[madsteve]

Keep plugging us Mandy!

I don't fancy our club being run the way some of those big boys are being run anyway, I mean what are the debts for the top 5 PL clubs? They must be exponential, along with the added pressure to succeed or it's debt accrued for nothing.

Was talking to a Derby fan yesterday & he was saying that much as he wants to win the league, he knows that he will hate it in the PL where the aim is to get ten wins and stay up. The Pl isn't much fun apart from the top handful of clubs. Ask any fan of Villa, Newcastle, Sunderland, Palace or Everton.

[Owlkev71]

Staying up, 1 win against the top 6 if your lucky and a Cup run is all you can look forward to .

Lets get promoted, take the money, get relegated and then get paid £50m through the parachute payments over 4 years for failure to stay up and then we are minted

[Statesideowl]

Completely agree, it's become a grind for many clubs and no longer a sport. To achieve the dream really is almost a dream for so many clubs now thanks to the ever expanding chasm.

In our current state though, as some of us have said before, it wouldn't hurt to go up, take a season long pasting and float back down on a golden parachute. We'd then be able to completely re-structure the club.

However, once we've achieved this we would be back in a rat race, likely prone to the same financial decisions that nearly destroyed us. AND... at least we'd be on the Tv more

[St Charles Owl]

For every one that makes a profit out of owning an English football club, there are ten that make a loss. Very few are in it for the profit. Most that come in now are in it for the status it brings so they can impress friends & clients.

Those sort of people (on a world wide scale) are only interested in PL potential. We become saleable if we have a chance of PL football.

Not sure why that Sarver guy who offered £20m for Rangers doesn't see Wednesday as a better prospect.

The thing about us is that any new owner could easily make a profit on us!! The asking price is 30m, add to that the cost of promotion and getting the ground back to acceptable standards and you are maybe doubling that amount to 60m investment. But get to the premier league and instantly the revenue spikes dramatically and the value of the club goes up accordingly, of course if we manage to stay in for a few seasons then its even higher. Most owners though do not sell at the right time in the Prem or the new owners pay over the odds, aka Venky's!!

Personally I would be happy to have an owner who wants to use us as a status symbol, it means he will make sure we get to where we could be used that way. I just hope whoever we get is in it for the long haul.

As for Sarver, MM was in the US when his bid for Rangers was announced, I would hope that MM made some move to make him aware of us!! Apparently an ex-Rangers player is the coach of Sarver's kids football team and he was the one who alerted him to their availability, but I still have a feeling his whole bid was a red herring to get other bidders out of the woodwork!! But as you say, we are probably a better long term prospect from a money potential, but if Rangers get back to the top of Scottish football then they would have a shot of the CL and at least the Europa League most seasons, irrespective of how we perform, that is very unlikely for us!!

[St Charles Owl]

Keep plugging us Mandy!

I don't fancy our club being run the way some of those big boys are being run anyway, I mean what are the debts for the top 5 PL clubs? They must be exponential, along with the added pressure to succeed or it's debt accrued for nothing.

Ok, to answer your question, here are some numbers from 12/13, bit out of date and as we know the tv revenues have jumped since then but I would assume they provide some indication of the perilous state of some teams. The two numbers are Turnover and then debt in millions.

Premier League club accounts 2012/13

Arsenal 283 93
Aston Villa 84 189
Chelsea 260 958
Everton 86 45
Fulham 73 1
Liverpool 206 114
Manchester City 271 54
Manchester United 363 295
Newcastle United 96 133
Norwich City 75 Nil; £7m net cash in bank
Queens Park Rangers 61 177
Reading 59 38
Southampton 72 19
Stoke City 67 36
Sunderland 76 78
Swansea City 67 Nil; £4m cash in bank
Tottenham Hotspur 147 55
West Bromwich Albion 70 n/a
West Ham United 91 77
Wigan Athletic 56 12

I suppose we would like to see us run like Norwich or Swansea but all this hinges on being in the prem and if you get relegated getting back in the first 2 or 3 years. Bolton for example are walking a huge tightrope with debt of around 12om and no prosepct of reaching the prem and parachute payments about to end!! Having said that, most of these teams owe that debt to owners, or owners companies, so the chances of it being called in is remote, unlike our situation where we owed our debt to a third party, in our case the Co-op.

[madsteve]

For every one that makes a profit out of owning an English football club, there are ten that make a loss. Very few are in it for the profit. Most that come in now are in it for the status it brings so they can impress friends & clients.

Those sort of people (on a world wide scale) are only interested in PL potential. We become saleable if we have a chance of PL football.

Not sure why that Sarver guy who offered £20m for Rangers doesn't see Wednesday as a better prospect.

The thing about us is that any new owner could easily make a profit on us!!  The asking price is 30m, add to that the cost of promotion and getting the ground back to acceptable standards and you are maybe doubling that amount to 60m investment.  But get to the premier league and instantly the revenue spikes dramatically and the value of the club goes up accordingly, of course if we manage to stay in for a few seasons then its even higher.  Most owners though do not sell at the right time in the Prem or the new owners pay over the odds, aka Venky's!!

Personally I would be happy to have an owner who wants to use us as a status symbol, it means he will make sure we get to where we could be used that way.  I just hope whoever we get is in it for the long haul.

As for Sarver, MM was in the US when his bid for Rangers was announced, I would hope that MM made some move to make him aware of us!!  Apparently an ex-Rangers player is the coach of Sarver's kids football team and he was the one who alerted him to their availability, but I still have a feeling his whole bid was a red herring to get other bidders out of the woodwork!!  But as you say, we are probably a better long term prospect from a money potential, but if Rangers get back to the top of Scottish football then they would have a shot of the CL and at least the Europa League most seasons, irrespective of how we perform, that is very unlikely for us!!

The problem for any owner is that in the PL, you have to spend all the TV money on wages and transfer fees just to finish 17th so there is invariably no profit. Maybe if you can survive for three seasons then maybe you could break even in the fourth season.

Another factor is that our home crowds are pretty poor for this division, behind Derby, Forest, Norwich & Brighton so we are unlikely to sell out every week in the PL. A lot of our fans have got out of the habit of going every week so we have a mountain to climb, particularly if we are losing most matches.

[St Charles Owl]

I actually think a lot of the fans would come back if we made it to the prem and we would be able to average over 30k. But to get the average higher we would need to stay in the prem for a few years and redevelop the ground, particularly the Leppings Lane end. To get the average up we need to be able to sell more home tickets but the "away" end is too big and impossible to segregate, so would sit half empty against most of the teams in the prem.

I do think teams are being more sensible when getting promoted these day though, they are relying on more of their promotion squad in the first season (except QPR!!) and are trying to work within budgets. At the end of the day you just need to do better than three other teams, and there are about 12 teams going into each season with that mindset. Spending the TV money on wages only is the way to go and let the rest of the revenue streams pay for the other stuff, but ultimately its up to the academy and the scouting to enable teams to find good players without spending the fortune that some teams do.

[Thurnscoe_OWL]

The xxxx mobile version is xxxx wank so I'm commenting to get to the end of a thread. xxxx xxxx

[St Charles Owl]

I see ex-Wolves owner Jack Hayward has passed away, he was one of the owners, along with Jack Walker at Blackburn, that I always admired for the efforts they put into their clubs.

[madsteve]

We haven't averaged over 30,000 in any season in my lifetime & that includes the Wilko, Big Ron & Trev Francis era. So it will be a quantum leap for us to achieve it now.