UV

You mean that after an unsuccessful push you can actually reign in costs and then rebuild leading to a relatively successful team WITHOUT getting relegated or going into administration? Well I never. I'm sure I read that once you got into a position of having a debt of around £70m and a high wages to turnover ratio it was almost unavoidable that debts would continue to increase and wages would "spiral out of control" ending up inevitably in administration unless you fortunately get a generous benefactor to take you over and "turn round the finances" by getting the club relegated and continuing to run the business at a massive loss year after year. If only Ashley could have taken us over in '99 or 2000, maybe he could have brought in someone like Vinny Jones to buy the players for Robson and saved us from the pain of the following years... No surprise that the inevitable suspects have derailed yet another thread into the same tired old Shepherd bashing. Assuming that your are of the belief that Ashley should of spent spent spent his way out of trouble, do you think that that is the same course of action that West Ham and Pompey should take to avoid the trouble they are in? Or is the fact that we fill our stadium regulary make our situations completely different in all ways possible? Your assumption is wrong, I'm not sure how you arrived at it from a post where I was talking about reigning in costs and rebuilding, but this thread is about INCOME so I wont derail it further by going into spend.

Only just noticed these figures were in Euros, I thought it was £101m as that's about what Llambias claimed it was in Feb of last year when he went to the supporters meeting. So despite an £18m increase in TV money, the club's revenue last year was only £4m more than the year prior to him taking over. Turning round the finances indeed. Just listened to Llambias on BBC Newcastle. (he actually had the gall to say the words "We've been honest" ). The money list was mentioned and he of course used it as an opportunity to increase the amounts "Mike pumped in", but he also predicted revenue this year will only be £48m. I can understand them predicting that figure at the start of the season, but with attendances being as high as they have been that's surprised me again. There's a massive reduction in the TV money of course, but with the parachute payment doesn't that only account for around £26m of the drop? A drop of 7k in attendances of ordinary punters equates to around 14%, say a drop of £5-6m in matchday revenues. That still leaves another £10m+ gone from matchday & commercial revenue. How many revenue streams have they worked their magic on? Let's just hope it all returns when we get promoted, but I fear some of it may be gone to stay (until something is done to build it back up again).

I take back what I said, I didn't remember that one, he obviously has used that excuse albeit a year after Mort denied it.

When you throw around figures of a £33m loss, I think a lot of people reading that will assume that the club actually spent £33m more than it took in in that year. It isn't that simple of course and I'm surprised the accountants haven't jumped in to clear that up for everyone. The vast majority of that loss was actually down to the accounting devaluation of the squad not an actual monetary outlay in that year. The club actually spent around £10m more than it took in that year, which while not great is not as bad as people might be being led to believe. It certainly pales into insignificance when compared to the actual monetary losses (measured by the increasing size of the debt to Ashley) while Ashley has been in control of the club.

Of course no one knows if we'd have gone out of business if Ashley hadn't bought the club. But when he did buy it our balance sheet was insolvent and that means that someone had to guarantee to fund the club for the next 12 months or the auditors wouldn't sign it off as a going concern. If its not signed off as a going concern every secured creditor has the right to foreclose. So who was going to give that guarantee if Ashley didn't? I do, and the answers is no. ;-)Football clubs only go out of business when their debts exceed the market value of the club in a solvent state, and a solvent NUFC is worth a more than £75m. Things have changed now though, because the clubs debts have nearly trebled in three years and now exceed its market value. didn't quayside point out that we were insolvent and ashley had to prove he had the funds to keep us going to the auditors ? And? you said the answer was no as solvent clubs could blah blah blah................our balance sheet wasn't solvent. No I didn’t. Do you want me to rephrase it so you can have another stab at the reading thing? Football clubs only go out of business when their debts exceed the market value of the club in a solvent state, and a solvent NUFC is worth a more than £75m. that to me doesn't describe an insolvent balance sheet. Did I say the club had to be solvent at the point of sale? It all boils down to getting a return on your investment. An insolvent business isn’t automatically a dead duck; it can still represent an attractive acquisition if the potential future income exceeds its liabilities. The debt levels merely determine the price, and since NUFC was sold for £135m there was clearly a long way to go before it became worthless. had ashley done due dilligence hall/shepherd would have got nowhere near that figure. would it be going to far to say ashley was the only one interested and he quite possibly wouldn't have bought had he known the full scale of things............then what was there to keep us solvent ? Yup good points. Others had a look but ran a mile after doing due diligence. Lerner paid £66 million for Villa and it was solvent and had very little debt, different business model I know but were we worth double the price? Would be astonished if Ashley would have bought us knowing what he knows now. Even Ashley doesn't use the "I didn't do due diligence, I didn't know I'd have to pay off the loan for the stadium, I was conned excuse", that's just used on his behalf by people on the internet, and I'm sure he's grateful. If Ashley rushed through the purchase behind the back of one of the major shareholders who was ill in hospital, it wasn't because he suddenly really really wanted a football club to give all his money to and just couldn't wait to get on with it, it was because he thought he'd stumbled across a bargain, and delaying it would only raise the price he'd have had to pay. Ashley effectively paid £200m for the club and he thought it was worth it at the time. Some of the hedge funds looking at buying the club were probably put off not by the asking price or the state of the finances, but by the poison pill of the stadium loan repayment, however that would not have been a deterrent to Ashley as he has actively looked to pay off any debt the club has even if he did not need to, even to the extent of paying up front for players. We had double the turnover of Villa and had a much better squad at the time so required less investment once bought. Even though Lerner has increased their turnover, they are still losing tens of millions year on year. Yes, we probably were worth double what they were at the time.

