Sport Football Thread 2011/2012

[Calashnikov]

http://www.bbc.co.uk...w-west-17049723

John McFall, Westminster's former treasury select committee chairman, wants the financial regulator to investigate Whyte's purchase of Rangers. Great shout. It might shed light on just where the fuck our money has gone.

Going on previous seasons, Rangers income for the nine months Mr Whyte has been in charge should be about £26m.

It has also been reported that he borrowed about £24m from Ticketus against a share of season ticket sales for the next four years.

The club is also said to have received about £5m for the sale of top goalscorer Nikica Jelavić to Everton in the January transfer window.

The combined total of these figures is £55m.

Mr Whyte has publicly stated that the monthly cost of running Rangers is about £3.75m.

Based on this figure, the cost of running the club during Mr Whyte's tenure would have been about £34m.

In theory, that should leave a surplus of £21m.

If the £9m figure claimed by HMRC over alleged unpaid VAT and PAYE is added, then the surplus cash figure would stand at £30m.

Working with these figures, some fans have been asking why Rangers was placed in administration.

Shystie motherfucker!

[neoELITE]

Just a couple of things from todays events...

Lee Clark getting sacked is a disgrace, Huddersfield are fourth in the league only four points outside the automatic spots. There has been criticism about the amount of money he has spent but the club are still right in contention, seems an arrogant decision to me. Huddersfield have no devine right to get promoted especially when they are battling with Charlton, Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United who are probably all bigger clubs.

I'm getting bored of the "Arsenal aren't very good" thing, it got boring three years ago. Either make Wenger spend money or get rid of him. I personally rate him highly but i just can't see him pushing Arsenal any further than they are at the moment without spending. Who knows if they hadn't got beat to us in the Carling Cup final, everything could have been different...

Using your Huddersfield 'aren't a big club' argument and then arguing against the "Arsenal aren't very good" criticism is a contradiction. If Huddersfield 'aren't a big club' as there are other teams in their league who you regard as being 'bigger', Arsenal aren't that 'big' either if you consider they're in the same league as Liverpool, Chelsea, Man City, Man Utd and Tottenham.

[Guest]

Radio 5 hammed up the old "Wenger's fault, he's had his time" stuff last night.

Why is football "journalism" do reactionary? It sounds like an easy job to be honest.

When will horrible Alan Green also choke on his self importance? I am awaiting the day.

[Hawkeye]

It might shed light on just where the fuck our money has gone.

He's no doubt a dodgy motherfucker, but then everyone knew that when he bought into the club.

Although those figures are a tab simplistic. It doesn't count the legal fees they would have run up fighting the inherited tax bill they are up against, which must be considerable. It also works on a theory that you start from a balance of zero. You need to look at the fact if the books where in good health you'd have had far more options than one dodgy cunt trying to pick up the club for £1.

Murray was the first one to start ripping the pish out that club. He outsourced just about everything, pretty much all of it to companies he owned! That shyster made sure he was getting his cut while playing the savior of Rangers card. As much as Rangers fans used to laugh and joke about Fergus McCann, that's exactly the sort of guy they needed to come in and clean things up after Murray. A guy that knew the books needed to be sorted first and foremost to protect the club against itself.

[Hawkeye]

Radio 5 hammed up the old "Wenger's fault, he's had his time" stuff last night.

Why is football "journalism" do reactionary? It sounds like an easy job to be honest.

When will horrible Alan Green also choke on his self importance? I am awaiting the day.

They just play up to the mentalness of many fans. Sadly a large section of football fans have two modes.

1. We're the awesomest thing ever

2. We're doomed, sack everyone

[Plissken]

Although those figures are a tab simplistic. It doesn't count the legal fees they would have run up fighting the inherited tax bill they are up against, which must be considerable. It also works on a theory that you start from a balance of zero. You need to look at the fact if the books where in good health you'd have had far more options than one dodgy cunt trying to pick up the club for £1.

Simplistic? Guy doesn't even realise transfer fee money is paid by instalments. Don't Rangers owe €1,5m to Vienna for Jelavic still? And that the club owed a shit load to one of the banks when he bought it - that HMRC tax bill isn't the only debt the club has.

[El Pibe]

I think many of us that follow lower league football aren't surprised to see Lee Clark go. The single most important thing to note of their unbeaten run was that they were beaten in the play-offs. An unbeaten run is all very well but it's better to win 3 games and lose 3 games than draw 6.

