quayside

I'm finding it hard to explain to people right now. I'm determined to stick by Moyes. I want the longevity and I believe he can be successful at Manchester United. However, it's the simplest of tactical decisions that he just isn't making. I don't understand it. I can maybe, maybe come to accept that he doesn't rate Kagawa, some managers just don't fancy a player. He's making mistakes all over though with numerous players and they just seem so glaringly obvious that it's hard to come out and support him afterwards. I mean, I'm never ever an expert at this sport, but what was it about his Everton run that makes you think he's the guy? He did a very good job at Everton IMO, but his record against the top teams is something that surely would frighten any Man U fan? That and the fact that Everton are way better now than when he was there. You have to give Moyes credit for where Everton are now like. They also aren't "way better" now compared to when Moyes was there either, they are sixth now (with a game in hand, tbf) and they finished sixth last season. and a lot of it is built on the good work of Moyes, sure Martinez has improved the quality of the football in an attacking sense (not that Evertons football was bad last season mind) but the defense is Moyes work. Both the above are fair posts. I would certainly agree that Moyes left Everton in a far better state than he found it, and he took them to a decent level. But I think this season they are considerably better than they have been for the last few seasons. He's a decent manager but not much more than that imo and I think he was always going to struggle to keep Man U at the level they were at, let alone improve them.

I'm finding it hard to explain to people right now. I'm determined to stick by Moyes. I want the longevity and I believe he can be successful at Manchester United. However, it's the simplest of tactical decisions that he just isn't making. I don't understand it. I can maybe, maybe come to accept that he doesn't rate Kagawa, some managers just don't fancy a player. He's making mistakes all over though with numerous players and they just seem so glaringly obvious that it's hard to come out and support him afterwards. I mean, I'm never ever an expert at this sport, but what was it about his Everton run that makes you think he's the guy? He did a very good job at Everton IMO, but his record against the top teams is something that surely would frighten any Man U fan? That and the fact that Everton are way better now than when he was there.

Long story short: 06-07 - £10m net transfer spend, wages up by £10m = net debt went up up by £10m Ashley doesn't buy club 07-08 - TV revenues go up by £18m, maintain yearly average £10m net transfer spend, maintain wage bill = debt reduced Of course there are other factors involved and revenues are affected by results, but basically keep the wages in check & we'd have been fine IMO. None of this would have happened of course, because Hall would have sold up to Mansour in 08 and Keegan would be leading us to our 4th consecutive title. Love the bit in bold I'll not comment on the rest, been there too many times......

UV will tell you it was all sustainable. I have serious doubts.....

Just seen this. I don't think I have ever said the club would do a Leeds or a Portsmouth. You can check my posts if you really want to and I'll own up if I'm wrong I simply state that the club was in a financial mess when Ashley bought it and (many times) have tried to explain why. I genuinely do not know what would have happened if the club had carried on under its previous ownership other than to believe there were serious financial issues.

