Happy Face

Do you see the irony? Where did I indulge in any heresay? I said that Geremi's wage covers that of the new players, and whether it does or not, it definitley covers a huge proportion. That's about it I think....unless you provide links to show other clubs stating they made offers for other players.

Bullshit Which players did Ashley not sign? What was the clubs debt in 2007? What is the clubs debt now? What exactly was bullshit?

If the club did nothing next season and simply tried their best to stop up without spending any money they would end the season having made a profit wouldn't they ? Its that cash I'm looking for him to spend on players. Like I said I'm looking at £10-£15m tops. If that is his plan (or using profits to pay off debt) then the question is whether we survive. Would taking us from 17 years of uninterrupted top flight football to being a yo-yo club be deemed as the right direction? It seems for some people the answer is yes...as long as the books balance. Personally I can't imagine celebrating the books being balanced after a defeat on a Saturday night. Either way, until the club actually does start losing less money than it was in 2007, or finishing in the top half of the Premier league I don't see how it can be said we're going in the right direction either on or off the pitch compared to when he bought the club.

wages maybe closer to 50% of turnover but that will mean little if he uses any excess to pay his loans back before the club is ready. I agree he has a lot to prove next season, like I said he has to spend some cash in the summer, we can't expect huge sums to be spent but he has to buy quality and replace the likes of Butt and Nolan. And yes he has to hold back on getting some of his loans back but nobody can predict what he'll do, but the question is, is mike ashley steering Newcastle in the right direction, I can't see how the answer can be no. At the very very best, if all you (and they) say is true and he's making the tough financial decisions to sort us out and the past year has been beneficial in terms of cost cutting, then I think the most you could say would be that he's put the brakes on our decline and there's a lot more work to do to start moving in the right direction. I don't believe that's the case though because, as I've said, the debt has been increasing at a far greater rate since Ashley arrived (and continues to do so). If we go up all The Ashley supporters are insisting he'll spend the money needed to keep us up....undoingh all the "good work" he's done bringing down costs. It's a logical fallacy.

I would answer this if the last few posts weren't realistic views on living with Ashley at the club and hoping for the best with regards to who who he puts in charge.

I hope not. I hope he can turn it around.

I'm confused. Why would NUSC speak up about this? It won't get Ashley out of the club. 5 stories on the NUST front page from the past week and not one makes mention of Ashley. On this subject, there's this... http://www.nust.org.uk/fsf-cleveland-police

Totally agree. We should aim for achievable goals. Even if Ashley did want to sell the club he couldn't. The fans ire should be direted at Desmond Decker. Show that he's less popular than Ashley and give him the opportunity to use him as a scapegoat. To be replaced by ... ? They haven't contacted me when I offered to be an advisor so maybe his plan is to shift lamb chop and offer me the top arse-licking job. Thing is, I'd be kicking his arse... Keith Edelman? Mebeez he could tempt Wenger

Totally agree. We should aim for achievable goals. Even if Ashley did want to sell the club he couldn't. The fans ire should be direted at Desmond Decker. Show that he's less popular than Ashley and give him the opportunity to use him as a scapegoat.

http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/data/630/GrammarNaziCat.jpg Without wishing to sound pedantic it was a spelling error I pointed out and not a grammatical one. You do understand the difference don't you ? Further to that, I would never criticise the grammar or spelling of anyone posting on here (we can all make mistakes) but when it is quoted from a media source then I think it's fair game to have a go at them as they should do better. In fact the number of mis-spellings, grammatical and pronunciation errors delivered by highly paid journalists on Sky etc is quite shameful and shows how far their profession has declined. i'll be honest, i thought tow the line was the correct usage probably form a nautical thing. having googled it is indeed toe the line. Just shows that using N-O can even be educational at times As I said earlier any of us can make that mistake, but when it's from a media source then they really should know better. I'd edited the original article. I did think "is it tow or toe?" and chose to go with an invalid assumption.

http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/data/630/GrammarNaziCat.jpg

