What a mess this club is.

[Sparks Rover]

32 minutes ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Hardly, they've injected £16m quid into the Club for an asset they already own because there was no other way round it due to the ludicrous FFP rules!

Check the balance sheet Rev.  Assets are down nearly 5m over the last couple of years... net worth - 150m .

We have no tangible assets apart from the.ground.

Edited November 19, 2021 by Sparks Rover

[Crimpshrine]

1 hour ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Hardly, they've injected £16m quid into the Club for an asset they already own because there was no other way round it due to the ludicrous FFP rules!

I think that is a very positive spin on the training ground sale.

The £16m will only cover losses incurred over the last 10 months or so. This time next year, the money will be spent but the value of the land will no longer be listed as an asset on the club's balance sheets - the asset has gone.

An alternative would have been to pay the bills as they normally do ( VLL share issues or whatever method ) and take a 6 point penalty while keeping the training ground as a club asset. To me it looks like a short term fix. If any of the board members were actually committed to the future of the club the sale may have been voted down - who knows? 

We could make up the 6 points in a couple of matches ( with luck ) but we're not getting the training ground back ever.

Edited November 19, 2021 by Crimpshrine

[tomphil]

To me it just smacks of no planning and no grasp on the situation as usual.

We've arrived at this point again and they've been alerted to it, looked around and seen no other players to sell other than Arma. He wasn't sold in time so it's a case of what do we do put some more in via share issue ?

No you can't that'll end up in punishment from FFP !  Oh ok what can we sell quickly ?  Well there's fixed assets but we need buyers and to get around the issues fans will raise over a sale.  Right we'll set up another company and buy it the decided what to do with it later on.

Job sorted for another year, we'll speak again next summer. 

I think that is more close to how things roll between here and India.

[chaddyrovers]

On 17/11/2021 at 18:53, roversfan99 said:

I repeatedly did point out that any signings would have been in the new accounting year, but you never directly responded to that.

In fact the article implicitly states that the Armstrong fee will give us some flexibility underneath the FFP threshold this year, so it actually backs me up that we could spend a bit in the summer if we had chosen too:

Well I did respond actually and LT has told you it will give us more flexibility for next season. Given that the 39 million losses is over 4 years not 3 due to Covid. Plus @philisaid this in the summer aswell as other people. 

On 17/11/2021 at 18:53, roversfan99 said:

degree of flexibility in the budget for renewal of contracts

Well we have offered these players new improve contracts and if we had been in embargo then we couldn't offer them better financial terms. 

On 17/11/2021 at 18:53, roversfan99 said:

Lets not lose focus of the fact that you had similar requests, hence your daily suggestions of Healey, NIsbet etc, so I am not sure why you are suddenly so keen to go against that

Cos I learnt more about the football league FFP rules and spoken to a couple of Rovers fans who had better knowledge of Rovers finances and us being close to being over FFP threshold 

[arbitro]

The timing of Venkys arrival and our demise couldn't have been worse. Hanging on for another year would have seen us get a larger portion of the £3.018 billion, up from £1.782 billion on the previous deal which expired in 2013.

Another reason to detest the owners.

https://www.sportingfree.com/football/history-of-premier-league-uk-tv-rights-deals/

[Ulrich]

3 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Hardly, they've injected £16m quid into the Club for an asset they already own because there was no other way round it due to the ludicrous FFP rules!

No Blackburn Rovers owned the training ground, now Venkys own it. It is not quite the same. Sell the club, and then build the houses and make money.

[JHRover]

An alternative to flogging the training ground in a seemingly desperate last minute scramble to avoid a points deduction would of course have been to run the club in a sustainable or semi-sustainable manner rather than once again allowing costs to spiral out of control and that going hand in hand with ever decreasing revenues and income.

I'm not interested in Covid and the figures from the last 18 months because there are steps in place to exempt Covid impact from FFP calculations. So the brigade who keep trotting out the 189% of turnover to wages figure need to go back to pre-Covid which is what is important.

It is telling of course that we are in the same boat as Derby and Reading, two other basket cases, whilst the actual sensibly run Championship clubs whether that be Preston, Millwall, Barnsley, Bristol, Luton all seem to have stumbled across the magic formula of maintaining mid-table competitive status in the Championship without racking up obscene debt, losses and being in permanent danger of falling foul of FFP.

Maybe it was the 'plan' that we would sell Dack for a healthy sum and that would be used to get us out of any trouble but I don't call that a plan. Of course player sales are part and parcel of life at this level and are needed from time to time to boost the coffers but a plan of relying on selling him and hoping that he didn't get injured, lose form or not attract serious cash/interest.