yet he's put in over 100million above the purchase price, is this right ? Was that because he didn't do the correct due dill before buying? Just another f*** up, got his fingers burnt, tried to spend his way out, got his fingers burnt again. Now we have conservative mediocrity. The main two things that due diligence would have revealed were that the debt was repayable on a change of ownership (that's a pretty common condition but its not always the case) and the club was in the process of losing about £30 million for the year. Without being entirely sure why he bought us (and no one is) it's not easy to call whether he would have cracked on with the takeover if he was aware of those two issues. The club is actually in a far better state and worth a lot more now than when he bought it that's for sure. Whether its worth more than he paid for it is another matter. I'll bite. "in the process of losing about £30 million for the year" To be clear on this, the vast majority of this £30m "loss" was amortisation of players. It's an accountancy tool (which is quite flawed in the football club model) used to help value the assets of a company. This is not the same as the club spending £30m more than it brought in for the year as most people would understand that statement, and it is not as if Ashley suddenly had to find an extra £30m. I think the actual cash flow loss for the year was under £10m and included significant costs due to the takeover (director payoffs, loan early repayment costs, aborted refinancing costs, etc). The club was actually one of eight PL clubs to make profit before player amortisation & trading. "due diligence" I'm sick of this term being bandied about. Due diligence implies having a team of accountants and business analysts looking at the books and the fine print of contracts, etc over a period of weeks to look for problems. What we are talking about here that he is supposed to have missed when buying the club is absolute basic stuff that could be answered with a few questions. Ask any supporter who was remotely interested in the club's finances at the time and they could have told you about the repayment clause in the stadium loan. If he had not tried to buy the club on the sly I am sure, even from his sick bed, Shepherd would have been only too happy to tell him about any problems with the club to try and put him off buying it. Not doing due diligence is the equivalent of buying a car without getting it checked over by the AA. If he really didn't know about loans becoming due or current year losses, then it's the equivalent of buying it without turning the engine on to see if it starts. Your memory is off by a bit I think. Net liabilities were £16m. It's not ideal by any means, but many clubs are technically insolvent including the likes of Everton & Villa. It's actually mainly due to the under-valuation of most club's squads due to how the accountancy process works. Our squad in the last accounts for example was worth only £37m apparently. That's just over 1 Andy Carroll (it was actually valued at only £30m when we sold him). Transfermarkt, which while by no means perfect looks to have given most of our players reasonable valuations, has the squad valued at nearly £150m No way the banks are going to pull the plug just because of an accounting practice poorly suited to the business. 2 years later when we got relegated we had a £36m overdraft. Not a loan secured against income or assets, a plain old bank overdraft. I think you over-egg the club's inability to get any loans, and in fact was in the process of a refinancing deal when Ashley bought the club. Well hello again UV. I’ve written many words in debate with you on this subject over the years and stated my views. Nothing either of us has said has altered the other’s opinion and I don’t suppose it’s going to change now, but anyway: This idea that amortisation is some sort of accounting concept that doesn’t matter is just wrong. It’s rather like a football club saying that their profit and loss account shows that they have broken even over a two year period. Then someone points out that they have spent £40 million on players over that period and they just say “well we don’t count that”. Amortisation relates to real money that the club has shelled out for players. As far as your suggestion on valuing players is concerned, how subjective is that? You would have to factor in unpredictables such as fluctuations in form and injuries. And you only have to read this forum to see that there are vastly different opinions on how good and indeed how valuable certain players are. Your description of what happens during a due diligence process is indeed accurate. If we are to believe what has been reported (from Sir John Hall) Ashley acted rapidly as there was interest from a far eastern buyer – but they wanted to do due diligence which would take some time. Ashley was keen to do the deal so he went ahead and bought the Hall family out fairly quickly to close out the far eastern buyer. Shepherd and (I think) Chis Mort both stated that the bank’s change of ownership clause came as a surprise to Ashley. I agree with you it should not have. However you seem to think the clause was open knowledge to “any supporter who was interested in the clubs finances”. Where do you get that from? How would anyone know the conditions of a confidential document between the club and Barclays when it wasn’t disclosed in the accounts or was publicly available? And by the way there’s no need to get sick about discussion on the lack of due diligence. It isn’t cited as a defence of Ashley, it’s quite the opposite. As a result of your post I’ve gone back and had a look at the old accounts (thanks for the rewarding experience). The £80 to £90 million figure I quoted from my memory was based on the accumulated trading losses (which were in fact £92 million) and you are quite correct that the net liabilities at 30th June 2007 were around £16 million negative. Turning to the debt the bank was picking up interest at well over 7%. So why would they call it in if, as you say, the club was perfectly capable of servicing the debt? The truth has to be that they saw an opportunity to exit from a company that had racked up more than £90 million of trading losses and which gave them a higher risk exposure than they were prepared to tolerate. And since the club had accumulated those losses over several years and since amortisation spreads real costs over several years you cannot pass them off as being mostly down to a flawed accounting concept. Finally you are incorrect when you say that the £36 million ”old fashioned” bank overdraft was unsecured. Note 12 in the 2009 accounts quite clearly states that it was secured on assets belonging to the club. No one lends £36 million without security. Your final sentence is interesting . All we know is that they spent some money on a capital refinancing project that was aborted when the takeover took place. Given that the bank fairly hastily invoked the clause that allowed it to call in its loan (which was repaid in September) would you care to tell us more?

Serious question - so far do you think he's made money out of owning the club? And if so how? He's getting millions of pounds' worth of worldwide exposure for his main interest (which coincidentally has increased in value by over 700% since he bought NUFC) via probably the world's most popular sporting event, for free. Just that. I just can't see that his ownership of us has had much to do with the growth of SD. If you look at the Sports Direct annual report you can see that he has virtually bought the entire UK market which accounts for more than 90% of their business. They basically own the UK market as a result of buying up the major brands and elimating the competition. The profit they made from international business was only about £11 million (total SD profits were about £290 million). To put it in perspective the SD international profit in 2013 was about 5% of what he has currently invested in us. Their international business is peanuts (relatively) and fwiw so far none of it comes from the Far East. Makes you wonder why he does it then. Just for a laugh perhaps. That is certainly possible. A "vanity project" was always one of the contenders. The best scenario for us is that at some point soon he does actually decide to launch Sports Direct on the Far Eastern market and does decide to use us to help him. I'm sorry but if that is the case - the man actively and deliberately damaging the club's prospects for no reason other than to massage his own ego (this is surely even worse than using it to further Sports Direct) - then it only makes your continued defence of him and his actions even more staggering. was it a defence of ashley or an objective appraisal ? It seems like its not good enough just to dislike Ashley or see the mistakes you believe he's made, absolutely everything has to be negative or you're part of his defence league. I'm not trying to have a go at anyone, but it does feel like that on here sometimes. Sad but true.

