SaintBobby

True enough.

You were wrong whether we'd scored or not....

Now need some help from Watford

Yessssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!

Put on saganowski now!!!!

Put on Saga FFS

The debt with Norwich Union/Aviva is massively toxic. They'd bite your arm off for £20m. They'd be lucky to stand up even half of that. A brilliant negotiating team might even be able to get them down to £5m or less. This is exactly why I don't want some half-arsed fans' consortium to buy the club. We'd have a bunch of red-and-white striped "believers" finishing a negotiation with Aviva, having cut the mortgage to £20m. Probably all patting themselves on the back for "saving" the club £4m. I'd be impressed if the representatives of the "fans" had got halfway down the corridor before the Aviva staff ****ed themselves laughing and all (rightly) awarded themselves £1m bonuses. Your "achievement" would have been to saddle the club with up to £15m of debt that we didn't have to pay. It's a f**k of a lot of well-intentioned charity gigs to pay that back.

yeah yeah yeah. To be clear, we DON'T want local MPs supporting this?

Romsey LibDem MP Sandra Gidley has joined the campaign to save the Saints. Please join one of the many groups on facebook - and also encourage your local councillors and MPs to do the same. http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/group.php?gid=76035014328&ref=ts

But Mr Fry (who I warm to by the hour) considers the sales "disappointing" so far... http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/articles/article.php?page_id=11629 I imagine a lot will hinge on the Wolves result. If we win, we'll shift a large number of last minute sales....If we're beached by 5 or 6 points by Monday, less likely....

I think 22,000 would be pretty good, actually. 3rd highest attendance of the season?

My real problem on this thread is I totally commend ooohTH and also love CB's comebacks. The problem for fans passing round "buckets" (even if these "buckets" raise £7m) is that the immediate future of the club hinges on 2 big things: 1. Renegotiating the mortgage on SMS downwards - and massively. 2. Wriggling away from a 10 point penalty either this this season or next. I'd like to think that as a relatively bright human being I could put a vaguely coherent case to Aviva on point 1 and a half-savvy argument to the Football League on point 2. But I'm not an expert on either matter and perhaps 80-90% of the club's finances hinge on delivering these two things. A few months ago, I argued strongly for the fans buying out the club. I set up a pledge on pledgebank. We needed about 1,000 people at £10,000 a person (or 10,000 people at £1,000 a person). I'm not saying that I marketed it very well or that I was the right person to lead it. But, wow, the silence was deafening. I think 6 people pledged the £10,000. There were - as far as I could see - no alternatives proposed from any fan group at all. The best we heard was a hope that Leon Crouch, Paul Allen or some other chap would leap to our aid. My impression was that Saints fans may have deep pockets, but they also have very short arms. SLH has now gone into administration with debts of around £30m. It is amazingly touching to see 79 year old's handing over £500 at the ticket office, but it is FAR FAR too late for that. Assuming we find a new board, their ability to negotiate the mortgage down by £10m, £12m or £15m - in a high-pressure 1 hour meeting with Norwich Union - totally dwarves any noble efforts to raise a few grand here or a few grand there. If the fans had really wanted to buy the club, SLH was on sale for a couple of million quid a few weeks ago. You should have acted then. If Saints fans are numerous, but largely impoverished, (and I suspect that's about the size of it) then the best thing they can now do is to pressurise the local council to act as a backstop for the new board. A few dozen letters to each Southampton City Councillor might achieve that. If the city council was willing to put pressure on Norwich Union (along the rough lines of "please write off the mortgage hand over the keys...I know it's unfair but if you do so, we will have a good working relationship with you on future projects in the city...if you don't, the city council will find it very difficult to work with you again") or possibly make an offer on the stadium of say, £1, with the possible threat of a compulsory purchase order and/or negotiate an alternative venue for the team to play at next season, this would be potentially helpful. Saints fans - in their hundreds - should lobby their local councillors along these lines (we're also helped by the fact that all three main parties are competitive in the city - it's not a "rotten borough") That would, in truth, achieve much more than well-intentioned imaginative fundraising efforts. However cute and imaginative they may be.

Post of the year. On the harsh side, but f-ing hilarious.

"We realised too late that the balloon had already gone up"

The shareholders are nowhere. The company is in administration. That means the board - elected by the shareholders - have conceded that the company is no longer a going concern. It is Mr. Fry's job to now dispose of the assets of SLH. One of these assets is Southampton Football Club. If he finds a buyer who is willing to buy SFC for £100m+, you may get some cash. More likely, someone will buy the club for £0.01 on the understanding that they shoulder the club's debt. In this scenario, your shares are literally not worth the paper they are printed on.

