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Mike Ashley

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geordiesteve710

geordiesteve710

Posted
Posted

It's his club to sell. He could sell it for any figure. He's never reallly planned on getting rid of it unless he gets an insane offer. That 300m was an insane price at the time.

 

Absolutely correct. After the way he has neglected the club and let it fall into the state it is in, it's like sticking a clapped out Vauxhall nova on autotrader at the price of a Ferrari then shrugging "guess there's no buyers out there then" when nobody shows any interest.

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loki679

loki679

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The club has become known for shunning the high transfer fees, wages, agent rip offs and signing on fees that blight the rest of the sport and has developed a reputation for scouting the darkest corners of Europe, regularly picking up young foreign players for cut-price fees and selling them on for big money two years down the line.

 

That would be French internationals Cabaye and Debuchy?  No mention of HBA - lost money, MYM - lost money, Marveaux - lost money, Santon - lost money.

 

People seem to talk about this great model we have yet what has it got us?  We've lost money on the vast majority of transfers thus far and are staring relegation in the face.  Wow.  Nice plan.

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Guest TCD23

Guest TCD23

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The club has become known for shunning the high transfer fees, wages, agent rip offs and signing on fees that blight the rest of the sport and has developed a reputation for scouting the darkest corners of Europe, regularly picking up young foreign players for cut-price fees and selling them on for big money two years down the line.

 

That would be French internationals Cabaye and Debuchy?  No mention of HBA - lost money, MYM - lost money, Marveaux - lost money, Santon - lost money.

 

People seem to talk about this great model we have yet what has it got us?  We've lost money on the vast majority of transfers thus far and are staring relegation in the face.  Wow.  Nice plan.

 

Completely in agreement with you as this pisses me off to no end. We've sold TWO players that fits this model. Carroll was a steal, no doubt about that but Cabaye? Seriously sold him for fuck all really considering how wealthy PSG are.

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Wullie

Wullie

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The club has become known for shunning the high transfer fees, wages, agent rip offs and signing on fees that blight the rest of the sport and has developed a reputation for scouting the darkest corners of Europe, regularly picking up young foreign players for cut-price fees and selling them on for big money two years down the line.

 

That would be French internationals Cabaye and Debuchy?  No mention of HBA - lost money, MYM - lost money, Marveaux - lost money, Santon - lost money.

 

People seem to talk about this great model we have yet what has it got us?  We've lost money on the vast majority of transfers thus far and are staring relegation in the face.  Wow.  Nice plan.

 

TBF to the writer, he's obviously playing devil's advocate there, as you can tell from the rest of the article. Unfortunately that is the perception of Mike Ashley from a lot of other people though.

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Dave

Dave

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/newcastle-united/11614055/Newcastle-United-to-pay-price-for-refusing-to-cut-wages.html

Newcastle do not have clauses in player contracts to cut their wage bill automatically if they drop into the Championship. Although it is unclear how many do not have the clauses, it is thought none of the top earners will be forced to take a wage cut. It is established practice for agents to demand higher basic wages for clients if these clauses are inserted.

 

A number of Newcastle players, who would guarantee Premier League survival if they beat West Ham at St James' Park on Sunday, have already indicated they want to move on in the summer. Moussa Sissoko, Papiss Cissé and Cheick Tiote’s agents are all looking for new clubs, while Telegraph Sport has also been informed that there are serious doubts about whether goalkeeper Tim Krul and right-back Daryl Janmaat will still be at the club next season.

 

Sissoko, who has already admitted he wants to join a Champions League club this summer, is one of the players who does not have a relegation clause in his contract, as his agent refused one when he joined from Toulouse in January 2013. Captain Fabricio Coloccini, who is the club’s best-paid player, is another who is thought not to have a relegation clause. Although the Argentina international has not agitated to leave since he was approached by San Lorenzo two years ago, he has admitted publicly that he would like to return to South America.

 

Others who are also keen to quit are Yoan Gouffran and Gabriel Obertan, although neither would be missed, given their poor form. Sammy Ameobi, Ryan Taylor and Jonás Gutiérrez will be out of contract in the summer and will not be offered extensions.

