As we signed him for only £100k from Oxford and he's on around £6k a week not a bad return. With Venky's approach now, we'll get £50k and £3k a week wage budget to sign his replacement. Although with his consistency, how many positions has Mowbray played him in when he's been here. He's forever changing his position giving him little time to settle. If he does go to Rangers, he'll be a success and probably shine in the Champions League qualifiers each season.

The £40m they had put away was paid out as a dividend to the previous directors as part of the sales price. The previous directors got their £135m and now Burnley are £90m+ in debt to MJD who also funded £60m into Derby. MJD will be ruthless to secure their funds back so should be fun when they do get relegated.

It's good in a way to reduce our dependency on Venky's as when they sell the new owners can then invest to grow instead of standing still. Also no matter who the owners are, they always reach a limit of spending before starting to call it quits. You just have to look at Lifelong Derby fan Mel Morris, £200m of own money invested then did not want to risk the rest of his Billion pound fortune so put it for sale and took loans from MJD capital for £60m+ with that loan tied against the ground, training centre and future income for next 5 years. That loan has to be repaid by the new owners just to move forward. It is a basket case financially and hat was a fan, never mind what Venky's could leave us with if they leave and not being fans.

We owe £150m to Venky's London Ltd, but according to the accounts we owe as well £15m Overdraft to Bank of India, £6m to the Tax man and £5m to other clubs. So not quite all to Venky's. We also have no idea how Venky's have provided the £150m to Venky's London Ltd, cash out of their back pocket, loans, etc or what is attached to those loans.

If we had a better fitter centre back, I would drop Lenihan in a heart beat. Every time I watch him I think how is he ever a centre back. Everything about his game is wrong, he has just not progressed or developed at all in 4 years. I would keep the same team as Saturday, more they play together the more settled the side will become, better understanding of playing with each other and most probably better results. I often think all the chopping and changing we do confuses everyone and results in our poor performances, only being good for 45 mins etc. He should stick to one formation, 4-3-3 or whatever, pick the best players for that formation and stick to it. Its a simple game, why does he always overcomplicate it?

I am pretty sure Cheston said at the Fans Forum in October 2019 that we needed to sell Dack in order to comply with FFP and even then it would be close and may require more sales. So the Finance Director did explain that we were massively over FFP guidelines. Unfortunately Dack got injured and we then got incredibly lucky with Covid arriving, allowing us an additional 12 months for compliance and also to build a player up to a similar sales level as Dack. We had last seasons very good squad and should have been challenging for promotion but we regressed. Mowbray received everything and more from Venky's he had asked for in order to mount a promotion challenge and didn't deliver. That squad is likely to be as close as we get to a promotion chasing squad for the next 3 seasons. Also this season seems to be a compete retrograde in transfer policy. We should have used our kids and put all of our available cash for a proper forward who can score goals and not bothered with any loans. After what i saw on Saturday at my first visit to Ewood in 20 months I am now pretty worried for the rest of the season. In quite a few games so far this season we have been pretty fortunate to get points from the games, eventually luck turns and we will really struggle.

Well Brentford sold a player for £20m+ each season and is the approach we should be taking. Buy X build him up for 12 months and then move on to the next target. I agree it is the approach we should be taking. The problem is we are just not set up to do it. Brentford will sell and already have 10 players scouted to replace that player. Everything from owner down is geared to stats, analysis etc. We would need Venky's to suddenly understand football and get involved more for this approach to work.

Sheffield Wednesday, Derby, Birmingham etc all sold their Ground and Training Ground to their owners companies etc to comply. Do you really want to sell Ewood Park and lease it back or potentially never own our own ground or training ground again? I would prefer a summer of hardship than trusting Venky's selling the ground and training ground. We'll end up in a horrible situation like Coventry or worse. A rising contract each year, £1m first year rising by 15% a year. Within 5 years we'll be ground sharing with Chorley or Bolton

It should afford us a lot of creative accounting and ability to bend the rules. However that requires employing good people to run the club which is something Venky's have always avoided doing. So pretty much everything falls back to Venky's ownership and the structure they have implemented. We are in a viscious circle all the time until they sell up.

Difference being, Middlesborough are a well run club, with an owner who cares and who makes sure he employs the best people he can to run the club. He also quickly makes managerial changes once he realizes it isn't working or if he has made a mistake. Our owners employ yes men, whose only employment criteria is they agree with everything Venky's say and implement it. If you have your own ideas or want to run the club professionally you are pretty much out on your ear. If you try and tell Venky's how to run the club or what they should do, you are out on your ear.

Lack of maintenance always proves costly in the long run. I bet Birmingham's budget for the season has gone on fixing that and quite a bit more.

