UV

You said he only he signed because we offered him more money than any other clubs involved. You said that kind of salary regime = hurling money out the window. You have repeatedly said how great the new wage structure is. The new wage structure would almost certainly not allocate the £50-60k a week you claim he is on to a young foreign fullback unproven in the PL. I can only conclude therefore you'd rather we hadn't signed him in the first place.

So you'd rather we hadn't signed him in the first place then?

They had to, it was part of the deal done back in 2004. If the casino legislation didn't go through the club would refund them the money they put in. Are you sure that £126m has been borrowed, and it's not just a facility which was agreed many years ago which is still in place? I very much doubt anything is actually happening now or we'd have heard about it. EDIT: No, wait - Ashley, Llambias, Pardew, CASINOS!!! It's all coming together - Ashley's running down NUFC as a football club so he can turn [email protected] into a massive Las Vegas style footy stadium themed casino!!!1!!11

Aye, it was initially the brainchild of Shepherd, MGM and the council during the whole super casino stuff. I've no idea how this works but how come Llambias is now director? Is it possible MGM Grand Newcastle was part of the deal for the club? Yeah, it would be.

MGM Grand Newcastle (Holdings) Limited's been a subsidiary since before Ashley. The plans for the hotel/extension were also pre-Ashley, and were put on hold as soon as he bought the club.

Knowing you have this view, can we now assume all of your posts are the official FA stance on any subject? It's sad that the FA is anti-free speech.

I hate Kinnnear and give him no credit because he is a Cockerney. This is why I also hated Hughton and gave him no credit for anything either.

No they wouldn't, if they'd got someone in who didn't work out for whatever reason they'd have sacked him and tried someone else. Just like Arsenal did until they got Wenger, just like Man U did until they got Ferguson, just like we did until we got Robson, just like every other club does. We certainly don't have a monopoly on poor managers, and it isn't the reason clubs go bankrupt.

If you look at the players in and out each year though, the years where they make their big money signings are when they sell their biggest earners and most expensive players. I don't get your point, they still have a positive net spend and are increasing their wage bill year on year. Their increased on-field success and attraction to supporters at home and abroad increases their turnover to cover this. In the last 5 years Spurs have spent on average £20m a season compared to us who have recouped £10m per season from transfers. Spurs are far more like the club we used to be than [email protected]. They must be getting nervous about being the next club to go out of existence like Leeds & Portsmouth. I hear it's pretty much inevitable. If they hadn't made the correct managerial decision after Ramos, they might have done. Their owner got it right, Shepherd got it wrong time after time. Levy's managers - Hoddle, Santini, Jol, Ramos, Redknapp. Hardly a list to be proud of, the only one with any success prior to Redknapp was Jol who was sacked shortly into the new season after a poor start having finishing 5th the season before and replaced with a manager who could only manage a bottom half finish and was sacked the following year. What exactly does that have to do with how the club is being run today, other than the fact Ashley has an even worse track record on managers?

If you look at the players in and out each year though, the years where they make their big money signings are when they sell their biggest earners and most expensive players. I don't get your point, they still have a positive net spend and are increasing their wage bill year on year. Their increased on-field success and attraction to supporters at home and abroad increases their turnover to cover this. In the last 5 years Spurs have spent on average £20m a season compared to us who have recouped £10m per season from transfers. Spurs are far more like the club we used to be than [email protected]. They must be getting nervous about being the next club to go out of existence like Leeds & Portsmouth. I hear it's pretty much inevitable.

True, but at the same time a lot of clubs used player sales to gradually progress. Spurs have to a certain extent. I just hope we keep Enrique basically, that's the safest bet. As much as I hate the c***s, Spurs is a prime example. Their netspend was pretty minimal until recently (selling the likes of Carrick, Berbatov, Keane, Defoe) for big fees and building the squad with that cash. It's only really been the last year or so that the net spend has increased a lot and are spending big without needing to sell their star players...and even then I reckon if a mega club offers over the odds for the likes of Bale or Modric they'd struggle to keep hold of them. The way Spurs and Arse have build their squads are good examples yes. Right now we're not able to hold onto our best players if they want to go. But through building brick by brick, we can develop enough depth to establish ourselves at around the European spots. Selling Carrick allowed Spurs to buy the likes of Bale. And us selling Enrique, could make it possible for us to go out and buy good talents with loads of potential. Can we please stop with this annoying myth that Spurs progressed by selling their best players. They were undoubtedly set back in their progress by the sale of Carrick despite spending ALL of the money they received PLUS another 20-odd million. http://i.imgur.com/89DFY.png Maybe the figures aren't completely accurate, but according to that site over the last decade Spurs net spend has been: 01-02 £8m 02-03 £13m 03-04 £14.2 04-05 £5m 05-06 £17.8m 06-07 £23.8m 07-08 £34.0m 08-09 £19.5m 09-10 £0.5m 10-11 £17.5m Total: £153.3m

