macbeth

So he thinks the best years are ahead of him ? Bloody hope so

We should rise above it. We were big enough to applaud Teddy Sheringham off the pitch last year, we shoudl do it with our lost one I adored him.

before 1991 the US had never had a president who got them into Arab lands. Since then they have been there more often than any other country. Which other country had given its troops the opportunity to compete abroad the way them Bush's have ? Where were you when those other presidents presided over the embarrassments of previous decades. Were you there ? Did you live through incompetent presidents. I did, I know how it was, you have no idea unless you were there. Well listen to me, this president is far better than any that have gone before. The Bush's have always backed their troops. Okay the last appointment of Rumsfeld didn't work out, but who at the time argues against it ? Did you. Don't remember you saying anything ? So Bush is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. You might want a new president but how do you know the next one would be any better ? How do you know that a new guy, or even woman, would be able to do any better than Bush ? I would rather stick with Bush who clearly knows how to back his troops into body bags than gamble on some unknown.

- 6pts for the whole season so 10th. He only scored three times where it mattered, Sunderland, Villa & Boro, if he didn't score we'd have drawn those three games. whereas as Shearer's 10 goals won us points against Villa (1) and Wigan (2), so in 31 games won us 3 points. So Sib has proved better already :roll:

I'd like to apologise for this happening. Many people have contacted me to say that before reading the excellent www.nufc-finance.org.uk site they too thought Shepherd was a good businessman. Suddenly they saw that us having crowds of 10,000 more than say Liverpool made no difference, as the money from those 10,000 peopel attending went straight out of the club and never benefited the team at all.

I tried to avoid judging the managers. The whole recruitment process, of the individual to be manager, your key appointment, has been flawed. Regardless of who has been appointed. Glad you finally acknowledge the manager is the key. Thanks for producinig those figures of how much money has been made available to the managers over the years. Great stuff. the appointment of the manager is the chairman's key decision, above all others. He should manage it. If he has to lose a manager eh shoudl do it at the correct time, if he has to appoint a new one he should draw up his job spec, approach all those who fit his criteria, and then appoint the best fit. There is no evidence that the current chairman has the skills to manage the process. He has demonstrably got it wrong too many times. The timing of the Robson dismissal was wrong. It was either too late, or too early depending on points of view, which ever it was not correct. I am not sure what criteria was used to pick Roeder. I see nothign on his CV pre-February 2006 that qualifies him for the job. Gullit was 'lost' at the wrong time, as was Dalglish. All of this points to a chairman not in control of the situation he is paid to be in control of. The amount released to managers is shown at http://www.nufc-finances.org.uk/transfers2.htm

I tried to avoid judging the managers. The whole recruitment process, of the individual to be manager, your key appointment, has been flawed. Regardless of who has been appointed.

You spend far more time working on financial posts than football related posts. You really reckon something like £2m per season on players would make a difference, do you? In any case, there's no limits to the misrepresentation you come up with in response to your frankly pathetic jealousy of people who are more successful than you are. You're a sad bloke. You really have a chip about people who are better off than you are, don't you mate? Sorry I will argue this one always, in the saddest and pettiest way. The club giving away £35m is wrong. How can do you justify that figure. Board run the business to lose £23m and then give away £35m. The first figure is form incompetence, the second from pure greed. I have no issue with those better off than myself. I will admit to being bitter and twisted that my football team has been bled dry by its owners. If it was Douglas Hall or Mother Theresa doing ti I woudl be equally annoyed. The £2m per season that you mention is actually £4m. It only seems a small amount cos you have divided the £35m by 9. If the money had not been given away where woudl it be. It may have been spent on the way along, or it may all be sitting in the bank, ready to give £20 to Roeder in January, or maybe it could have been used to pay off the debt on the ground? Again, I fail to see how anyone can say it has benefit NUFC to take none of those options and instead just give it away. 4m ? Do you think a PLC give no dividends ? If they gave half what they do, then the money "lost" to the club is between 1.5 and 2m quid on average. You think that will make the difference between us challenging Chelsea and Manu :lol: What a load of bollocks you talk. Your agenda gets funnier all the time. All our managers have been bankrolled with more than enough money to have won the League Cup at least. You haven't a clue about football. Not a clue. as I have said, there are plenty of impressionable people that will believe your crap if you look for them, and join your crusade. Why give a dividend at all? If a business loses £23m why should there be any dividend. Dividends are a share of profits to investors, not a God given right. The loss-making business that is NUFC has given away £35m. You are happy that this is correct, many people feel it wrong. Why do you think there has been no dividend at all this year ? And is it correct to have no dividned this time ?

