UV

Most of them? Unless the manager leaves the club, what's the point of sacking one manager to appoint someone exactly the same? The board of that club would get (rightly) slaughtered by their fans. BTW, do you think Robson should still be manager?

It only goes up to 2006, but how are these clubs still in operation with year on year losses? Villa Blackburn Everton Man City Boro

They've handed the paper in but it doesn't get marked until May. If they fail that one I think you can expect one or two threads much longer than 39 pages.

Also, Geordies don't have loyalty to tesco - if sainsburys sold cheaper milk they'd probably go there instead, not keep going to tesco in the hope that one day milk would drop to the cheapest price in the country. Glory shopper

Chelsea's debt is about £500 million if that helps. The key difference with Chelsea compared to the others is that virtually all of their debt is owed to the owner of the club, whereas the others have external debt. I don't understand. What's the difference between Chelsea's situation and ours? Think he's on about the rest of the 'big 4' rather than us. As I see it he's saying Chelsea have a £500 million debt which is owed to Abramovich as he has been spending his own money on the club, whereas we have zero debt because Ashley paid it off with his own money, rather than we have a £75m debt owed to Ashley. It may be just a technicality, or it may be significant in some way. That's what I don't understand. I was talking about Chelsea compared to the rest of the top 4 as Alex said. As far as we are concerned Ashley put in £75 million but I don't know if it went in as a loan or as equity because it happened after the 2007 year end and the exact details aren't in the latest accounts. Interesting. I'd guess he probably did the same as Abramovich. So actually when people talk about Ashley having payed off the club's debts, in all probability the debts have effectively just changed hands and we don't know what the terms of the loan are (ie Ashley may still be charging the club interest on the loan).

Chelsea's debt is about £500 million if that helps. The key difference with Chelsea compared to the others is that virtually all of their debt is owed to the owner of the club, whereas the others have external debt. I don't understand. What's the difference between Chelsea's situation and ours? Think he's on about the rest of the 'big 4' rather than us. As I see it he's saying Chelsea have a £500 million debt which is owed to Abramovich as he has been spending his own money on the club, whereas we have zero debt because Ashley paid it off with his own money, rather than we have a £75m debt owed to Ashley. It may be just a technicality, or it may be significant in some way. That's what I don't understand.

Chelsea's debt is about £500 million if that helps. The key difference with Chelsea compared to the others is that virtually all of their debt is owed to the owner of the club, whereas the others have external debt. I don't understand. What's the difference between Chelsea's situation and ours?

0? Roeder may never have been a manager that was going to get us challenging back at the top, but he is nowhere near one of the worst managers the Premiership has ever had. Even Souness isn't tbh.

Yes, Mort tries to give that impression at every opportunity he can doesn't he. Actually it's the accounts that give that impression. A loss of 32.9m for a 12 month period and an injection of 75m needed to prevent the auditors qualifying the accounts as not being a going concern, according to the Guardian. Yes - that is more or less what the accounts say. Whether insolvency was a certainty without Ashley is another issue. The club would have had to find some more funding to get the auditors to give it an unqualified report. They had in fact spent nearly £3 million on a project designed to achieve that iirc. They probably would have got the backing from somewhere but it would obviously involve more debt and I can't believe that there would have been huge pots of money to spend on transfers in the near future. FWIW although the club is on a more secure financial footing now I don't think that Ashley and Mort should be beyond criticism for their running of it. I hadn't seen that article actually, so fair enough. He does keep harping on about it though. Am I wrong in thinking that a large part of that £75m was due to the stadium loan which had to be refinanced because of the takeover? ie if we had not been taken over that wouldn't have been part of the equation and was a long standing debt which was paying for itself over time? FWIW I'm not saying there wouldn't have had to be cutbacks under the old board, or that the takeover was a bad thing, just that we weren't as close to bankruptcy as is being made out.

Yes, Mort tries to give that impression at every opportunity he can doesn't he.

The "frightening" thing is that this same topic has been covered before and the timelines were all posted yet once again it seems to be dragged up to slate the way the club is being run, we complain about the press having a go at the club yet we're as good as them at spinning, if not better at times. For some people it's more important to back Fat Fred than their football club. For some people its more important to slate someone off for eating all the pies than to be able to see that running a club who qualify for europe more than every team bar 4 actually means they are doing a decent job of running the football club. Still dont listen do you, i cant believe someone can use a stat which doesnt hold much water considering it doesnt paint the true situation of the club. You conitue to use the 7 european qualifications out of 10 years as opposed to the 4 top 10 finishes in the same 10 years stat, even thought the top 10 finishes show the truer picture for the club. If we were to look at who had the most top 10 finishes for the club in those 10 years, do you think we'd still be the 5th best? Nope. Show much for your ambitious chairman crap. No wonder your "opinions" hold no water on this board when you talkabout "facts" which have no relevant context to the situation and are contrived to fit a silly agenda. If you want to talk about relevance, what relevance is the arbitrary choice of 10th? Top half. Wow. No footballing significance whatsoever. Mid table is much of a muchness, pretty much a lottery where you end up. Oh noes Spurs were better than us because in the 8 years they finished mid table they came 9th twice and 10th twice, but in the 6 years we came mid table the best we did was 11th! If you want to talk about relevance you have to talk about relevant achievements. Qualifying for Europe is a relevant achievement. It's a hell of a lot harder to get a team into the top 4 (which we did 5 times under the previous board) than it is to win the also-ran pissing contest in the middle. Never mind, we'll be great now we're under new management, and thank god we didn't waste any money on players in January eh? You must be well chuffed about that. Only if they were complete idiots. You didn't did you?