 

The fact that so many players either do not want to be at the club, or already know they are leaving, seriously weakens Newcastle’s survival chances and means head coach John Carver has consistently struggled to motivate the side since he replaced Alan Pardew in January. Newcastle United declined to comment when asked by Telegraph Sport to clarify how many players had relegation clauses in their contracts.

 

Meanwhile, Carver is stubbornly clinging on to the hope he will be made head coach on a permanent basis if he keeps Newcastle up, even though he has presided over an embarrassing slump that has taken his team from ninth in the table to fourth from bottom. He has won just two games as head coach and Newcastle have lost nine out of their last 10, picking up a solitary point. Should Hull beat Manchester United on Sunday, Newcastle must beat West Ham to avoid relegation.

 

Although Newcastle were last relegated from the Premier League as recently as 2009, the club have not learnt from previous mistakes. Whereas Hull and Sunderland, the two other clubs who could go down on the final day of the season, have made sure their wage bill is slashed, with relegation clauses that will cut wages by as much as 50 per cent, Newcastle could be accused of arrogantly believing they are too good to go down. When Newcastle fell out of the top flight six years ago, relegation cost them £35  million in lost revenue.

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Wallace

Wallace

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3086971/Newcastle-players-face-slash-wages-relegated-club-looks-avoid-mistakes-six-years-ago.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

 

But this article says their wages will be cut although it doesn't mention relegation clauses but it wouldn't be a surprise if the club thinks it can just cut everyone's wages.  Somehow I don't think the agents will be agreeing to that.

 

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Guest Roger Kint

Guest Roger Kint

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3086971/Newcastle-players-face-slash-wages-relegated-club-looks-avoid-mistakes-six-years-ago.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

 

But this article says their wages will be cut although it doesn't mention relegation clauses but it wouldn't be a surprise if the club thinks it can just cut everyone's wages.  Somehow I don't think the agents will be agreeing to that.

 

 

Considering he couldnt do it last time thats never going to happen man.

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Dan Gleebals

Dan Gleebals

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It's a nothing article really, our squad is so small now and with the players wanting to leave/those out of contract its irrelevant anyway, hardly going to be left with 25 players on +50K a week!! As if.

 

Whether it premier or championship football next season, we are going to have one horrific team/squad.  Stay up and they will do the usual minimal spending, go down and it will be all about shopping in league one/lower leagues of Europe to try and blag a season in the championship!

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hakka

hakka

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http://grantland.com/the-triangle/2015-premier-league-newcastle-mike-ashley-relegation-sports-direct/

Good article, aside from this:

Yet, in retrospect, Pardew, who has gone on to take Crystal Palace from the relegation zone to a comfortable 12th, was one of the few things keeping the team competitive.

Competitive?! :rant:

 

If he means keep us in the league, then he has a point. It would be wrong to assume anything more than that like.

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The College Dropout

The College Dropout

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I don't remember the last time we gave an active first team member a new contract. Coloccini in 2013?

 

When we came back up we tied Krul down, Tiote within a year and a half of signing. That whole spine that brought us up / kept us up contracts are all due to expire in the next 24 months. Granted most of them are useless now but in general we don't plan to hand out new contracts.

 

So the only players you expect to stay (if we stay up) are the lads we've signed during the last couple season that haven't really impressed but not sucked too bad.

 

That's a grand total of: Perez (due to inexperience), De Jong, Cabella, Colback, Anita (if we have no buyers), Saylor (who will run down his contract cos nobody will buy him), Coloccini (run down contract), Darlow, Lascellas, Haidara, Dummett.... that's it. We might have to keep a couple that have a year left on their contracts if we get no offers but if we sold Santon for peanuts we'll sell Cisse for £4m.

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EthiGeordie

EthiGeordie

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Matt Scott: Ashley is good for Newcastle. They would be mad to drive him out of Toon.

 

When Newcastle last won the English top-division title, they really did do it in black and white. It was 88 years ago. It is 60 years now since Newcastle last won the FA Cup and 16 since they lost the second of two consecutive finals. In short, theirs is not a tradition of trophy-laden triumph.

 

Indeed, apart from the 1950s, since the Second World War Newcastle have spent at least one season outside of England's top division in every decade. They have been a regular, but not permanent, fixture on the Premier League fixtures list.

 

Take a look at the chart below, showing Newcastle's historical finishing position in the English-football pyramid since 1946-7. As you can see, it has all the pulsing volatility of a cardiogram.