Defending Ashley is like praising someone for trying to build up a dwindling fire by pouring water on it and keeping the embers going by feeding it with £50 notes. Some of them are HIS £50 notes so job well done!

How exactly? Because it exists and has not been paid off? Ashley has taken the sting out of it by converting it in to interest free loans to him, but the debt still exists. When Ashley bought the club the debts we had didn't vanish. Quayside points out that Ashley is now in for £300m. £134m for the club suggests he's now forked out £166m on debt/further investment. NUFC-finances says he took over a club where Shepherd had built £70m of debt. This suggests that Ashley is the one to have built up a further £96m of debt in just 3 years. £26m more than Shepherd managed in 10 years. And that's without paying any interest payments or any dividends and all he's gained by spending much more than Shepherd is relegation. But Shepherd is the one who's bust us? Aye, right! He's probably built us a nice new stadium with the money (in cockneyshire), but is saving it as a surprise for christmas.

How exactly? Because it exists and has not been paid off? Ashley has taken the sting out of it by converting it in to interest free loans to him, but the debt still exists. When Ashley bought the club the debts we had didn't vanish. So we'd have been in a completely different situation if Ashley had bought a debt free club for £200m? I still don't understand how it's hurting us if Ashley has paid it off with cash he had to hand?

How exactly?

Harsh. He might have had very good reasons for resigning.

Nolan and taylor weren't really the answer to our troubles, having sold Given and Nzogbia to turn a profit we really could have done with a bit of pace to secure the 1 point extra needed to survive. It's funny because he arrived and spent massively when we should have been cutting back, then in the window before relegation he changed his policy to spend nothing when a little investment would have been massively cost effective long term. I get the impression that his refusal to spend now only coincidentally matches up with being the right thing to do at this time. When we reach a window where real investment is needed again, I'm certain he'll get it wrong again. Also, I don't think Shepherd actually invested in '92 did he?, I thought it was all bank loans that he and the Halls were liable for if it went tits up. Not sure about that. We didn't really spend massively in the transfer market in summer 2007, although there was a hike in wages. We may have had a net transfer spend of between £5 million and £10 million (after selling Parker, Dyer) but at that stage, having done no due diligence, I don't think Ashley had the first idea of the economics of the business he'd just bought and he simply went where Fat Sam led him. Transfer dealings were put on hold for months until Mort completed a strategic review of the club which seemed to take ages. Did a wage and transfer fee budget not come out of that? Saying Ashley ignored that and "simply went where Fat Sam led him" is very generously absolving him of blame for increasing the wage bill and making the club less financially viable.

