[Link]

Anyone else noticed that Sky appear to be muffling or dampening the crowd audio when fans chant “Sky TV, is f***ing shit”? Noticed it in a few games recently.

So many fond memories of Harry Pell. That goal against Leyton Orient in 2022, trying to target franchise supporters in the warm up that season.

A link to accompany CW’s post about Pell [Link]

Aww. Poor Harry Pell. We went to sit in the home end at Cheltenham a few years ago and they absolutely loved him there. The children all had his name on their shirts.

If it comes to it it will have to be some Nick Roberton John Green and a Mate or Two type consortium with Plough Lane remaining under Trust ownership and leased to the club.

Sad about Harry Pell having to retire through injury

Has anyone looked at how SCMP impacts us compared to other clubs in L1 & L2?

Don’t need to look too far- isn’t Nick Robertson worth £100m+ ?

Just looking at Wikipedia- there are 29,000 people worldwide with a net worth of $100m+, so it’s not implausible that one of them might fancy owning “the greatest story in football” (TM) if we were for sale

JG- fair points- I do agree that whoever buys us will need to have a LOT of cash available (whether £100m or not isn’t the big question) but those people are out there - just look at other clubs. If we were well run we would be looking for someone like that now, so we could control the sale process, but the stubborn attachment to fan ownership and our “block all change” constitution means that we will likely have to take our chances with administration. I don’t think that £2.8m of annual losses are inevitable (I suspect that if we were better run we could trim that a bit) but I think that there is no way that we can be profitable, as so many other clubs are willing to run at a loss by paying up for players and we have to do the same if we are to compete, which means making losses unless we can have sustained income at levels greater than those of our competitors (and I see no reason why we can do that in a ( 10k capacity stadium)

Nick - a few thoughts/clarifications: 1) Accepted we rarely sell out but are more often than not running at 95% useable home support capacity. I would point out that there are often occasions where I would like to purchase further tickets for friends or family but am unable to do so unless they sit a few blocks away; 3) I wasn't suggesting that they would need £100m to purchase the club - but they might need £10m-£20m to invest in increasing stadium capacity and improving training facilities etc in addition to funding £2.8m of losses each year (which you seem to imply are inevitable - and who knows you might be right - but a notion that I'm not prepared to concede. The minimum of £100m real net worth, was what I was referring to. Anyone with much less than that will be unlikely to stomach the pain. I agree that the best and most likely bet, unless the Club at least try something radically different, will be for such a person to buy the Club out of administration - although presumably if they bought all of the shares currently owned by the Collective the purchase capital would remain in the club - so the result might be the same.

Russ - they couldn’t even send a bond survey email out today without mucking it up

Anyone know the format of the meeting next week? Will there be open questions?

DTB were unable to answer questions on Discord as to why they chose to target debentures rather than looking at other areas like concessions. Maybe they will answer similar questions at this upcoming meeting. Maybe our finances are better than rumoured. Maybe I just saw a pig flying over my house.

I agree with Nick :)

Nice that Kingstonian get a mention in that piece 😀

JG- (1) we rarely actually sell out, so generally “don’t” have 10,000 fans wanting 8,000 tickets, and certainly would not not if we doubled the price as you suggest (2) the model of a rich guy owner happy to fund losses is the model for for pretty much all of the clubs in the league, I am not sure why we would be the only club nobody was interested in - but if there is indeed nobody interested in taking us on then so be it, but there is no way that we can be profitable in the league so let’s hope that they are around somewhere (3) anyone who buys us will likely do so out of administration, so won’t need anything even vaguely like £100m to buy the club- just enough to offer to pay out creditors a bigger % than they would get on liquidation (plus obviously they would need to be willing to cover ongoing losses)

But I reiterate - if any of you know of someone with £100m+; happy to fund the development of the stadium; and happy to lose £2.8m each and every year - so that 8000+ of the wealthiest and highest income earning football fans in the UK can have their entertainment subsidised - then introduce them to the Club. I know a fair amount of successful entrepreneurs - but none of them are idiots!

How else do you ration/allocate, other than through price? If you have 10,000 fans wanting to purchase 8000 tickets - no issues at all with the concept that those who are prepared to help fund the club the most should get those limited tickets.

DD - would have lower running costs than PL - but could we persuade the great helmsman to steward the car park again?

Former EFL stadium that hosted three different clubs could be abandoned as manager calls for 'Arsenal-style' solution [Link]

Also, looking at the number of actual home games in the last 4 seasons up to this one, the average number of home games (excluding EFL trophy games, which have minimal attendances) has been just over 25 games per season (23 league games, average of 1.5 FAC and 0.5 league cup home game, plus one play off game last year).

Paddington These days i'm classed as right wing (Never voted Labour) .but yes also find the idea obnoxious.

JG- fair enough- though of course your £12 of extra revenue per seat would actually cost each buyer £14.40 including VAT. If you assumed that attendance would fall by even 20% as a consequence of us effectively doubling prices (which is a very optimistic assumption) then the extra revenue from (say) 27 home games would be about £1.3m which is all very well, but still leaves us with a loss of £1.5m per annum. As I say, I don’t disagree with the idea of raising prices a bit but there is no way that we can break even by just increasing ticket prices - people will only pay so much for L2 or L1 football