Redslo

The Liverpool forum thread following the recent LFC announcement makes for interesting reading. https://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=335603.3040

But you were complaining in advance of the 2015-2016 season too. At best you are the Southampton FC cuckoo equivalent of a broken clock who just happened to be right last summer. More likely you are the equivalent of a digital clocked that flashes 88:88. But either way a broken clock provides no actual information. That is pretty much true of every club in the Premier League. That is because we are the only club that has consistently performed above its perceived level each of the last four years. (And yes I include this year.) While I know it is just a metaphor, I must say that anyone who tries to go up a down escalator but keeps stopping to take a breath has only their own stupidity to blame for their lack of progress. The real question is what do you suggest the club should do differently? (Stop doing this is not a valid answer.)

FFP was not intended to level the playing field--except perhaps amoung the not rich clubs. The concern was the number of clubs losing money and going into receivership. Supposedly, that has stopped happening. As for the effect on Southampton if we got a new rich owner, it is not hopeless, but almost. If we were content not to play in Europe, we could spend 35m a year more than we take in--actually a bit more since some expenses don't count against FFP--to compete in the premier league. 35m is about 675K a week so we could overpay a few players that way but it would require a rich owner willing to lose lots of money and never play in Europe.

Bill Gates youngest child is 15. I suspect we should target him to move to Woolston (a place I have not actually heard of--and Bill Gates probably hasn't either) in 3 or 4 years as an empty nester. None of that is true. We do our transfers early, late, and in the middle of the transfer windows just like almost everyone else. I don't know. Didn't we buy someone off Bayern recently? Not if you want to play in Europe. You can sort of do it in the Premier League still. If you recall, Man City and PSG were sanctioned for doing that sort of thing and only just recently go the limits on their spending removed. http://www.espnfc.us/blog/uefa/258/post/3108919/uefa-no-financial-fair-play-sanctions-for-manchester-city-or-paris-saint-germain

Of course, the same can be said for your posts.

Just curious: do you read the club's financial and not understand them or do you just make up stuff?

The Guardian did not say that. 63m is the net debt where as 6m (actually 5.6m) is the interest payable. There is also 3m interest receivable so the net interest payable is about 2.7m. That does not sound nearly as bad. Also, these are the amounts owed and payable as of 30 June 2016. They are not the average balance owed during the fiscal year or the actual net interest paid during the fiscal year. (I do not currently know those numbers, but if I find them I will probably post them.) If the Guardian is right that Liebherr is earning 5% then the lower numbers make more sense and there probably is another higher interest loan out there. Exactly.

"behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others" Well, not all others of course, but in this context, quite right.

I hurt my back so I thought it would cheer me up to respond to some nonsense. Did he say signed up or lined up? And why would that happen? Wouldn't it make more sense to sell the assets with the club and get a better price and a happier buyer? You do understand that Reed doesn't get to keep the money--it belongs to the club. If you feel Reed is treating you like a moron you are probably projecting your actual status into his actions which are completely unrelated to you. I have never understood comments like this. Exactly what is the advantage to Reed in mismanaging the club and taking us for Mugs? Did he make a bet with the guy who runs Palace that we would finish lower than them this year and he is desperately trying to win that bet? This is all very silly. Exactly what were they supposed to have done differently? Not sell players who want to leave? Buy more expensive replacements who are no more likely to be successful here than the less expensive ones? Pay higher wages than the club can afford to keep/get better players? Some of the fans here live in a fantasy world where things are going poorly when they are not and the problems are easy to fix if only the people running the club were as smart as the fans. That last part is actually true though. If the people running the club were as smart as the fans we would be able to fix the club's problems (being in League One) by firing them. If his bonuses aren't football related that is bad luck for him since the performance over the past several years would have resulted in pretty good bonus. Also, where is the evidence that they have been taking money out of the club? Overall Ms. Liebherr has put money in.

Could you point out where that money is please? I have looked at the club's financials and I don't see it so I must be missing something.

No it is run to break even. The profit will come when the club is sold or, maybe not at all, if Liebherr decides to stay on indefinitely. New owners, particularly ones like the ones looking at us now, who have less money that Liebherr would be a much bigger risk. They might actually want to take money out or they might want to spend money neither they nor the club really has to try to buy our way into the Champions League. I am slightly more optimistic about hanging onto VVD because the new six year contract makes no sense if he was going to be sold this summer and makes very little sense if he is going to be sold in 2018. Probably true, but would it be run better or worse?