Huddersfield are desperate to make it to the Championship and if they can get a better manager in quickly, they have the players to do it.

It's an understandable decision.

I just hope they don't cast their eyes towards Tisdale. I'm don't think they will, though.

[Rsdio]

I already have . He'd be a long-term appointment though, the general consensus is that the players need a rocket up them to try to drag them up this season and while I rate Tisdale REALLY highly I don't know if that's really his thing.

I'd say the majority are hoping for Warnock to come back but whether he'll be keen on competing for automatic against his beloved Sheffield United or potentially risking all the goodwill he has amongst our fans for previous successes remains to be seen.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Simplistic? Guy doesn't even realise transfer fee money is paid by instalments. Don't Rangers owe €1,5m to Vienna for Jelavic still? And that the club owed a shit load to one of the banks when he bought it - that HMRC tax bill isn't the only debt the club has.

Nevertheless, the point is that with the possible exception of the relatively small Jelavic fee, that money SHOULD be appearing somewhere. The games have been played, the tickets have been bought and paid for, the loan from Ticketus must have been delivered. If it's all been used to reduce Rangers' debts, it should show up on the balance sheet as such. We know it hasn't been used to pay HMRC, or buy players. So where is it?

[Plissken]

Nevertheless, the point is that with the possible exception of the relatively small Jelavic fee, that money SHOULD be appearing somewhere. The games have been played, the tickets have been bought and paid for, the loan from Ticketus must have been delivered. If it's all been used to reduce Rangers' debts, it should show up on the balance sheet as such. We know it hasn't been used to pay HMRC, or buy players. So where is it?

http://leggoland2.blogspot.com/2012/02/lloyds-and-rangers-crisis.html might help (unverified blog, but still)

Apparently Rangers owed Lloyds £18m, and part of the condition of Whyte buying was that had to be repaid in full, immediately. Rangerstaxcase also mentions it in passing - http://rangerstaxcase.com/2011/06/05/new-rangers-mystery/

Could be wrong, this is complicated as hell, but maybe that is where £18m of it went.

[Calashnikov]

http://leggoland2.bl...ers-crisis.html might help (unverified blog, but still)

Apparently Rangers owed Lloyds £18m, and part of the condition of Whyte buying was that had to be repaid in full, immediately. Rangerstaxcase also mentions it in passing - http://rangerstaxcas...angers-mystery/

Could be wrong, this is complicated as hell, but maybe that is where £18m of it went.

I think the £18m Lloyd's debt is where the Ticketus money went, but the lone from them (our next 4 year's worth of season ticket sales ) was £24m. Where's the rest of it? The guy has to lay all of this out absolutely clearly now. It's the lack of transparency which has angered the fans for the longest length of time. He just skipped having an AGM this year

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Someone on the Tartan Army forum summarises Whyte's masterplan, crudely but I suspect very accurately:

- Whyte buys Rangers for £1

- takes an unsecured loan of £24 million quid

- lends £18 million of it to Rangers as secured debt [to pay Lloyds debt]

- he becomes sole secured creditor and has 1st dibs [on assets like Ibrox]

- places Rangers in administration

- administration fails, too much debt and can't agree a CVA with creditors [especially HMRC]

- Rangers Football Club liquidated, RIP.

- Whyte transfers assets to new parent holding company

- new Rangers are formed - King Billy's Loyal Army FC*.

- everyone [including HMRC] scraps out for what little is left under the old Rangers

- Craig Whyte sells KBLA FC for £Xm, makes sweet profit

- KBLA FC are debt free [and admitted directly to SPL to protect TV deal]

- taxpayer, Ticketus [and anyone who's already bought a 12/13 season ticket] and Wee Maggie the cleaner all get screwed.

Pretty feasible plan. But who'd buy KBLA FC? Perhaps the consortium of fans and former directors who are currently talking about doing just that:

http://www.bbc.co.uk...otball/17034043

Someone from the Rangers Supporters Trust on Scotland Tonight last night suggested such a group might be able to come up with as much as £30m. That would certainly be enough to get King Billy's Loyal Army FC off to a viable start, even after buying Ibrox from Whyte. (Lease is also possible, depending on how much brass neck Whyte is prepared to exercise in sticking around. He may even ultimately come to be seen as a hero by Rangers fans, for effectively allowing the club to wriggle out of £60m+ of debt at the cost of only one league title and a couple of seasons of being humped by Dynamo Potato of Kragizagistan in the first qualifying round of the Europa League.)

