Colos Short and Curlies

Its definitely STalyor. He's got a distinctive 'crouching picture' pose

To put another spin on it, my boss has been made redundant but has brought up a number of grievances. Most of these are wrong, a FACT I know as he has quoted me in them and what he is saying is at best a grossly warped view of events and at worst complete lies. He will end up getting a settlement higher than he should - it should be basic redundancy but he'll walk away with about £20k on top. Doen't mean he is right and the company wrong This one? If so you should present this as proof he's a congenital liar. Nope, he got given the heave ho last summer! Last man standing here now

The Goomba Goal Machine will hit double figures

To put another spin on it, my boss has been made redundant but has brought up a number of grievances. Most of these are wrong, a FACT I know as he has quoted me in them and what he is saying is at best a grossly warped view of events and at worst complete lies. He will end up getting a settlement higher than he should - it should be basic redundancy but he'll walk away with about £20k on top. Doen't mean he is right and the company wrong

I want both, promotion and then European Football to look forward to next season. Lovely.

FYP

Its a non starter as within 5 years the 'top 4' will be in a European Super League (4 quarters a game, rolling subs, 100 sponsors per shirt, limitless budgets,topless cheerleaders (hopefully) - basically commercialised shite - and the rest of the country can get on with having a competitive league again

In reality nothing much has changed, Ashley is still asking more for the club than anyone is willing to pay when you take the debt into account. Or perhaps there are people willing to pay what he's asking, but the stumbling block is Barclays and the overdraft. It seems quite a reasonable conclusion to draw that Mort et al can meet the asking price, but are reticent to have to pay off an extra £25m to reduce the overdraft down to Barclays's standard £10m for a Championship club. That money could represent all and more of what they had put aside for transfers and I'd have thought they'd have been very wary indeed of the public reaction should they take over and then have nothing to spend on bringing new players in. Given the general mood of the fans, I'd suggest that any takeover without the means to significantly improve the playing staff would be doomed from the start as the fans simply wouldn't accept it, rightly or wrongly. The overdraft is still a debt, Barclays aren't obliged to loan money to anyone so they have every right to be a stumbling block if Moat or any other buyer is relying on their money to buy the club. Your point? How many times do you want me to make it? So you're trying to say that the actions of Barclays bank are Ashley's responsibility? If you buy a business then you take on its debts as well as its assets, anyone with a brain knows this. It's hardly Ashley's fault that the person who wants to buy his business and with whom he has agreed a price is struggling to prove that he can run it once it's his. Moat would have been aware of the level of the overdraft having done due diligence and it doesn't appear to be a secret that Barclays's standard overdraft for a Championship club is £10m, yet he seems to not have made allowances for that, perhaps he assumed that "We're Newcastle Utd "Big Club"TM, that won't apply to us!". Whatever he thought, it's not Ashley's fault, yet despite that he seems to have done what he can to resolve the issue, firstly by reducing the overdraft and secondly seemingly negotiating a deal with Barclays to let us keep it at £25m, which is two and a half times the amount that they would give to any other club in the same division. It seems to me that if anyone should be getting shit over this it's Moat (just realised I called him Mort before ), but don't let that stop you from believing Ashley is the root of all evil. My calf is hurting today for no apparent reason, perhaps that is Mike Ashley's fault and all, the bastard!!! You don't HAVE to acquire the liabilities of a business when you buy it. Depends on how the sale is structured

Lua Lua - Guthrie - Smith - Jonas Thats the way forward, Luax2 is never going to get the chance to prove himself sitting on the bench, he's got pace and can't be any worse than Barton or Nolan in that position. Stick Lovelyhands and one of Carroll/Shola/Ranger up top and the goals for column will markedly increase

:colo: :colo: :colo:

This is like bloody Nostradamus. Or the X-Files. I hope the smoking man's in this one.

Hang on, over the course of this evening he's been compared to Shola and Carroll, and now he's the new Martins.

If UEFA push this through all that will happen is the likes of Real Madrid and Man U will form a breakaway Super League outside of UEFA's family. Games will have 4 quarters, the pitch will be full of sponsorship painted on it and music will be blaring after every goal. Time outs will be allowed, along with rolling substitutes. I can't wait personally, get rid of the monsters and let the rest of us get back to enjoying football with all of its flaws

23k Great effort that. I think its the highest of the round. Nah, its a disgrace that 29k stayed a home. Best fans in the world yadda yadda

They're in £500 million pounds of debt. Aye and it shows on the pitch like Well i'm not too good on finance but surely being in that much debt cannot be sustainable. IUt can if your income is high enough, which Manures is. They'll have to refinance it in about two years. There's no way they can pay back the interest + principal on the 14% shit they've got. It'll be an interest only agreement. Principle will only be settled on sale of the club. It's like printing money for the bank, guaranteed income for as long as the loan exists. The perfect win win for bank and owner

What's in it for the Yanks/Canadian's though? Non-stop sex with Cheryl Cole.

I think Redheugh is bridging the divide between the club and the fans right now.

