Guided Missile

This...

You had me at "I was born..."

Duncan, when you update your marvellous book on the history of Southampton Football Club, I wonder where no-marks like Wilde and Lowe will rank alongside Charlie Miller, teaching the Brazillians how to play football, Matt Le Tissier teaching the world how to score great goals, Ted Bates teaching the World about loyalty to one club and our fans teaching Arsenal fans how to support a losing club in the FA Cup Final. You have many chapters left to write and I have a feeling the best is yet to come, with Wilde and Lowe a sad footnote...

Daren, you and I haven't seen eye to eye in the past, but your email address, long since deleted, was on my contact list due to my desire to contribute to the Beautiful South. Instead, you got a copy of an email to my bank manager at Barclays re my overdraft. You will be delighted to know that when that f***ing bank put the squeeze on me and my company about 9 months ago, I was able tell them to shove their overdraft and I paid it off, due to the great year we had in 2008. This might seem like a John Smith moment, but it really isn't. This year has been cr @p so far, to be honest. But what I have learnt this season, is to pick my fights with the right f***ing people and you, as a fellow Saints fan and passionate charity worker, are not one of them. Go in peace...

Is that your best f***ing effort at a positive post?

Stanley, feel free to let it go, but try and channel your thoughts and energy into something positive. Hate leads to destruction, anger leads to self-destruction and there is so much to be positive about. We live in God's chosen country, with a fantastic stadium which will be around long after you use a bus pass to get to it. Our relegation will release so much affection for the plight of the club that our subsequent promotion is all but assured. ...and remember, Lowe and Wilde are gone...forever...

Steve, like Wes Tender and Alpine Saint, I have taken you off ignore and I've got to tell you how good it feels. You have tried so hard to help Saints with not a thought of monetary reward and I hope you can accept my sincere apologies for a lot of what I've posted. The club needs supporters like you and a loyal post like the one above is nothing less than the posters on this forum would have expected from you...

Legod, I really do feel your anger. Whatever has separated us before will unite us from now on. I appreciate my poor use of the "Working Class" term, but I sense that with the meltdown in the financial market and the end of easy money in the boardroom, we will all have to work for our money, rather than lazily enjoy capital gains on the back of investments. In a sense, then, I feel all of us, in this new world, will become "Working Class". What better than having a modest and well run club to support in the future, living on the income from it's fans and representing the future. I hope you understand that I wasn't trying to separate the fanbase, but like the recession we are going through, many wrongs will be righted by this relegation and we will both live to see a better life in the future. I also hope that I can meet you one day at St. Marys and put a smile on your face. You deserve this at least, like all our long suffering fans...

Away from the overreaction to our inevitable demotion to League One, with all it's attendant hysterical wailing and pointless blame laying, I thought it may help to start a thread, in which calmness reigns and only positive thoughts are present. The only rules on this thread are, (if we can manage it): Politeness and sympathy for your fellow poster/fan No blaming anyone for the past Only positive posts about the present and future of the club Humour and support from/for all Call it a therapy thread, if you like. Therapy for the only assets that the administrator can't sell, yet are the club's greatest treasure, the fanbase. I would like to start by hoping that from this day on, the fans can continue to show the rest of the country how we respond to adversity. I am sure that when we stand inside our magnificant stadium, in the warm Spring Southampton sunshine, at the end of the next game, knowing that we are down, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" will echo round the ground and we will know that starting next season, we can only expect better things. So, my first positive thought is how much of a cult team we will become, stripped of our Championship arrogance and money. A sort of hard southern enclave of the underdog, swaying the neutral and earning respect. Working class, now Lowe has gone and southern to the core, now Wilde has gone.

It may also be worth reading the Swindon Town Press Release about these timewasters from Best Holdings: "On the 14th August 2007 a contract was signed with Best Holdings enabling them to acquire a controlling interest in the Club. This contract was due for completion by 31st August 2007 and provided for the CVA payment and the Club's outstanding PAYE liabilities to be settled in full. Contrary to the front page article in The Swindon Advertiser dated Tuesday 9th October, there was no provision in the contract of August 14th to make a payment of £8m directly to the Wills Family. An amount of £3m was ascribed to the shareholders; this was allocated for the repayment of monies owed to Shaw Park Developments, arising from the rescue of the club six years ago, and to cover litigation and legal costs. The Club is willing to make available for scrutiny, by the media, the August 14th contract with Best Holdings which was signed by Jim Little, Jorge Rubenstein and James Wills. It has been well documented that dialogue continued between the Club's shareholders, Best Holdings, and their respective legal representatives in an attempt to finalise the agreement. Throughout August and early September the three main representatives of Best Holdings; Jorge Rubenstein, Rufus Brevett, and Jim Little, regularly attended meetings at the Club to discuss strategy and budgets for the 2007/2008 season. As recommended by Best Holdings the Club proceeded to sign three foreign players the cost of whom Best Holdings in good faith agreed to underwrite. During September 2007 the Shareholders and the Club's CVA Supervisor Andrew Andronikou of Hacker Young began expressing concerns at the time being taken to conclude the deal with Best Holdings. In view of these concerns exploratory talks were initiated with another interested party. The Club has now been able to grant this alternative investment group a short period of exclusivity to negotiate the purchase of the Club. In exchange for these rights, the potential suitors have made a substantial "lock-out" payment which Andrew Andronikou has used to reduce the Club's Inland Revenue liability and stay the possibility of any legal proceedings. Over the last two months, whilst the Best Holdings talks continued the Wills Family supported the Club as they have done so for many years. However they accept that it is now time to pass on the responsibilities for so doing to new investors. Every effort is being made to achieve this aim. However, the negative media coverage and the type of protests held at the ground on Tuesday 9th October are not helpful to this process." In the words of that great song, "I Predict a Riot"....