 

So to break it down: Newcastle spent 15 of the 67 completed seasons outside of the top division - or 22% of them. In all that time they did not win the title once and only spent 21 seasons in the top 10 of English football - or 31% of them. They had a mean finishing position over the period of 15.85 - substantially closer to 16th than 15th - and there is a standard deviation of 9.03, implying the volatility we can see over time.

 

Mike Ashley took over as Newcastle owner in the summer of 2007, shortly before the financial crisis struck. In his seven completed seasons, the average finishing position has been 13.43 (s=1, implying quite considerable consistency in this, the current season's relegation scare notwithstanding).

 

Depending on what happens in the final round of Premier League games in the coming weekend, when Newcastle host West Ham United at St James' Park to secure their Premier League safety, they will either be relegated to the second tier during this decade, as they have been in so many others, or they will survive. But whatever happens, it will not be an unusual campaign for the Magpies given their historical record.

 

Even so, the supporters are restive. Their arguments are best articulated by the website AshleyOut.com, which describes Ashley's tenure as "an organised tumble into mediocrity". Some of what the website has to say is unarguable. "There have been embarrassing appointments at director and managerial level, our club and ground have been associated with tacky brands [and] club legends have been humiliated."

 

On each of these points there is a valid example. Appointing Joe Kinnear, a former heart-attack victim with a genuine dislike for most journalists, was never going to be a public-relations success. Several foul-mouthed tirades and another heart attack later and Kinnear was gone from Newcastle. Bringing in Wonga.com as title sponsor, a firm that was last year banned from using a television advert that declined to make public to consumers its 5,853% annual interest bill, was never going to win hearts and minds either.

 

And Ashley's cohorts should probably have thought through the consequences of upsetting Kevin Keegan, whom the club's own website introduced as a "Geordie messiah" upon his return for a second, unsuccessful spell as manager. These, it must be said, are all fair points but none of them is a crime against football, or unique to Newcastle.

 

But then AshleyOut.com goes on to make some completely spurious accusations that have little basis in fact. "Club debt has risen, match day and commercial revenue have dropped significantly and, most importantly, our league and cup records have deteriorated," it adds.

 

Newcastle's net debt is £94.9 million, which is nominally higher than before Ashley took over. But the claim is also disingenuous. There are £18 million of loans that are repayable on demand and £110 million of longer-term loans, all offset by £34.1 million of cash in the bank. However, what AshleyOut.com omits to mention is that all of these loans are owed to Ashley himself and they do not bear a penny in interest.

 

While not mentioning this pretty-damn-important fact, it also overlooks what the financial picture was in the penultimate 12 months of the previous regime's stewardship of Newcastle, and it was far from pretty. The club was drawing £5.5 million against an overdraft and had £64.9 million of loans with institutions. These bore a crippling coupon that cost them £5.635 million in interest alone, or 6.5p in every pound Newcastle earned. When diverted to the playing squad, that interest bill could have paid for two players each earning £50,000 a week - which in 2005-6 Premier League terms was a huge sum of money.

 

Add in 2005-6 debt repayments of £4.9 million and Newcastle spent more than £10 million in interest and installments over that 12-month period. Only £11.4 million of new borrowings could cover it. In that same season the Magpies paid out £25.7 million on new players, raising the 2006-7 wage bill by £15.2 million, or almost 20%, at a time when turnover had risen only £10.5 million.

 

This was Newcastle's halcyon period, when they were routinely competing in European competitions. But it was playing success borrowed from the future. Even before player trading, Newcastle were spending more than they earned. Where they had routinely plugged gaps with new debt, would lenders have handed over the cash after the financial crisis struck? Or would they instead have been forced into the kind of player-asset-selling spiral of decline and relegation, leading to bank foreclosure and administration, as Southampton suffered? We will never know, because Ashley replaced the external debt with his own loans that the club had no need to service annually.

 

So that hopefully deals with AshleyOut's club-debt complaint: the club is absolutely without question not financially worse off under him than before. Then there is the issue of match day and commercial revenue. I find it truly puzzling that presumably paid-up Newcastle fans would call for their club to raise match day revenue, which is already some of the highest in the land. In 2006-7 there were 27 home matches, raising total match day receipts of £33.6 million. Last season there were 22 home games, worth £25.6 million in total.

