*are

We cannot escape the inevitable fact that there is a price to pay for League 1 and Championship football. If we want to continue paying a pittance - handing out nearly free tickets to children as if we were the Pied Piper, subsidising fans simply because they are 67 or "unwaged" - then we need to accept League 2 football. One gets what one is prepared to pay for in life and in every walk of life quality costs. You can't unfortunately dine at Claridges for the price of a Big Mac. I hold no grudge against either Tilley or Neufville - I'm just depressed that our fanbase appear too mean to retain them and enable us to compete with the likes of Bradford and Wycombe.

Not piling in OI I respect you and all that stuff but “main mood of the DT membership”? Can that be claimed either way these days with the auto-membership and lack of engagement despite huge claims of success as such?

Spit if what you said was correct then clearly you would have a case. However our average home gate will not be “fantastic” for League 1; our average ticket price (bum on seat revenue) is one of the lowest in the entire football league pyramid and our shop sales are relatively pitiful.

You're very weird KD! It's definitely not my club or yours, as neither of us is willing to do much to fill the black hole of losses. I'm fairly pragmatic, the main mood of the DT membership is currently in favour of fan ownership so we should give the new Boards a chance to come up with a believable plan. If they don't then we need to look at finding serious outside investment and I'd vote for people who wanted to do the planning. But I don't think Tilley or Neufville owe us anything as if they had had really crap seasons we'de have got rid of them.

OI thinks it’s HIS club, not OUR club. It’s these people who will hold us back.

Fair enough, I'm just willing to accept that Jackson, Cope, Neufville and Tilley are way better informed than me about football and I accept their decisions. I won't boo either and hope they do well other than when playing us.

Think the point is we can’t keep our better players from taking an arguably sideways step and leaving for Northern shitholes paying an extra groat. That’s the price of fan ownership.

OI I think it’s pretty clear that a lack of ambition has been a facet of our ownership model in recent years eg the depressing albeit genuine “oh well let’s have a drink” vs the lack of substance behind “championship in 5 years”. But it’s not a timeless feature hence our immense rise up through the pyramid. L1 is a major test of our DNA as we experienced last time. There’s no shame in relegation from L1 for a club of our size. But if there are opportunities to grow bigger and fend off the inevitable then they should be prioritised and that will indeed involve many factors including ambition, structure, capability and many more.

You said “do we get upset” re departures. Yes, I did re Ball. Because I think he should have been signed. Also, don’t get me wrong about Tilley and Neufville. I’m more upset because we can’t compete and imo,people who don’t want the club to get outside investment are holding this club back

So we had some sort of "moral" duty to Ball etc as some of us seem to think the likes of Tilley and Neufville are letting us down by not signing again?

Some we do, some we don’t. Eg reaction to Ball.

Do we get upset when we release people at the end of a contract? What the players are doing is no worse and no better than our attitude to Ball, Nightingale etc.

Dorking. Agree…

If they don’t want to play for us ….then good riddance.

I think Neufville to Bradford makes sense for him and he can fight to be a starter. I'm less sure about Tilley to Wycombe, a good player but I don't think I'd want him as a starter in a League 1 team fighting for promotion.

Tilley will go to Wycombe

I should have said … If rather than when

OI: I think you are partly right but even when the structural losses are eliminated, I do not believe fans ownership will ever be able to compete with multi millionaires

The problem with fan ownership is not our ambition but whether we can eliminate the structural losses and if so how. If we can't, fan ownership is doomed. In the meantime we have lousy budgets as Cope pointed out.

Fantastic crowds,high ticket prices, vast corporate, ground share, great shop sells, but still a massive loss, we need to send Doge in😂

Tilley next

Sorry to see JN go, but not surprised at all, and very best wishes to him, he worked his bloody socks off to help us get promoted, and he deserves further success!! The only plus is that this has happened early enough for Cope to act on it, and I’m sure he was expecting it anyway…

We just have to evolve to get more outside investment.

Ambition would be a desire to find investment in order to complete and expand our ground in order to take advantage of the commercial opportunities from which we are otherwise excluded. As things stand we can’t afford to make the 3rd floor provide revenue let alone profit and we can’t get thousands more fans in each home league game when we’ll have clubs like Reading, Cardiff and Huddersfield coming to Plough Lane.