*Okay, probably Glasgow Rangers FC, which is what everyone thinks they're already called anyway.

[Calashnikov]

^^ It certainly looks that way. I repeat: sociopathic loonball.

[Blooming Marvellous]

yeah that's what is generally seen as what his plan is. He also has a long track record of liquidating indebted companies (rangers would his 26th) and walking away with a profit, some not even owing an awful lot.

So basically he walks in and screws over the employees and other creditors completely, and walks away with more money for his castle roof repairs. Which he still doesn't pay anyway.

A nasty, selfish, immoral piece of shit for sure but Rangers, or Rangers 2012 or whatever, could still come out of it OK, not that that's high on his list of priorities.

[Hawkeye]

A nasty, selfish, immoral piece of shit for sure but Rangers, or Rangers 2012 or whatever, could still come out of it OK, not that that's high on his list of priorities.

Depending on how this plays out don't under estimate the start up costs.

Would they still own Ibrox? If not you're looking at rent costs or having to fund a new stadium. Would all players be freed and thus in today's world you're looking at a squad full of signing on fees! It would be a costly business and take time for the club to be where the fans expect them to be.

[PaB]

From BBC:

Rangers staff:

• 11 first-team coaching staff
  
• 7 academy coaches
  
• 13 media-PR
  

This little snippet says so much about the state of football. And , well, the country in general. More people employed to tell the world how great Rangers are, than there are actually making Rangers great.

[Plissken]

You know what the sad thing is? If all that came to pass, the fans would accept it. Taxpayer screwed, employees screwed - and the fans will say "where do I send the money to get my season ticket?"

[PaB]

Depending on how this plays out don't under estimate the start up costs.

Would they still own Ibrox? If not you're looking at rent costs or having to fund a new stadium. Would all players be freed and thus in today's world you're looking at a squad full of signing on fees! It would be a costly business and take time for the club to be where the fans expect them to be.

Also I don't see why they should get automatic entry to the SPL. As a new club, surely they should enter at the bottom and work their way up - Ala MK Dons.

Plus I think all other SPL clubs have to agree to allow the new club into the league which is by no means a forgone conclusion.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Depending on how this plays out don't under estimate the start up costs.

Would they still own Ibrox? If not you're looking at rent costs or having to fund a new stadium. Would all players be freed and thus in today's world you're looking at a squad full of signing on fees! It would be a costly business and take time for the club to be where the fans expect them to be.

Actually, digging a little bit reveals that the Ibrox stadium is worth somewhere in the region of £100m, so the notional consortium wouldn't be able to afford to buy it off Whyte. So he'd probably end up leasing it to them, giving himself a nice little nest-egg of a couple of million quid a year for life from his £1 investment.

That leaves the consortium a useful amount of cash to start putting a squad together (the wage bill of mid-table Motherwell is about £3.5m a year, and transfer fees from smaller Scottish clubs still tend to be in six figures rather than seven - two of Aberdeen's best players just went to Championship sides for around £300K each, for example - so KBLA FC could afford to buy SPL-standard talent pretty easily), and probably still tens of thousands of grateful and relieved supporters willing to cough up £500 a year on tickets.

How many of them would hang around for long if/when the team didn't win a couple of trophies every year is a question mark, but it's certainly doable in the first instance.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Also I don't see why they should get automatic entry to the SPL. As a new club, surely they should enter at the bottom and work their way up - Ala MK Dons.

Plus I think all other SPL clubs have to agree to allow the new club into the league which is by no means a forgone conclusion.

They SHOULDN'T, but they will. The £80m Sky deal would be likely to collapse without four guaranteed Old Firm games a season (they draw 5-20 times the TV audience of other SPL matches), and the record of the other SPL teams in standing up to the OF is abysmal. In their blinkered short-term thinking, even a diminished Rangers is worth more to them than letting tiny Ross County (current leaders of Division 1) come in to make up the numbers.

(Also, the SPL and the Scottish Football League, which governs the lower divisions, are entirely separate bodies, just as in England with the Premiership and Football League. If the SPL, in some zany alternate universe, did decline to admit KBLA FC, the SFL wouldn't have to either. They could all, in theory, just tell the new Rangers to go fuck themselves. There's no pyramid structure in Scottish football, and plenty other clubs have been fruitlessly waiting many years in the hope of admission.)