 

This meant Newcastle were earning £1.24 million per game back then and are taking £1.16 million now. This is a real-terms, post-inflation drop in per-game ticket revenue of almost 25%. With occupancy rates of 95.9% of capacity, it can only be assumed that the decline in gate receipts from 2006-7 to 2013-14 was down to substantial real-terms cuts in ticket prices. What's the beef?

 

Newcastle earned £25.6 million of commercial revenue in 2013-14, compared with £27.6 million in 2006-7, which is a 7.25% drop. But the sponsorship landscape has changed unrecognisably in the intervening period. Back then, Newcastle were one of England's six richest clubs, with a turnover higher than Manchester City's, comparable with Tottenham Hotspur's and only a few tens of millions less than Liverpool's. They were in Europe and had competed in the Champions League within the previous five seasons, adding to their marketability.

 

But even before Ashley took over, Newcastle's qualification for the Champions League had become highly improbable with the arrival of Roman Abramovich and his billions at Chelsea. That improbability became as good as impossible with the deployment of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth at Manchester City and after the financial crisis struck, firms became more discerning about whom they would sponsor. Now, blessed by their boom-town London location, Tottenham generate revenues 50% higher than Newcastle, Liverpool more than double. [see related article below.]

 

That Newcastle still generate in excess of £25 million a year in sponsorship, retail and merchandising revenue (while Everton take less than half that at £11.8 million despite a much greater history of success) should be a source of pride, not rancour. And if Newcastle do not take sponsorship income from Sports Direct, the FTSE-listed retailer of which he is a substantial shareholder, it is because they do not need to. The club is a wholly owned subsidiary of MASH Holdings, through which Ashley also holds his shares in Sports Direct. If he wants to put money into his club he can do so with his own cash through equity or soft loans, and does not need to put it in through sponsorship revenue.

 

The fact is Newcastle have not needed his money in recent years. In 2011-12, when they finished fifth, they generated £93.3 million in revenues and, despite a wages-to-turnover ratio of 68.7%, still had £11.9 million left over to spend on transfers - which they duly invested. In 2012-13 there was a £14.3 million operating-cash surplus and a net £17.7 million was spent on players, sending the club £4.5 million into its overdraft. Last season the operating surplus was £25.6 million in cash and a net £8.3 million was generated from the transfer market, producing an overall cash surplus of £31.4 million.

 

A pretty good indicator of a club's natural finishing position lies in its wage bill, and Newcastle were one of few of the non-title-aspirant clubs to invest heavily in theirs. While Everton added only £6 million of the £34.1 million in fresh funds they received from the new Premier League television deal in salaries, pushing it down from 73.0% of turnover to 57.5%, Newcastle splurged on theirs. Of the Magpies' own £34.1 million uplift in revenue, £16.5 million was committed to wages, leaving the ratio at 60.4% of turnover down from 64.4%.

 

When Newcastle were fifth in late November of this season, that did not seem like bad business, nor was it the "deterioration" in the league performance that AshleyOut.com claims. But what was happening on the pitch was not reflected in the stands. Another website, SackPardew.com, produced 3,000 leaflets in a campaign aimed at driving him from the dugout.

 

It worked, as Pardew switched clubs (and league positions) with Crystal Palace with John Carver taking only 10 points from a possible 54 after his January 1 appointment. Newcastle fans should hope that if the club goes down, Ashley will support them financially through the Championship again as he did five seasons ago when they bounced back as league winners. Because after the collapse experienced following Pardew's departure, they should be careful what they wish for. If Ashley pulls the plug on his investment then the spiral of terminal decline they risked entering before he arrived, one experienced by other good clubs such as Leeds United and Portsmouth, could very well become a reality.

 

 

http://www.insideworldfootball.com/matt-scott/17044-matt-scott-ashley-is-good-for-newcastle-they-would-be-mad-to-drive-him-out-of-toon

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The College Dropout

The College Dropout

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Please don't anyone click on that.

 

They dont need to click it they can read with with out, We have to face what others are saying about us.

2-bit article from a 2-bit website. Begging for clicks with that article.

 

In the wider footballing community Ashley is lampooned. Even Sky - Soccer Saturdays, MNF, he's derided.

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