Yes, I agree. It is unbelievable how far down Ashley has managed to take the club in such a relatively short space of time, undoing all of the excellent work done by those he bought the club from. The club has a history of mismanagement. One chairman's fuck-ups in no way gets another chairman off the hook for his. If Hicks sold Liverpool to someone who paid probably double what the club was worth and the new owner brought in a novice chief executive, they didn't get in the champions league, then sold all their players, went through four managers in a season to manage on a shoestring, concentrating on covering the debt and got them relegated within 2 seasons it would hardly be viewed as success for the new regime would it? Raise your expectations.

FYP

I think he came with the best intentions and thought he could be in it for the long haul. He planned to make a success of it from the start. When it went belly up he hoped to get out with as little loss as possible. I think he's naive and incompetent rather than malicious or machiavellian.

Amazing how we all agree Ashley has been a fuck up but take all this effort disussing exactly how much of a fuck up.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/mort-brings-sea-change-to-tone-of-business-on-the-tyne-460911.html

That was from the first set of accounts which they signed off and they were for the season before they arrived. The accounts covered up until 30th June 2007. Are you sure you've got that right The accounts released in January 2009 said... http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2009/01/23/newcastle-united-club-accounts-reveal-state-of-play-61634-22758691/ That's covering 2007/2008 isn't it? Otherwise there's been no accounts covering any of Ashley's time at the club. I'm 100% certain, I've got the accounts open now and it covers the takeover and specifically mentions buying out Sir John Hall in June of that year, the end of that financial year was 30th June and just over 3 weeks later. Not like NUFC-Finances.org.uk to get it wrong. Their 2008 results say... http://www.nufc-finances.org.uk/ If only yours wasn't a hard copy and you could quote it. :-[

That was from the first set of accounts which they signed off and they were for the season before they arrived. The accounts covered up until 30th June 2007. Are you sure you've got that right The accounts released in January 2009 said... http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2009/01/23/newcastle-united-club-accounts-reveal-state-of-play-61634-22758691/ That's covering 2007/2008 isn't it? Otherwise there's been no accounts covering any of Ashley's time at the club.

The debt wasn't £70 million, we had spent future income so the debt was higher and closer to £100 million as Michael Owen was our future Northern Rock and Adidas sponsorship money. The season before we were taken over saw our annual debt almost treble, our gates had fallen by almost 2,000 per game and our wages to revenue ratio had risen from 63% to 72%. That was Ashley's first year in charge (2008) wasn't it?

Smith was the first signing they made, the others were lined up before they were in control and all they did was agree to the transfers before they knew the true state of the club. They weren't in a position to do much different at that time without knowing the state of the club, what do you think would have happened if they had refused to sanction those transfers at that time? The club was running and they had to allow the club to function on a normal basis at that time. As for the losses, the season before we lost £33 million was an 11 month season and we lost £12 million. I think we made a small loss in 2005 and a £4 million profit in 2004 so I don't know where you're getting your figures from, mine are coming straight from our accounts. I can't be arsed to look to see when we got something like £10 million to cover the injury to Michael Owen, we had to pay his wages once his injury cleared up so we had a boost one financial year. I agree with your figures. I'd just rounded the £33m down to £30m (of course £7m of that was interest that Ashley doesn't have to worry about, so to be averaging a £32m loss each year is even more astonishing). On the few signings he sanctioned early on...he never exactly put a stop to that at any point down the line until relegation looked likely.

