To be honest I think everyone at Ewood expected the trio to be gone this summer and can't believe they are still employed. Seems everyone else at Ewood seems to be leaving instead which paints a very depressing picture.

I think the trio expected funds from Armstrong sale and the released players to be invested back in the team. Venky's have decided against. If you look back at how much Venky's put into the club, there was no real difference to them of being in the Championship or League 1, the money they had to spend was identical. Also they got a promotion out of it and has been there only success. So i don't think they really care.

It's a possibility or a sale. Getting rid of operating costs normally make clubs more attractive to buyers but normally the wrong type of buyers sadly. I think Venky's have just gone we've spent £70m in the last 3 years and got nothing out of it what so ever. So the club needs to now start operating in a similar manner to Preston and Barnsley who have done a lot more than us over the past 3 seasons.

I think it is more serious this time. Last time nobody touched Brockall, youth, coaches, backroom teams, none football, maintenance etc. and just sold players. This time Waggott is doing both, decimating the infrastructure and getting rid of players. Getting back from this, will be impossible with Venky's still in place.

A couple of friends who are very close to the club.

Yep, sadly won't be the last person to leave this summer

The owners are no longer comfortable with £20m a season. They are going back to their original funding ideas when they purchased the club of £5-7m only per season. If a good deal comes through they may increase to fund this. Waggott and Mowbray have been informed in the past couple of weeks and therefore have to cut everything down to that funding requirement. The new operating budget for everything is £16-18m a season. The analysis team and recruitment team are being downsized as is the u23s and youth teams. Backroom team such as Damien Johnson and Lowe may also be off shortly as well. A cut of all of the none football side is also happening, maintenance, marketing, commercial, catering, club shop, office staff etc. Moving to one base at brockall will also save close to £1m a season. It maybe exempt from FFP but Venky's are no longer funding an open cheque book approach so has to be cut.

i believe it is rolling and we would be under an embargo until we reduced operating costs to significantly as well as being limited to the size of contract we can offer existing players. There are an awful more players next year who may well leave on a free

To be honest i am not sure if any of our players have actually improved since Mowbray has been here and i would class most players as mismanaged as none of them suit a possession based game plan. Ours fit a quick/counterattacking based system. We used to be so good at signing the likes of Rothwell (probably as close to Bentley as we now get) and turning them into world beaters that it really is depressing when we are having these discussions. If you look at how good our coaching team used to be and yet now we have a League Two based setup. Even MK Dons and Oxford have more qualified and experienced coaches than we have and i never thought i would write that down. Look how well Ainsworth coached his League One/Two players last season at Wycombe to within 1 point of staying up. Ours just don't have a clue.

So let's say he goes to Sheffield United and helps them get promoted with lets say 10 assists and 5 goals. Would we then be allowed to say it is our training and utilisation of players that is the problem? I think a lot of it gets coached out of our players to play the supposed possession based football. I think players like Rothwell who thrive on confidence are just scared now to follow their natural game incase dropped or get the blame for trying to make things happen. Look at Travis, when he broke through he was an impressive box to box player, very similar to Bryan Robson in many ways. In the past 2 years he has become a shadow of his former self, more in mold of Evans, pass it side ways at all costs and don't drive with the ball.

I bet Mowbray is starting to wish he blooded some of the youngsters in the last 4 games of the season when the pressure was off, instead of saying he already knew enough about them.

Quite possibly yes. I don't see new players arriving and Travis, Brereton and Gallagher have not had a pre season so will be short of fitness. So as things stand that was our strongest squad.

Barnsley's owner owns 4 other clubs and has implemented the same model at all of these, so i would say it is tried and tested approach. Regarding Brentford they chose to put money into getting castoffs instead of putting £20m into building a Cat A academy. Once an academy is built it is cost neutral as you receive a grant from the FA covering the player costs.

