That interview reminded of the deference displayed in this famous clip...30 seconds or so in...

”Steve...why are you so great ?”

23 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

‘Consultations with fans groups are beginning’

Is there a chance that brfcs gets its own session? @Herbie6590 @J*B 

As I just do not trust that the holding to account Waggott needs will take place with the FF etc, whereas the quality of some of the forensic posts on here has been top notch.

I wouldn’t bank on it TBH but if we can, we will obviously...

12 minutes ago, 47er said:

Very odd if Brfcs has a rep and we're not allowed to know who he/she is! Never come across that before.

Usually a rep is elected.

Come on, who is it representing me? Why the secrecy?

Hang on a second...this isn’t a club or society...but if you all are willing to pay an annual membership fee then we can change the construction of the organisation along those lines ?
All members would of course have to take on board joint & several liability in the event of any legal action though.

This is cock-up not conspiracy....trust me...

16 minutes ago, RoversClitheroe said:

I genuinely think @J*Bshould be the BRFCs representative at these things, every view he has is pretty representative of all of us on this board and he's probably the most balanced.

I thought multiple I/Ds was against forum rules @J*B 😉

Rovers....Clitheroe....you should have come up with something more subtle...😁

Listeners to today’s Price of Football podcast will have heard a discussion regarding Coventry City’s training ground at Ryton being once more on the market to facilitate a housing development... 

Just now, Crimpshrine said:

Next Fans Forum meeting is 8th March so pre-meet must be 1st March. This question has to be put to Waggott. Could the BRFCS rep put this on the agenda please ?

@J*B Have we received an invite ? 

5 minutes ago, JHRover said:

They've made a rod for their backs by mentioning the indoor pitch being built down there. That will be the expectation now. If that can't be built then not even the imbeciles on Facebook will be able to claim that its anything but a drastic downscale of the operation.

“Tony doesn’t like artificial pitches as they cause injury so this makes sense...”

From the brochure....30 square miles ? 🤔 Am I missing something...?

2 hours ago, Dan said:

Every season we don’t go up, we are losing massive amounts of money. If we did go up, Venky’s would see a large amount of money come into the club. The longer it goes on, the more they lose. 
 

This is just my opinion, it’s not been officially said anywhere. 

That’s a pretty accurate summary...

3 hours ago, Dan said:

Sorry, I’m no expert 🙂 Whatever it is though, it isn’t good. They aren’t switched on, attentive or reactive enough to set us up to win promotion. 

I’ve never understood why they pump all that money in and then don’t seem to care.  How hard would it be to get someone with some football knowledge advising them? 

This season was win or bust. We’re not going up now(they’ve waited far too long to change the manager, it was still possible up to recently), so I believe they will be calling it a day. After they’ve recouped/mitigated as much as they can of course. 

Won’t be long until they’ve flushed their precious baby down the toilet.  

I was interviewed by Gregor Robertson for the Times last year for the 10 year anniversary (lack of modesty klaxon) & I likened Venky’s to someone who buys a stately home, sacks all the gardeners & maintenance staff, then burns it to the ground...then thinks...”Perhaps we should think about rebuilding it ?”

Only now, they’ve reverted to Venky’s 1.0 & seem set upon a course of further destruction of the legacy.

9 hours ago, Dan said:

Selling the land we own and our better players to start with? Making money by selling what they can before pulling the plug. 

It’s not asset stripping if they pump in £200m first. It’s loss mitigation. 

2 hours ago, Dan said:

Wag got will stay, he’ll be assisting with the administration Venky’s will put us in once they’ve asset stripped us. 

Do you know what asset stripping means ? Genuine question...

38 minutes ago, chaddyrovers said:

We seen a few people staring he retiring but you think they are wide of the mark. 

Can you state why you Waggott isn't retiring? 

No...it was shared in confidence.

5 hours ago, arbitro said:

There is a new development going on close to me and through a friend who knows the people who sold the land I was told they got £60k per plot. The Ribble Valley would be higher I guess but some of the ridiculous figures being banded about are, I suspect wide of the mark.

20-25% of Gross Development Value is a reasonable desktop estimate I suspect...c.£20m perhaps ? (170*450k) 🤔

5 hours ago, RoverDom said:

When you look at the sums and assume I havent missed anything, it can only be of any real benefit to someone earning a bit of commission out of this. 

I dont know if anyone involved in this is say a CEO on the brink of retirement... 