Moving this to a more relevant thread as I thought it deserved some defence... Joke. It's certainly comical that someone would post a still picture of a player out of his position as evidence of poor defending. Watch a video of it and go back to the start of the move. He has to cover the centre because all the other defenders are over on the left or in the case of Williamson covering Saha. http://i.imgur.com/16ZXQ.png http://i.imgur.com/wzXx7.png http://i.imgur.com/49Tbp.png http://i.imgur.com/sVrsc.png http://i.imgur.com/s2cHn.png http://i.imgur.com/QZq5g.png

Yes you are. There's nothing intellectual about hating someone for taking a better paid job with improved prospects, especially when their current employer encourages them to do so.

Carroll was playing in the first team in 2006 and had been at the club since he was 10. Ranger, Ferguson, Krul and Kadar are hardly local lads. Bringing in young promising lads from around the world at 16/17 is one part of the academy, but making sure you're the academy of choice for kids in your catchment area is another. If another club gets the pick of the kids when they are younger, they're unlikely to jump ship to us from Sunderland or Middlesbrough at 16.

Good job Mike's pouring money into the academy to make sure we get the pick of the local lads in nice and young then.

Never going to happen. Riise doesn't fit our bill. Not saying it's true at all, but how does he not fit our bill? If he's a free agent, I'd say he fits our bill exactly. Please include an explanation of how Lovenkrands does fit our bill in your answer.

It seems you're still having comprehension problems, and don't seem to understand that all the parties accepted that the meaning of the term "final say" in this context is to do with the acceptance or non-acceptance of a player, and nothing to do with wanting players outside the financial restraints set by the board. Keegan accepted there were financial restraints, he very likely wasn't happy with what they were, but that was not the issue which caused him to be constructively dismissed, it was the fact that the club signed a player when he explicitly and forcefully told them he did not want them to. This proved beyond doubt that club had broken the contract, however it's pretty likely (it's strongly implied in the report) that even without this explicit example, they would have found in Keegan's favour anyway as Dennis Wise was happy to tell them that he was within his remit to ignore the views of the manager and it was in fact he who would decide who was bought or sold by the club. There are very few managers, and certainly no top ones who would accept that situation unless they themselves were happy to put the responsibility in that person's hands. Are you seriously trying to suggest that it's an everyday occurrence at Man U or Arsenal say that Wenger & Ferguson get told that a player is going to be brought into the first team squad, and when they say they don't want him the club goes fuck you we're bringing him in anyway? Constructively dismissed = dismissed = £2m payoff explicitly stated in contract What part of that don't you understand? Keegan's lawyers tried to argue that as the contract was broken by the club it was all null and void so that part of the contract shouldn't hold, but they were ruled against, and rightly so IMO. They also tried to argue that he should get compensation because his reputation had been sullied. The ruling was that the report findings would be enough to restore his reputation. They were very naive and wrong on that count and his reputation has undoubtedly been damaged, so he probably should have received compensation for that. You're just a nosey parker. When stuff like that comes out, both parties are damaged as negatives will be focused upon, but I'd stake my life the club would come out by far the worse of the two to any independent party.

Massively skewed by the year we bought Shearer, Sir Les & Tino for £30m. and including Jan 08-Sept 08 What I hope we all realise now is what we should have done when we finished 6th in '95 was not to have bought those players, but to have tried to bring through some youngsters from the academy. This would surely have had better outcome than bringing in those mercenary trophy signings.

I think some people have either forgotten, or have a poor comprehension of what was said in the tribunal findings and need to read it again. http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/4662583.Keegan_tribunal___read_the_full_transcript Here are some snippets that can hopefully clear some points up for the hard of understanding For madras, to address his implication that Keegan wasn't given the full amount of his contract because they thought he was partly to blame: Clearly on the last point they were sadly wrong. Keegan had a choice. He could have put up with being manipulated and lied to, being forced to lie or stay silent on transfer dealings, and carried on collecting his lucrative wages. Or he could leave and risk the club suing him for £2m for walking out on his contract - the reason he needed to prove constructive dismissal. The fact that some think he should have continued to take the club's money, lie to mislead to supporters (rather than to help with a sale/purchase or for the benefit of a player, etc), and just be a front for the actions of others at the club who did not in his eyes have the best interests of the footballing side of the club at heart says quite a lot about the integrity of those people. On the timing of his departure - if he had stayed and left say at the end of the next season it would have been claimed by the club (with justification) that he had accepted the situation, he would never have won a constructive dismissal case in those circumstances, and would have had to pay the club £2m. There would have been no less of an outcry from supporters then than there was when he did leave, however it would have also had the effect of disrupting that Summer's transfers. If he had left during the Summer, then he would have been accused (with some justification) of "not giving the system a chance". Once again, there would have been no less of an outcry from supporters then than there was when he did leave, and it would have also had the effect of disrupting that Summer's transfers - more than Milner would have most likely put transfer requests in, and we may have had to offer Xisco better wages to join!