I have NEVER said that the board from the 60s, 70s or 80s was good. I wouldn't try and play the "I was there" card the way NE5 does, but I was nonetheless. (Although no that much in the 60s, I'm not THAT old :winking:) In that case, why do you insist they are "the same as the current board" Thank you for admitting you know jack shit and have been arguing that you do. ] where do I insist they are the same as the current board. You may have made that one up and then converted into a FACT in you own head, but you will never find me defending the indefensible. I leave that to you

but you shouldn't belive everything you read in the Chronicle

You spend far more time working on financial posts than football related posts. You really reckon something like £2m per season on players would make a difference, do you? In any case, there's no limits to the misrepresentation you come up with in response to your frankly pathetic jealousy of people who are more successful than you are. You're a sad bloke. You really have a chip about people who are better off than you are, don't you mate? Sorry I will argue this one always, in the saddest and pettiest way. The club giving away £35m is wrong. How can do you justify that figure. Board run the business to lose £23m and then give away £35m. The first figure is form incompetence, the second from pure greed. I have no issue with those better off than myself. I will admit to being bitter and twisted that my football team has been bled dry by its owners. If it was Douglas Hall or Mother Theresa doing ti I woudl be equally annoyed. The £2m per season that you mention is actually £4m. It only seems a small amount cos you have divided the £35m by 9. If the money had not been given away where woudl it be. It may have been spent on the way along, or it may all be sitting in the bank, ready to give £20 to Roeder in January, or maybe it could have been used to pay off the debt on the ground? Again, I fail to see how anyone can say it has benefit NUFC to take none of those options and instead just give it away. PLC's give dividends. How much money has been made available to successive managers during the period the club has been giving dividends? Thanks in advance PLCs don't give dividends at the level NUFC have done. Paying out at ~6% when the likes of Tesco only pay 2% highlights that. The amount of monay paid out on players has no connection to the amount paid in dividends. Why link the two ? Instead link the amount paid out in divdiends to the amount paid in interest on the ground development. The club could be sitting with no debt on the ground, no interest to pay for the next 10 years. What a superb position to be in. No, instead we'll pay £4.5m per year in interest. You prefer the club to be in debt, and the shareholders to have the money. This woudl have made no difference at all to the amount paid out on players, but would have made the whole club more safe financially. If disaster struck and we were relegated the first call on the club money is he mortgage. The board could have removed that threat, but instead invested the money in pension funds for Hall & Shepherd.

You spend far more time working on financial posts than football related posts. You really reckon something like £2m per season on players would make a difference, do you? In any case, there's no limits to the misrepresentation you come up with in response to your frankly pathetic jealousy of people who are more successful than you are. You're a sad bloke. You really have a chip about people who are better off than you are, don't you mate? Sorry I will argue this one always, in the saddest and pettiest way. The club giving away £35m is wrong. How can do you justify that figure. Board run the business to lose £23m and then give away £35m. The first figure is form incompetence, the second from pure greed. I have no issue with those better off than myself. I will admit to being bitter and twisted that my football team has been bled dry by its owners. If it was Douglas Hall or Mother Theresa doing ti I woudl be equally annoyed. The £2m per season that you mention is actually £4m. It only seems a small amount cos you have divided the £35m by 9. If the money had not been given away where woudl it be. It may have been spent on the way along, or it may all be sitting in the bank, ready to give £20 to Roeder in January, or maybe it could have been used to pay off the debt on the ground? Again, I fail to see how anyone can say it has benefit NUFC to take none of those options and instead just give it away.

I have NEVER said that the board from the 60s, 70s or 80s was good. I wouldn't try and play the "I was there" card the way NE5 does, but I was nonetheless. (Although no that much in the 60s, I'm not THAT old :winking:) The difference we have in outlook is that I take the optimistic approach. I believe that there are people out there who could run an £80m business better than the current board are doing. We're not talking about running the Lloyds Bank, or BBC, or Boots, or Tesco or the Post Office, with thousands of employees, complicated, wide issues to address. We are talking about an essentially small PLC, with a fairly simple set of problems. That there was no one in the families who owned the club in the 80s who had the business skills to be successful was very sad. We have reached the same point again. There is no evidence that the two execs currently running the business, Freddy Shepherd and Douglas HAll have any idea where they are going. The latest financial results are the culmination of their combined efforts over at least 9 years (15 if NE5's view is taken). The business is close to financial collapse. Assets of £16m, monthly losses of £1m, costs fixed with long term player contracts. A recipe for disaster. Of course you are correct in saying that any replacements may be worse. But why should they be ? There are hundreds of similar sized businesses out there being run successfully. Potentially even appointing a Finance Director may make huge difference. As chairman, Shepherd should be doing that sort of "top to bottom" review of the club. If the hopeless McKeags could be replaced successfully then I belive the hopeless Halls and Shepherds could also be.

