quayside

Anyone who is involved in this "auction", if it exists, needs to have access to proper money. Doesn't matter who is in the "winning consortium" - whether it's Shepherd with all his so called experience of running this football club and Shearer as the dream ticket local hero manager. We are going nowhere without investment.

It is right - can't remember whats in those expenses or even if the accounts give much information on them, amortisation of the playing squad is one item, the costs of running SJP and the training ground (heat, light, maintenance etc), costs of merchandise sold - maybe some rent to the council as well.

It sounds wrong - I haven't got the accounts here but it might be because St James Holdings came into existence in July 2007 so the comparative figure is only for 11 months and not a full year. Edit: The insurance money received on Owen's wages in 2007 and Allardyce's payoff in 2008 could be other distorting factors. I'll have a look tomorrow.

So despite recent reports, does that mean the purchase price will be approx. £100m for the club, and any new owner still has to pay the debt off as well? Or, is he really writing off that debt payment now? If he wants to waive the "repayment of debt" clause and write the debt off he can do so - entirely up to him.

So, just how did we end up with £6.6m in interest payments or have they simply f***ed up the figures? Believe it or not I think he got stuck with paying some interest on the loan he paid off as some sort of early settlement penalty.

This is so true. It was going the same way pre-Ashley as well. No co-ordinated planning or forethought.

You might end up with Owen yet, at least you won't have to pay a fee for him. I would imagine a club doing as well as yours wouldn't want their front line grinding to a standstill though. To be fair to them their front line did virtually grind to a standstill last season, and they still found a way to get results playing midfielders up front. It would be easier for them to set up a side to play to Owen's strengths (assuming Owen is in any sort of form) than it would be with Oba IMO.

What a buffoon Mike Ashley is.

If some of the youngsters (Ranger and co) come good we may have something good to say about him in a couple of years time or so - but right now that seems insignificant compared to the utter chaos he seems to leave in his wake.

The company has advisors (a merchant bank, stockbroker) who would put a value on it based both on its historical performance and more importantly on its projected performance. The projections are then examined by an independent firm of accountants and tested for reasonableness. It is then "floated". The company's merchant bank would underwrite the floatation .i.e. buy any excess shares not bought by the public or other institutions. The valuation was not Ashley's although he would have had a target in mind and prepared projections accordingly. The company has substantially underperformed since floating. There has also been a lot of criticism of the communication by Sports Direct and its PR generally is pretty awful (Ashley called his shareholders "whingers" in an interview not so long ago). Ashley has also taken flak for appointing people who are mates of his and not considered to be up to the job. In some ways thats fair enough because the City's assessment of being up to a job isn't always fair or based on detailed knowledge, but when results are disappointing its hard to defend. I only mention all this because there is a bit of a familiar pattern in some of it. I wonder how many of these "advisors" have a decent knowledge of football? Historical performance and projected performance depends as much on how wisely the money is spent on players, and that's something that can't be forecast looking at a spreadsheet. Wires crossed there Tron - I was talking about the flotation value of Sports Direct.

The company has advisors (a merchant bank, stockbroker) who would put a value on it based both on its historical performance and more importantly on its projected performance. The projections are then examined by an independent firm of accountants and tested for reasonableness. It is then "floated". The company's merchant bank would underwrite the floatation .i.e. buy any excess shares not bought by the public or other institutions. The valuation was not Ashley's although he would have had a target in mind and prepared projections accordingly. The company has substantially underperformed since floating. There has also been a lot of criticism of the communication by Sports Direct and its PR generally is pretty awful (Ashley called his shareholders "whingers" in an interview not so long ago). Ashley has also taken flak for appointing people who are mates of his and not considered to be up to the job. In some ways thats fair enough because the City's assessment of being up to a job isn't always fair or based on detailed knowledge, but when results are disappointing its hard to defend. I only mention all this because there is a bit of a familiar pattern in some of it.

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.

Yes, purchasing a company means you purchase all the assets and liabilities of that company - since NUFC owes £110m to Ashley's company (St James' Holdings Ltd or whatever its called), that debt will be attached to NUFC when ownership changes hands. Pretty sure a heavily discounted settlement on this loan would be part of any deal. Following a takeover, there is no way anyone would want £110m owed to a former owner on the books. Yup - would have thought so.

I don't think so because we don't owe any third party, such as a bank, any money. Ashley has financed the club with his own money so we're safe from administration if that's what you mean. And we are still a very viable business for someone with just a little bit more nous than Mike f***ing Ashley. Erm, I think the whole gist of the the thread is that actually we owe Barclays quite a lot of money. But there is no certainty or published financial record that we actually do owe Barclays that money. Just a newspaper article says so tbh...

I don't think so because we don't owe any third party, such as a bank, any money. Ashley has financed the club with his own money so we're safe from administration if that's what you mean. And we are still a very viable business for someone with just a little bit more nous than Mike f***ing Ashley. Erm, I think the whole gist of the the thread is that actually we owe Barclays quite a lot of money. Really, I thought the only bank we would be dealing with would be Northern Rock, hmmmm, and didn't Ashley transfer alot of the debt that he couldn't pay off onto Sports Direct, so we only owe them money. No.

im beginning to think he has one of those brain tumours that changes your personality, turning an intelligent, canny businessman into a frothing at the mouth buffoon who fails to do what he should and does exactly what he shouldn't. There are exceptions but amongst the select band of people that make vast sums of money from modest beginnings (and huge respect to anyone who does that btw) Ashley is fairly typical. They believe that because they've cracked it in one particular businesss they walk on water and can apply their expertise to another market. They try and apply the same rules that worked in what they did before and f*ck up.

Last reported overdraft at 30 June 2008 was about £5 mllion, and that was the only external debt the club had. Don't know what's happened since then tbh - but everything thats been communicated points towards Ashey avoiding too much borrowing.

Willie McKay won't let him agree to accepting a penny less than his contract entitles him to, even if Barton wanted to (which is unlikely).

Income is about to reduce by somewhere in the region of £50 million. The club was already running at a loss on Premiership revenues. I just can't see that players earning £60/£70/£80 grand a week can have any future. Oba will have to be sold imo.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/29/joey-barton-newcastle-united-alan-shearer Who said its up to him? Little c*** can f*** off i'm still sure we have grounds to sack him over what happened between him and shearer How? any aggressive act of insubordination, is grounds for dismissal isnt it? Maybe - but who can be sure Shearer didn't start the whole row off. What if it's true that Shearer kicked it off by ripping into Barton and calling his tackle on Alonso "a coward's tackle" and Barton's act of insurbordination was in retaliation?

Kinnear as Director of Football, Dowie as manager - dream ticket

Ketsbaia cometh ... Has just signed a contract to manage Olympiakos so unlikely.

stevie t sticking his oar in for the captains armband, doing a bit of crawly bum lick Yup - but assuming he does stay Habib should get the armband imo.

Post Redknapp there was some coughing and spluttering by Mort that Arry hadn't actually been offered the job but it seemed pretty f*cking obvious that he had. I'm just curious where the appointment of Wise came from. Redknapp wouldn't have had any of that surely, so was Wise just brought in to handcuff Keegan in the transfer market because they didn't trust his judgement? Also how would a cheque book manager like Redknapp have handled a net spend of next to nothing? Perhaps that's the reason Redknapp said no. Maybe - but you would think they had sorted all that stuff out before they went as far as signing any sort of Heads of Agreement. This is Mike Ashley we're talking about. Seems unbelievable that the "job description" wasn't sorted early doors but err... fair point I suppose