sunder↓and

[Optimistic Nut]

Going to have to win about 6-7 in a row soon just to stay in touch with the Play Offs.

[nufc4eva]

Going to have to win about 6-7 in a row soon just to stay in touch with the Play Offs.

 

You just know they will somehow manage it (And hopefully lose in playoff final)

[Paully]

Going to have to win about 6-7 in a row soon just to stay in touch with the Play Offs.

 

Six in a row, marra

[Nobody]

Brentford away to Bolton while Sunderland at home to Cardiff. Mackems lose and Brentford win and they are in the relegation zone

[Stifler]

Brentford away to Bolton while Sunderland at home to Cardiff. Mackems lose and Brentford win and they are in the relegation zone

Even if Sunderland drew, so long as Brentford won then they would be in the relegation zone.

[Benwell Lad]

Those who visit RTG may have noticed recent posts by a rather savvy accountant who posts under the name Grumpy Old Man.

He is currently looking at the accounts and business "philosophies" of a cross section of clubs who are in, or were recently in, the Championship, covering Birmingham,Blackburn and Derby thus far.

It makes fascinating reading and shows how precarious the situation has become for some of our clubs.

[Paully]

A red and white mate is doing his nut about this tweet! "The bastards are even giving you lot ammo about our away support now" Ha ha ha!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[TK-421]

Haha, creased.... its like the club is trolling its own fans.

[Figures 1-0 Football]

Those who visit RTG may have noticed recent posts by a rather savvy accountant who posts under the name Grumpy Old Man.

He is currently looking at the accounts and business "philosophies" of a cross section of clubs who are in, or were recently in, the Championship, covering Birmingham,Blackburn and Derby thus far.

It makes fascinating reading and shows how precarious the situation has become for some of our clubs.

 

Aye, really good posts they are.

 

Blackburn spent £19m in 3 years buying players and staff out of their contracts, unreal.

[afar]

A red and white mate is doing his nut about this tweet! "The b******s are even giving you lot ammo about our away support now" Ha ha ha!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's hilarious, the replies are mint. I'm sure it was meant as sincere by the club but it looks really awful.

[Exiled in Texas]

Those who visit RTG may have noticed recent posts by a rather savvy accountant who posts under the name Grumpy Old Man.

He is currently looking at the accounts and business "philosophies" of a cross section of clubs who are in, or were recently in, the Championship, covering Birmingham,Blackburn and Derby thus far.

It makes fascinating reading and shows how precarious the situation has become for some of our clubs.

 

Grumpy has been leading the charge for a while to explain to those RTG Dim Wits who think that Short is trousering all the "para shoot " (sic) money and all the Pickford money, and explaining how Short has been propping up the club year after year.  Of course anyone who even slightly challenges the notion that Short/Bain are to blame for the financial state and more so the state of the team, is immediately labeled a Mag and the pitchfork and torch Mob set upon them.

 

His new series of posts looking at the financial situation of several clubs are great - and really explain the predicament that Sunderland find themselves in.  The penny is now dropping for them (although based on their financial state, they might want to save those pennies)

[DJ_NUFC]

Those who visit RTG may have noticed recent posts by a rather savvy accountant who posts under the name Grumpy Old Man.

He is currently looking at the accounts and business "philosophies" of a cross section of clubs who are in, or were recently in, the Championship, covering Birmingham,Blackburn and Derby thus far.

It makes fascinating reading and shows how precarious the situation has become for some of our clubs.

 

Grumpy has been leading the charge for a while to explain to those RTG Dim Wits who think that Short is trousering all the "para shoot " (sic) money and all the Pickford money, and explaining how Short has been propping up the club year after year.  Of course anyone who even slightly challenges the notion that Short/Bain are to blame for the financial state and more so the state of the team, is immediately labeled a Mag and the pitchfork and torch Mob set upon them.

 

His new series of posts looking at the financial situation of several clubs are great - and really explain the predicament that Sunderland find themselves in.  The penny is now dropping for them (although based on their financial state, they might want to save those pennies)

 

For those of us who don't wish to venture into the wasteland that is RTG, what is the gist of this bloke's assessment? Is it mismanagement or, in the case of Sunderland, not enough bums on seats and regular fans to make enough from ticket sales? A dearth of sponsorships? Interested to hear where these clubs have gone wrong.

