OzzieMandias

"regulars" at Blu Bamboo.

To be fair to UV he, like many others of us, appears to be more concerned about the actual nosedive into the CCC rather than a still notional threat of financial oblivion. And it is, and must always remain, notional; who knows what the previous owners might have done to protect their investment? On the basis it was a public company rather than them being "the owners" their options were fairly limited. This isn't difficult; if you own a lot of shares in a plc and the plc goes under you lose a lot of money. The Halls and Shepherd owned a lot of shares and therefore had a substantial interest in maintaining the club's viability. Or in flogging it off quick so someone else had to pay their bills. You've changed your tune since you thought Shepherd was hanging on to the club for dear life by not selling it to a hedge fund and allowing the club to flourish via a leveraged buyout. Probably about the same time you changed your tune about the merits of protesting against the owners. Hall wanted to sell. Shepherd wanted to own it all. This was well known and part of the reason the deal between Hall and Ashley was done behind Shepherd's back as Shepherd had tried to block the takeovers in the past - he convinced people like Ozzie he had anyway. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-471478/Shepherd-Betrayed-friends.html You could argue that he was lying, but to what purpose when the vast majority of supporters hated him and wanted him out and saw Ashley as our saviour? By saying he wanted to keep the club and fight Ashley's takeover he only made himself even more unpopular (if possible). It all seems pretty far fetched that he was just putting on an act of wanting to takeover himself while buying up more shares in a company which was about to go bankrupt 2 months before Ashley showed up out of the blue so save us, and then carried on the act afterwards at a time when Ashley could do no wrong in the eyes of most supporters. You're a sad twat, aren't you, hoarding old posts to use out of context? Why on earth shouldn't I think it good idea to protest against one owner, at one time, in one set of circumstances, and not consider it counter-productive or pointless to protest against a different owner, at a different time, in a different set of circumstances? Just to take one of many variables, Fred was vulnerable to fluctuations in income; Ashley isn't. And where did I argue on this thread that Shepherd wanted to sell? I know he claimed he wanted to keep the club, though fuck knows where he thought he was going to get the money to buy out SJH etc. But hey, maybe he was just as incompetent as you when it comes to interpreting a set of accounts and was labouring under the delusion that everything was hunky dory.

And the loudest. Apparently.

To be fair to UV he, like many others of us, appears to be more concerned about the actual nosedive into the CCC rather than a still notional threat of financial oblivion. And it is, and must always remain, notional; who knows what the previous owners might have done to protect their investment? On the basis it was a public company rather than them being "the owners" their options were fairly limited. This isn't difficult; if you own a lot of shares in a plc and the plc goes under you lose a lot of money. The Halls and Shepherd owned a lot of shares and therefore had a substantial interest in maintaining the club's viability. Or in flogging it off quick so someone else had to pay their bills. Shepherd didn't want to sell.. in his last few years as chairmen he was actually buying up more shares. There goes your theory. Yeah I must have imagined SJH flogging it off quick so someone else could pay their bills.

To be fair to UV he, like many others of us, appears to be more concerned about the actual nosedive into the CCC rather than a still notional threat of financial oblivion. And it is, and must always remain, notional; who knows what the previous owners might have done to protect their investment? On the basis it was a public company rather than them being "the owners" their options were fairly limited. This isn't difficult; if you own a lot of shares in a plc and the plc goes under you lose a lot of money. The Halls and Shepherd owned a lot of shares and therefore had a substantial interest in maintaining the club's viability. Or in flogging it off quick so someone else had to pay their bills.

I think I went to the old Wembley just three times. Once to see David Bowie, once to see Madonna, and once to the final of Euro 96.

For comedy purposes one hopes that UV does indeed continue trying to peddle the idiotic narrative that financially everything was just wonderful up until the point when Shepherd left the club, and then immediately nosedived the minute Ashley took over.

For once I more or less agree with you.

Were you there for that Barcelona CL game when it was so foggy you could hardly see from one end of the pitch to the other? Aye, I was living in Prague at that time so I took the time to travel up north and watch the game and visit the city. My memories of the game itself are equally foggy... Luís Enrique opened for us, they drew no much later on... and then the remainder of the thing was rather dire to watch. In the second half I couldn't see any of the play at all when it was down the Barcelona end. Gabor Király was the only player visible, standing on the edge of his area and peering down the field. Players would come back into view only when Barça attacked up the right. Whenever this happened everyone in my area starting singing a song which went (rough translation): "So nice, so nice, to see you again!" I didn't stay until the end. The match had been going to make me late for a date with a beautiful Slovenian woman, so when it all descended into opaque ridiculousness, I fucked off to have a drink and get laid instead.

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! You're almost as bad at similes as you are at figuring out accounts. You'll have to highlight the bit where I was "defending Ashley", unless you think that laughing at you amounts to the same thing.

UV and Happy Face discussing finances is a bit like Ant and Dec discussing quantum physics.

He lacks the necessary sense of humour.

The thread title's (deliberate?) misconstruction of Llambias's words basically proves that what the guy was actually saying ("There is a very small section of fans that are basically not reasonable, there is no reality to where they are.") is essentially correct. Congrats on the own goal.

Were you there for that Barcelona CL game when it was so foggy you could hardly see from one end of the pitch to the other?

The world's most famous country? Meanwhile, I've been to a few games at Budapest's Népstadion, and the old Wembley was miles better than that. I've also been to a load of games at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and old Wembley was better than that, too, before the remodelling for WC 2006.