Next set of accounts will be much bigger, these are only up to June 2020, next set is up to June 2021. You can pretty much do these, commercial revenue will be down as will matchday income so i would say £3.5-4m knocked of our Turnover, so expect Turnover to be £9.5m. Then wages will be up by another £3-3.5m. We didn't lose many players last season but added significantly in Douglas, Ayala, Kaminski etc. So a wages to turnover ratio of around 320-350% maybe slightly more. You have to remember that, this includes all player wages (players, coaches, youth players etc) plus pension and national insurance contributions etc. Our highest paid player i believe is on around £15-17k per week and will be Dack.

Yep we are completely mismanaged from top to bottom and have not learned a thing. That is really because we have no functioning board who would normally advise against these things. If you look at it, no one, apart from Cheston is here from last time behind the scenes so Mowbray is making the same mistakes as Bowyer. Waggott is useless and just a cash drain so here we are in our rinse and repeat playbook

You asked for a middle ground, i told you what it is. If you want a middle ground where we don't gamble, sell players when we should or have issues with FFP, we have to cut our cloth accordingly. It's that simple Preston income £13m, total expenditure £18.5m. Luton income £12.8m, total expenditure £14.5m. Our income £13.8m, total expenditure £33m. I also don't think it is acceptable to have commercial revenue plummeting as much as we have. Last season we lost Dafabet sponsorship and replaced with Recoverite at a cost of £2m. Dafabet sponsorship was worth £2.9m a season, Recoverite are paying £750k a season, that is how much our stock has fallen. Companies don't want to be associated with a laughing stock and poorly run show. There is no board and even companies in the Far East have functioning boards to hold a companies management to account. Yes i know they are exempt but they still have to be paid for, if you are not spending on facilities and management you can put more into your squad. Pretty much everything at Ewood these days does not make any sense what so ever. All of this is pretty academic really, Venky's seem to be fine pumping in £20m a season and we negotiate FFP by selling everyone after 2 seasons and rebuilding. If that is the way they want to go fine, but they need the right manager in who goes for it in those 2 seasons and does not blabber on about a slow build when we all know he has 2 seasons to do it before the taps are turned off.

People aren't going to like this but, you just have to look at the operating costs of ourselves and them. We are geared up for premier league football, to operate us it costs £6m a season before player costs, coaches and director costs. To operate Preston £2m, Luton £1.5m. This is on maintenance, training ground, stadium etc. They have more commercial revenues coming in. Don't waste cash on player investment projects such as Brereton, don't waste cash on player contracts when not playing players, have smaller squads, less coaches, smaller analytics teams, medical facilities etc. If you want to operate like them, you do what Waggott was trying to do last season, reduce training ground, get rid of cat A academy etc and no £1m+ transfer spend on players just free transfer and small £500k transfer fees as well as reducing the weekly wage budget for a player to £10k at most. Also as fans we must accept if an offer comes in for a player he goes as happens with the clubs you suggest us following. No offering new contracts to keep the player, they are gone. Hemmings injects £5-7m a season into Preston, with FFP a owner can do £10m a season. We have to remove around £8m of costs a year from the club, not to go through the cycle.

it doesn't, he should have been gone last season. he has 10 months left on his contract so sacking him wouldn't cost that much now and needs to be done urgently so we can rebuild

you can spend for 2 years and pull back spend in the third year to still be within FFP guidelines. The guidelines state you can lose £30m in total over those 3 years excluding, spend on stadium maintenance, youth academies, new pitches, new stadium etc. on average at the moment we are losing £12-14m a season on items covered by FFP. So for 2 seasons we we lose £24m - £28m and in season 3 we can only lose £2-6m meaning we have to cut costs and sell a couple of players to the tune of £10m. Now everything that is happening this summer should have happened last summer but Covid pushed it from a 3 year phase to a 4 year phase allowing £40m spend over the 4 seasons. I think it is something like £12m of sales and savings we need to make this summer to comply. We have not renewed contracts to the tune of £5m and then we need player sales to the tune of £7m anything over that we can invest in the squad. Next year we can start the rebuild again for the next 2 year cycle unless we change and operate to a Brentford/Barnsley approach which is more self sustaining.

