In it for the long term? (5 Viewers)

Deleted member 5849 said:

Thank God for that!

So far only |Mr. Dazzle's come up with any coherant argument as to why you might keep an academy if not interested in the club But his argument hinges on the desire to sell the club...

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Bit quick on the draw then

Deleted member 5849 said:

Exactly!

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And a lot of this is to do with Higgs......which some would like to see lose out on......and they are a local charity.

What about the PR angle?<br><br>Would you get rid of something extremely popular with fans while you're trying to win a PR war?<br><br>The move the Northampton is integral to their plan, but ticket prices, football style, the academy are all things they need to keep fans onside.<br><br>Imagine the attendance if we'd shut down the academy at the same time as moving to Northampton.<br><br>Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it was part of the condition of the move: you don't shut down functions of the club to pay for it.<br><br>Just trying to throw some possibilities out there, I'm not 100% convinced that Sisu aren't in it for the long term in their head.

Deleted member 5849 said:

Would you agree that if you have no interest in the football club, paying money to maintain a football academy is a waste of cash?

After all, it was high on the list of cost cutting potentials for first Robinson and his board, then the early SISU board...

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at some point its reasonable to assume that they want to sell the club as a going concern their has to be meat in the sandwich and a return to the higgs is a cheap filling. the academy has produced the heart beat of the current squad and without the academy their is no lineage to this. so for once it shows good business acumen on SISU's behalf, but has nothing to do with being in it for the long haul and certainly nothing to do with football acumen.

Deleted member 5849 said:

Saying that again doesn't alter the fact that you are thus accepting it is the desire of SISU to sell, and therefore that is their desire to own the Ricoh and/or a stadium, to increase the value of the club on sale...

Otherwise if it was all about the Ricoh and nothing but the Ricoh, you'd cut *all* costs as an irrelevance.

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I don't think it is *just* about the Ricoh, after all as the anchor tenant, the better the club is doing, the better the complex does as a whole. But we're back to the question of: at what price?

Also, I don't see how increasing the value of the club helps anyone but Seppala. Surely best case scenario is someone "invests" (there's that word again) £40m to clear the Sisu debt and acquire the club (or whatever figure from £24m-£90m that you've heard). That will surely go down as a loan? Leaving the club back at square one, almost literally to where we were, but with severely reduced income streams from football, despite any profit from elsewhere.

The question that interests me is: what's the best strategy to get this debt millstone off our neck? Because surely until that is done anything else is just sticking plasters?

bigfatronssba said:

I thought they got funding for the academy, and the FA told them unless they get back to the higgs sharpish they would lose it?

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They gave us a matched grant, we committed 500k to our academy, FA matched it.

I don't recall the FA saying anything to CCFC about the Higgs.

SkyBlue_Taylor said:

They gave us a matched grant, we committed 500k to our academy, FA matched it.

I don't recall the FA saying anything to CCFC about the Higgs.

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There was a story that came out saying that we were told the Warwick Uni facilities weren't up to scratch and to move to a suitable place, only the Higgs is suitable in the local area.

Deleted member 5849 said:

While you're reading up, read up on Stoke and Peter Coates

On the one hand, he's a benefactor, no? He's certainly pumped a lot of cash into hem.

He's also, because of the constraints of how football is set up in this country, pumped a lot in as loans. £10s of millions of loans.

To his credit, he's written off a fair amount, converted it to equity, but the club still owes him a rather large pot of money.

Ever since the FA changed how clubs were forced to be constituted, so they were no longer clubs, it's encouraged clubs to loan off their owners rather than see benefactors contribute gifts. Now you'd *hope* that on his death, Coates will leave provision for his debts to be written off... but no guarantees.

However, back to the original point, the point I was getting at was some of the more absurd/extreme arguments I see here, that for SISU it's all about the Ricoh, the club is a bettering ram to get the Ricoh and the club can die as soon as that happens. Maybe the club is being used to get the Ricoh, but then if that's for the benefit of the club, even if it also benefits the owners to do so, isn't that fully utilising a community asset for the community, and for the purpose it was built anyway? Shouldn't football club be central to football stadium? In the days of p[ublic/private partnerships, why are we seeking an ideological split?