If the fans of the other SPL clubs (apart from Celtic) had even the slightest shred of balls about them, they'd say to their clubs "If you vote to allow New Rangers straight into the SPL we'll never come to another game again", but they don't and they won't, because at the end of the day football fans (of which I'm one) are fucking idiots.

[Fry Crayola]

Also I don't see why they should get automatic entry to the SPL. As a new club, surely they should enter at the bottom and work their way up - Ala MK Dons.

MK Dons didn't. Nor did AFC Wimbledon, if that's who you meant - they joined at the then 8th level of English football, which isn't the bottom by a long shot. Other clubs were similarly entered - FC United and AFC Liverpool started in the 10th, AFC Telford in the 8th.

Those clubs were all much smaller than any reformed Rangers would be.

Plus I think all other SPL clubs have to agree to allow the new club into the league which is by no means a forgone conclusion.

Not a forgone conclusion, but financially it's in their best interests to vote in the other half of the reason the SPL gets the TV deal it does. In football terms they might be better off without, but football stopped being run on football terms a long time ago.

[Daley]

MK Dons didn't. Nor did AFC Wimbledon, if that's who you meant - they joined at the then 8th level of English football, which isn't the bottom by a long shot.

Just out of interest, what's the bottom tier of English football, which has a path to the top? I'm sure it must split a million times into regional leagues but how low could it go?

[PaB]

MK Dons didn't. Nor did AFC Wimbledon, if that's who you meant - they joined at the then 8th level of English football, which isn't the bottom by a long shot.

Right. But its not the second tier which is where they were when they split. They certainly didn't rejoin at the same level or anything like it.

[Swallow]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system

[Fry Crayola]

The lowest level is 24, but it depends on the region. Some regions have more divisions than others, and each is run by their own FA so they'll do things their own way. Check the Wikipedia page for the English system and you'll see that the Mid Sussex Football League Division Eleven is the lowest division. Bad news if you're a Burgess Hill Wanderers fan.

The FA don't really deal with that sort of thing, focusing instead (when it comes to non-league football) on what they call the National League System. This is fairly well structured and consists of levels 5 (the Conference) to 11 (county league top divisions). These sides are the only ones that compete in national competitions, with those in levels 5-8 playing in the FA Trophy, in levels 9-11 in the FA Vase, and in 11, representative sides compete in the FA Inter-League Cup, the winner of which represents England in the amateur UEFA Regions' Cup. The FA Cup is open to everyone from levels 1-10, provided you've played in at least one of the three cups the previous season.

Most newly formed teams with enough clout for you to hear about them in the first place look to enter in from level 10 up, and normally can do because a lot of lower league sides refuse promotion (they just can't handle the costs associated, and there are ground grading requirements that can further limit progress). Nobody really minds this except a few traditionalist die hards who want to see them start at the bottom.

[Fry Crayola]

Right. But its not the second tier which is where they were when they split. They certainly didn't rejoin at the same level or anything like it.

No, but there are a few things to remember. First, when AFC Wimbledon was formed, the old club still existed and still played in the league. There was no "gap" for them to slot into. Secondly, AFC Wimbledon were a pretty small club compared to football league members. They had good attendances, but were never going to be seriously considered for a place in the league even if there was one.

Within Scotland, you don't get any bigger than Rangers, and any reformed club will be equally as big as Rangers. The SPL would have a gap in it, and as Rev Stu says, the SPL and the SFL are separate entities. The SPL isn't duty bound to fill the gap with a Division One side. Now, the usual fare in the UK when a gap forms is to repreive sides from relegation and let it flow down, but given a choice between Rangers and Dunfermline in the league, I reckon they'll run with Rangers.

[Art Vandelay]

You're a credit to football regulations and history, Fry.

[Sportello]

If the fans of the other SPL clubs (apart from Celtic) had even the slightest shred of balls about them, they'd say to their clubs "If you vote to allow New Rangers straight into the SPL we'll never come to another game again", but they don't and they won't, because at the end of the day football fans (of which I'm one) are fucking idiots.

Who knows what Vladimir Romanov will do? He's properly nuts.

[Fry Crayola]

You're a credit to football regulations and history, Fry.

It's basically all I've got.

[Timmo]

Unemployed for any amount of time by any chance? When I lost a previous job I basically became a football uber-geek to fill the time and I outknowledge most of my peers now (not counting the computer brains on here)