Jeepers!! £187 in wages for every £100 of income. Venkys have “spent” over a quarter of a billion quid. £108m in loans and £147m in shares ... madness! Football is crazy!

Another thread on same topic.

I don’t think it helps who was in the picture to be honest, of all the players in the squad we had the most woefully under performing player of the season and a fantastic player that fans feel doesn’t have the right attitude to make good of his undoubted talent. Had the picture been of say Danny Graham, id personally think he has busted his balls all season and deserves a break. Footballers are spoilt babies and cancelling this break would have been counterproductive and if anything would have been seen as “giving into the fans” by players. I regularly listen to the John Parkin and Chris Brown podcasts and they talk of the mentality of players and fans relationship to time off and going out drinking , if you are winning it’s team building if you are losing it’s taking the piss but it’s the same players having the same down time win or lose.

Agreed, he needs dropping for his own benefit. I don’t ever want to see a goalkeeper look as lost as Jake Kean did in the end so for his own sake Raya needs taking out of the firing line.

At least we completed our away day checklist - Awful goals conceded. Raya concedes a howler.

Is it “devaluing” the product long term though. In the 90s as a School kid in Accy I got free/ cheap tickets through school and became a season ticket holder for 20 years. A massive problem is that we employ people in Waggotts role who have to get short term results and hammering loyal fans is a freebie. Joys of modern football hey!

I’ve always thought Hyndburn in terms of Gt Harwood and Rishton was Rovers, but in Accy I always found it to be a far closer mix but swinging towards the “higher achieving” of Rovers and Burnley amongst the young. I do believe that Stanley are actually hurting Rovers, as I strongly believe that a good percentage of their increase in fan base has come from fans walking away from their own clubs rather than being new to attending football matches. I strongly believe that Rovers should be doing all they can to pull in the young, as others have said get hundreds of tickets out to the schools every game. I simply cannot see how it cannot make money if as little as 2-5% take attending Rovers more regularly. I think that a good number of our fan base have gone long term/ forever, can you really blame them? Football is an absolute mess, as a football club whether we want to admit it or not we are on life support. We need somebody (like pretty much all clubs outside the top 5 premier teams) to fund the club as a huge loss making venture, not so we can see great football and be vastly entertained but so footballers, agents, managers and Sky can get richer. I understand why fans are broken, as life gets harder for people the rich want to get richer and inexplicably they want more brass from Joe on the street to fund it through higher ticket prices, higher in stadium food and beverage prices and higher Sky tariffs.

My bad, I’ve been wrongly informed. It’s £110k per month. Still eye watering really!

I’m still absolutely astounded that the guy is on £120k p/w at Chelsea! He declared it on his court papers over a driving offence.

Exactly, lack of effort and imagination seems to flow when it comes to the Ewood experience. I know a lot of people don’t bother with a pint but I’d say a hell of a lot of people who don’t attend have found other things to do on a Saturday and a chunk of them may well go and enjoy a few beers. If you can enjoy a few decent quality beers at the football before and after the game with friends or family the game kinda falls into the background and the “day out” is the important thing. I actually think the club should be trying small things to bring back hundreds of season ticket holders just as much as the headline cut price ticket deals to tempt thousands of walk ons.

I remember a few years ago, might have even been during the premiership years they had a wainwright stand at the back of the Riverside. I often went and had 3 or 4 pints, then a pie. The stand disappeared after not too long and I haven’t bought a pint at Ewood since as it’s all over priced rubbish. I do often think that having a proper set up of decent beer in the fan zone would be profitable, Burnley do it, Stanley do it. We seem to just offer beer that has the highest mark up and nothing on the real ale front. Our nearest geographical rivals seem to have deals with Bowland Brewery for good beer, why can’t we?

I have to admit of late I've seen two instances when I would expect team mates to "step in", yesterday Smallwood was surrounded by Sheff Utd players after his challenge and I would expect even for mind game purposes our players to front them up and say "we are up for this fight" it didn't happen and the rest of the game certainly proved we didn't fancy the fight! Also when Birmingham scored their penalty, Raya did some messing around with the ball and he was barged by their lads and not one of ours backed him up. Little battles and mind games are not being contested which I find hard to swallow if I'm being honest.

Teams pay huge sums to analysts to come up with ways of winning. Yet most people on here could tell you how to beat us - We tire dramatically after 65 mins leaving huge gaps. Attack our useless left backs. Swing balls into the box as we seem to have an inability to defend crosses. Slide passes between the centre half and full backs they don’t have a clue what to do! If you get one keep coming at us as we won’t stop wobbling. I’m so pissed off at making the same woeful mistakes.

Have to admit I felt a little sorry for Steele too in the end, he just looked like he wanted to cry! At the same time I still remember when he played in our relegation season and no matter how well we started the opponents always seemed to score with their first attack, terrible goalkeeper. I don’t really think any of the managers came across particularly well, the chairman was an absolute moron too and basically felt all problems were down to Rodwell not walking away from about £3 million for nothing!

