If We Hadn't Got Rid of Richardson.... (1 Viewer)

Progress on the new stadium was painfully slow and at the point when Richardson was ousted as chairman not so much as a brick had been laid. Yet some two years previously the club had sold Highfield Road to property developers.

"That was under my predecessor's regime," said McGinnity, "and he sometimes lived with his head in the clouds. He sold [Highfield Road] and the money was spent on players as opposed to reducing the debt."

Richardson vehemently denies McGinnity's claim. "That is absolute bunkum," he said. "That money was not used to buy players at all, it was put towards the new development. We sold Highfield Road with the full board's approval.

"We had already got the planning consent for the new stadium and there was a total commitment to move. It's very easy for McGinnity to shift the blame, but he was party to it in every way."

Richardson looks like Chubby Brown a bit.

I think he would have ran a football club better.

Nick said:

Richardson looks like Chubby Brown a bit.

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Look at the post above Nicks. #141

Grendel said:

No. Richardson had agreed a clause to buy the ground back. That clause was actually sold after he had left office.

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The whole Ricoh project seemed to fall apart over a relatively small amount of money. By the time it all collapsed and CCC came into the picture a lot of the funds were already in place, such as the money from Tesco. Seem to recall from the council funding document at the conclusion of the project the actual amount they put into the build was relatively small.

How different might things be now if instead of taking over the project they had loaded the club the money in a similar fashion to the loan they have given to ACL?

Can't remember why things went so off budget, was it just that the money had been used to cover a lack of funds generally in day to day operations or was it the decontamination. Have a vague memory that cost a lot more than was first expected but can't recall if that was the clubs responsibility.

I think the Ricoh was a decent idea poorly executed. There seemed to be little contingency for anything going wrong or even us no longer being a premier league team. We then found ourselves in a position where we had little choice other than to agree to whatever deal was offered, no matter how bad it was.

I'm not and never have said Richardson was guilty, McGinnity was innocent. However, I can't agree with your re-writing of history and making out it to be the biggest historical injustice since Richard III. Richardson was ousted as he nearly bankrupted the club. He ran up debts of £60M. At the time I seem to recall Robinson and others stating that he was doing things on the quiet without board approval. There's no way on earth I would want that crook anywhere near CCFC again.

Grendel said:

Richardsons version is, I am led to believe, the truth. Let's face it McGinnity sold svery single ssset and contractual right he could to avoid his friends losing out financially,

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This might be of interest:

CONTRACTS were signed for the building of the pounds 113 million Ricoh Arena in October 2003.
The land and buildings are owned by a Coventry City Council wholly-owned subsidiary company, Coventry North Regeneration.
It leases them to Arena Coventry Ltd, which runs the whole complex. ACL is a joint venture between the council and the Alan Edward Higgs charity and will split any eventual profits.
City development director John McGuigan said the long-term prospects for the company were good, adding: "It's not the council's intention to be investing any more money in Arena Coventry Ltd."
Alan Edward Higgs charity took over Coventry City Football Club's original share in the venture.
The cost stacked up as follows:

£59million from sale of land to Tesco.
£10million one-off investment and
£21million council loan (since repaid) and pounds 2million to speed up the arena's completion, of which it got about pounds 400,000 back from contractors Laing O'Rourke.
£10million from Coventry City Football Club.
£4.8million from Advantage West Midlands.
£4.7million from European grants.
£5million from land sales.

Another interesting quote from Paul Fletcher too in this paragraph:

By the time Fletcher joined the project the deal for the land - originally set up by Richardson - had been struck. The club had planned to buy 72 acres of land at the old gas works at Foleshill which would cost pounds 20m to buy and decontaminate. They then agreed to sell half of the land to Tesco for pounds 62.5m, leaving a profit of around pounds 40m to build the stadium. But the club didn't have the funds to complete the deal so a joint venture between the club and the council with both owning 50 per of the equity was agreed. However, Fletcher revealed: "Mysteriously, once the purchase of the land and sale to Tesco had been completed, Coventry City Council informed the football club that they were unable to share with them the profit from the sale of the land due to 'state aid' implications and instead offered them 50 per cent share in the company that would operate the Ricoh Arena but the council would own all the equity in the property."

