ikri

This. He's worth holding on too next season not on 85k a week he's not Where are you getting this? Some people here act as if they are on the f***ing board. Give it a rest. All reports point to him being on 60k + even more. What do you reckon he's on then? If not that high? If you believe the press they'll tell you that everyone at the club from the tea lady upwards is earning £60k per week.

Shepherd on his own simply does not have enough cash to fund the club for at least one season in the Championship. Whoever buys the club needs to set aside enough money to pay the wages of all of our current players in the event that we can't shift the high wage earners. That means that they'll need an additional £60m. How is Shepherd going to find that? Borrow against future season ticket sales & sponsorship deals? We've been down that path before with Shepherd and it wasn't pretty. If Shepherd is simply the front man for a consortium who keep him on a very tight leash it might work, but Shepherd on his own is a disaster waiting to happen.

They're unlikely to have more than £60-70m between themselves to purchase the club so they'd have to fund the club through debt again.

Whoever buys the club will need to budget about £60m for the coming season, just to cover wages in the case that we can't shift most of the useless knackers who took us down. Shepherd cannot afford that, he's not worth more than £45m on his own. Either he's found other people with enough cash to buy the club or he's mortgaging the club to fund the purchase like Man Utd.

Nobody will pay 100m as is. 100m+ 100m debt= 200m You honestly believe he is asking for the loan to be repayed as well? there's no loan. What he did was guarantor the debt against his own wealth, the debt is still there. potential buyers are seeing this+ the wage bill for a useless squad, and running a fucking mile,...hence no sale. Those loans are documented in the club's accounts aren't they? If he's knowingly submitted dishonest accounts then getting his asking price for the club will be the least of his problems.

Disagree entirely with that first paragraph. A number of my mates are Liverpool fans including one that knows his wife Louise's Dad well. When he was at LFC he amongst the rest of the team were sponsored by Jaguar. He used to get a brand new Jag each year free and sell his year old one to his now father-in-law at top book price. There is rather a dim view of Michael Owen outside of the North East. There's a rather dim view of Owen in the North East too tbf

I don't really believe it either. But the way they keep going on about it, it'll have to be a massive bit of front by the current lot or if indeed Seymour is making stuff up again. Not sure why anyone would want to pay the 100m now all they have to do is wait for more chaos and pay half that. If there was only 1 interested buyer then that would make sense, but can they afford to gamble with waiting for a drop in price when there's at least 1 other bidder with the cash ready and two more who may have enough to buy the club for the current asking price?

It's the guy who writes for the Mirror isn't it? I seem to remember that he was right about a lot of things going on last year.

Want to supply any evidence for this or have you just guessed?

eh? WE won't be getting a good fee, the money will not be going towards new players for us, it will be going straight in the fat c***s pocket. No money has gone into Ashley's pocket FFS, he will be selling the club at a significant loss by the looks of it. Selling at a loss maybe he is, but say he gets £12mill for Bassong what do you think he will do with the money? Since he's negotiating to sell the club he'll either be forced to reduce his asking price for the club by the same amount or he'll have to leave that money in the club. He cannot sell the club's assets without affecting the valuation of those assets.

To attract visitors (and advertising revenue) to nufcblog I'd guess. Unless you meant why is a Microsoft co-founder interested in the club? Nagger please! They've simply picked his name out of thin air based on his wealth and his ownership of 3 sporting franchises in the US.

To attract visitors (and advertising revenue) to nufcblog I'd guess. Unless you meant why is a Microsoft co-founder interested in the club?

I really hope that you're right. Players like Duff and Smith are the reason that we're in this position. Overpaid, under performing, unmotivated garbage. They might run around a lot when they have to, they might dive into tackles but they have contributed almost nothing in the last couple of years, there were games last season where we'd have probably done better if we'd simply dropped the entire midfield and played 5-5 with the defence hoofing the ball up field. I feel that we'll probably end up being stuck with Barton though, he's a risk for any club to take on and he's on massive wages here, I can't see him taking a wage cut to join another team even if they're in a higher league.

Aye, I'd heard that they only just have the asking price and struggled to raise that. It think its the one fronted by Shep If that's true then they need to rethink their buyout. The club needs major surgery to rebuild a hugely unbalanced squad and that's going to require money, as is spending at least 1 season outside the Premiership. Without the additional TV revenue the club is going to be running at a pretty massive loss again this year unless they can renegotiate every contract at the club. Whoever buys the club is probably going to need to find about £50m this year to cover losses and fund transfers with the same amount being provided for squad strengthening whenever we return to the Premiership. We will be selling a lot of players though which will reduce the wage bill massively and bring in millions of pounds in transfer fees. Even if we only manage to remove £30m from the wage bill and bring in £25m from those player sales we'd be pretty much breaking even this season. Which means the only funds the new owner would need to come up with is transfer money, say £20m. The club can't guarantee that they'll be able to sell anyone. There's no way that we can force the high earners out of the club, they could easily pledge their undying love for the club and bleed us dry for the rest of their contracts. Whoever buys the club really needs to have sufficient funds available to cover the wages of everyone currently at the club, plus be able to fund new transfers. After that any sales should be viewed as a bonus.