Zero arguments from me on that point BUT I stand by my point. Give me the club debt free tomorrow and I have £100m in the bank, I believe I would run out of money. How the club can be appealing to anybody to buy astounds me.

Every time the finances come out at pretty much any club I am always staggered that anybody would own a football club. If I had £100m and Venkys gave me the club debt free tomorrow, I’d still be of the belief that my money would run out before I could get the club “self funding”. How much longer can football continue to run in this way, multi million losses are just the norm?!

Not sure if it’s new news but “price of football” on twitter has put up details of our finances up to March. Major points drawn on are. - Debt is £124 million. - £15 million loss for that year. - Venkys put in £19 million in shares. - Wages were £15.7 million. - Net transfer income was £471k. - Highest losses in League one history.

Woah, the corporate quote will be “well we tried an offer AGAINST TABLE TOPPING Norwich”. Waggott won’t miss a trick!

Rodwell for the penalty was pure hungover on a Sunday morning pub league stuff!!

This for me is one of the biggest points in attendance dropping, the eye has massively been taken off the ball on attracting people through the door. Customer loyalty (fans are customers, I hate to say but plenty of our followers in years gone by were PL fans not necessarily Rovers) does not lend itself to blindly following a brand. Everybody will always look for a better deal be it car insurance, supermarkets or mobile phone contracts, do Rovers offer something out with of the 90 minutes that stands up to the local competition? Accy Stanley have gone down the route of having a £30 day out, £20 ticket and the rest in beer with good quality ales at £2 a pint and £1 after a win, I know a good few lads who I know used to go to Ewood see this as a better option for their hard earned cash than spending sometimes £27 (lets not start on the surcharge!) on a ticket then circa of £4 for a fosters at Rovers. As Matt says whilst Burnley are in the PL they will sweep up “customers”, but at the same time their fanzone has good quality beers at reasonable prices and the golden goose of PL football. I started going to Rovers as they gave handfuls of tickets to my primary school in the early 90’s is this an avenue that is still used, if not why not? As others have previously said is any sort of transport laid on? As a kid I used to get on a bus at the Boars Head in Accy as my parents didn’t go to the match, this pub doesn’t exist anymore and my parents wouldn’t have trusted me to get on multiple buses could the club run free/ cheap buses from nearby towns that will allow kids to go without parents? Talking from personal experience that bus allowed me to see my heroes in the 90’s and had me buying season tickets until last season, my brother too! If you can’t get the parents get the kids is my biggest advice.

As a lapsed season ticket holder after having one for 22 years (until last season)I shamefully have to admit I’ve simply got out of the habit of going to games. It’s very hard to describe the feeling of still being madly into Rovers frantically checking twitter during all games but not having a massive desire to go to games live. I can only fire out a few things that potentially spring to mind. - I can catch highlights of the game within 20-40 minutes on the sky sports app. - Red button and sky covered matches give me the chance to catch quite a few games a season. - Seeing Jason Lowe run straight out of play with the ball on the relegation day and thinking that guy is a multimillionaire ... the game has gone mad. That really effected me believe it or not - friends and family have got out of the habit of going to games we had 9 season tickets by the first season in the Championship, we now have none. - I don’t believe in thinking watching lower level football is the answer as that is “proper” football, I’m Rovers only. I don’t watch match of the day or other matches on sky. - The fact that football is decided now by strikes of owners pens, for all the fantastic work Mowbray and the players have done a move called from India (Coyle appointment) can send the whole club tumbling. So reading back through that now I’ve put it down in writing, Sky makes it too easy for me to follow my club without giving up my spare time and I suppose money but the money isn’t an issue per se. I resent how Owners now run football and footballers are paid too much. Most of the people I attended with fall into one, some of all the categories above and it saddens me but hey, at least I’ve been honest.

Completely overrun, when we push up they pass around the back and bypass 4/5 players. We need Palmer and Dack to start showing more for the ball just to soak some pressure off the back line. Could be a long half!!

Can only echo a few points covered by others, an enjoyable watch at Ewood yesterday. We played out a good game against a team that should have realistically walked all over us, but the tenacity and fight we have instilled in us meant that didn't happen, we are certainly far more LABORE than ARTE but by god it feels great to have at least one of those after the hell of the previous years. Things can obviously improve, we have 3 strikers trying to fit into 1 position and it is a real dilemma as none of them hold the ball up as well as Graham but they both have attributes that Graham doesn't have. We could probably all agree that playing them on the wing isn't the answer, the first half particularly Bell was regularly left two on one after Armstrong gave the ball away cheaply. Mowbray is paid the money to come up with the answer to that problem though.

We got hammered the second half, maybe Mowbray showed them an Instagram slide show at half time.

I’m afraid our Bradley is simply a very immature young man and his career will be defined by having a manager that can keep him on the straight and narrow, he simply doesn’t seem capable of doing so by his own steam and the company he keeps. I remember Bowyer encouraging Marshall to move out of Manchester to Hurst Green to keep him away from temptation during the week and his performances peaked as a result. I hope he gets a huge fine for bringing the club into disrepute and finally learns from it, I have my doubts about the latter.