Perhaps one of the law bods can explain. He was found not guilty, so there'll basically be a whole new civil trial then? Sounds like that could get very expensive for the DJ if he loses. Much easier to win a civil trial - got to prove a much less severe burden of guilt

Because he's worth less than the overdraft is for would be my thinking. But surely on paper he'd be worth more if he owned the club. But there again if the club goes tits up where do Barclays get their money if there is no one with adequate resources to guarantee it? Government bail out probably

Where did you get this from? There's no way the club's worth anything like £200m+. Writing off that loan has to be part of any realistic deal surely. The key word there is realistic. I don't any more than anyone else on here but I could well believe that Ashley's insistence on recovering his loan is a key reason for there being no takers so far. I've seen nothing from any reliable source that indicates the loan is being written off. When you buy a business you inherit its assets and liabilities and the loan is simply a liability of the company. It is indeed, I put it in specifically. If Ashley is attempting to the sell the club for £100m plus £110m debt to Ashley plus any overdraft, then any and all bids have almost certainly been pure fabrications. If he is trying to sell the club for that, then he isn't seriously trying to sell it at all. (I don't believe this is the case.) The only realistic way he could sell the club for anything like £100m is if he wrote off the debt. If this is the case and if the money from player sales is going towards reducing that debt, then should a sale go through he is effectively "trousering the cash" as it is reducing his losses and is money the club will never see again. How does he get that cash out of the club though? People on here who are significantly more clued up on finances than I keep saying it would be illegal. There's nothing illegal about paying off a debt. The debt is to Ashley. The money would go into Ashley's bank account. I've said this before, but in order to get the accounts signed, Ashley (or more specifically SJP Holdings) will have signed a guarantee that the loan will not be recalled within one year from the date the accounts were signed. By using transfer fees to pay off this loan he would be comitting fraud. Of course the terms of the loan could show that (e.g.) £20m is payable each year back to Ashley on demand. If this is the case then there would be no reason why this could not be front loaded. I haven't seen the loan agreement so don't know its specifics, but I seriously doubt that it is structured in a way which would allow it all to be called in at once unless there is a major event (like a change in ownership)

Dear Merlin..... You usually close to facts but it is wrong the Portsmouth saga is still going on with the owner put the club on sale over a year now. Birmngham was on sale and use to negotiate with this HK bloke for nearly two years. So please lets not put false logic to raise our hopes.... I think the biggest difference between us and the other two clubs you mentioned is that they, if i remeber correctly, have both been run quite astutely, which means that £80m pretty much means £80m. With us you buy the club for £100m knowing you are inheriting the highest wage bill in the championship, a £100m loan and a club that is in no way financially prepared for life in the Championship. We need a major financial restructure or immediate promotion in order to avoid servious problems in the near future - that is a f***ing massive risk for any businessman. If i was buying a club as an investment i'd probably opt for Birmingham City Yup the fire sale at Pompey since January suggests a club that has been run astutley and within its means. Good ol Harry with his wheeling and dealing i'm sure i've heard Alex McLeish say that birmingham have overspent as well Yes, but they're sensible enough to do something about it before it gets ridiculous. They've made decent profits on Defoe, Crouch, Diarra and Utaka so they're probably OK now. They definitely have a much weaker squad than when Arry was managing them but if they can stay in the Prem they'll be alright. Buy 'run well' I mean relative to us - we're still paying for players who haven't played for us for fucking years, we didn't write relegation clauses into half the player's contracts, we paid ridiculous wages for players who were well past their best and we put ourselves on the verge of administration by spending well beyond our means. Birmingham may have overspent based on their own self-imposed financial constraints but they would still be sustainable in the Championship if they came straight back down. A self-sufficient championship club with a loyal fanbase and a decent shot at promotion is a much more attractive proposition than a debt-riddled Premier League underachiever whose only plus points are a big stadium and a fiercely loyal set of supporters. As we would have been. Pompey's form since the turn of the year has been as bad, if not worse, than ours. Only a good start saved them last season and this year they are one of the favourites to go down. So I would disagree that they did something before it was too late, they've just delayed the inevitable relegation - at which point they will have no saleable assets and will run administration very close. I'm not familiar enough with Brum to comment.

Dear Merlin..... You usually close to facts but it is wrong the Portsmouth saga is still going on with the owner put the club on sale over a year now. Birmngham was on sale and use to negotiate with this HK bloke for nearly two years. So please lets not put false logic to raise our hopes.... I think the biggest difference between us and the other two clubs you mentioned is that they, if i remeber correctly, have both been run quite astutely, which means that £80m pretty much means £80m. With us you buy the club for £100m knowing you are inheriting the highest wage bill in the championship, a £100m loan and a club that is in no way financially prepared for life in the Championship. We need a major financial restructure or immediate promotion in order to avoid servious problems in the near future - that is a fucking massive risk for any businessman. If i was buying a club as an investment i'd probably opt for Birmingham City Yup the fire sale at Pompey since January suggests a club that has been run astutley and within its means. Good ol Harry with his wheeling and dealing

Robbed I tells ya. But to counter BONTEMPI, the point is we finished in the top 4. Means nothing, change your shirts to red, finish fifth and get in anyway

But when the buyers have money the sales are less severe. We are in a recession - more sales with better discounts Once we recover - less sales Everton are going to get £20m + for Lescott, we should be seeing at least £15m of that, there is no way Taylor is only half as good as Lescott and the relative prices should reflect that (not that I rate JL anywhere near the £20m bracket mind)