Don't we have to get away from the black and white, and look for the shades of grey in order to find a way that all parties can 'win', as opposed to sumo wrestling between various parties? Don't we need to get away from the ideological paranoias on both sides in order to move forward?

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I agree we need to look for those shades of grey (oo er! Joy Seppala with whips!). I also agree that there's a win win scenario in terms of the club's long term success.

However, the point still stands that the organisation to profit from the lump sum value of the Ricoh is not CCFC, it's Sisu Capital/Arvo. Those charges of everything we own aren't for nothing, this is set up to get back Seppala's "investment". Personally it's why I favour a rental deal, the club is worthless, Sisu want the Ricoh to make a few million back on a sale. There's no benefit for the club there, other than income streams which I seriously doubt will compensate for £30-50m of debt on the club, at least not in my lifetime.

shmmeee said:

There was a story that came out saying that we were told the Warwick Uni facilities weren't up to scratch and to move to a suitable place, only the Higgs is suitable in the local area.

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And then about a week later the news came out that they were moving the academy back.

Also, what is a grant. Does it have to be paid back or is it free money? There will be continued payments as long as certain guidelines are kept to. This includes training facilities.

Astute said:

They tried to go elsewhere. They were told the new place was not up to standard and would lose funding. The funding is free money. The academy players are on much less money than decent free signings. How many free signings have we just made against academy players in the squad? They got an offer to go back. They listened. They went back.

How about listening to us fans? This would also bring in much more money if they brought us home. Start talks on bringing our club home.

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It might be free money, but a Cat B academy costs c£1m to run, of which the FA contribute c£500k, the club has to find the other £500k, so the club would be £500k better off without an academy.

http://www.skybluestalk.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18060

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stupot07 said:

It might be free money, but a Cat B academy costs c£1m to run, of which the FA contribute c£500k, the club has to find the other £500k, so the club would be £500k better off without an academy.




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It was certainly the line that Ranson took early on, with Joe Elliott offering to sell the idea to the fans that closing the Academy would be a good idea.

lordsummerisle said:

It was certainly the line that Ranson took early on, with Joe Elliott offering to sell the idea to the fans that closing the Academy would be a good idea.

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Yep, even more so now the potential payment you can receive under EPPP for academy players is peanuts.


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What a great question NW. Looking at it I think you're right that they wanted to keep the academy, though obviously they wanted to do it as cheaply as possible and it was the FA that forced them back to the Higgs Centre.

If it was just about draining the blood out of CCFC before casting it completely adrift, I guess we'd have to concede that they'd have bailed out of the academy and offloaded Wilson and Clarke by now. I think they're trying to retain some value in the on-field business, probably with a mind to an exit, and likely with a gambler's eye to a long-shot return to the Championship this season, perhaps. Obviously I'm offering this as opinion rather than fact! However the academy does seem to have proved its value, simply in terms of the players produced, so maybe they're keeping it simply because it remains an asset rather than a cost.

Regardless, my gut feel is still that they won't want to stick it out at Northampton for more than a season or two, because it really is piling loss upon loss. What's the 'market value' for a League 1 team with gates of 2,000, I wonder.

Deleted member 5849 said:

Saying that again doesn't alter the fact that you are thus accepting it is the desire of SISU to sell, and therefore that is their desire to own the Ricoh and/or a stadium, to increase the value of the club on sale...

Otherwise if it was all about the Ricoh and nothing but the Ricoh, you'd cut *all* costs as an irrelevance.