Aye, I'd heard that they only just have the asking price and struggled to raise that. It think its the one fronted by Shep If that's true then they need to rethink their buyout. The club needs major surgery to rebuild a hugely unbalanced squad and that's going to require money, as is spending at least 1 season outside the Premiership. Without the additional TV revenue the club is going to be running at a pretty massive loss again this year unless they can renegotiate every contract at the club. Whoever buys the club is probably going to need to find about £50m this year to cover losses and fund transfers with the same amount being provided for squad strengthening whenever we return to the Premiership.

Very mediocre defender. If we need backup players then I'd prefer that some of the younger players got their chance ahead of someone who isn't really likely to get much better than he currently is.

From that story and from the statistical likelihood of getting 8 consecutive away games on Boxing Day I'd hazard a guess that it's down to a request by the club or police, probably the club trying to be cheap and not wanting to pay anything extra to staff for having to open on a bank holiday.

That's disgusting, inexcusable, behaviour from any manager.

So, is the reason that we've not played at home on Boxing Day for years now because the club have requested it or because that guy has some bizarre grudge against the fans?

Rich American with experience in owning a sports franchise, one who possibly has a lot of time on his hands these days. What could possibly go wrong? http://www.scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Politics/Images/george-bush-trying-to-open-door.jpg

The best thing about that article is that it contains no direct quotes. I'm hanging on to that in the hope that Fat Sam comes in with a bid to 'rescue' Alan Smith. Since Fat Sam based a lot of his decisions on Opta performance stats it would suggest that since he kept picking Smith even when there were other options available purely because Smith's Opta stats were good. If that was the case then I could see him wanting him again, based on his flawed Opta methodology.

We do everything in public. Other clubs only go public when pretty much everything is agreed.

You see,i can't make head nor tail of Ashleys handling of the club,everything he's done has been detrimental to the club in some way.The things that we feel are right,he's shot them down in flames shortly after..ie Keegan,Shearer.. He's a gambler. He took the risk that the players we had would be enough to avoid relegation, that gamble failed in spectacular fashion. I don't believe that he had any malice in his actions, but his actions do appear have have a number of things in common with someone addicted to gambling His actions meet more than a couple of those criteria.

He may be a figurehead, he maybe a big contributor to the consortium and with a potential 33% of ownership (his funds) looming you simply cannot say he's just another employee. good point, and remember last time as part of what you could call a consortium of the halls and the shepherds, freddy was obsessed about building up his control of the club and expanding his influence, which is why board members weren't replaced, footballing decisions were made by him, and dodgy deals with NTL and MGM were made. Where’s Shepherd going to get £33m from? Just a guess, but he might be able to find £33m from the £37.6m he was paid for his shares in the club by Ashley. He’s been spending it. http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/business/3812803.Shepherd_Offshore_in_shipyards_deal/ http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2009/02/25/freddy-shepherd-buys-former-school-la-sagesse-72703-23007435/ The Times has his net worth down as £48m so even taking those bits of spending into account (the Shepherd Offshore shipyards deal won't have been entirely financed by Freddy) he should still be able to scrape £33m together and still have a great deal of money to spare. He'd have to love NUFC an awful lot to risk 60% of everything he owns on the basket case Ashley would be leaving behind. With so much of his personal wealth at stake he’d probably keep his eye on the ball? I think it would be problem if he was chairman, too much bad blood under the river. But I wouldn't be too concerned if he was part of a consortium that bought the club. I've no doubt that he loves the club. He also had roughly the same percentage of his wealth tied up in the club when he was chairman. I just don't trust him to run the club

He may be a figurehead, he maybe a big contributor to the consortium and with a potential 33% of ownership (his funds) looming you simply cannot say he's just another employee. good point, and remember last time as part of what you could call a consortium of the halls and the shepherds, freddy was obsessed about building up his control of the club and expanding his influence, which is why board members weren't replaced, footballing decisions were made by him, and dodgy deals with NTL and MGM were made. Where’s Shepherd going to get £33m from? Just a guess, but he might be able to find £33m from the £37.6m he was paid for his shares in the club by Ashley. He’s been spending it. http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/business/3812803.Shepherd_Offshore_in_shipyards_deal/ http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2009/02/25/freddy-shepherd-buys-former-school-la-sagesse-72703-23007435/ The Times has his net worth down as £48m so even taking those bits of spending into account (the Shepherd Offshore shipyards deal won't have been entirely financed by Freddy) he should still be able to scrape £33m together and still have a great deal of money to spare.