BigGwynram wrote:The new plan for season ticket whilst appealing to fans purely on a financial basis, does concern me on the long term. It does look somewhat like a panic incentive to simply keep us going short term, but what could it mean long term.
It does look like another Leeds scenario,and we all know what happened there, you cannot sell all future revenue streams and still have a future income. Imagine our potential investors being told "yes you can by the club for X amount,But if the team is successful and gets into the Premiership, you will lose any ticket revenue from possibly ten thousand fans who will now have free tickets"that is somewhere around 4 to 5 million pound of lost revenue.
It all smacks a bit of short termism, and us fans aren't in it for the short term, we are stuck with it for life.It's O.K. for some short term current investors/profit seeking business men who by then will be sitting in the Caribbean villas drinking cocktails.
We are being told that this money will be made available to Dave Jones (that's a new one,NOT!!)yet next year we are supposedly paying back Langstones, PMG, HMRC so if we can do all that next year, how are we in such a mess this year and yet we have not made any payments to afore mentioned.And barring one or two players, our crown jewels have already been sold off, so there wont be the 28 million pounds player sales we have recently had.
I am genuinely concerned, I don't want to put any fans off buying season tickets, I'm in the process of buying mine, but I really am worried about our future.
Gwyn
As a marketing ploy , the new offer is very well thought out - the prospect of a possible free season ticket for Premiership football next season is attractive and will give a big boost to sales over the next couple of weeks (they have been poor to date , despite the 5 year price freeze offered). By the way , Burnley did this last year , so it is not quite the new idea of Dave Jones that the club is making out , but full marks to him if he suggested to the board that they copy the idea.
Financially , the deal has its flaws.
Not a problem if promotion is actually achieved as the cost of the scheme even at the max. of 10,000 tickets is likely to be less than £3m taking nto account child and over 60 tickets and this will be affordable out of the £30m plus of extra prize money that would come from that promotion. Also ,I would think all the other 14,000 seats (including the expensive Premier Club ones that have been hard to shift so far) would be sold at normal or higher prices to compensate as well. Plus there would be additional adverising and sponsorship money.
The problem comes if the money comes in now and is spent .I don`t believe that the majority of it will go on new players , but a lot used to deal with existing pressing debts and instalments due to Langston until any new Malaysian investment arrives (if it does at all) - in any case it will be spent (and quickly). Therefore , we could arrive at the start of next season with half our gate money already long since received and spent , and very little to replace it .What replaces that hole in the cash flow finances?
Peter Ridsdale really does worry me with a policy of borrow money now and spend it in exchange for giving away next season`s income and beyond.It worried me further when he mentioned at the recent Muni meeting the term "securitisation" - which is basically giving away many years of future income in exchange for a lump of cash now and relies heavily on that future income being as good as or better than current levels for it to work. Highly risky and probably one of the main factors that brought Leeds Utd to its knees financially (when they didn`t qualify for Europe each and every year they didn`t generate enough income to pay off the loans and had few players to sell to balance the books as they had already sold them to finance companies!). I had hoped (perhaps naively) that he had learnt a valuable lesson from that failure and wouldn`t risk repeating it.
I truly hope that a full takeover by the Malaysians takes place with a new cash injection into the club (rather than just into the personal pockets of a few individuals who sell their own shares to them at inflated prices , reducing the balance available for the club itself). Without it , the only Plan B available is the continuation of fire sales of players in every transfer window to raise cash , and there is no guarantee of that happening all the time.
But the club needs lots of money , and soon and the Malaysians must be aware of this (and that they are probably the only bidders out there - I don`t quite believe this "second potential investor " bit) and will use this in their negotiations on price and other terms - people like Vincent Tan don`t become billionaires by wasting their money on business deals on a whim. So , if the current shareholders are too greedy with their personal pay-offs they are seeking , that could delay or even scupper any deal.
Just some of my personal thought.
Keith