My understanding is that talk of early retirement is wide of the mark

1 hour ago, RevidgeBlue said:

With respect, you are talking absolute rubbish on this point and imo being extremely disrespectful to Jack Walker. I hope my post doesn't send you scurrying off to the moderators to complain as I would prefer not to suffer a ban and I'm not surprised you riled many people with your comments yesterday.

No-one expects the facilities left by Jack to remain untouched for 100 years or more in his honour or memory.

No-one expects the Jack Walker "Legacy" to mean that future owners should be hamstrung or restricted in their running of the Club.

The Jack Walker "Legacy" is a notional standard to aspire to which if met would be for the protection of the Club not it's detriment.

When Brockhall was built, the limited value of Ewood Park as a site meant the main danger was always a subsequent owner flogging the the training complex. That's precisely why the covenant protecting the use of the land was introduced.

No-one but no-one would be complaining if this was a genuine upgrading of the training facilities. But it's not, it's a substantial downsizing of the complex in an attempt to generate a short term cash injection which will be to the long term detriment of the footballing facilities at the Club. And once this asset is gone it's gone those facilities can never be replaced.

That is why people are up in arms about the Jack Walker "Legacy" about which you are so dismissive not being respected. This scheme is for the short term gain of either the current owners (which admittedly would be their prerogative were it not for the legal covenant) or the Club employees who appear to have been involved in some sort of similar scheme at Coventry, or both.

It certainly isn't imo in the long term interests of the football club. Ultimately that's the litmus test for deciding whether something respects the Jack Walker legacy or not.

It's not about making silly statements like you can't touch buildings for hundreds of ideas as it might dishonour Jack. The idea though is that if you do touch them you make them better! If you replace it with something not as good then that obviously is an insult to his memory and what he did for the Club.

Nailed it.

1 minute ago, perthblue02 said:

It was there a minute ago I read it, just tried again and your right it's gone!

Somebody concerned about m’learned friends...

9 hours ago, Hoochie Bloochie Mama said:

Interesting discussion (to me anyway😉) but I'm still none the wiser! And very tired! 

In the words of Vic & Bob I just couldn’t let it lie....😉

Upon checking...the share capital increases are with the parent company VLL. The company that is subject to FFP is the football trading entity BRFC (per Kieran Maguire’s podcast) not the parent.

Let’s look at the BRFC figures then to see what V’s have injected...

June 16 - share capital £146.9m, loans from parent £87.2m

June 19 - share capital unchanged, parent loans £126.8m

The owner has therefore introduced funds of....£39.6m...spooky (!)...over a 3 year period. This suggests that Rovers are sailing close to the FFP wind as of June 19. The June 20 numbers will reflect some of the Covid impacts but the June 21 ones will potentially be a bloodbath....hence the whole Brockhall project IMHO...

41 minutes ago, tomphil said:

If this gets blocked it could turn into the new snowball theory. 

Also i wonder if this policy of loaning kids in from high end clubs is someone trying to show the owners that's the way to go instead of your own cat 1 ?

The purpose of the Academy is two-fold, provide first team players, then sell them to help fund the clubs working capital.

If we lose Cat 1 status, both of those become harder.

Developing other clubs players of course helps them....so it would be perverse in the extreme to pursue that intellectual argument....*insert pithy comment here* 🤨

1 minute ago, Hoochie Bloochie Mama said:

You're misunderstanding my point (this could be my fault), see my edited post above. I understand the £39m loss, my point has always been how much can the owners inject every season as part of FFP rules in order that they comply with FFP rules. You said £39m, but that is wrong. You seem to be confusing losses with external funding. 

My edited link gives the answer - £8m a season. http://www.financialfairplay.co.uk/financial-fair-play-explained.php

So, back to my original point, Venky's are exceeding that in share issues every year. How?

I was still editing my post...re-read it now 👍🏻

18 minutes ago, Hoochie Bloochie Mama said:

That's the bit I don't think is right, but would love to see a link. 

https://www.mikethornton.xyz/ffp-and-p-and-s/

if a club loses more than £39m via the FFP calculation it is subject to penalty.

If the club is to continue trading, it must pay its bills so it either borrows more or the owners put more share capital in to provide working capital. 

Owners can put in more than the £39m if they choose....but the funds would not mitigate the FFP fail & the idea is that a fine would be imposed to negate the impact of the cash injection. 
 

So in practice...they are restricted as to what they can invest. 
 