Fletcher revealed the "state aid fiasco" took 12 months to sort out and cost pounds 1m in lawyers' fees. As compensation, the council offered the club 50 per cent of operating profit from the Ricoh. But the club's massive financial problems came to a head following relegation from the Premier League and under the chairmanship of Mike McGinnity, City were so desperate to stave off administration that they sold their shares to the Higgs Charitable Trust for a "snip" of around pounds 4m at a time Fletcher says theArena had been valued at pounds 37m, therefore making their share worth around pounds 18.5m. He concludes by urging the council and Higgs Charity to sell their shares back to the club a"fair and equitable price". insisting football stadiums should be owned by clubs not local authorities and charitable trusts - which is exactly what current Sky Blues owners SISU are trying to negotiate at this moment in time in order to prevent the club from going out of business.

chiefdave said:

The whole Ricoh project seemed to fall apart over a relatively small amount of money. By the time it all collapsed and CCC came into the picture a lot of the funds were already in place, such as the money from Tesco. Seem to recall from the council funding document at the conclusion of the project the actual amount they put into the build was relatively small.

How different might things be now if instead of taking over the project they had loaded the club the money in a similar fashion to the loan they have given to ACL?

Can't remember why things went so off budget, was it just that the money had been used to cover a lack of funds generally in day to day operations or was it the decontamination. Have a vague memory that cost a lot more than was first expected but can't recall if that was the clubs responsibility.

I think the Ricoh was a decent idea poorly executed. There seemed to be little contingency for anything going wrong or even us no longer being a premier league team. We then found ourselves in a position where we had little choice other than to agree to whatever deal was offered, no matter how bad it was.

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Grendel said:

No. Richardson had agreed a clause to buy the ground back. That clause was actually sold after he had left office.

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Yeah he agreed to the buy back clause going in but it was according to AEHGrandson (with nothing to back it up) put in at the insistence of his dad Sir Higgs who didn't want us to be homeless. It was posted in a thread called confuse.com and I'll post a link in a moment when I can get Firefox to work on my phone again.
EDIT:

AEHGrandson said:

.....
One of the reasons that he was so keen on the Ricoh Arena was because it was helping to regenerate this run down area of Coventry. He was concerned that had it not gone ahead we would have been homeless and as a result had a clause put into the sale contract. This would have allowed us to buy back Highfield Road for the same amount as we received for it plus some small interest had the deal to build the Ricoh fallen through.........

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And what of Richardson? What of his salary? What of the interest free loan of £80K he had from the club every year? What of the £300K he made from the sale to Tesco?

Richardson couldn't even spell truth. Look at the views of the fans after the board meeting in December 2001 and the quotes from other board members after he was ousted in January 2002.

Grendel said:

Richardsons version is, I am led to believe, the truth. Let's face it McGinnity sold svery single ssset and contractual right he could to avoid his friends losing out financially,

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henry the wasp said:

Apologies. Bryan Richardson. I will edit. My anger at GR and BR got the better of me.

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No worries just weren't sure if you were raging at both or one

Grendel said:

Fans are purely motivated by success. No one criticised Richardson for his lack of interest in prudent financial management when the team was a success.

Any attempt at the time to have balanced the books would have been met with derision,

I'm not portraying him as an honest guy. I am portraying him as someone who wanted the football club as a brand as far up the tree as it would go. In that sense he was a far better bet than McGinnity, Elliot, Hoffman, Ranson, Fletcher and pretty much anyone else you can think of.

All the success post the F A Cup season and the subsequent Sillett years are under richardsons tenure.

What he got out of it financially is irrelevant. He earned it during those years. Also he was a strong character and that is significant. He wouldn't have been bullied by other board members - I could just see him putting the club into admin with his toothy grin - "sorry about that Geoffrey - it's football" and yes no doubt taking another bonus for it.

I know if he had remained in power the club would have been in a better place and if he'd been paid 10 times what McGinnity got I know he'd been worth every penny - he was a winner and all his successors have been hopeless defeatist losers.

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So you know that the person who put our club in so much trouble by spending many millions each year that we didn't have and also sold our ground without a replacement sorted....whilst paying himself a lot of money for doing so........... would have left our club in a better place if he never got forced out? Sorry but you need to try much harder if you want anyone to fall for it.

shmmeee said:

No worries just weren't sure if you were raging at both or one

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tbf, both are appropriate.

There's a lot of merging of the synchronic into the diachronic on this thread...