You mean that after an unsuccessful push you can actually reign in costs and then rebuild leading to a relatively successful team WITHOUT getting relegated or going into administration? Well I never. I'm sure I read that once you got into a position of having a debt of around £70m and a high wages to turnover ratio it was almost unavoidable that debts would continue to increase and wages would "spiral out of control" ending up inevitably in administration unless you fortunately get a generous benefactor to take you over and "turn round the finances" by getting the club relegated and continuing to run the business at a massive loss year after year. If only Ashley could have taken us over in '99 or 2000, maybe he could have brought in someone like Vinny Jones to buy the players for Robson and saved us from the pain of the following years... No surprise that the inevitable suspects have derailed yet another thread into the same tired old Shepherd bashing. Indeed madras, indeed. No cash dividends since 2004 (didn't you say you were happy with the running of the club until then?). Mort cost more than Shepherd and D Hall combined, I doubt Llambias is on much less than Mort, maybe more. Even Dennis Wise was on double what the old chairman got. What is the going rate for running the warehousing facility for a multi-million pound commercial enterprise? Should it be significantly less than the £150k per year that bankrupt the club? I honestly don't know. Back on track, the thread is about the money the club brings in not how it's spent. The only reason that has anything at all to do with the old board now would be to mention the head start it gave Ashley over most of the other clubs now in the league above us, and to serve as a benchmark of what has been shown the club can achieve. If you think the old board ran the commercial side of the club badly, and it was easy to achieve that commercial income, then that's great because it should also be easy to surpass it. How about we discuss how well Ashley is doing on this side of things? Let's start with the new sponsorship deals...

Link? http://www.football-finances.org.uk/newcastle/2008/assets15.gif

We were self sufficient before Ashley took over, I don't know where people get the idea from that we weren't (well actually yes I do, it's from Ashley's propaganda machine that people were happy to believe when he took over and for some reason still believe now, and sites like nufc-finances which were only ever interested in being anti-Shepherd). The club had no more of a debt when Ashley took over than it did in 2001 prior to us going through a period of football we can only dream of now, so to blame it all on the debt the club had when he took over is ludicrous. The debt was perfectly manageable - the vast majority of it was a long term fixed rate mortgage which was used to build something which brought in revenue to cover it's own repayments and left plenty over to add to the money we could spend on transfers and wages. Only around £25m of the debt was due to transfers/wages/running costs - you'll struggle to find many Premiership clubs without sugar daddies who have less debt than that (I think it's only Blackburn and the promoted sides). How this is seen as financial mismanagement is beyond me. The debt couldn't carry on growing indefinitely of course, but what on earth makes people think that the old board would have completely recklessly let it get out of hand? There's no evidence for it at all, in fact one of the major criticisms of the old board before it became fashionable to claim we were about to collapse financially was that in the Summer of 02 that we didn't spend extra money beyond the budget on transfers (we spent the budget early on Woodgate) before we had actually qualified for the CL proper. If the board had been as reckless as some seem to believe, then we would have gambled on getting into the CL that year. Maybe it would have made a difference, or maybe Shearer or Dyer or Woodgate or Hughes wouldn't have missed their pens, but the fact they didn't take the gamble shows they at least had some restraint in the risks they took. There's no doubt in my mind that barring another disastrous injury filled season worse even than the one under Roeder we would never have been relegated and that staying in the PL we would never have gone to the wall under the old board. Prior to relegation, the money Ashley put in was specifically to take on any and all debts including paying up front for players (which he could charge interest on should he chose). He did not put money into the team to improve or even maintain the quality of the squad, nor did he put money into improving the club infrastructure to bring in more revenue (on the contrary revenue streams have even been sold off I believe). No extra value or improvement went into the club because of the money he put in it, was just a change of creditor. It's not money that Ashley HAD to pay to keep the club running, it was just a change from owing money to the likes of Deportivo La Coruna to owing it to Ashley which he spins as "putting money in". You can chose to believe that he was going against how most clubs in the world operate (even those like Chelsea or Man City with no money worries) somehow for the long term good of the club, or that he was simply increasing the price he thought he'd be able to get for the club while appearing to be a generous owner. However the net outcome is the same whatever you think his motives were. Post relegation the money has obviously gone to cover some of the loss of revenue due to his mistakes, but doesn't cover anywhere near the full loss of revenue & squad value. So how anyone can say if we get promoted we will be in a much better position than when we left is even further beyond me. Ashley has turned this club from a stable, self-sustaining Premiership club into a potential yo-yo club unless decent amounts of cash are spent in the Summer on players for the here and now, not just punts on cheap players noone else wants who may come good. He has NOT somehow miraculously turned round the finances, by losing the club at least £50m in income, selling off or giving away revenue streams, making over 100 support staff redundant, and selling off/letting the contracts expire of most of the best players at the club.

:lol: We weren't full for Bristol City, so I can't see this one being full. I'm surprised for this one they haven't moved the home fans into the away section and given over the rest of the ground to the away support so they can make the most of the occasion and fill the ground at least once this season. Third kit tbh. I should imagine we'll still play in the yellow away kit with Watford wearing their away kit too to avoid a clash, otherwise the neutral TV viewers tuning in to get their regular NUFC fix might get confused seeing another team they don't recognise wearing our colours.