I will try and illustrate what I mean by amortisation skewing the picture with an example. A player comes through the academy and is sold by the club in the Summer for £20m cash up front. The club goes out and buys 2 players for £10m each, cash up front, on 5 year contracts. The club has broken even over those transactions, there is no cash to pay or be paid in the future. This is the reality of the situation. The accounts however at the end of that year will show for those transactions that the club made a £16m profit. Every subsequent year, assuming the players are retained the accounts will show a £4m loss even though no cash was paid out in those years. There are no £4m cheques being written to amortisation FC or the office of amortisation. Anomalies like this are why I think it is far more relevant to focus on the cashflow. If a player is paid for up front, that is reflected in the cash flow and will result in a larger debt in that year. If a player in paid for in instalments that is reflected in the cash flow for each year you are paying those instalments. This is surely a much better reflection of how a club is doing financially year to year. In 2007, turnover was £87.1m, the cash flow was -£5m. In 2008, turnover increased to £99.4m but the cash flow was -£34m! That's an extra £41.3m of outgoings in 2008. That has nothing to do with amortisation, that's additional cash going out of the club in 2008 compared to 2007. There will be exceptional items and takeover costs which may account for some of those additional costs, but personally I consider that an astonishing figure and would hope those who are looking at those accounts would be trying to work out the causes of that and explaining where the massive increases came from. Unfortunately I have never even seen that pointed out let alone explained as sadly it seems things like the extra shares in the club that Hall and Shepherd took in 2005 is far more worthy of analysis and criticism.

I think that was their stance until the dire end in the Carroll saga. But when you're literally drowned in money, what can you do? Die?

quayside I have and will defend Hall & Shepherd for how they progressed this club to the level where it was capable under the correct management of getting into Europe, buying players that most other teams in the league wanted, and hanging onto most of the ones we wanted to keep. They were so successful at it that it got to the point that we as supporters expected to do these things, and took the money that came into the club for granted. This once again though is not about defending the previous regime, but trying to put into context the state of the club when Ashley took over and how that has changed. Additional costs incurred in the first years of Ashley's ownership were due to Ashley's decisions not because of the existing state of the club, and reduced revenues today are in no small part a consequence of how it has been run since. You know very well those profit and loss figures are affected massively by amortisation. It's a useful accounting tool for valuing a business (although in the case of an asset like a club's playing squad it will be a wildly inaccurate one), but it can and often does show a very false picture of how the club did in any particular year. The valuation of the squad from one year to the next depends as much on who you sell as it does on what you sell them for, and a high spend one year will affect the amortisation figures for the next 4/5 years even if say you paid up front for players with a large transfer fee you received for an academy product. I believe that and to a large extent When you say "the club lost £34m" I think you know very well that most people will interpret that as we spent £34m than we made which is not the case; you don't have to write out a cheque for the amortisation. The actual figure that most people would interpret as the loss is £5m (taking this from your post in the Enrique thread). In 2007 the club was paying interest on loans, did not have the shirt sponsorship money coming in, was paying the instalments on some of the players it had previously bought in like Owen & Luque, and made a £5m cash flow loss. There would have been some inevitable increases in costs in 2008, but knowing there was an increase in premiership TV money of £18m (overall was less as we weren't going to get UEFA TV money) there is no reason why the club could not have at worst broken even in cash flow terms. I don't have the 2008 accounts to analyse the cause, but the fact that you have said elsewhere there was a £34m cash flow loss in 2008 shows that Ashley must have drastically increased the costs in that year way in excess of how the club was previously being run. I would guess a major part of this was due to paying for players up front. This isn't relevant to Ashley's running of the club, so I wont labour the point, but I have a mortgage on my house. That doesn't mean I can't take out a higher mortgage on it. The club WAS able to secure a major refinancing project, so I'm not sure why you keep trying to insist that it wouldn't be able to. Once again it's not particularly relevant to the discussion - I was just trying to address most of Teasy's post - however I was under the impression the dividend issued in 2005 was taken as a scrip dividend by Hall & Shepherd the main shareholders at least. I stand to be corrected on this. I have seen that article, I didn't comment specifically on it at the time because it's almost exactly the same as your opinion, and I've commented on that before. Unless I'm mistaken the same guy (it was an Arsenal supporter and they took the same line) has written stuff before about our accounts, and at that time he acknowledged that he had taken a lot of his figures, and the editorial standpoint from nufc-finances. This may well be one of the "independent experts" not mentioned. The person who ran that was no more qualified to do so than me and had an unashamedly anti-Shepherd agenda, (now that Shepherd has gone he's not interested in our accounts anymore, he'd rather work on the accounts of Spurs, Liverpool and Scottish clubs). The figures are useful, and I would hope people would draw their own conclusions from them. The comment is still opinion though, do not try to dress it up as fact. Specifically for example he doesn't address WHY the debt has increased so drastically under Ashley, and just accepts it as a fait accompli saying that the previous board wouldn't have been able to raise that much. Just because financial analysts agree doesn't make them right. Maybe I'm getting above my station, but if someone had asked me years ago whether self certified 100% mortgages were a good idea, I'd have gone against the financial experts. If you put a reduced wage bill in front of an accountant they'll probably say it's a great thing. That wont take into consideration the increased chance of relegation, the reduced ability to attract players and hang onto your best ones, the reduced interest from supporters in the club, and the reduced revenues in future years that will come from being just another also-ran which together may mean that you eventually have to cut the wage bill even further just to stay in the black. I think we agree that the club would have made a cash flow profit this year regardless of Carroll's sale (as does that article), this will not come as a surprise to Ashley either, so I'd be interested in what you think the plan so "the club is run at a “break even” manner by the year 2015/2016" actually means? Do you think Ashley is aiming to pay off all the extra debt he has put onto the club in the next 5 years? Personally I have a nasty feeling that is the plan. If so, considering the already reduced revenues which put us back in amongst a lot of the teams we used to have an advantage over, do you think this is achievable without this extra handicap putting the club at major risk of another relegation? Invaluable contribution as ever Ozzie. Glad to see you're adding salient points to the argument and not just blindly cheerleading the side which is anti-Shepherd whilst not understanding a word of it.

