A huge THANK YOU to everyone in here who chipped in to our tickets appeal over Xmas. Today, we transferred £428.55 to the AFCW Foundation, which will buy tickets for 30 children/parents from the Foundation’s PL Kicks project to attend a game - these are people who otherwise might not be in a position to come to a game. Who knows, they might become long-term supporters… great job, guys 💙💛

jg - To stretch your analogy further, can you show us the slim people who are dieting successfully in Leagues 1 and 2, or indeed the Championship? It is clear that you are good at financial matters but I'm not going to put faith in your solutions without being shown working examples rather than your gut (pun intended) feelings of what can be done.

OI – I don’t disagree with the first part of your post but I disagree that it is inevitable that we will always need to be run at a loss. There seems to be a general thread on this forum that because everyone else is losing money then it is somehow inevitable. It’s tantamount to an obese person stuffing their face with extra-large, triple cooked chips, taking comfort from the fact that everyone around them is also obese and eating even bigger portions. Our revenue from the last season (when we were in League 2) was over £10m which I understand put us in the top third; our losses of £2.8m put us in the bottom third and were 25% above the average loss per club (Deloittes). We are clearly over eating!!!

Running a business on “commercial Lines” is largely to do with having your own balls on the line. Your money…your losses. It’s easy to normalise £2.8m annual losses if it is someone else’s money…it hurts if it is your own. One manifestation would be the over 66s bursary/subsidy/concession. A company run on commercial lines would only offer such a bursary if it deemed it to be a good marketing strategy towards the goal of minimising losses or maximising profit. A “Collective Not for Profit” organisation gets embroiled in all the emotion.

Trigger - nope, fail to understand your view on my posts ......... you might need to explain more? If you do not know what I am writing about, why not ask a question instead?

According to AI, they have £81m debt including £70m bank loans. Ouch

Literally told you why I was asking.

2009 via Play-Offs, 2014 2nd in Champ, 2016 1st in C/ship, 2023, 1st in C/ship & 2025 2nd in C/ship

Burnley too. Lost count of how many times they've been promoted to Prem and then relegated rinse repeat. Would be interesting to see their finances. I guess they pay championship wages and every 2-3 years get a Prem TV dividend

Luton is case worth considering. One season in the Prem and their new ground is paid for. They'd rather not be in L1 but they have a fantastic ground to look forward to which will revenue.

Arguably, running a club on a commercial basis would be to invest £100m of shareholder money to get to the premier league and boost your tv revenue by £200m a year. On paper that seems a more sustainable model than sitting in League One spaffing £3m a year on average players and going nowhere. Assuming one gets to the premier league, of course, otherwise it’s just speed-running administration (although we aren’t doing a bad job of getting there ourselves).

OI - good man. :o)

Trigger - I am very good. Why do you ask? Had a very good day business wise.

PP99 is was on my personal pub crawl on Saturday night.

Thx

You ok Laurence?

Postie-all our EFL games start then something to do with youngsters not allowed to play after 9pm

Commercial basis to me means having a strong likelihood of making a profit or at least breaking even from the organisation's business activities themselves. On that definition almost no EFL club is run on a commercial basis, they are all expected to lose money on their main business activities.

Why the early KO tom night?

Laurence - because if it was then we’d have fired Buckley before he hired him.

JG - where or how in your estimation is AFC Wimbledon not run on a commercial basis, please?

JG - fair enough. My real concern is that just removing the DT from ownership (by diluting it down by the sort of massive rights issue that you are suggesting) and running the club on a "more commercial basis" wouldn't make us profitable (no, or almost no, other club in L1 is profitable), so you would still have the question of who covers the losses. The reality is that a rights issue of that kind (if successful) would mean ownership by a small group of wealthy shareholders (your "£2m crew") while the DT got diluted down and the rest of the 5,000 shareholders either put in enough to maintain their existing small stakes or didn't, and got diluted further. It would, though, give the club a big slug of cash, which I agree is not to be sneezed at.

Kind of not interested in watching it now. Edited? Why?

That’s brilliant only five and a half days to put up a video.

@aideen - the meeting footage will be available tomorrow am now