Your post totally dismisses the state of the club at the time that Ashley bought it. I could have sworn that this thread was discussing our current situation and why we are were we are and the benefits or not of having Ashley. It’s too easy to pretend that this is about Shepherd v Ashley, which it isn’t and bury your head in the sand when it suits you. My post is about what Ashley inherited and it being part of the reason why we’re in the shit. I could see where you were coming from if Ashley had improved the clubs position either financially or positionally (if that's a word). But by December it was him who'd doubled the debt he inherited from £70m to £140m. Llambias says he's just extended that debt by another £25 or £30m. And we're still in the championship. In Shepherd's last 4 years he averaged a £12m loss each season. Llambias has apparently almost trebled that to an average loss of £32m a season over 3 years. The situation he inhereted was a pretty shitty one. But he's managed to make it a whole lot worse. What did he do exactly to do this? I thought Quayside said that Ashley inherited a club that was losing £30m a year. Amongst others, he signed Viduka, Barton, Geremi, Smith and Coloccini on expensive contracts without relegation clauses. He similarly extended the contracts of Butt, Ameobi and Taylor without condition of relegation, he sacked two managers who required expensive payouts and he got us relegated. We'd lost £30m in Shepherd's last year in charge. We never lost more than £12m any other year. In the 3 years prior to the £33m loss, the average was £5m a season. For the loan to have since extended their loans by £96m would be astonishing, VERY worrying, and entirely Ashley's choice. Of course if he were to cancel the loans I'd forgive most of it. Paid Dennis Wise £2m a year... ...to spend £5m on Xisco.... etc.

Our financial health has been stabalised and it should begin to improve. If anything good can come from our relegation then it will be getting rid of the dead-wood which we've picked up over the years and probably couldn't afford to get rid of while in the Premiership. We need good management at the club to gain from our current situation and start to build once again. Can we do that with Ashley and llambias? No idea, they haven't looked like being able to do that so far and they must deliver if we go up. The only reason the £70m of debt outstanding under Shepherd in the Premier League was less sustainable than the £166m of debt we've now got under Ashley in the Championship is that Ashley is covering it. That's not a compliment either.

Your post totally dismisses the state of the club at the time that Ashley bought it. I could have sworn that this thread was discussing our current situation and why we are were we are and the benefits or not of having Ashley. It’s too easy to pretend that this is about Shepherd v Ashley, which it isn’t and bury your head in the sand when it suits you. My post is about what Ashley inherited and it being part of the reason why we’re in the shit. I could see where you were coming from if Ashley had improved the clubs position either financially or positionally (if that's a word). But by December it was him who'd doubled the debt he inherited from £70m to £140m. Llambias says he's just extended that debt by another £25 or £30m. And we're still in the championship. In Shepherd's last 4 years he averaged a £12m loss each season. Llambias has apparently almost trebled that to an average loss of £32m a season over 3 years. The situation he inhereted was a pretty shitty one. But he's managed to make it a whole lot worse. What did he do exactly to do this? I thought Quayside said that Ashley inherited a club that was losing £30m a year. Amongst others, he signed Viduka, Barton, Geremi, Smith and Coloccini on expensive contracts without relegation clauses. He similarly extended the contracts of Butt, Ameobi and Taylor without condition of relegation, he sacked two managers who required expensive payouts and he got us relegated. We'd lost £30m in Shepherd's last year in charge. We never lost more than £12m any other year. In the 3 years prior to the £33m loss, the average was £5m a season. For the loan to have since extended their loans by £96m would be astonishing, VERY worrying, and entirely Ashley's choice. Of course if he were to cancel the loans I'd forgive most of it.

Your post totally dismisses the state of the club at the time that Ashley bought it. I could have sworn that this thread was discussing our current situation and why we are were we are and the benefits or not of having Ashley. It’s too easy to pretend that this is about Shepherd v Ashley, which it isn’t and bury your head in the sand when it suits you. My post is about what Ashley inherited and it being part of the reason why we’re in the shit. I could see where you were coming from if Ashley had improved the clubs position either financially or positionally (if that's a word). But by December it was him who'd doubled the debt he inherited from £70m to £140m. Llambias says he's just extended that debt by another £25 or £30m. And we're still in the championship. In Shepherd's last 4 years he averaged a £12m loss each season. Llambias has apparently almost trebled that to an average loss of £32m a season over 3 years. The situation he inhereted was a pretty shitty one. But he's managed to make it a whole lot worse.