Normally when things have not been maintained well for 5 - 10 years when you suddenly start fixing things, you suddenly find out why it's best to keep things maintained. Waggot was saying it would cost £2.5m for the new pitch, stadium i was thinking £3m to sort everything out but normally in infrastructure and maintenance you double you estimate if a lack of maintenance. Hence £10m, might be less but could well end up around that figure.

To sort out all the issues at the stadium, relay the pitch etc is probably close to £10m now with the amount of work which has been delayed. Then you have the Riverside to sort out and decide what to do with it, probably £15-20m to sort that out. At this rate it would probably be cheaper to knock down Ewood and rebuild it. So if you were buying you'd know you had probably £30m to spend on the club infrastructure pretty soon after you have purchased, probably £5m on training ground improvements and equipment that has not been replaced (Training Ground frost covers for instance). You'd expect Venky's probably want £60-70m to sell, you'd be at £100-110m spend before you even sign a player. We'd need £20m spent on players and 2 years to build a squad to get promotion and running costs during that time would be close to £35m. New owners would be able to boost revenues pretty easily but you'd need someone to sink close to £170m within 2 seasons to sort the club out and set us up to fight for promotion. I think looking at it as an investor when I am buying companies, there are other clubs better placed to get that sort of investment than ourselves sadly. You'd expect probably MK Dons as a likely candidate for a wealthy investor than ourselves at the current time mainly because the money they invest would go straight to getting promotion and improving things. Here you would spend a fortune to stand still (money being sunk to rectify all of Venky's mistakes and delays since owning us).

Wycombe seem to be doing very well so far this season. The year in the Championship seem to have done well for the belief of their players and management team. It must be brilliant to support a team again, where everyone at the club is busting a gut to get you promoted again.

Our commercial income collapsed long before Covid. Dafabet were paying us £3m per season, Recoverite is at £750k. Add to the diabolical season ticket handling and you are probably looking at close to £5m out the door. This season you are probably looking at a total Turnover of £11m, you could even possibly get below £10m if we are not featured on Sky very often. A good cup run this year was critical really. Getting a Premier League club in for a competitive game had a chance to re-engage with lapsed fans etc. We should have done everything in our power to get above 12,000 season ticket holders this summer, to make us attractive for commercial sponsorship and TV matches. If it meant 50% discount for a year we should have done it.

You have around £30k-33k a week to play with, two frees and spend the rest on new contracts would be a better approach. We seem to be spending everything on loans, Mowbray's decision.

I have excluded all of Covid in those calculations, the figures were our normal average loss. The figures i quoted were for our 2019 financial year to june 2019, to June 2020 we lost £22m, this year just gone will be at £28m+ loss.

If you look at it, FFP is £39m loss over 3 years. We at present lose £20m a year. Minus things we can deduct means we probably have £16m that goes towards FFP over 3 years that is £48m. The wage savings this year so far are around £100k a week, which is a £5m saving, we apparently have a £30k a week wage budget, so net saving will be £3.2m a year, knock that off the £16m puts us dead on FFP requirements per year going forward. There is no mystery just we are now operating inline with FFP.

Nope we shouldn't but i was just showing if the club wanted to there are ways and means we could easily do it with a bit of creativity. If FFP is replaced by Wage to Turnover % as seems likely then these types of deals will become all the rage.

Yep but it would be a way to pay the larger players we wanted to buy without effecting the club. As Venky's are trying to break into Latin America at the moment, i am sure they will be looking at something similar to fund Brereton's new deal.

You could for example structure it so that Rovers do £20k of his salary, the player gets to keep his image rights and then does a deal to promote Venky's chicken in India for £20k a week. A benefit for the player as better income tax rates in India as well Fully compliant with the regulations and he stays within our wage budget. Done, took me 5 mins to figure a way round the rules and i am not an expert on these matters.

I believe Tosin Adarabioyo was around the £750-£1m loan fee mark. Man City sold him a year later to Fulham for £2m plus a 20% sell on clause. I am sure it would have been more prudent for us to try and sign him for £1.5m plus a 30-40% sell on than doing the loan at that fee.

Yep we will be doing a substantial fee. I think anything up to £1m per player.

100% agree, with the amount we are offering for the loans we are guaranteeing the parent club that we are going to play each loan player in every game he is available. We have a budget of around £30k a week for new players this season, each loan player so far we are offering £5k a week for or 20-25% of their weekly wages so we will be guaranteeing to play them each week. I believe they were looking at Dale from Crewe last week to bring in permanently but that has died down over the weekend after Crewe wanted £1m plus £300k of addons for him.

I think Chapman is heading back to Shrewsbury in the next few days.