Sorry, is this yet another thread to deflect attention away from the current owners?

Nah, it's a forum for discussing Coventry City. You should try it sometime.

Jack Griffin said:

Sorry, is this yet another thread to deflect attention away from the current owners?

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Jack Griffin said:

Sorry, is this yet another thread to deflect attention away from the current owners?

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It isn't all about our current owners. It was all started by Richardson by spending a lot of money that we didn't have and then making us homeless to bring a little bit more money in. The present moment has come about because of the poor attempts to correct major problems started by him.


There are quite a few that have at least a small part of blame for where we are now. But Richardson was the catalyst.

Grendel said:

Christ your now even doing stand up. No doubt the taxpayer has paid for your comedy course - run by the look of it by Sky Blue Tony

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Nearly as funny as your six figure salary when you know nothing about what you said your job was about whilst spending most of your time on here.

Grendel said:

You seem very jealous. Do you need a sub?

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Will do. My dog shit cleaner up is going on holiday in a few weeks. Even you might be qualified enough for this job.

When BR came to the Club in '95 we were, if I recall, around £1M in debt. When BR left we were £60M in debt. He sold our ground and had to rent it back because his folly was so far behind schedule and dgodness knows what happened to the money from the Tesco deal. He oversaw our relegation from the top flight after 34 years. OUr wage bill when relegated was £17M, 125% of our turnover. Hardly the definition of a winner.

Grendel said:

.....he was a winner and all his successors have been hopeless defeatist losers.

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Absolutely. It amazes me that Jack and others try and persuade us that all our problems started with SISU and we should look forward not back. Ironic really because without these fucks up in the past then SISU wouldn't even be here.

Astute said:

It isn't all about our current owners. It was all started by Richardson by spending a lot of money that we didn't have and then making us homeless to bring a little bit more money in. The present moment has come about because of the poor attempts to correct major problems started by him.


There are quite a few that have at least a small part of blame for where we are now. But Richardson was the catalyst.

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torchomatic said:

When BR came to the Club in '95 we were, if I recall, around £1M in debt. When BR left we were £60M in debt. He sold our ground and had to rent it back because his folly was so far behind schedule and dgodness knows what happened to the money from the Tesco deal. He oversaw our relegation from the top flight after 34 years. OUr wage bill when relegated was £17M, 125% of our turnover. Hardly the definition of a winner.

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Maybe it is dependent on your personal definition of what a winner is. I just find it very hard to understand how anyone could defend him for what he did to our club and for the downfall it led to.

torchomatic said:

When BR came to the Club in '95 we were, if I recall, around £1M in debt. When BR left we were £60M in debt. He sold our ground and had to rent it back because his folly was so far behind schedule and dgodness knows what happened to the money from the Tesco deal. He oversaw our relegation from the top flight after 34 years. OUr wage bill when relegated was £17M, 125% of our turnover. Hardly the definition of a winner.

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The debt level is disputed by BR, would be nice to know the full truth, but the figures per BR seem more accurate.


- Asked about the club’s huge reported debts when he left in January 2002, he insisted: “Can you imagine a club like Coventry being allowed by its bank to get £59m in debt?


“There is no way; it’s impossible. The day I left, our overdraft was £7.3m which was within our limits at the bank.


"The only other debt we had was money owed to Geoffrey Robinson and Derek Higgs and there was £10m to Robinson which had to be invested under his instruction on buying players – we couldn’t use it to pay wages or interest or anything else at all – and the same applied to Higgs which was about £2.5-£3m, so if you add all that up it was still only about £21-£22m.


“But the money from Higgs and Robinson was meant to be soft, long-term loans to the club because they were passionate supporters and directors.


"The only money that was absolutely on the line was the money to the bank and all that other stuff was a load of rubbish so I have no idea where they got that figure from.


"They took the transfer money that was due to go out and never took the transfer money in that we got, which was far, far greater than anything we ever had going out.


“If you look at when we sold John Hartson, Moustapha Hadji, Craig Bellamy and Chris Kirkland – there was a whole string of them that had to go – all of those came back in against any money that was due out, but they never took that in.”


Richardson left the club at the end of January 2002 and little more than three months later the balance sheets for the year ending May 31, 2002 – the club’s first year down – showed the net debt had been slashed by more than half to £27.8m, a figure that was actually even lower at around £23m due to the sales of Lee Hughes, Magnus Headman and David Thompson.