[Figures 1-0 Football]

Derby:

 

Derby were the third club to go up in 2006/7, alongside us and Birmingham. They went straight back down the next season, taking our unwanted record low points total with them. They’ve been in the Championship ever since, occasionally getting close to promotion (most notably in 2014 when they lost in the play-off final with Tufty as manager), and rarely flirting with relegation. For most of the time, they were owned by an obscure American group, General Sports Derby Partners LLC, who were seemingly content to provide limited amounts of finance as loans or share capital to keep the club ticking over. As such, that makes them a suitable candidate to look at as a kind of steady state Championship club. Where things start to get interesting is 2014, when General Sports were bought out by a previous minority shareholder from pre-2007, Mel Morris. Morris is an interesting character; he made most of his wealth backing the developers of Candy Crush. He’s not desperately wealthy (net worth £500m according to the Sunday Times Rich List), but he is Derbyshire-born and very ambitious for the club. They now have a mission statement – “To make Derby County Football Club a sustainable and perennial competitor in the top half of the Premier League with a philosophy both on and off the field of continuous personal and team development supported by first class facilities, staff, coaching, youth development and support systems. We are committed to building a reputation for excellence in everything we do and becoming the ‘club of choice’ for all our staff, players, supporters and other stakeholders as well as highly talented players and aspiring youngsters”. There’s an avowed aim to achieve promotion, and by the end of 2016 Morris had backed this personally to the tune of £73m.

 

In the early years I looked at, Derby had to come to terms with life under parachute payments at first, and without them later. They seem to have an incredibly loyal fan base, and equally loyal commercial partners. Fluctuations in turnover derive mainly from changes in TV income. They consistently spent more on players than they brought in, and consistently turned in losses around the £5m mark/season. This resulted in the owners having to gradually increase share capital and loan finance. To be honest, at times they seemed to be a “mini-me” for us, with numbers right for the Championship. They maintained a very tight control over staff costs, hovering around the £12-13m mark most of the time.

 

And then Morris comes in, and it all gets a bit weird. In two seasons, they double the wage bill, have a net cash outflow on transfers of £17m, and incur losses before tax totalling £23m. The problem is that this hasn’t yet got them up. There’s no doubting the owner’s ambition, but the question has to be asked – what happens if they don’t make it. It will be interesting to see how much more Morris committed in 2016/17, given that he was in for about 15% of his worth at the end of 2015/16. Their frequent managerial changes (McClaren, Clement, Pearson and Rowett in the space of three seasons) hint at a certain desperation. This season, they still aren’t exactly setting the world alight, with 10 points from 7 games.

 

What are the lessons? I suppose the main one is how a club gets by as a “normal” Championship team; they’re just a bit better controlled than, say, Birmingham. The other lesson they might be teaching, should they not go up this year, is the consequences of spending to get out of the division and failing. I suspect that their next couple of sets of accounts may make very interesting reading.

 

Blackburn:

 

How do you start to explain Blackburn Rovers?

 

The first set of accounts I looked at, for 2006/7, reflected a season where they'd finished 6th in the PL, had a healthy balance sheet, and were looking forward to another European campaign. But, even then, there are hints in the directors' review of the business that they were struggling to keep pace with the way the finance was changing. In the absence of Jack Walker, they were struggling to provide the level of investment needed. In some ways, those accounts reminded me of the last set of accounts we produced when Bob Murray was chairman.

 

The first notable change of tack comes with Mark Hughes leaving (something the board make clear they weren't happy about. There was a big increase in transfer activity under BSA (now, there's a surprise ), although they did far better than we were doing in terms of matching up sales and purchases. On the field, there was still a measure of success. The balance sheet still looked healthy, but investment was still a problem. A search for new investors led them to the Rao family, owner of Indian conglomerate VH Group - better known as Venky's.