Serious question - so far do you think he's made money out of owning the club? And if so how? He's getting millions of pounds' worth of worldwide exposure for his main interest (which coincidentally has increased in value by over 700% since he bought NUFC) via probably the world's most popular sporting event, for free. Just that. I just can't see that his ownership of us has had much to do with the growth of SD. If you look at the Sports Direct annual report you can see that he has virtually bought the entire UK market which accounts for more than 90% of their business. They basically own the UK market as a result of buying up the major brands and elimating the competition. The profit they made from international business was only about £11 million (total SD profits were about £290 million). To put it in perspective the SD international profit in 2013 was about 5% of what he has currently invested in us. Their international business is peanuts (relatively) and fwiw so far none of it comes from the Far East. Makes you wonder why he does it then. Just for a laugh perhaps. That is certainly possible. A "vanity project" was always one of the contenders. The best scenario for us is that at some point soon he does actually decide to launch Sports Direct on the Far Eastern market and does decide to use us to help him. I'm sorry but if that is the case - the man actively and deliberately damaging the club's prospects for no reason other than to massage his own ego (this is surely even worse than using it to further Sports Direct) - then it only makes your continued defence of him and his actions even more staggering. was it a defence of ashley or an objective appraisal ? It was an attempt to be objective and go beyond the "he's making millions out of us" stereotype by looking at some facts, but it obviously wasn't well received. It was not a defence of the many shocking decisions he has made since he bought the club.

yet he's put in over 100million above the purchase price, is this right ? Was that because he didn't do the correct due dill before buying? Just another f*** up, got his fingers burnt, tried to spend his way out, got his fingers burnt again. Now we have conservative mediocrity. The main two things that due diligence would have revealed were that the debt was repayable on a change of ownership (that's a pretty common condition but its not always the case) and the club was in the process of losing about £30 million for the year. Without being entirely sure why he bought us (and no one is) it's not easy to call whether he would have cracked on with the takeover if he was aware of those two issues. The club is actually in a far better state and worth a lot more now than when he bought it that's for sure. Whether its worth more than he paid for it is another matter. Not knowing the terms of the loans exactly, he could have refinanced the debt OR put debt on the club at more favorable times and taken advantage of low interest rates and crawled back some of his cash. Would make it easier for him to sell as well if he was to get favorable financing due to his padded balance sheet. There's no reason for us to be "debt-free" by the way - we could easily have a favorable debt encumbrance and it would lower some of Mike's exposure. Refinancing the debt with Barclays wasn't an option. They called it in and in so doing took a lot of risk off their books. In June 2007 the club was technically insolvent, by somewhere between £80million and £90 million from memory. Why would anyone lend us anything in those circumstances? The credit crunch was big at the time as well and banks were crapping themselves. Ashley had to cough up. No one would lend much on our balance sheet. The main thing that has been achieved under Ashley is some sort of financial stability on a year on year basis but we are still insolvent if he calls his debt in. Thats why he has to guarantee not to do so every year, and that guarantee is recorded in the accounts.

Wasn't the merchandising raised at the recent meeting with the fans? I haven't totally digested what was said but it sounds like some sort of outsourcing arrangement where the club picks up a cut on the transactions. So club revenue goes down but the case is that we make more profit. I agree that more transparency would be good. I'd love to see a comparison of the before and after finances.

yet he's put in over 100million above the purchase price, is this right ? Was that because he didn't do the correct due dill before buying? Just another f*** up, got his fingers burnt, tried to spend his way out, got his fingers burnt again. Now we have conservative mediocrity. The main two things that due diligence would have revealed were that the debt was repayable on a change of ownership (that's a pretty common condition but its not always the case) and the club was in the process of losing about £30 million for the year. Without being entirely sure why he bought us (and no one is) it's not easy to call whether he would have cracked on with the takeover if he was aware of those two issues. The club is actually in a far better state and worth a lot more now than when he bought it that's for sure. Whether its worth more than he paid for it is another matter.

yet he's put in over 100million above the purchase price, is this right ? Correct, at the last count it was about £250 million in total of his money invested in us.