I could even understand or accept it if our business model  was to rely on a big sale from time to time to plug the shortfall, but that is not the plan because to do that you have to invest cash into obtaining those players to begin with (not relying on loans) and you have to ensure your best players are under long term contracts that enable us to command substantial fees in the event interest comes along. This isn't what is happening here.

It is just a complete disaster of a situation and they all share in the responsibility.

The owners to their credit are seemingly able and willing to chuck in cash that goes way above and beyond what many other Championship clubs are able to do which should be an advantage yet as our league positions show has counted for very little.

They just take so little interest in the requirements of running a club at this level that money is squandered all over the show, in a boom and bust model where we go from having a massive bloated expensive squad to a threadbare one running low on assets of value and reliant on the loan market.

They also allow and seemingly want a structure where the club is run by people who may not be up to the task in hand or be empowered to do the job as needed which means people like Waggott are left to run things like a cornershop operation for years on end whilst presiding over decline, falling sales and yet there is no consequence to that.

People keep telling me the issue here is having too big a wage bill and outgoings being too high. Well how about revenues being too low? What are we going to do about that?

[Mattyblue]

Well it ‘gives us more flexibility for next season’, so all good then!

Though selling fixed assets to get through the next 12 months seems a very precarious way to run a business

Edited November 19, 2021 by Mattyblue

[broadsword]

5 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Hardly, they've injected £16m quid into the Club for an asset they already own because there was no other way round it due to the ludicrous FFP rules!

I might be wrong, but isn't the difference that before they owned it *through * their ownership of the club, but now they actually have it themselves outright? 

 

So, and I'm not saying how likely this is, but if they did turf out, the training ground goes with them? 

[broadsword]

2 hours ago, arbitro said:

The timing of Venkys arrival and our demise couldn't have been worse. Hanging on for another year would have seen us get a larger portion of the £3.018 billion, up from £1.782 billion on the previous deal which expired in 2013.

Another reason to detest the owners.

https://www.sportingfree.com/football/history-of-premier-league-uk-tv-rights-deals/

I honestly don't need any more. Believe me

[broadsword]

26 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

Well it ‘gives us more flexibility for next season’, so all good then!

Though selling fixed assets to get through the next 12 months seems a very precarious way to run a business

"When you have burned everything you have then you must set yourself on fire" 

[Miller11]

1 hour ago, JHRover said:

People keep telling me the issue here is having too big a wage bill and outgoings being too high. Well how about revenues being too low? What are we going to do about that?

The same people will blame it on the fans for staying away. “What can we expect with 10k attendances” is the new one. All the fans fault, no expectation on the club to actually re-engage with all those they have alienated over the last decade, high praise for the positive PR stunts that are the next gen games, and an acceptance of the nonsense that the club has “done all it can”.

I even had someone telling me the other day that the low attendances were down to the negative fans that still go to Ewood! Apparently he doesn’t want to sit next to someone who complains about how the club is run.

[JHRover]

It's like most other businesses - antagonise, upset, alienate your customers and most will give over spending their money with you.

Football slightly different in that there will always be a basic number who will keep on coming regardless and there is a lot more loyalty to football clubs than to most businesses, but the fundamental principle is the same. If you are expecting people to hand over their hard earned cash you'd better treat them with respect or give them something that they enjoy or makes them feel valued.

In any other industry you obliterate your customer base and do nothing to change it then you go bust through rank bad business performance or the staff/management get changed

In the parallel universe of Blackburn Rovers however the perpetrators of the poor performance keep on going, getting very well paid for it regardless and many fans blame their fellow fans for the issue. Beyond bizarre.

[Mattyblue]

Agree with that JH, however we need to remember that a lot of fans aren’t like us, they can take it or leave it, they simply want to watch a decent side, a bit of excitement, a potential promotion push every now and again etc. 

Spending a decade generally about 10th to 18th in the second division is not going to attract floating support, especially considering season ticket prices have pretty much doubled during that period.

Edited November 19, 2021 by Mattyblue

[funny-old-game]

6 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

His exact words were along the lines of "I want to make sure the Club's all right when I'm gone".

Once he had gone the Trust's Solicitor Paul Egerton Vernon announced in the LT that there was no specific pot for the Club but that it was hoped the profits from the other Companies would sustain Rovers. Whether this was Jack's actual intention who knows, but to play devil's advocate the amounts needed to remain competitive at the top end of the Premier League were rising all the time and the family had either no interest in football, or a passing interest but weren't willing to risk the family silver on the Club.

I know several of the family to say hello to and I would say they are exceptionally nice people in a social capacity. As owners however the last straw for me was when they announced they were withdrawing funding from the Club and then one of Jack's other Companies Fly Be subsequently appeared as sponsors on the front of Birmingham City's shirts.