Smith has played in 26 out of 30 league games. Nearly half (9 of 21) of the goals we've conceded have been while he's not been on the pitch. Put another way, by my reckoning when Smith has played we've conceded at a rate of 1 goal every 2 games, when he hasn't we've conceded at a rate of 1.6 goals per game. Maybe he's nowhere near as poor as you think he is, and the role he's been asked to play is a major part of why the defence has been so relatively solid this season?

No-one is the opposite of someone else. You can pick out a few characteristics where they may be different, but it's ridiculous to just pick out those attributes and say that's the reason they were chosen. You can't tell me that the only reason Dalglish was appointed was because he was the polar opposite of a very successful Keegan (which he isn't), and the fact that he had previously shown himself to be a very good manager had nothing to do with it. He was appointed on merit. He happened to have a different management style to Keegan. I don't know how to put this in a non patronising way, but if you think simplisticly yourself, you'll tend to project that thinking onto how other people made their decisions.

I addressed Roeder. I think he was always just a temporary appointment until someone better could be found. Allardyce Gullit and Souness were somewhat reactionary appointments to the major perceived flaws of the team at the time. 2 out of 6 doesn't make it a policy.

He was brought in to bring discpline, the problem was, the owners and the players were misbehaving. I've said it before, our appointments under Hall/Shepherd tended to be reactionary to say the least. Dalglish - wanted a more pragmatic approach as Keegan's team was perceived to be too cavalier. Gullit - enough of that now, doesn't work and the fans hate it. Give us sexy football. Robson - Gullit didn't understand Newcastle's heritage, get a Geordie in (admittedly a Geordie who was a top class coach and in between jobs). Souness - Robson too soft, let's get a renowned hard man in to bang heads together. Roeder - was just a soft and easy option really, reasons aren't as clear or bland as with the others. Allardyce - issues with injuries / players not being as good on the pitch as on paper. Get in the sports science nut with a reputation for making a team more than the sum of its parts, don't care if the football's shit. For the record I wasn't against the appointments of the first 3, and the most reactionary appointment was clearly Souness, easily. This supposed point is massively overplayed, it's really just a cute parlour trick. If you take any 2 managers (any 2 people even) there's always something different you can pick out and say look they're the opposite of each other. Of course managerial appointments after a sacking are somewhat reactionary, if they weren't what's the point of sacking the old manager to replace him with someone the same. Obviously one of the attributes you will look for in a new manager is what you think was wrong with the one you got rid of. Dalglish wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Keegan. Robson wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Gullit. Roeder wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was a temporary appointment made through lack of being able to find anyone suitable (in the eyes of the board) at the time. Allardyce wasn't a reactionary appointment, it was an appointment made on merit of someone who had a different style to Roeder. You can disagree with the choice of people or if their qualifications for the job were satisfactory, but they weren't appointments made because they were exact opposites of their predecessors as is made out. At the time Robson was sacked and for years before there was an awful lot of whining going on while we were finishing up the top end of the table and playing in the Champions League about how we were the "laughing stock of football" (it's the permanent state of every club on the planet) because of the way a few of the players were behaving off the field. There was definitely pressure building up from supporters to do something about it so it was obviously a factor in choosing a new manager (although Souness wasn't the first choice and the others who turned it down weren't as extreme as him). I thought it was a terrible appointment myself from day 1, but there were a lot of people at the time who were happy with it from the discipline point of view alone. Also, I don't want to be a Souness apologist, but he didn't do half the damage to the club that's attributed to him. He set us back a couple of years but no more than that, and certainly nothing terminal. Of his signings, really only Boumsong, Luque and Owen turned out to be bad for the money paid. Boumsong was expensive for a defender but he had a pedigree and had already looked decent in a British league. He was a better risk than Coloccini for example. He started off well too, but it all went a bit shit (didn't he have a load of personal problems with his kid and his wife being seriously ill and living in France?). Owen's leg breaks massively affected the view of his time here and can't be blamed on Souness. The less said about Luque the better like. Of his sales, although it was a big one, only Bellamy was a real loss (I was pissed off at the time but hindsight showed that Robert was finished anyway).

every club could say they shouldn't be where they are...hartlepool had they backed clough a little, huddersfield had they bought st john and someone else who's name i can't remember like shankley wanted. all clubs are where they deserve to be. A year before Ashley bought the club we deserved to finish 7th, and 2 months before we deserved to be playing in Europe.