I'm not genetically a Lowe-hater, but I thought his performance was lamentable. "My name is Rupert and I went to public school..."...being a line of defence for his unpopularity is lamentable. This man seems totally incapable of beginning a sentence with the words "I think one of the things I did wrong was...." He had ten months to balance the books and failed, whilst also overseeing two changes of manager and a lamentable performance on the football pitch. I think most Saints fans will be more concerned with keeping the club alive and trying to avoid relegation. But I hope to find a few minutes to investigate what processes need to put in train to ensure that Lowe, Wilde et al are disqualified from acting as company directors for any company in the UK, and for a substantial period of time. It won't help Saints now to do this. But it's the right thing to do and might help humanity in general.

I doubt it will feature very prominently in any history books...

But my point was, on my numbers, you wouldn't need a billionaire. Would be nice to have one, but if my numbers are even half-right, Southampton FC can wash its own face.

It was Swansea - in the Jan tarnsfer window.

I think we turned down £500,000 for Dyer didn't we?

It does seem to me that a huge amount hinges on renegotiating the mortgage (it's beyond me why the former board of SLH couldn't do this). Given the value of SMS to anyone other than Southampton Football Club is pretty damned minimal, it strikes me that the barganining position with Norwich Union is strong. My very, very tentative calculations would be this: 1. Renegotiate mortgage down to £5-10m, cost of servicing this and eventually repaying it is c. £500,000 per annum 2. Pay-off the debt to Barclays at the rate of £500,000 per annum over a c.20-year period. 3. Assume average gate receipts of about £200,000 a game, about 25 times a year = £5m. 4. Assume all other income (TV revenue, shirt sales, merchandising, programme sales, sponsorship) of £1m per annum. 5. Assume profit on player sales of £1m per annum. 6. Assume SMS running costs of £2m per annum (ticket office staff, electricity, stewarding etc etc). 7. That leaves in the region of £4m to spend on player/coaches wages. This would probably mean our 4 or 5 "star" players being paid around £7,000 a week (up to £1.5m on "star" player salaries), 12 or 14 squad players on an average of £3,000 a week (c. £2m on the bulk of the first team squad) and the remaining £500,000 being split between coaching staff and academy players. All of this seems achievable if the mortgage can be negotiated down - but WITHOUT paying off the remaining mortgage or clearing the debt to Barclays (whcih may have to be refinanced). So, what am I missing?

I can imagine there are 200,00 people on the database - this is just a subset of anyone who's been a member or season ticket-holder or purchased home-end tickets since 2001, right?

Great article by Martin Samuel. If Lowe's parting salvo is to save us a ten point penalty through a cleverly exploited loophole, then fair play to him. Doesn't mean I'm going to forgive him for his previous sins, however. When Lowe took over from Crouch last year, I wasn't as opposed as some. It seemed to me that a severe auterity package was what was needed to save the club. Even if this involved us having a team of such poor quality that we got relegated to League One. But to execute a half-arsed austerity package in such a ham-fisted fashion and end up with SLH in administration anyway is just unforgiveable.

Was wondering if I could call on the combined intellectual might of readers of this forum to help me with a few questions. 1. Is there any evidence - any at all - to suggest that Richard Branson has, at any stage, ever had the remotest interest in buying Southampton? Or that he is actually a supporter of Saints - or even vaguely sympathetic to us? Or even has a passing interest in football? If so, what is this evidence? 2. What - in less than a few hundred words - is the most compelling case for a multi-millionaire buying Southampton FC (putting aside reasons of personal vanity or a lifelong support of Saints)? Specifically: why are SFC's debts nothing like as bad as they first appear? Why are we a better prospect than other CCC/League One clubs? How much better is our "infrastructure" than other CCC/L1 clubs? How much bigger - and more expandable - is our fanbase compared to other CCC/L1 clubs? I know all the generic arguments here - but am v weak on specifics. (e.g. how good is the training facility at Staplewood and compared to what? how high is our average attendance compared to other clubs - including weak supported clubs in the Premiership? How massive is our season ticket base compared to other clubs? etc etc etc) Any/all help most appreciated - if you don't want to post here, please PM me.

I love the idea, and am amazed clubs don't do this sort of thing automatically. However, I think there are a few big problems though with all these ideas which might raise a few grand here or a few grand there... 1. This is an utterly microscopic drop in the ocean compared to what we need to raise. I understand the "every little helps" theory, but a few grand here and a few grand there is going to make sod all difference really. The club's debts are so vast - and the size of the Saints operation so huge - taht we just aren't in an AFC Bournemouth, York City et al situation. 2. It's not obvious (at least to me) who would actually get the money. It seems the most pressing thing for a new board would be to reach an agreement with Aviva/Norwich Union on the mortgage. Some suggestions have been made that this might be negotiated down from £24m to as little as £5m. But, I'm not interested in handing over my readies to help pay the present mortgage if all this is going to do is help Norwich union's shareholders. On a guesstimate, the present mortgage paymenst are presently costing us about £4,000 a day. 3. What we really need to do, as a fanbase, is try and draw the positive attention of potential buyers to the club.