Parky

I want Shearer and Keegan.

He said they were aiming for top 4.

You'll win nowt with kids man. If they're good enough they're old enough.

I'd rather give younger fitter players pitch time. Radical I know.

Dear me, he's clearly too fragile for the CC.

http://greg.org/archive/team_america_kji.jpg I wov the toon! Come to think of it he'd be an awesome owner. Can you imagine him doing transfer negotiations? "We want Jermaine Beckford for free or we'll develop nuclear weapons."

I take that and raise you an administration and -12 points.

I think this. If he thought he had even an outside chance of getting the job back he'd have been shitehawking in the media for weeks. Yup.

:omg:

Over human life? You pig! We don't even have a buyer yet and people are lining up to throw stones. Ridiculi.

I'd prefer the survival of the club.

I absolutely agree on all counts. What puts all this into perspective is that Everton DOUBLED NUFC's turnover in the figures released today - even Fulham and Wigan did better than NUFC....a sobering lesson for those still claiming that NUFC are 'a big club'.. we finished TWELFTH in Prem t/over.... I plumped for 3+ years in the Fizzy - an unless a really decent takeover happens quickly, I stand by that. I don't think the club can handle more than one and at the extreme two seasons in the Championship. The longer we stay out the less chance there is of EVER getting back.

In before the lock....etc....

...then he went to the bar and got pissed with Lambiarse.

Kinnear won't be back.

Ashley has still fleeced investors in Sports Direct though. He floated it at £3 a share (but kept about 55% of the shares iirc) and trousered £929 million in cash based on that valuation. Following the flotation at its worst it went down to about 40p a share and that was before there was a recession. The dive in price was due to poor performance and the company not delivering what it had said it would. It is also generally regarded as being one of the worst run PLCs on the market. The price has recently recovered, as you say, and is about 85p now, but thats still well short of the flotation value. When the price dived Ashley started buying up the shares again taking advantage of the lower price - last time I looked his holding was back up to about 75% of the company. Sneaky fuck.

Aye, spending the sort of money the club could no longer afford to. What a boy. Yeah, whereas the current regime's solution of spending only the money that the club could afford was a fucking resounding success, wasn't it? That'd be a good point if lack of spending was actually the cause of our problems for the past year, which it wasn't. Please don't make me put on the same list Liquidcack is on.

Bet MA has been losing money all over the shop as well.

There is that. However the upwardly spiraling wage costs (74m per year) is partly due to our attempt to compete with clubs with vast tranches of ongoing wealth transfer. Money that has primarily come into the game through corporate and big business buyout of football, which was correctly identified in the 90's as a strong vehicle for company messages.

Hence my Shearer caveat in the OP.

I think football (ie top flight football) will have to undergo a very real crisis if it is ever to return to its local roots. When you hear stuff like that Game 39 proposal, it is really flaunted in our faces that we're not the people who matter any more, it is the mass audiences in the Far East who make the tv rights so valuable. So valuable that the league wanted to introduce an extra match which would, at a stroke, destroy the validity of our league being based on every club playing every other club twice - the last vestige of the "level playing field" gone in the name of money. As a supporter, I don't particularly feel the benefits of this being the richest league in the world. My season ticket still costs me a lot of money, I'm watching the same four teams win pretty much everything, even breaking into (for one or two seasons only) that top four is seen as an achievement of the size of Burton Albion winning the FA Cup. Talking of which, the FA cup, in the new Wembley, and yesterday we have 25,000 fans of both sides getting tickets, meaning 40k for stuffed shirts from the FA and corporate sponsors. The entire game is wrong, wrong, wrong from top to bottom, and ideas like following the Barca line of membership (ie great ideas based on noble morals) are fucked from the start The entire game is drowning in a sea of wrong. It doesn't even matter if you are a well run club (I know we aren't), it is almost impossible for even Everton and Villa (very well run) to compete. Personally I'd like to see a limit on loans, transfer budget caps (50M), squad size (Liv have 62). The PL and the CL are no longer competitions worthy of the name.

Isn't the problem that people want an owner that will be able to put money into the club (i.e not Ashley or Freddy), wouldn't a fans' consortium do just the opposite? We wouldn't be able to plug the club with money if needed, which it probably would. I don't see the parachute payment and the money from player sales being enough to stablise us. Yeah, I know and I agree. The hypothetical Real/Barca scenario would be more beneficial in the long-run. Even if we are condemned to the Championship for a couple of years, if we can become financially stable and viable, then promotion into the Premiership will mean that we can actually spend money too because of our fanbase. We're not like other teams who need someone to shoulder their spending sprees. The infrastructure at the club is still very strong. We've got a short-run financial problem. If this can be solved, then a Real/Barca style ownership is possible. The Barca model is fine, if you're a club with the money printing ability of Barca. The fan ownership model is an ideal, and it is hard to pick at the principles behind it, it would be a beacon for the rst of football in many ways. But, you;d still be competing against clubs bankrolled by rich owners. 10k average extra punters through the door over your competitors makes little difference these days. That's why football is intrinsically fucked. Manchester City, 250m transfer budgets, buying everything on the planet capable of standing up, etc etc etc. Honestly, what's the point? All things that average people had emotional connections with are being broken by a corporate - playboy mentality. Somehow and at some point we need to take the game back.

camus-esque Sartre.

Isn't the problem that people want an owner that will be able to put money into the club (i.e not Ashley or Freddy), wouldn't a fans' consortium do just the opposite? We wouldn't be able to plug the club with money if needed, which it probably would. I don't see the parachute payment and the money from player sales being enough to stablise us. Yeah, I know and I agree. The hypothetical Real/Barca scenario would be more beneficial in the long-run. Even if we are condemned to the Championship for a couple of years, if we can become financially stable and viable, then promotion into the Premiership will mean that we can actually spend money too because of our fanbase. We're not like other teams who need someone to shoulder their spending sprees. The infrastructure at the club is still very strong. We've got a short-run financial problem. If this can be solved, then a Real/Barca style ownership is possible. It will happen one day.

FYP. :-[