This is a good question, you shouldn't be worried about asking. I'll give a view, I'm sure NE5 will give another later :winking: The accepted wisdom is that the people running a business want it to do well so that they can get a long term gain from its success. So if the people running the business can consistently make a profit, and share that profit amongst shareholders the shareholders will be happy. The longer this goes on the better for everyone. There is a difference with the way NUFC has been/is being run. When people invest in a business they usually expect a return on the money they invest. So if a year ago you'd bought 100 shares in Tesco say, at £3.10 each so £310 in total you will be expecting a dividend on your invetsment. In Tesco's case they gave a dividend of 2.3% for each share. So last year you would have got about £7 in a dividend. At that rate you'd take about 50 years to get you investment back. The other thing to bare in mind though is the price of the shares. Your £3.10 shares have gone up in price and are now worth £3.90. You could sell your 100 shares for £390, and make an £80 profit. The return you've had in a year would be this £80 and the £7 dividend, so £87 on your £310, a total of about 28% in a year. It may be that you wish to keep your shares, happy that each year you'll make some dividend and the share price is liable to stay improving. For the people running Tesco there will be a constant desire to get the share price higher, and to keep the dividend as high as the business can afford. The shareholders will want as much return on their money as possible, the people running the business will be also want dividends high, but will also want to have as much money in the business as possible to invest in more stores. Tesco's huge profits could allow a dividend of three times the size it is, but they want to keep the money in the business to help it grow. With NUFC there is a couple of problems. The first, and main one is that the people running the business are exactly the same as the people demanding the dividends. What this has resulted in is the demands of the shareholders being the top priority rather than those of the business. Usually the two are balanced out so both 'sides' are happy, in NUFC this is not the case. Lets look at the Halls investment for example. The accounts of Cameron Hall show that the shares they own in NUFC cost them 11p to originally buy. The dividends that have subsequently been paid on each of these shares is 21p. So when you bought your Tesco shares it would take 50 years to get your investment back purely in dividends. In the Halls case it took 4 years to get their original money back, and 8 for them to double their money. At the end they still owned all the shares but had taken out £18m in dividends. Why does this matter ? Well NE5 has said, repeatedly, that it doesn't. For the Halls to take out that amount of money (he says) makes no difference to the amount of money the club has to invest. The Halls don't own all the shares, but the total given to all shareholders is just under £31m. Again viewed by some as a negligible amount that has made no difference to the club. I'll not try and pargue the point I will let you work out whetehr it woudl be better for NUFC to have that £31m or for the shareholders to have it. There is another effect though. Your original question on the people running the business to want long term success has gone. The Halls have doubled their money, and still own 55m shares. Why should they bother about the future ? If you had bought a lottery ticket that won you £18m would you still be driven to buy a lottery ticket every week ? Maybe, but it wouldn't be that important. This is what has happened with the NUFC board. They have in the short term made more money out of the club than they could ever have dreamed of, there is no financial motivation for them any more. As the Halls shares cost them 11p and the dividend has already covered that, it means that if they sell their shares now it is pure profit. So at 70p they make rrrrr70p profit. The other factor is that the shareholders have taken so much money out in the last 8 years that there is no more left to be taken. The people running the club have got the business losing £1m per month, which just cannot be allowed to continue. They have even persuaded the sponsors to give them sponsorship ahead of the time they would normally have expected it to help them get through. Over the last 9 years the board has managed to produce a financial loss of £58m, with £35m of that loss coming from giving money away to shareholders. Most people running a business as recklessly as they are would get turfed out by the shareholders who just wouldn't let the situation continue. The shareholders would want to see some long-term strategy to protect their interests. Again, because the major shareholders also running the business stops this normal way of running a business happening. The concern would be if the share price collapsed, to say 20p. The Halls could sell their shares to Shepherd for £10m, making a further personal profit of £10m. Shepherd could then move to own the whole club. He wouldn't have to publish accounts to let us know what is going on. If he is prepared to give away £35m when we know about it, just try and imagine how it would be if he had no watching what was going on.