 

What follows is a masterclass in how not to run a football club. Knowing nothing about football, they effectively placed control in the hands of agencies SEM and Kentaro, who, it appears were delegated authority over transfers and hiring/firing managers. When BSA was provided with a list of players he had to buy, he refused - and was sacked, to be replaced by Steve Kean. The relationship with Kentaro rapidly soured as the Venky's realised they were being taken to the cleaners, while on field performances worsened. Venky's reaction was not to get a proper CEO in, but to trust no-one. According to a Mail article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...ty-trashing-historic-club-like-Blackburn.html, they were even approaching journalists for transfer advice.

 

When relegation followed in 2011/12, the decided to buy in an attempt to get back at the first attempt. The attempt failed, and further investment was no more effective. The nadir came with relegation to League 1 last season.

 

During the Venky's tenure, turnover has fallen from £57.6m to £22m, with cumulative losses of £111m in the same period. Debt has risen from £30m to £104m, while a further £10m debt has been capitalised. The wage bill was very slow to come down after relegation, and was still £25.3m in 2015/16. On top of that, they paid out £19min 2013-16 buying out player contracts.

 

In many ways, they're an object lesson in problems arising from, firstly, not having adequate relegation wage cuts and, secondly, spending to achieve a swift return to the PL, but not getting there.

 

As far as I can see, the Venky's remain totally averse to accepting help or advicehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39872280. It's hard to see how they'll turn this around.

 

How does this relate to us? Maybe we just need to take the lesson that achieving promotion by a big spend isn't a guarantee, and that a reasonably firm financial footing is needed to go down that route. In other words, can you actually afford to have the spend not work?

 

Birmingham:

 

What I'm doing in all this is looking at about 10 years' worth of accounts, and trying to see what it is that clubs are doing to get by in what is a very difficult division in terms of making ends meet.

 

Blues are an interesting start point. In the years 2007-20111 they're something of a yo-yo team before failing to recover from winning the League Cup and being relegated in the same season, and languishing in the Championship since. They've also spent most of that time under, shall we say, colourful owners.

 

What's most noticeable is that, in comparison to us, they've never been big spenders. They spent less than £20m getting out of the Championship in Carson Yeung's first year of ownership, and this was by far their biggest outlay in the last decade. In practical terms, this means that they've always had fairly low debt levels, peaking at about £25m in 2013. They have also been helped by the holding company writing off £15m owed to Yeung personally when they took over that debt after his conviction in Hong Kong.

 

Their survival tactic since 2011/12 has been to take an axe to staff costs, and to spend as little as possible on incoming transfers, while selling off promising players. The wage bill in 2015/16 was £15.3m, covering a head count of 184 permanent staff and around 500 match day casuals; of this 64 were playing staff, an indication of just how low championship player wages can be. Having said that, this was still more than 100% of turnover. Gate money is a pretty pathetic £4m or so.

 

What they seem to have is a modus operandi for just about getting by. They still had going concern problems, though these may have gone away with new owners during last season.

 

What they show is that, at an operating level, an austere approach will keep you afloat (just). How relevant is it to us? Our external debt is the big worry here - the ability to refinance in a Blues situation would be entirely dependent on any lenders' view on the adequacy of the SoL's value as security; the cash flows are totally insufficient to repay debt with any comfort.

[Sho Time]

Fuk of mag

[Altamullan]

Those who visit RTG may have noticed recent posts by a rather savvy accountant who posts under the name Grumpy Old Man.

He is currently looking at the accounts and business "philosophies" of a cross section of clubs who are in, or were recently in, the Championship, covering Birmingham,Blackburn and Derby thus far.

It makes fascinating reading and shows how precarious the situation has become for some of our clubs.

 

Grumpy has been leading the charge for a while to explain to those RTG Dim Wits who think that Short is trousering all the "para shoot " (sic) money and all the Pickford money, and explaining how Short has been propping up the club year after year.  Of course anyone who even slightly challenges the notion that Short/Bain are to blame for the financial state and more so the state of the team, is immediately labeled a Mag and the pitchfork and torch Mob set upon them.

 

His new series of posts looking at the financial situation of several clubs are great - and really explain the predicament that Sunderland find themselves in.  The penny is now dropping for them (although based on their financial state, they might want to save those pennies)

 

Ooh, that provoked a bit of a long hard look in the mirror re some of our commentary on the unmentionable (without the c word) one...