Not so and you know that But I don't think the advertising at SJP has done anything much for SD so far. He owns more than 90% of the markets he operates in. But if you read what I said above I do genuinely think that if he decided to get into the Far Eastern market, the combination of the SJP advertising being seen on tv plus a team competing for the league and playing Champions League would definitely help SD get some traction in the Far East. Clearly Pardew is just holding the fort until Ashley is ready to take the club up a few notches

Serious question - so far do you think he's made money out of owning the club? And if so how? He's getting millions of pounds' worth of worldwide exposure for his main interest (which coincidentally has increased in value by over 700% since he bought NUFC) via probably the world's most popular sporting event, for free. Just that. I just can't see that his ownership of us has had much to do with the growth of SD. If you look at the Sports Direct annual report you can see that he has virtually bought the entire UK market which accounts for more than 90% of their business. They basically own the UK market as a result of buying up the major brands and elimating the competition. The profit they made from international business was only about £11 million (total SD profits were about £290 million). To put it in perspective the SD international profit in 2013 was about 5% of what he has currently invested in us. Their international business is peanuts (relatively) and fwiw so far none of it comes from the Far East. Makes you wonder why he does it then. Just for a laugh perhaps. That is certainly possible. A "vanity project" was always one of the contenders. The best scenario for us is that at some point soon he does actually decide to launch Sports Direct on the Far Eastern market and does decide to use us to help him.

Serious question - so far do you think he's made money out of owning the club? And if so how? He's getting millions of pounds' worth of worldwide exposure for his main interest (which coincidentally has increased in value by over 700% since he bought NUFC) via probably the world's most popular sporting event, for free. Just that. I just can't see that his ownership of us has had much to do with the growth of SD. If you look at the Sports Direct annual report you can see that he has virtually bought the entire UK market which accounts for more than 90% of their business. They basically own the UK market as a result of buying up the major brands and elimating the competition. The profit they made from international business was only about £11 million (total SD profits were about £290 million). To put it in perspective the SD international profit in 2013 was about 5% of what he has currently invested in us. Their international business is peanuts (relatively) and fwiw so far none of it comes from the Far East.

Serious question - so far do you think he's made money out of owning the club? And if so how?

I think Ashley's motives for buying the club were always schizophrenic. Far East promotion, buying it to sell it on quickly at a profit, showing his mates that he was a proper big time geezer.....There are probably other theories and at various times they may all have been true. As far as the Sir John Hall quote is concerned if Ashley was still serious about wanting to use NUFC to enable SD to hit the Far Eastern market he would need to make the club far more successful than it has been and turn it into a marketable global brand. He would need to compete (seriously) for the Premiership, sign up the odd marquee player, play Champions League etc - there's been no sign that he's ready to make that happen any time soon.

Does that ever happen? I am struggling to remember when a genuinely good player left the club against their will. Scott Parker (mixed opinions on how good he was) was reported to want to stay but I can't think of one since then. Edit: Joey Barton Possibly Carroll, although that deal was inevitable for the money involved. Maybe - there was clearly a desire for the club to cash in (rightly imo) but I do think Carroll wanted out as he was offered a staggering wage that we wouldn't match. I suspect he may have had some regrets since though.

Yup I mentioned Parker, both he and Bellamy carried on playing at a high level. Robert had been great but was a spent force when he left though, did nothing afferwards. Those were all a few years back, no one for the last 6 years unless you do count Barton, whose on going value to the club was debateable.

Does that ever happen? I am struggling to remember when a genuinely good player left the club against their will. Scott Parker (mixed opinions on how good he was) was reported to want to stay but I can't think of one since then. Edit: Joey Barton

Not surprised, what he said was factual after all.

The finances of a football club consist of quite a bit more than player sales, player buys and tv money. How about wages and the running costs of a 50,000 seat stadium for a start? It's fair to say that after his early cash injections Ashley hasn't continued to keep putting money into the club and that to some extent defines his ambition. But so far there's no signs that the club is being bled dry as you put it.

a) OK but there is certainly a case for us being being unlucky due to being on the wrong end of that decision. And that is whether the decision was down to that particular interpretation of the offside rule, incompetence or some other darker reason. b) Thought we were lucky to get 3 points at Spurs of the top of my head. However just to make it clear I don't subscribe to the view (as some do) that Pardew is a fluke magnet.

The saying goes that luck evens out over a season, I'm sceptical on that one myself, but there was certainly a payback of sorts today for whatever luck Pardew may have enjoyed this season.

It certainly does look like it's over. He's taken some abuse on this thread. Sure he had limitations as an attacking winger but he worked his arse off defending the flanks and he won us countless free kicks so keeping the pressure off our sometimes fragile defence. He is a proper pro, always gave everything he had and did a good job for us in some weird times at this club. Buen Viaje...