I hadn't seen that thread, and I've only read the first page. The board should not be in the situation where they have to gamble with the club's finances. Except when they release figures every 6 months they are the sole guardins of the club's finances. They have consciously taklen us to where we are. When ever the club have spent money the board have approved it. They explicitly say in the report this week that it is their sole responsibility, no one elses. This is how it should be. We should never ever have to gamble of spending. They have always known how much money is available. If the club has spent £50m over the last two summers then that is the boards view of how much the club could afford. I would expect they have no money tyo spend in January. Nothign has changed form August, we have had no unexpected CL money so hopefully they spent all they could afford in the summer. There is an optin on C. Option C is the real extension of option A. Option C is that we spend, more than we can afford on trying to stay up, and we go down. Our fall would be harder than Leeds. So I think that means B.

No. That board showed no ambition at all. Do you see the financial mess that the current board have managed us into, as being acceptable ? So, after 9 (or 15 if you wish) years of being responsible for the finances of the club do you view them as being successful as they have us losing £1m per month ? Yes or no will do. Thanks

??

To me that reads that you think Ridsdale was the most ambitious of chairman, and that the chairman who had to take over after him was totally unambitious. I could at this point do a NE5ism and say "so you think Ridsdale would be better than Shepherd", and quote it for the next year, every time Shepehrd is mentioned. Of course I wouldn't do that. Maybe.

If Bournemouth had lost yesterday, it would have been the 7th defeat in a row for their new boss Keving Bond, giving them a record of 0-0-7 They fluked a 0-0 draw against 10 man Bradford

I think we shoudl invent a new phrase that covers your view of the board. I'm sure others can refine it, but essentially it could be "blameless if he does, blameless if he doesn't". I'm not sure why you feel I'd want a Murray in charge. He would just be as financially incompetent as Shepherd, so we'd still be in the mess. But surely it wsn'ty Murray's fault anyway, it was Reid, Wilkinson etc to blame for their mess. :winking:

howay man Dave, its a straightforward question. Do you think a board should interfere or not ? If you do, don't criticise when they do, and if you don't, don't criticise when they don't. What do YOU think ? I'll have a go. The board should never ever interfere with the choice of player the manager makes. They appoint the manager and they should give him total control over the players he wishes to bring in. (The only time this woudl change would be if a Direcotr of Football was in place, and he shoudl be involved nwith the team manager, but we don't have a DoF) What the board do have to do is to tell the manager how much money he can have to build his side the way he wants to. If you are Carlisle United chairman you tell your manager that he has a budget of nothing to go on players, unless he trades some players out. Carlisle manager decides that there ar enly free players to be brought inand that he will use his development skills to improve the players he has. If you are manager of Stoke you tell your manager that he has £150,000 to spend plus anythign he can raise from transfers. Stoke sell aplayer for £100k and bring in another for £250k. All other improvement to come from developing players. What didn't happen at NUFC was this settign of a budget. Souness came to his chairman and said I want these players. Chairman said okay, without seemingly having any idea how much the club coudl afford. No bounce back by the board, or even leadership, by saying "Graeme we back you 100% and here is £20m". Instead the board abdicated responsibility and just let him spend, spend, spend. The manager demonstrably got it wrong with his choices but the board had no control. The manager should always want more, and better players, it will help him have a better side. That is the managers role. If he doesn't want to improve the side he isn't the right man. The board have to manage the whoel company, and they are solely responsible for the finances. The cchairmna of Carlisle, and the board at Stoke didn't let their manager's spend £50k or £500k on a player, cos they knew the club couldn't afford that. Those boards looked at what could be afforded and backed the manager to the hilt, without compromising the long term future of the clubs. Our board just decided to borrow as much money as they could to buy players, without any view of how much could be afforded. I know the argument that we HAD to buy otherwise we would have gone down. That is a fair comment. But a year on I'm not sure what has changed

If it's an existing shareholder with a significant stake, they have to disclose their purchase to the Stock Exchange. So it may not be the "mystery buyer" you're thinking of after all! Reckon it was Macbeth, destory from within when I win £100m on the Eurolottery I'll offer them £30m for there shares, take it or leave it, while changing my name to "Geordie Abramovitch", how can they turn it down ? What ever is left after my wife and daughter get the shoes and frocks they 'need' I'll use for investing in the club, I believe shareholders are allowed to put money in as well as take it out :winking:

I thought he was great. Fantastic deadball player, free kicks and corners just perfect. Had great vision for a pass, epitomised in a pass to an overlapping Bernard to score. Watch the Feyenoord away game, he is just superb. What would have been great to see was him playing in the same side as Robert. eeHe could hav ebeen the player to set Robert free, with passes in front of him. Robson couldn't see that working and in two seasons they were together on the pitch for less than 80 minutes in total. We tried to play him wide left, didn;t work, we tried to play him as a Gary Speed type, didn't work. We should hav eplayed him as a Hugo Viana type, but no one had the imagination. In the end his confidence in himself seemed shattered, and the crowd's matched that.