[Exiled in Texas]

For those of us who don't wish to venture into the wasteland that is RTG, what is the gist of this bloke's assessment? Is it mismanagement or, in the case of Sunderland, not enough bums on seats and regular fans to make enough from ticket sales? A dearth of sponsorships? Interested to hear where these clubs have gone wrong.

 

It's more money going out than coming in.  Primarily because they Buy-High and Sell-Low.  They pay high prices to get players in, and if/when they sell them the players value is always lower than what they paid and they lose money on the transfer.  It was something like only 3 players out of 38-ish who were sold for a higher price than they paid. 

 

But they are in denial about the costs incurred by their frequent manager changes (All Short's fault), and also in denial about the support/attendance.  They assume that 40K attendances in the PL means that their game day revenue is fine - they won't recognise that the FTM (Free Ticket Marras) is diluting their game day revenue as many of that 40K is not actually paying for the tickets. (RTG-"how can we be losing money with 40K attendances every week?")

 

 

[DJ_NUFC]

Interesting stuff. Almost justifies Ashley's model of buying players with sell-on value

[Exiled in Texas]

Kinda

 

But it really points to the fact that Ashley has been working on a sustainable financial model (even if we don't like the results on a Saturday afternoon).  Fans want more that 17th or lower-mid-table, but is it a viable financial plan to "invest" $$$ when the pay off is only $$ (or more likely $).

 

These discussions do point out that fans see their clubs as a football club not as a business (but the business needs to be viable for the club to survive), and there are business decisions to be made that should be made with a business mindset.

 

I do like some of the RTG rantings, that are better observed from the outside looking in (probably similar things said on here too for NUFC/Ashley too but wheres the fun in that)

 

Invest - Short should invest more of his money in the team, and give us a team we deserve.    Translated to Short should keep tipping money into the pit without any hope of seeing a financial return. 

 

Administration - If we go into Administration its the fans who suffer the most.  Nope - I think its the shareholders who invested their money in the business and who lost it all who suffer the most.

 

Spend to get promotion - They only way out of this financial mess is to spend and get back to the PL.  That would be the same PL where SAFC was losing money every season.  And when you are already spending more than you earn...spending even more that that is probably not the best approach

 

But, see how the Mags spent their way to promotion, they spent 50M/80M on new players to get promoted - Yes, but they also sold 50/80M of players because they had bought quality players who they sold for a profit

 

We are truly fooked - Yes. Yes, you are.    But enjoy saying 9-1 and 6-in-a-row as that makes it all worth while.

[afar]

One of the reasons (not the sole reason of course) that they are in this mess is that they have (and still continue in the lower league) abused the loan system. They've been bringing in too many players they don't own and helping develop them, to fix holes in their squad. These players are just taking first team opportunities away from your own youngsters or preventing them from seriously addressing holes through player purchases of their own.

 

They like to pat themselves on the backs for developing the likes of Welbeck and Rose, but this and the fact the the general quality of the loanee has not been at that level, look at the list of players they loaned last season, has just been papering over the deficiencies and not helping them build assets that they can sell for profit.

 

I'm glad we have not touched the loan market to much of an extent, and that on the rare occassion we do, we protect ourselves buy insisting on buyout clauses such as Atsu's and Merino's.

 

The state of Sunderland should be a warning to a lot of clubs who continue this short term policy. Honestly think that UEFA/FIFA or the FA need to tighten up on the regulations for loans, teams like Sunderland have become over reliant on them to their long term determent while teams like Chelsea have quite frankly been abusing it from the other side. There should be tighter limits on how many you can loan in and out, and to which clubs. Chelsea wouldn't stockpile all the best talent if they couldn't loan them to top flight clubs here and abroad. 

 

[Exiled in Texas]

Yes - that's certainly not helping them develop players that are appreciating in value in the long term. 

[DJ_NUFC]

Fair points about potentially having a minor regulation about amount of players you're allowed to loan out -- this would solve the problem of Chelsea hoarding players.

[Guest Howaythetoon]

The mackems are fucked, they will linger down there for a long time and perhaps even drop further unless Short sells up.

[Rich]

Where have all the mackems from on here gone?

[Guest firetotheworks]

hithere is currently active.

[xLiaaamx]

Stray got a little rattled and started going full RTG didn't he?