2 Man Utd 24 10 1 1 31 8 7 1 4 25 12 36 53 31 points at home 22 points away

I was simply parroting Parky's assessment of our tactics there tbh. I have absolutely no problem with well argued critiques like you give yourself, it just seemed like this thread had descended into a match thread type slag fest with no thought whatsoever going into the criticisms. It goes without saying that the defending has set us apart in this league and is the main reason we are top. However if we blamed the midfield for poor defending last year you can't just ignore it as part of the improvement this season, and part of that is the coaching and tactics. We also have the 4th highest number of goals for. That has to come from somewhere and it can't just be from Nolan, Shola & Guthrie creating goals out of nothing and being lethal in front of goal, they're not the players you would have said that about before the season started. In fact a lot of the criticism Hughton is getting is from playing Nolan at all and from having Guthrie on the wing where he is getting his assists and goals. The team we have CAN play good football and we've seen it on occasion, however I think the main problem is that they just don't have the stamina to sustain it for much of the game, especially the central midfielders which are the key to it. I suppose you could blame Hughton for the fitness of the players, but generally I think it's just an inherent failing in those players and there's not a lot you can do about it. FWIW I have my doubts about Hughton myself, but I'm more concerned about his potential ability to motivate the players when things aren't going so well than his tactics. I'd be much happier if h e was the assistant manager. Why not just post the last para and save the essays? Nobody will read all of that. You're concerned about his "potential ability to motivate the players"....!!! Wake the fuck up. He'll be out on his ear after 12 games the most in the PL. Cool. Then we can pick up Benitez after Liverpool sack him, and the following year get Wenger once we finish above Arsenal.

I was simply parroting Parky's assessment of our tactics there tbh. I have absolutely no problem with well argued critiques like you give yourself, it just seemed like this thread had descended into a match thread type slag fest with no thought whatsoever going into the criticisms. It goes without saying that the defending has set us apart in this league and is the main reason we are top. However if we blamed the midfield for poor defending last year you can't just ignore it as part of the improvement this season, and part of that is the coaching and tactics. We also have the 4th highest number of goals for. That has to come from somewhere and it can't just be from Nolan, Shola & Guthrie creating goals out of nothing and being lethal in front of goal, they're not the players you would have said that about before the season started. In fact a lot of the criticism Hughton is getting is from playing Nolan at all and from having Guthrie on the wing where he is getting his assists and goals. The team we have CAN play good football and we've seen it on occasion, however I think the main problem is that they just don't have the stamina to sustain it for much of the game, especially the central midfielders which are the key to it. I suppose you could blame Hughton for the fitness of the players, but generally I think it's just an inherent failing in those players and there's not a lot you can do about it. FWIW I have my doubts about Hughton myself, but I'm more concerned about his potential ability to motivate the players when things aren't going so well than his tactics. I'd be much happier if he was the assistant manager.

It's one thing to suggest an alternative formation or tactics and put forward an argument for why it would be better, it's quite another to say Hughton is the worst tactician to have ever managed a football team for not implementing your hair brained scheme in every game. The main aim of the thread is a credible one ie he isn't good enough for the rigours of the PL. Get of yer high horse. He might know more about the players than we do, but he certainly doesn't exhibit the ability to change or be flexible. Balls pumped down the middle is bollox end of. Balls pumped down the middle is 1 Newcastle 27 10 4 0 25 6 6 4 3 18 10 27 56 Passing football is 2 Nottm Forest 28 10 1 3 31 12 4 9 1 13 9 23 52 3 West Brom 27 8 2 4 29 15 6 6 1 26 14 26 50 Good attack, no defence is 4 Cardiff 27 6 3 4 22 11 7 3 4 30 19 22 45 Good defence, no attack is 5 Swansea 27 6 6 2 11 8 4 6 3 12 12 3 42 half way through of. Not sure how you can say he's not flexible when he's played Pancrate at RB and was laughed at for another stupid decision until it turned out he put in a decent performance so that was quickly forgotten. In numerous games he's brought on subs and changed things and has improved the team and won us games. The donkeys are higher than my horse, and in part that's down to the manager.

It's one thing to suggest an alternative formation or tactics and put forward an argument for why it would be better, it's quite another to say Hughton is the worst tactician to have ever managed a football team for not implementing your hair brained scheme in every game.