another club with big money behind them who are strugglng to make an impact, so a win at Molyneaux will be huge Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Morning all. This season is strange, for me anyhow. Previous few years, every defeat left me pissed off with thoughts of "here we go again, same old ****e" type of thing.Different this year though.Clearly a lot of improvement all over the place and reading the weekly posts from the guys here and social media, seems to confirm that. A midweek draw, a bad result but in front of a healthy 20k crowd, but still feel very positive about upcoming games. Of course, Cellino only needs to forget to shave one morning, and the usual protesters will start making a racket again
Morning Billy, are you saying move the Forest story to the Forest board, or its own thread on the Leeds board?
Morning Eire. Agree with you. Suppose a 20k crowd, on a cold Tuesday evening in October against a relegation candidate is not too bad. Would be great to be getting crowds of 30k again. This should come as we climb the table.
Morning all, 20,000 home attendance, even on a Tuesday night, even against little Wigan, is just not acceptable for a one club city It's embarrassing
You must remember, at weekend games, a good section of the crowd travel long distances, whether from abroad or other parts of England. Its just not possible for many to be at Elland Road at 7.45 midweek unless taking a couple of days off work. Id guess 20k midweek equates to 24 or 25 k on a Saturday playing against the same unglamorous opposition
Yes I get that Eire for me it's a 450 mile round trip and over £100 all in but for a club with such a large catchment area it's annoying that people living within half an hour of the ground can't be bothered to attend
Its like teams that filled grounds in the pl and get relegated, they lose 15k fans over a couple of seasons if they dont get back up. Personally, I find it amazing, after well over a decade in the doldrums, that we can still attract 20k midweek. Scum have a big catchment area but give them 12 years out of the pl and see how many of their 70k gobshites would continue to turn up
No it isn't Forza because Wigan are a little club with minimal support. Were we to get 20k for a Tuesday against the likes of the Bar Codes, then your point would be justified. Morning by the way
Morning all. Irritating result on Tuesday. Some sloppy defending, but all in all some good stuff. Nice to see Charlie charging down the left. For Wolves, I think we might need Bridcutt return to a DM role. Maybe Dallas will be on the bench. If not. I'd expect to see Sackho on one side and Roooooooooooooooofe on the other. Time to get back to winning ways I think
attendances also get influenced by away support, and Wigan don't exactly fill their own tiny stadium so were never going to bump up the crowd on Tuesday ... the likes of Villa and Newcastle will bring at least 5000 if Leeds are willing to give them that amount ... our biggest problem with support is that we are starting to lose local youngsters to the so-called glamour clubs because of our long period outside the top flight I remember going to see Leeds Rhinos at Wembley in a Cup Final ... on the train afterwards I was sitting with a family from Leeds, all wearing their Rhinos shirts ... talk turned to Leeds United, and it turned out they went to Elland Road often, except for the 16-year old daughter ... she was a Chelsea "fan" because they had success under Mourinho and were wealthy enough to compete consistently ... I was stunned, a Leeds loving family with a Chelsea fan, but that's how it goes being outside the Prem does hurt your support base, but at least we know we still have a very large base, unlike the Bournemouths, QPRs, Blackpools, Pompeys and Boltons of this world ... when these smaller clubs drop out of the Prem and stay out beyond their now ridiculous parachute payments, they really start to suffer as they discover that their small support can't sustain them anymore here's another example ... I know a number of Huddersfield lads who haven't been to see their team play for over twenty years, but all have said that if Town get to the Prem they will start going to games again ... how fcuking sad Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
The plus side tothat Billy, is when we get back to the the **** hole that is the PL the fickle young Chelski and other fans will return