You and HTT will be loving it even more as we plunge towards League 1 next season then.

I'll discuss it if we go down. Until then it's a moot point. Whether we go down or not from this point on will have very little to do with what Ashley & Mort do now. That is in the hands of the manager, the players, and the other teams in the scrap. It is the decisions they have already made which have put us in the position where relegation is a distinct possibility. It's like saying it's okay to drink drive if you don't kill anyone. The decisions at the start of the season were cautious, which was understandable if frustrating for us as supporters. The decisions in January were high risk, showed a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the situation, and are deserving of criticism whatever the outcome.

I know being forced to study something always made me passionate about the subject... Do they get tested on it?

Put them all straight in the first team!

So Big Sam plays s*** football, loses some games and should be given time? KK comes in and loses to Man Utd and Arsenal and should be shown the door? Have a word. Home draws with Boro and Bolton? Do they not count? What about that miserable performance at Villa? At least with Allardyce we were grinding out results, the football may not have been good at times but we had a team of determined players who wanted to win. You can't say the same about the side now. Did I fall asleep and wake up in an alternate universe?

http://www.newcastle-online.com/nufcforum/index.php?topic=22678.0 After some pressing they let on the rule was this: Why this detail isn't in the rules is beyond me. Maybe the mods just want to leave it vague so they can ban people they don't like

Roy Keane?

Can one of you accountants please tell me what qualifications I need to get to "earn" £2.9 million by giving some advice on refinancing a loan. :fictionaltheologicalcharacterwept: I thought people like Willie McKay were leeches, but that takes some beating. Question: If player amortisation costs are included in the losses does that mean that player transfer fees are not included?

What I find hilarious is that I know with absolute certainty that if this season we had still been under the old board, and the same decisions had been made, the very people who are now defending Ashley & Mort would be absolutely vilifying Shepherd for it.

We'll see at the end of the season wont we. Teams "too good to go down" have done it before, and they'll do it again. I'm sure you're right though, surely a team containing the likes of Viduka, Smith & Milner could never get relegated. Anyway, got to rush out to my local Sports World store now as there's a closing down sale on which is ending soon. Don't want to miss out.

Just because the whole legality of this issue is a grey area, it doesn't mean to say the rules about where you are going to draw the line on this site "to be safe" should be. Some people have had posts deleted for simply mentioning 4 or 5 upcoming games, others haven't. No-one knows where the line is drawn between discussing the next few games and printing "a fixture list". It's up to the whims of the mods at the time. Pin it down.

Serious breach of copyright here FYI: http://www.newcastle-online.com/category/match-reports/

Of course you can, it's not clear at all what is or isn't allowed from the OP. If you take the following quote literally: then we wouldn't even be able to legally speak the words "Newcastle United" as that name is on the fixture list so cannot be "transmitted in any form". This is of course absurd. So what constitutes a fixture? Simply "Home vs Away"? or "Home vs Away @ time & date". You've said that match and pre-match threads are okay, so 1 fixture is okay but 2 is not? Are 2 or 3 okay? What's the limit? If you're going to ban people for it, this needs clarifying in the rules. There's nothing in the law about it being okay to publish the fixture lists after the event, so all I have to to is search for "post match reaction" and hey presto I have a fixture list for the matches already played available on this site. Better ban all the people who started these threads now! I've seen no hard and fast rules anywhere about what exactly constitutes a breaking of this copyright (or more aptly what would cause FDC to complain to your ISP and shut you down, as I'm sure the vast majority of this is not ACTUALLY a breach of copyright at all). If you've been shut down before you really should have gotten this clarified. If this is a quote from FDC: then it seems to me that the date is an integral part of the fixture, and so a simple list of games without dates does not constitute a fixture list.

It really isn't. Unfortunately Given is now our Paul Robinson, a liability living on past reputation in most supporter's eyes who seems undroppable. Maybe he will regain his form, but it wont be this season (personally I doubt he ever will). I know there may be other factors involved, but just look at the turn around in Spurs' defensive record since they dropped their sacred cow, 3 clean sheets in the last 5 games.