27, 26, and £6m 16 years ago for a 28 year old. Short termism at it's worst! These are the types of players RupertCommunicator assures us we should avoid knee-jerking our way into tearing apart our team with!!!! They manifestly didn't work the last time and nearly financially crippled us.

How is looking at the results in the year immediately prior to Ashley taking over tenuous? It shows the amounts coming in and going out before he started to change things, and if we compare them to how they have changed now we can objectively see whether the finances of the club are better or worse in each area. Define "spiralling out of control". It's a nice easy cliche, but please demonstrate exactly what you mean by it. What costs were inevitably going to rise, or what income was inevitably going to fall due to actions prior to Ashley taking over. Not interested in what you think Fred would/wouldn't or could/couldn't have done, it's just conjecture, what was actively in place that was making things "spiral out of control" which Ashley would have been unable to stop getting worse? Not sure where the £12m has come from, but at a realistic maximum the interest payments would have gone up by £1m. We had no sponsorship money coming in in 2007 either, so its a valid comparison when looking at the profit & loss. This is another myth. From the 2007 accounts: "At the beginning of 2007 the Group began work on a major refinancing project which was due to be in place by 30 June 2007." Why couldn't we have sold our best players and thinned out the squad then too? That's all Ashley's done now to make us "financially stable", so how was there no way to do that then? This is of course under the false assumption we needed to reduce the wage bill. Ashley increased the wage bill by £7.5m. We spent £5m more than we received in 2007. In 2008 we were due to receive £15m in increased TV revenue. Running things as they had been, we had £10m to play with in additional costs to those in 2007 to have a positive cash flow in 2008. Is that really "a state"? Is it really spiralling out of control? Which do you think is better for the club - £25m up front for a 5 year unconditional deal, or £2.5m per year for 4 years conditional on staying in the Premiership? Are you seriously saying the latter is the better deal? We must be the only Premiership club which has a lower shirt sponsorship deal than it had in 2004, let alone half the amount. One would hope costs were down more than the revenue. Are they? I have no idea if that is separated out in the accounts. FWIW I believe you have to go back to 2004 when we made a profit to find cash dividends being paid out. If the wage bill really is £37-£42m it will probably be the third lowest in the league. If you think it's necessary to keep it at those level do you honestly think it's sustainable to securely stay in the Premiership with your wage bill comparable with the newly promoted sides? I think it will be more like £20m short. We were constantly in the top 20 teams in the world in terms of revenue even when not playing in Europe. Now we're back in the Premiership we should be capable of pulling in £110-£120m, I'd guess it will actually be under £100m. I doubt the cost savings will be that much actually compared to 2007 levels. I guess you mean 2008 & 07 there. I don't accept that costs were inevitably going to be significantly higher, nothing that wouldn't be covered by the increased TV money anyway. What significant additional costs are you thinking of?

If the sell on clause exists it will only be for any amount over £35m he's sold for. No way it's just 25% of whatever Liverpool might sell him for.