What is the long term ambitionof our club????

[Niall_Quinn]

Sorry, meant to say... It's on!

[Niall_Quinn]

Say there was an uprising from the fans and demands for Kroenke to GTFO and Usmanov to come in. The finances might be sorted out but don't the new financial fair play rules stuff us anyway as far as dumping money into the club? We're a bit screwed aren't we, in terms of ever catching City or Utd. The door has shut.

[IBK]

Its worse than that, jim.

Basically You can only kill off this debt by finding out who AFC sold these bonds too, and tempting them into selling them back to the club.
ie: Even if we have 227mill in the bank, that will be earning crap all interest, which we have to pay tax on too.
we will still be paying out more than that in interest each year.

An aside - I remember reading* that Usmanov has been a busy bastard buying up a lot of these bonds on the open market. He then went to the board and offered to tear them up, if they replaced them with new voting shares instead (a 'debt for equity' swap, if you will).
Obviously this means making room in the boardroom for him, and 'diluting' the stakes of the rest of the shareholders.

The PHW/Fiszman/Kronke axis told him to do one. I infer that they would rather run it for themselves as a moneyspinner than let it turn into a rich man's plaything which bankrolls trophies. To be honest though, neither prospect corresponds to what we think of as traditional football club. Sadly, that vision seems to be incompatible with the game at the highest level nowadays.

* ref: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/foo...nals-debt.html

and I agree with your inference.

TBH in this brave new money world of football I am starting to wonder what on earth the point of keeping Usmanov out was in the first place. I mean its not as though Kroenke can't damage the club big stylee if he so chooses. (Some would argue that he is already due to his only interest being maintaining/increasing his share value).

[Alan B'stard]

A classic demonstration of why all bankers should be burned. I'm serious, round up the cunts and throw them on a bonfire. Greedy, greedy, eternally greedy bastards. Can you imagine how much these stinking money changers are thieving out of the club over the years? And then add that to shareholder payoffs. A payoff for what? Running the club into a ditch? The lion's share of everything generated is sucked out like the club is suspended in a vacuum. The money changers have created their "loan" out of thin air at zero risk and with hyper usury rates of return (as usual) and the shareholders have put fuck all in and are sucking like fucking leeches. And who owns the stadium when the bloated leeches are finally sated? The fans? Nope, some American bloke. So what, exactly, is in it for the fans?

$amir Na$ri - that's what. Cahsley Cole and his swerving Bentley. Nick, I couldn't score a fucking goal to save my life but thanks for the £52k a week, Bendtner. 8-2 humiliation at Old Trafford?

But look on the bright side, we did get a 29 year old injury victim at the end of his career and the loan of a player nobody else wants. And fine, let's hope they can at least produce some entertainment, at least let's have some of that.

When you look at the bigger picture it makes you wonder where the football fits in any more.

thats the board who did that, not bankers.
you may as well blame car manufacturers for everyone who gets run over.

At the top of the game it has become so expensive, that you hve two choices
(1) be a well run club who care nothing about winning trophies, but care everything about balancing the books and squeezing money out of every angle they can.
(2) prostitute yourself to a rich person, who can buy as many trophies as you want.

Put it this way, our dads and uncles experience of football was more spontaneous and tribal than ours will ever be now. bankers have nothing to do with that.If you want to blame anyone blame the general public for allowing murdoch to turn it into McFootball.

Maybe this is the result of a truly shit AFC summer but I'm struggling to keep interested these days. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[Niall_Quinn]

Bankers have been a vile curse on humanity for centuries, they have destroyed everything - even hope. Football is just another casualty in a long line. I'm not saying they directly forced anyone to take their imaginary money, but what they have done is created an all encompassing financial environment that means nothing anywhere moves without paying them their cut.

Where does the principle income originate for any football club? Gate receipts and brand merchandising, plus exploitation of home grown talent or an efficient scouting network. We take the intervention of banks for granted, but what service do they actually perform that warrants their massive return on an imaginary risk? They do nothing, build nothing, enhance nothing. It's the customer funding the club in real terms, we generate the actual wealth. The bankers come along and offer to create money out of thin air at zero risk and hand it to the club in advance of customer receipts. But this comes at the cost of eroding the final revenue by whatever amount of insanely greedy interest the bankers want to leech. We don't need them, we've just allowed them to create the conditions in which they dictate their own indispensability. In that respect I agree, we're to fucking blame for allowing bankers to exist at all - my original point.

As for the cuntish board, by comparison they're just little fish snouting around for a free meal. Filthy pigs it's true, but just another product of the world the bankers have carefully crafted. The stunningly simple but perfectly effective solution is to insist clubs operate on receipts arising from football and only football. Shirt sales would be fine, selling flats? Fuck off, what does that have to do with a football club? Let clubs fail when they run out of money. Pay lower wages, have less fancy stadium, less TV, less of everything. That's football genuinely living within its means. Local lads growing up supporting a club and working through the ranks to score the winning goal at Wembley. That's football, a thing to stir the blood, not some crappy roulette wheel for fat corporate bastards and a blood bank for thieving scum bankers who, if they operated as they do in any other industry would be instantly jailed or hanged. Cunts. Burn them.

Yes, I'm mad. Just like anyone else who suggests the very cosy and convenient arrangements set up by banksters and their cronies is not inevitable, that there really is an alternative - indeed an alternative mankind has actually experienced in the past, not some fanciful leap into the unknown. Every cunt of influence tells us how it has to be, what's rational, immutable, inviolable. And it just so happens these rules and constants are maximised to line their fucking pockets at the expense of everyone else. How fucking convenient.

Yeah, it's the bankers. They are at the root of every fucking evil on this earth. Every last one. It's just not so easy to pick out the individual cases now we are deluged beneath their bullshit. Too big to fail they say. To fucking crooked to live is my motto. Kill the cunts if you want to save football and everything else.

[Niall_Quinn]

you may as well blame car manufacturers for everyone who gets run over.

I would if the car manufacturers had found a mechanism by which they could force half of us to drive to fast and the other half to jaywalk. Then you might say they were culpable. Who controls the economy from top to bottom? Who pulls money in and let's it out, who creates it from thin air or makes it vanish by tapping a button? Who effectively either forces us to drive too fast or alternatively pushes us into the road, under a bus? Fucking bankers is who. Good job they don't make cars. Then again the cunts don't make anything, only profits (even when their losses are huge). Kill them.

[Özim]

and I agree with your inference.

TBH in this brave new money world of football I am starting to wonder what on earth the point of keeping Usmanov out was in the first place. I mean its not as though Kroenke can't damage the club big stylee if he so chooses. (Some would argue that he is already due to his only interest being maintaining/increasing his share value).

It's all down to different sorts apparently.

Kroenke was a bad sort that turned good.

[Niall_Quinn]

It's all down to different sorts apparently.

Kroenke was a bad sort that turned good.

PHW is a man of conviction who cannot be bought, don't you think?

[Özim]

PHW is a man of conviction who cannot be bought, don't you think?

Most definitely football comes first for this man, I'm particularly impressed with his PR skills though, not many would have handled some of the situations as well as he has.

That's why he's universally loved.

[Darth Vela]

In terms of the team, I think the long term strategy is still to build on a base of bringing the talent through the youth system and supplementing any shortfall in abilities with outside buys; the only way we can try to compete imo and the only way we'll try.

In terms of the financing of the club and all the ownership issues, fuck knows.