The English Football Thread

[Cuthbert]

Originally Posted by Newkie

Typical that manure fans are crying when they still go out and blow 25 mil on a player. We were the only club to not actually buy anyone, every team in the league has strengthened, they may have lost players in certain areas but I don't think many are weaker, but we certainly are.

I see what you're saying, fair enough they've spent 27.5m, but they've also had a turnover of over 300m and it's gone straight into the owners' pocket and paid off some interest on the debt. They've been announcing deals galore all summer with tomato juice, tyre and other pointless companies, sold the naming rights to Carrington for 150m, they're constantly told the money is there, unlimited budget and yet it's never spent. They could spend 150m net every year and still fall in line with FFP and they're resorting to the nonsense you saw last night .

That Herrera deal was a joke and the player is raging, he offered to take a wage cut and pay for part of the deal himself and United pulled the plug, he's gonna speak about it later today. It's obvious the club won't spend more than 30m a year, I'd be raging too if that was Villa.

Most fans hoping this means a sale is on the horizon but I don't see one coming that soon. If we're lucky we'll manage to struggle on for two or three seasons, allow Ashley to take all of the new TV money out of the club, get his money and **** off.

What is the financial situation like at Newcastle? I swear he has actually spent money in the past? Why tighten the purse strings now? The best thing to do would be to spend to keep them in the PL for the next few seasons because of the TV money surely?

[Newkie]

Originally Posted by Christian Benteke

I see what you're saying, fair enough they've spent 27.5m, but they've also had a turnover of over 300m and it's gone straight into the owners' pocket and paid off some interest on the debt. They've been announcing deals galore all summer with tomato juice, tyre and other pointless companies, sold the naming rights to Carrington for 150m, they're constantly told the money is there, unlimited budget and yet it's never spent. They could spend 150m net every year and still fall in line with FFP and they're resorting to the nonsense you saw last night .

They do make a tonne of money, but don't forget their wages to turnover is still something like 50%. They still have 350mil+ debt and a year or two ago spent 50 mil just on net interest on those debts. They get what they want most windows and just seem to throw their toys out of the pram when they don't get it. I reckon the money was there but Moyes is just confused on what to do with it. There were some pundits saying they should have announced a marquee signing on the day Moyes was announced, but he would have still needed weeks at least, even with SAF's help, to know what he was working with to begin with. After that though it was a bit of a shambles.

Originally Posted by Christian Benteke

What is the financial situation like at Newcastle? I swear he has actually spent money in the past? Why tighten the purse strings now? The best thing to do would be to spend to keep them in the PL for the next few seasons because of the TV money surely?

The financial situation is great from a business perspective, I think we've actually made an operating profit in the last two years. But Ashley has never really invested, other than interest fee loans to pay off our debt which went up to about 150m but is steadily going down. He came in and spent a bit of money initially but in the last 3-4 seasons I think we're one of three clubs to make a profit on transfers, selling our top performers, Milner, Given, Nzog, Bassong, Oba, Carroll and made about 80 mil on transfers. The Carroll sale made us break even by 1/2 mil with his transfer, but now we make a profit even without player sales.

We only needed a bit of quality investment last summer and we would have been right up there behind Everton and ready to take them on during a period of change (now for instance) Ashley skimped out though, sold our reliable squad players and trusted youngsters with no experience because we don't loan them and develop them properly, so we got buggered, lost Ba and had to make up for the lack of summer signings in Jan. Now we're being told this summer's work was done in Jan, it's a ****ing joke honestly. We're told its for FFP but there are so many ways around it and every club is doing it that we seem to be the only club focusing on stability, when we still need improvement on the pitch. That's why it's crazy you have Cardiff and Southampton spending 30 odd mil and we're sitting there with no outlay at all when 10 mil would probably have shored us up.


In reality we shouldn't need investment to stay up-the squad was small and then decimated by injuries (as usual) and we could barely field a competitive side. We're angry because we needed possibly one or two signings to get back to "best of the rest" really, but now we can't be sure. Pardew is already under massive pressure and the only replacement would be Poyet or Kinnear, Poyet is alright but Kinnear is insane and no matter how good our players if the manager loses them/happens to be kinnear then we'll implode again.

[Newkie]

Originally Posted by Christian Benteke

What is the financial situation like at Newcastle? I swear he has actually spent money in the past? Why tighten the purse strings now? The best thing to do would be to spend to keep them in the PL for the next few seasons because of the TV money surely?

In a nutshell, he's keeping it tight, hoping on the odd big sale where he can reinvest say half of that and pocket the rest so we can stabilize and continue to operate at a profit. Then he can use the TV deal to directly pay off the clubs debt to him, after that he can directly help himself to club profits until someone buys us, I guess he's hoping that someone will look at one of the only self sufficient clubs in England and consider investing in them, but all these ****ing saudis seem happy to go in for Sheffield or Forest

[Cuthbert]

Originally Posted by Newkie

In a nutshell, he's keeping it tight, hoping on the odd big sale where he can reinvest say half of that and pocket the rest so we can stabilize and continue to operate at a profit. Then he can use the TV deal to directly pay off the clubs debt to him, after that he can directly help himself to club profits until someone buys us, I guess he's hoping that someone will look at one of the only self sufficient clubs in England and consider investing in them, but all these ****ing saudis seem happy to go in for Sheffield or Forest

Ashley sounds like a twat.

Would you actually want to be taken over by one of these oil tycoons though? It's a question I often ask myself. I'd say the best clubs to do this at currently are Villa, Newcastle and Leeds as they have the largest catchment areas.

But seriously would you want Newcastle to be the next City or PSG?

We take the piss out of Chelsea and City but I think the reality is we'd pretend we were against it then once the trophies started rolling in we'd be loving it.

Originally Posted by Goofle11

I think a lot of people will be shocked at how good Oezil actually is. Easily a Top 10 player in World Football.

People shouldn't be shocked unless they only watch MOTD.

[Newkie]

Originally Posted by Christian Benteke

Would you actually want to be taken over by one of these oil tycoons though? It's a question I often ask myself. I'd say the best clubs to do this at currently are Villa, Newcastle and Leeds as they have the largest catchment areas.

But seriously would you want Newcastle to be the next City or PSG?

We take the piss out of Chelsea and City but I think the reality is we'd pretend we were against it then once the trophies started rolling in we'd be loving it.

We've been telling the world for about 6 years now, the problem was it started with the charva brigade of "KK MESSIAH" lovers and we just got put down as over dramatic fans from the start. Don't get me wrong, our previous regime was untenable and Fat Freddy Shepherd was an absolute **** and Ashley did help us fix some issues but he's just made too many crazy/insulting decisions.

Without a shadow of a doubt I would take any owner over Ashley now, even an unknown quantity like Venky's were would be worth the risk. For a few years me and many of the fans were "better the devil you know" especially as our finances had turned around and while Ashley was being a tight bastard but it's gone too far now, risking premier league safety to pinch pennies is a joke because if we go down again it would add another 60 odd million to the debt and we'd have to start again with the squad.

I'd love to be money bags. As far as I'm concerned pretty much every other club is being bankrolled by their owner, it's just a matter of by how much. It's not like we'd be selling the soul of the club as we're chock full of frenchies and our academy doesn't show much promise, maybe two or three from 18-22 worth keeping and if they were going to be "the real deal" they'd be showing more promise than they are. In fact a City like takeover would improve our academy massively, our club have less coaches/staff than man united have physios so we'd at least get some investment...I absolutely loved our promotion season and first season back and we were nice and gritty and obviously we had a Geordie number 9 which is always great to see, but if we could compete for the title like 15-10 years ago and actually win it I'd love it.