It may be worth popping out and buying a copy of today's (Saturday's) Echo. It's only fair that the posters on this site read what their journos have reported today, re this company, seeing as they obviously read this thread yesterday... Talk about cut and paste...

Can I just add my sincere congratulations to your many achievements, John. It is rare to read a post of such depth of feeling and may I say, humility. I think the overwhelming impression I get from your inspiring story is that without the return of Lowe, you would not have had the time nor motivation, to achieve your goals. I hope you can find some way to express your gratitude to our former Chairman, perhaps in the form of a card or maybe a bowl of fruit...

The nightmare begins if these guys are within a million miles of St. Marys. They will make Rupert Lowe look like Mother Theresa. I particularly like this translation from a Portuguese website: "The British company, Southern Cross, no longer exists and its director, Bruce Anderson and his associate, Jorge Rubenstein, are being investigated by the Fraud Department of the New Scotland Yard. Southern Cross was responsible for numerous frauds in the UK and to get funds for committing these frauds, Bruce Anderson and Jorge Rubenstein fabricated documents with false information and even when questioned in British courts, Bruce Anderson vowed them to be true under oath, which constitutes a very serious crime, but both Bruce Anderson and Jorge Rubenstein, are free and clear from punishment. In fact, Jorge Rubenstein is at this moment engaged in transactions of Portuguese players to the UK." Let's hope Southampton Football Company Limited is not a front to buy our club.

Where's Wally? Open this and then study the photo below

Portuguese group linked to Tranmere Rovers takeover Apr 29 2008 Prenton Park TRANMERE Rovers could become the latest English club to fall into the hands of foreign businessmen. The Daily Post understands a Portuguese investment company has had talks with the club and is working on plans to take a financial stake, or even control, at Prenton Park. The group behind the move is believed to be responsible for the aborted takeover attempt at another League One club, Swindon Town, last year. Operating under the name of Best Holdings SGPS, the Portuguese investment company announced they were taking control of financially troubled Swindon in July, 2007 – then pulled out in October. Tranmere may look like a more stable target for the group than Swindon, who subsequently reached agreement with a locally-based consortium headed by businessman Andrew Fitton. Best Holdings allowed little information about the company’s background to reach the public domain during the brief flirtation with Swindon. However, the Daily Post understands the man behind the Swindon takeover, Portuguese businessman George Rubenstein, was present at Prenton Park for a reserve team game last month. Best Holdings appointed American Jim Little as chairman designate when they moved in at the County Ground at the start of the current season. Rufus Brevett, the former Queens Park Rangers, Fulham, Plymouth and Oxford defender was co-opted to the board as an adviser. Little, a former vice-chairman of Irish club Cork City and the managing director of a real estate advisory company, was reported to be behind Swindon’s recruitment of a number of continental and South American players. By the time Best Holdings pulled out of the County Ground in October, manager Paul Sturrock was forced to trim his squad to meet budget demands and many of the foreign recruits departed. None made a first- team appearance. Little and Brevett also left the club.

They bought out Swindon according to this.

It's exactly Southampton Football Company Limited....

I still say that Madonna would have paid at least a million...

We could have got rid of the plc without going into administration. Stanley, we have had our disagreements in the past, but I think we finally agree with each other that plc's are outmoded, when it comes to football clubs. See this post. Bottom line, with the proper leadership within the club, it didn't have to come to this...

Lloyds Bank would be delighted to offer a commercial mortgage to a qualified applicant at 6% fixed. Put that together with a discount on the outstanding stadium loan with Norwich Union, who would take £15M in a heartbeat and you very quickly go from £2M interest payments per year, to £900K per year. Who the f*** would take on this pile of sh !t (SLH) as a going concern, when they could buy the football club for, let's say, £5-£10M, renegotiate the stadium loan and save over million a year in interest payments to compensate for the reduced crowds...

Better than getting better gates, avoiding administration and staying up?

As a person who has had first hand experience of administration and the way administrators think, I can assure you I am not naive. The only reason that the administrator would sell the club as a going concern, would be if he could raise more money, than selling the assets of SLH separately. Take it from me, there is NO way Southampton Leisure Holdings plc is, or will be sold as, a going concern. 8.5% interest on the Stadium loan, vs a 0.5% base rate is the biggest reason, for a start. The second reason is that our team is second from the bottom in the Championship and likely to get relegated to a place where 14,000 average crowds are a rarity. Liquidation occurs far later in the procedure and as Clapham Saint may tell you, when every asset of value has already been sold. No, this is an SLH asset sale, where the buyer avoids any contingent liabilities SLH may have, together with the ability to renegotiate the terms of the loans together with any other contracts SLH may have entered into...

The reason I may be confused, concerning the player registrations and where the corresponding intangible asset figure resides, is that I haven't assumed that they are within the legal entity, SFCL. You may be right, from an accounting standpoint, but I don't think that matters. The reason you are forced to assume who holds the player registrations is because the Group has not shown the individual P&L and Balance Sheets, nor the related inter-company transactions. The reason they haven't done this is because, from the 2008 Annual Report: "The Group has one main business segment, that of professional football operations. As a result, no additional business segment information is required to be provided." This is what will trigger the 10 point deduction, IMO...

Says who?? I would be amazed...

Who cares? They're only run by "Southamptoners", anyway... ************irony alert***********