As Rovers needed a net influx of funds of c £2m - £3m p.a. at the time and Fly Be presumably flew a large number of flights from East Midlands Airport I suppose the moves were sensible in a strictly commercial sense.

I bet Jack was spinning in his grave at that point though.

Ross owned FlyBe at the time and took umbrage at having to go to the trustees and for money for another business yet rovers had just spent 8 million on Andy Cole. Maybe (only my opinion) this was his way of sticking 2 fingers up to the club that he had no interest in.

Edited November 19, 2021 by funny-old-game

[tomphil]

3 hours ago, Miller11 said:

The same people will blame it on the fans for staying away. “What can we expect with 10k attendances” is the new one. All the fans fault, no expectation on the club to actually re-engage with all those they have alienated over the last decade, high praise for the positive PR stunts that are the next gen games, and an acceptance of the nonsense that the club has “done all it can”.

I even had someone telling me the other day that the low attendances were down to the negative fans that still go to Ewood! Apparently he doesn’t want to sit next to someone who complains about how the club is run.

We'd need about 25k evey week to service the finances the way the club is run.

People chucking out the crowd insults are in cuckoo land i'm afraid.

[tomphil]

2 hours ago, funny-old-game said:

Ross owned FlyBe at the time and took umbrage at having to go to the trustees and for money for another business yet rovers had just spent 8 million on Andy Cole. Maybe (only my opinion) this was his way of sticking 2 fingers up to the club that he had no interest in.

I think Flybe was just part of the Trust and run by the Chairman of that Trust basically.  The lad you mention was further down the pecking order probably.  In the end it seemed they were all squabbling amongst themselves and the hand that fed them.

 

[Upside Down]

Throughout my life the things I generally heard about the Walker kids was that they were essentially just spoiled trust fund babies with little or no respect for the people that put them where they were. As far as the club was concerned, they saw it as nothing other than a drain on their finances and had little to no interest in it.

That is only what I heard from other people of course and I couldn't possibly have an opinion of them as I never knew any of them. However Blackburn is a small place and reputations can precede you.

[tomphil]

I remember some of them being at the FA cup semi in Cardiff v Arsenal.  Looked like they were happy enough to be there then.

At some point not that long after though it seems they weren't happy to be involved anymore. 

Who was actually in charge though, the Trust chair or the family ?  Surely they'd have had to vote on these type of things.  Also who was advising, maybe they weren't the only ones taking bad advice.

In fact i think that is what was alleged when the lawsuits started flying a few years later !

[dingles staying down 4ever]

Wasn't Flybe floated on the stock exchange in 2010 so hadn't the Walker family already started to sell off the family silver? Flybe was based in Exeter before it went bust and indeed also sponsored Exeter City.

[Sparks Rover]

On 19/11/2021 at 10:25, chaddyrovers said:

Well I did respond actually and LT has told you it will give us more flexibility for next season.

 

They've sold the fecking property.....are you happy with that Chaddy.?..Fixed assets stripping down.....look at the balance sheet and we have just under 2m worth of assets (players etc).....

You'll just go with whatever they do in some blind support-at-all costs attitude.

What next?  Ewood? Fiddling while Rome is burning you are...🤷‍♂️

Edited November 20, 2021 by Sparks Rover

[JWU-Andy]

2 hours ago, Sparks Rover said:

They've sold the fecking property.....are you happy with that Chaddy.?..Fixed assets stripping down.....look at the balance sheet and we have just under 2m worth of assets (players etc).....

You'll just go with whatever they do in some blind support-at-all costs attitude.

What next?  Ewood? Fiddling while Rome is burning you are...🤷‍♂️

it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if you're selling assets to fund the day to day expenses of a football club/business/household then you're in trouble - big trouble.  Then again, reading some of the people who blindly follow (in the name of being a loyal fan 😂) the club no matter what, maybe it is.

To be serious for a moment though, the club really didn't have a choice if they wanted to comply with the current P&S rules, but you've got to ask yourself why revenue; matchday, corporate and commercial is down so much?  Personally i think there is a disconnect between the fanbase (on many levels) and the club.  Until the disconnect is seriously addressed, the decline in revenue lines (as SW likes to call them) will continue.

I'd love to know the conversations that happen behind closed doors as to why the revenue continues to decline - or maybe everybody just looks the other way and takes their monthly wage without rocking the boat. Who knows.

[Upside Down]

The disconnect will be solved when venkys fuck off.

[Leonard Venkhater]

On 19/11/2021 at 13:20, broadsword said:

"When you have burned everything you have then you must set yourself on fire" 

"How can you rise anew, if you have not first become ashes?"

[broadsword]

“My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal.”