I apologize for responding to one of your posts. You don't know what you are talking about. She has not, so far, taken money out of the club. The transfer profits have remained in the club to fund things like capital spending and increased salaries. For the year ending 2014 our turnover was 106 million. For 2015, it was 114 million. There is no 150 to 200 million per year available. (Admittedly, with the new TV contracts the number will be higher for 2017. 2016 hasn't been reported yet to my knowledge.) If you think the club should be able to spare 20m out of 150m then, presumably, you recognize that is a negative 16m out of 114m. In other words, the club is doing about what you think it should be doing given the actual financial resources available.

If a bit overcooked.

Actually, we can compete with them on wages even with their one time Champions league revenue bonus. What we can't do is compete with a club that makes the champions league regularly, has a world wide fan base to generate more money, and appears on TV a lot more than we do. An interesting question is whether Leicester structured their new contracts this summer wisely so as not to face a problem next year without champions league revenue. Characterizing our past couple of years as negative net spends ignores costs other than transfer fees. You have the luxury of doing that but the club doesn't. I hate to disagree with you for disagreeing with the person I just disagreed with, but FFP is not our limiting factor right now. The current owner clearly wants the club to be self-sufficient. FFP would allow the owner to kick in 8 million pounds a year or so and fully fund the youth academy, charitable and community development spending, and capital spending out of her own pocket. She doesn't want to do that and I don't blame her. This is a sensible post.

Shouldn't this post be an auto ban for libeling football.

It is some of the best idiot drivel performance art around.

I did not read every post in this thread so I apologize if someone else has already posted this link. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/11/02/southampton-in-talks-with-chinese-firm-lander-sports-development/ Wilson has always had good sources inside the club so this paragraph seems significant to me: "A deal of £200 million has been mooted, but Liebherr is said to be keen to find out more about Lander’s intentions before considering selling or even simply diluting her stake." This suggests that she would not want to sell us to an asset stripper and might simply be looking at getting a minority investor. That might be a way to fund a stadium expansion, the rest of the new training facilities, and other improvements. This is not a way to spend more money on players because FFP limits that too much for additional money to be that significant--a new owner could kick in maybe 10 to 15 million more pounds a year but aside from the money that is spent on the Youth program, we would have to lose the money so that the input is covering actual losses under FFP accounting.

The EPL FFP rules are very lenient. You can overspend by 35 million pounds a year. What that means is that a club who has no intention of playing in Europe could outspend the rest, but to what point.

I have an American law degree but I think it means that he should strive to be our 4th best central defender because that would get him on the bench in some games and he might play when there are enough injuries. Presumably, this is his first target. He should eventually strive to be our best central defender and then get sold to Liverpool.

How do you manage to live with so little hope and optimism?

You are not even trying. Remember performance art requires some effort and originality. Do you think tottenham is feeling very lucky right now? I thought the deal had already paid for itself after the Manchester United game last season. He might be proving the insane ones wrong, but they won't notice. That was a peculiar decision. I think the goodness of the ref was that he made no bad calls that cost us points. That is all we can ask. The announcers on the American TV broadcast said that they were playing crowd noise prior to the game. They did not know if they were playing it during the game, but surely that would be against the rules. The difference is that our meltdowns are not based on reality. Nonsense. There is far worse nonsense already here.

Second I think. http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18912882

But we didn't sell without replacements being in place. We lost Mane, Pelle, Wanyama, Juanmi, K. Davis, and Stekelenberg. (I am only counting players that mattered and Gazzaniga going out on loan to get playing time is not a loss.) We have replaced the two goalkeepers. The club considers Austin the replacement for Pelle. The club considers Hojbjerg the replacement for Wanyama. I am sure the club considers Redmond and Boufal to be the replacements for Mane and Juanmi--not that Juanmi needed a replacement. The only one who was arguably not in place was Boufal, but we know the club had been going after him for a while. Quite possibly the club was confident the transaction would happen and preferred to watch his recovery from injury progress further before buying him. As for the percent of key players we lose being too high--you do realize that we are only going to lose key players or ones we don't want at all. That being said out of our best 11 at the end of the season we lost only 2. That doesn't seem so bad.

Or San Jose Earthquakes.

The 7 million is now much TV money can be used to increase wages. Doing these calculations without inside information is difficult but you can't ignore the cash flow issue. Wages have to be paid in cash, not profits. Celtic wanted to make the group stage of the Champions League. VVD was not available until that was resolved. 3 million more pounds would hardly have convinced Celtic to give us him early. Except we signed him to a 5 year contract giving us three years--at least in theory.