The FFP calculation isn’t just a case of adding up 3 years P&L numbers. It is an adjusted calculation. So owners are allowed to invest extra on allowable expenditure e.g. stadium redevelopment, training ground etc. So Venky’s could well have been investing more than £39m gross...because some of that is allowable.

1 minute ago, Miller11 said:

The fact you can flog your ground or training facilities to bring you in line with “Profit and SUSTAINABILITY rules” just shows what a farce the whole thing is.

Well you can sell all your players as well so don’t get hung up about that...😉

2 minutes ago, JHRover said:

Having visited the academy site many times both as a spectator of the under 18 team and also through work, studied these vague plans in the document I am pretty confident that the site cannot accommodate what is required and supposedly sought by the club. There simply isn't the space, and that is before we factor in access, environmental issues, neighborhood opposition etc.

Lets take the indoor pitch - the existing one must be 50ft high and there's no scope for building above it. The 'new' one will have to be the same height and cannot be built on top of. What does this mean? Well the 'plans' in the document show that technically there is space on the existing car park/academy site for the indoor pitch. But what they aren't showing are all the other facilities that we will also need down there outside of the footprint of the indoor pitch. 

Most of these facilities are essential and not optional - even just as a senior training facility - changing rooms, canteen, kitchen, gym, office space, analysis room, boot room, laundry room, plant room, storage. Where do all these things go outside of the footprint of the indoor pitch and car park? The only place they can go is on the grass down there.

A few problems with building out onto the grass.

1) As soon as you start doing this you lose pitch space. At the moment there are 5 pitches down there. Build out and that immediately becomes 4. The senior squad and u23s currently rotate between 4 pitches on the STC. Then we would also have the academy, u18s etc.

2) The academy site down at the bottom is itself in a sensitive area and I'm pretty sure contains strict restrictions on what can be built down there. I believe those pitches prior to Rovers' using them were sports pitches used by the hospital/staff before it shut down. The reason Rovers took over those pitches was because they were restricted for development - they couldn't be developed for housing and the academy building down there now was built on the footprint of the old changing rooms. The reason Jack Walker got those pitches for Rovers to begin with was because they were limited to sports use rather than development so were available 'on the cheap'. So it certainly isn't going to be as easy as building over whatever they like to fit everything they need down there. They are going to be heavily restricted and they know this, hence the references to building on the existing car park and no reference to building over grass areas.

Then we come on to the strict requirements of Category A academy status. It isn't a pick and chose optional game. There is a long list which gets longer every year of facilities and items that the club must have access to in order to qualify for Category A status. 

An indoor pitch is one of them. They also need a pitch with spectator access/use for u23s to play games on. They also need an outdoor artifical pitch which they have up at the STC. So one of the 4 or 5 remaining pitches would have to be ripped up and relaid on that basis. They also need a floodlit pitch, which again is on the STC pitch and would need installing down at the bottom in an area where there is likely to be opposition to it.

Accommodation is a requirement - a set number of rooms, including dining areas, and classrooms for the scholars - where are these going to be built? On top of the indoor 50ft high pitch?

Lets have a think about staffing levels. Again having Category A status stipulates a certain level and number of coaching staff. There must be 50 players in either the first team squad or u23 squad. Probably another 20 u18s. Then at least another 50-60 staff - management team, medical team, analysis team, office staff, kitchen staff, groundsmen.

You must be looking at accommodating in excess of 120 people easily on a daily basis. These people all need access and parking. The road down to the academy is a single track lane running through what has become a housing estate. It just won't work. 

I'd feel confident that this little scheme was a non-starter on the above basis but unfortunately they will have done their homework and will know all this already. This is where the con comes in because they will push ahead with it despite knowing this, knowing full well that we won't be able to get these facilities built down there but by the time the penny drops or the Category A status is lost the houses will be built. 

I wish I could double like this...outstanding...

7 minutes ago, Hoochie Bloochie Mama said:

I get that, I just don't understand the difference between share issues and external investment? Why is the £20m they've invested this year to keep the lights on not part of FFP calculation?

And how much are owners allowed to invest each 3 year cycle? Googled it but not easy to find info.  

They aren’t different for FFP. A club can lose up to £39m in a 3 year cycle...though that has been extended due to COVID.

When a club loses money, the owner can invest up to £39m to cover those losses via loans or share capital.

We must be perilously close to the FFP threshold before COVID. This whole proposal is to my mind to bring us back in line. It has nothing to do with improving facilities.