Before he was ousted, Richardson had made £22.5m for the club by selling Hartson, Bellamy, Hadji and Kirkland, but it was successor Mike McGinnity who was applauded by shareholders at the club’s AGM in December later that year.

Grendel said:

I really don't know why you get so silly and personal. You do sound bitter and jealous. Bit sad really,

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Pot kettle black

The shareholders meeting in December 1991 tells a different story. Suggest you read the news from that.

Rusty Trombone said:

The debt level is disputed by BR, would be nice to know the full truth, but the figures per BR seem more accurate.


- Asked about the club’s huge reported debts when he left in January 2002, he insisted: “Can you imagine a club like Coventry being allowed by its bank to get £59m in debt?


“There is no way; it’s impossible. The day I left, our overdraft was £7.3m which was within our limits at the bank.


"The only other debt we had was money owed to Geoffrey Robinson and Derek Higgs and there was £10m to Robinson which had to be invested under his instruction on buying players – we couldn’t use it to pay wages or interest or anything else at all – and the same applied to Higgs which was about £2.5-£3m, so if you add all that up it was still only about £21-£22m.


“But the money from Higgs and Robinson was meant to be soft, long-term loans to the club because they were passionate supporters and directors.


"The only money that was absolutely on the line was the money to the bank and all that other stuff was a load of rubbish so I have no idea where they got that figure from.


"They took the transfer money that was due to go out and never took the transfer money in that we got, which was far, far greater than anything we ever had going out.


“If you look at when we sold John Hartson, Moustapha Hadji, Craig Bellamy and Chris Kirkland – there was a whole string of them that had to go – all of those came back in against any money that was due out, but they never took that in.”


Richardson left the club at the end of January 2002 and little more than three months later the balance sheets for the year ending May 31, 2002 – the club’s first year down – showed the net debt had been slashed by more than half to £27.8m, a figure that was actually even lower at around £23m due to the sales of Lee Hughes, Magnus Headman and David Thompson.


Before he was ousted, Richardson had made £22.5m for the club by selling Hartson, Bellamy, Hadji and Kirkland, but it was successor Mike McGinnity who was applauded by shareholders at the club’s AGM in December later that year.

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torchomatic said:

The shareholders meeting in December 1991 tells a different story. Suggest you read the news from that.

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91?

Post it up and I'll have a read. Cheers.

Rusty Trombone said:

The debt level is disputed by BR, would be nice to know the full truth, but the figures per BR seem more accurate.


- Asked about the club’s huge reported debts when he left in January 2002, he insisted: “Can you imagine a club like Coventry being allowed by its bank to get £59m in debt?


“There is no way; it’s impossible. The day I left, our overdraft was £7.3m which was within our limits at the bank.


"The only other debt we had was money owed to Geoffrey Robinson and Derek Higgs and there was £10m to Robinson which had to be invested under his instruction on buying players – we couldn’t use it to pay wages or interest or anything else at all – and the same applied to Higgs which was about £2.5-£3m, so if you add all that up it was still only about £21-£22m.


“But the money from Higgs and Robinson was meant to be soft, long-term loans to the club because they were passionate supporters and directors.


"The only money that was absolutely on the line was the money to the bank and all that other stuff was a load of rubbish so I have no idea where they got that figure from.


"They took the transfer money that was due to go out and never took the transfer money in that we got, which was far, far greater than anything we ever had going out.


“If you look at when we sold John Hartson, Moustapha Hadji, Craig Bellamy and Chris Kirkland – there was a whole string of them that had to go – all of those came back in against any money that was due out, but they never took that in.”


Richardson left the club at the end of January 2002 and little more than three months later the balance sheets for the year ending May 31, 2002 – the club’s first year down – showed the net debt had been slashed by more than half to £27.8m, a figure that was actually even lower at around £23m due to the sales of Lee Hughes, Magnus Headman and David Thompson.


Before he was ousted, Richardson had made £22.5m for the club by selling Hartson, Bellamy, Hadji and Kirkland, but it was successor Mike McGinnity who was applauded by shareholders at the club’s AGM in December later that year.

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If we weren't much in debt why couldn't we get the money together to buy the land that the arena was built on?

Sorry, 01

Rusty Trombone said:

91?

Post it up and I'll have a read. Cheers.

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