You think Ashley should have sold more players? Bought fewer? What?

Given will be asking for a transfer to another nationality after the number of goals Brazil are going to score tonight.

No we havent Oh yes we have I don't know what figures you're basing the transfer "profit" on, as no fees seem to have been announced.

Anyway, Sir Bobby spent his first two years balancing the books and getting the wage bill under control (the old board not having run things as flawlessly as some on this thread have been suggesting), and, if you average it out, got less to spend per annum than the managers before him and after.

In a nutshell, the buyer would pay Ashley £80m as a settlement on the £110m+ loans outstanding (£30m loss)...and £1 for the club (£134m loss). Again, i don't buy it, but if it is the case, it's a horrible indictment of his purchase and his running of the club. He's every bit as much to blame as anyone that preceded him at the helm, probably moreso. He increased the wage bill at the club by over 10% in his first year, paid out large redundancy packages to two managers in his first 18 months and got us relegated within two years. putting it like that is like saying that as shearer was manager when we got relegated then it is solely his fault. Don't be silly. I don't think I said anyone has been solely to blame for anything. Shearer was in charge for 8 games. He took us from being 2 points from safety to a finish 1 point from safety (closer to survival). We'd taken 6 points from the last eight games before he came in and he won 5 points from the last 8 games (only slightly worse). He spent nothing. He didin't have the time or the power to make the situation any worse. Completely different to spending 18 months following the policy of your predecessor (badly), then blaming your predecessor and his policy for all the ills that have befallen the club. are you telling me that "He increased the wage bill at the club by over 10% in his first year, paid out large redundancy packages to two managers in his first 18 months and got us relegated within two years." wasn't meant to intimate that you held him responsible ? did he spend 18months following the policy of fred. seems more like one summer to me. I said it above..."He's every bit as much to blame as anyone that preceded " It was about 15 months after buying the club he gave Coloccini his current contract used as a prime example of the crippling wage bill. i'd like to actually know how much coloccini's on. i've heard everywhere from £45,000 to £80,000. like yourself i blame him in part, my apologies as i thought you were, like many, attempting to make out it was all his fault. At what point does the state of the club’s finances become Ashley’s fault then? When does he become responsible for what’s happening at the club? The figures are a bit worrying. A weekly loss of £500k works out at annual loss of £26m, and that’s after receiving a £12m parachute payment and making a net transfer profit of at least £10m. That means that if we go up the extra £35m in TV money won’t even cover the losses the club are incurring under the current set up. Where is the money for team strengthening going to come from, could it be a case of having to cut the wage bill further? I dunno, but... 1) The "£500,000 a week" isn't some gospel figure. It was an unnamed "source" in a half-baked story in a crap newspaper. If it refers to anything, it's probably to the £20 million Ashley was announced as putting in after no one came up with the money to buy the club. 2) If we go up, and the extra TV money etc then covers costs, then Ashley's £20 million next year might go to funding playing purchases rather than making up the shortfall. 3) Won't some of our higher earners drop off the wage bill anyway after this season? Butt, for example. 4) Isn't there money soon to come in from a new shirt sponsorship deal?

FANTASTIC? Remember Toon Gate? he should never ever had been allowed back!, that scenario almost got the club relegated that season more than made up for that with subsequent achievements while robson was in charge. at our height under robson he was just abotu the best chairman you could wish for.however the biig decision was always going to be replacing robson and he completely and utterly f***ed it up and our decline since then can all be traced to that one decision. he tried to claw us back by giving souness 36m for transfers but it simply compounded the situation. had he timed the robson replacement correctly, brought in a top manager (after all we were a top club back then) and gave him the money souness had spent instead, then theres a good chance we would still be up there fighting for 4th spot in the table. More than made up?!? he got lucky that he sacked gullit at a time when robson was available! he appointed 1 good manager out of 5 or 6! a shocking record! also when he sold gary speed behind robson's back, also the club has went forever downhill when we SPENT £0 in 2003/04 You talk total shite, and basically ignore and disregard what other people are saying then continue with a tunnel visioned rant. Shepherd got lucky because Robson was available when Gullit was sacked. Such an empty statement. The opposite is true in 1997 surely though? Shepherd was UNLUCKY when he first came calling that Robson was in employment at Barcelona. JohnnyPD excellent posts. From Souness onward FFS undid all of his unwork. So many inaccuracies as well with regards to figures quoted here too. Shepherd made £70m out of NUFC, excluding the wages and share dividends, he made just under £37m from the club, Sir John Hall walked away twice with a lot more than Freddy Shepherd. I have more time for Shepherd than Hall, "Lady Mae and I bankrolled the Andy Cole deal and acted as guarantors" who gives a fuck??? As if there was ever any guarantee of him losing his money. Actually it was SJH who was chairman the first time Robson was approached.

You never know, though. He might be one of those players who fancies getting a game now and again.

hows it bollocks. yes they had a very healthy wages/turnover ratio. and they spent the leftover on over the top pay and dividends for themselves. and why gloss over the last few years of his tenure ? Christ What will take for you to grasp what I'm saying. As a commercial business we were far more succesful than we are now, our ability to generate money, and the commercial aspects of the club put us in the big league. And then they fucked it all up, and THEN they sold it.

Who has said that? I did. Doesn't mean I want it to happen, but he would come back if the offer was there, and its not like he needs the money so if the wages were right and the fee isn't daft i wouldn't be surprised to see it happen. As I said though, doesn't mean I want to see it happen. I would. Very surprised.