To really operate in the Championship on a low income model as we have, you really need to operate the Barnsley and Brentford model. You only buy players who are below 24 years old, who you can develop and sell for a profit as well as developing your own youngsters who you can sell. You also under no circumstances loan players in as that is just a development position in your team being deprived from your own assets!!! You have got to, and this is very important, explain to your fans that this is the approach you are taking and they must understand you are selling highly prized assets to fund operating costs, buying new players and slowly building the club to fight for promotion. This approach is probably 3-5 seasons to build up for promotion If you have a larger income such as Leeds or Derby you can fill buy experienced players and sprinkle with loan players who will push you into a promotion chasing side. Its higher risk as you have no assets at the end of a loan period and if you don;'t get promoted you start from scratch the following season but you have the income to cover it. What you can't do with a small income is operate in the Derby/Leeds way or you will get hit by struggling with FFP all of the time. Which is the approach we are taking. For instance we brought in Elliott when it would have been better to let Dolan and Chapman lose to gain more experience. Bothe of them may now have developed to be sold for £7m a piece this summer. The season before we brought Tosin Adarabioyo and loaned out Wharton to Northampton, it looks like it would have been much better to have kept Wharton and build him up for that season and we could very well have sold him by now for a substantial sum.

i don't, as soon as he said he wasn't interested in going for the League One title was the time he should have been booted. An ambitious manager would have made sure they went tooth and nail for that knowing the club may not get another chance at a title for a decade. I'm pretty sure Jack, would have sacked him for not dreaming big and settling for second best at that moment!

Pretty much yes. I also remember reading on this forum a few years ago that Venky's are comfortable spending £20m a season. However, if you for example wanted to spend more than that, for example another few million on a player, then this additional funding would come from the next season budget. £22m one season, £18m the next. I have no idea how Covid has impacted this thinking. All in all i can't see anything more than either a couple of free transfers or loan deals.

I think we will be lucky to get 2-3 players in by the end of the transfer window. After the FFP delay to 4 years, this is always the year where to have to balance the books ready for another push and squad rebuild next year. We just have to look at what would have been in our profit and sustainability submission to the EFL. it would have budgeted for 8,000 season ticket holders, we are looking at getting 5,000 so that's £1.2m down straightaway at a £400 average price. We will be saving £5m in player wages of released players and that is already in the figures submitted to the league, it will probably have stated we'll make a £8m player trading surplus this year after the probable sale of Lenihan, Armstrong and Rothwell. Looking at the financial figures we can only lose this year around £7m compared to our normal £20m. If we think about it all of ours signings and contracts adhere to the 3 year FFP cycle, the issue is Covid popped it to 4 years, so instead of selling players such as Dack, Armstrong, Rothwell, Travis etc with either 2 years or 1 year plus a 1 year option. We are now trying to get high transfer prices to cover FFP at a time when our players have a year on their contract. So it will be very tough to cover everything.

It depends on how long it takes to get promoted. If we somehow manage to get 5,000 season tickets sold this season, there are an awful lot of people who are now used to not attending and doing something else than watching Rovers. Also it seems we have the lowest sales and viewing figures for digital matches last out of all of the Championship. I would say at the minute we'll be lucky to get back to 8,000 season ticket sales if we get back to the Premier League with the present incumbents in charge. I think in the 60's people said the same after the FA Cup ticket fiasco, they'll be back within the season. Most who stopped attending never came back!

The Barnsly owner knows exactly what he is doing and a new CEO has been appointed, Khaled El-Ahmed, who is already briefed and experienced in how the club need to be operated. I wouldn't be too worried about them and to be honest their new CEO looks very impressive. It took them 1 week after the resignation of their previous CEO and no Agency insight. A very will run operation. With Cardiff, it isn't about what players we would want of theirs, for them it's about the right players being brought in for them to be get promotion and be competitive. Last year I don't think any of us wanted any Barnsley player and yet now there would be several we would be interested in.