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off course i accept they will sell the club, they didn't acquire it for the love of the game or indeed the club. like i said the decision to keep the academy was a business decision, not a footballing one. it adds value to the brand and provides a direct link to the current squad which is showing the academy is good for the club. as also pointed out it was also the only thing that the FL have put their foot down with regards to enforcing the pirate code "rules" they operate. so the investment works on 2 levels, it keeps them on side with FL and it looks good in the shop window.

i don't buy into the idea that once they have the ricoh they will unite it with the club and sell them together. they may well sell them together at some point should they ever buy both but it doesn't make sense for them to do this straight away, there is a cow to be milked before this.

it has now been confirmed that the club will not own the stadium in the 1st instance, so the club is going to have to pay shitsu rent. how muck? who knows, maybe more than we were paying before the rental strike, maybe not. if they go public with the rent deal, fair enough. however if they don't, expect the worse. the club wont be going public and complaining to anyone willing to listen, their will be no rent strike, no playing on public sympathy against the big bad land lords.

they will also have a nice big asset for security to obtain money from. remind me have they re-mortgaged Ryton?

once the big fat cows milk has dried up it wouldn't surprise me if that's when they sell the ricoh to the club for a big fat profit, loading the club with debt and then sell it all on to the next sucker to try and sort it out.

i know its only a theory but it has as much, if not more than any possible positive theory you could come up with about shitsu owning the ricoh.

i'll remind you, they are a hedge fund who are there to serve their investors, not the paying customers of one of the companies that are unfortunate enough to be owned by them. so assume the worse, anything else is a bonus. if you're assuming the fairy tale you are setting yourself up for a fall i'm afraid.

lordsummerisle said:

It was certainly the line that Ranson took early on, with Joe Elliott offering to sell the idea to the fans that closing the Academy would be a good idea.

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I was wondering where you'd gone. Mentioning the academy is like saying Beetlejuice three times to you isn't it?

stupot07 said:

It might be free money, but a Cat B academy costs c£1m to run, of which the FA contribute c£500k, the club has to find the other £500k, so the club would be £500k better off without an academy.

http://www.skybluestalk.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18060

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - so please excuse and spelling or grammar errors

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How much have we saved by not having a squad with bought in players? I'd wager the wages alone more than outweigh the investment. I expect if they could they'd have nothing but academy players.

shmmeee said:

How much have we saved by not having a squad with bought in players? I'd wager the wages alone more than outweigh the investment. I expect if they could they'd have nothing but academy players.

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True, but I think that view is a little cynical. At the end of the day it still costs the club money to run and we're not given free money by the fa to still in someone's back pocket. It does show some kind of medium to long term commitment.

stupot07 said:

True, but I think that view is a little cynical. At the end of the day it still costs the club money to run and we're not given free money by the fa to still in someone's back pocket. It does show some kind of medium to long term commitment.

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Oh I agree, though I think there are short term reasons to be seen to be looking long term (now THAT'S cynical!). Just saying that's it's not as altruistic as all that, the academy (when run properly) should never be a money sink overall. Even if we never sell a player academy graduates are cheap and save on signing fees.

shmmeee said:

Oh I agree, though I think there are short term reasons to be seen to be looking long term (now THAT'S cynical!). Just saying that's it's not as altruistic as all that, the academy (when run properly) should never be a money sink overall. Even if we never sell a player academy graduates are cheap and save on signing fees.

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The graduates have to be good enough though, but Yeah, if you look at Crewe, they have a good conveyer belt of talent. The new EPPP rules are going to seriously hamper the likes of them who have been reliant on selling young talent.

You could also point to that man united era - can you imagine how much they saved on bringing the Neville's, beckham, scholes, and butt through, and even brown and o'shea played big parts in their dominance.

stupot07 said:

Yeah, if you look at Crewe, they have a good conveyer belt of talent. The new EPPP rules are going to seriously hamper the likes of them who have been reliant on selling young talent

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Don't get me started on EPPP, yet another reason Government needs to step in to sort out football governance.

Edit: hence the when run properly. Which credit to Sisu is something they've done right from day one regardless of the mess elsewhere. Rioch is the best footballing appointment we've made in my lifetime IMO.