13 hours ago, OldEwoodBlue said:

This is simply not correct.

Pre virus, we were standing at minus £15million with FFP compliance.

That was netted off in the budget by selling Dack who then got crocked.

We are now minus £15.7 million.

Owners cannot just bung in £700K. It needs to come from income.

Methods of income are revenue from fans (nope), commercial revenue (nope) or player sales.

I wasn't referring to FFP,  but cashflow, in that this season they have had to put an additional £700k into us that they hadn't budgeted for to get us to the end of the season.

Also what is the point of our European Scouting Network with FFP hanging over us? 

If FFP is still being implemented next season and to comply we need to reduce our losses by around £8-10m, so talk of a transfer budget and increased wages is pretty far fetched.. We all know we need 5-6 new players in the summer to stay still never mind progress and I don't know how that can be achieved.

The Covid crisis will most probably mean our season ticket sales, whenever they go on sale, will be down to around 4,000. So another £2m of lost revenue from these need to be found as well.

42 minutes ago, chaddyrovers said:

 

I think we have improve from last season to this season. He has improved players like Nyambe, Lenihan, Travis and Armstrong into key players for our club and the future. He is bringing through players like Rankin Costello from our academy so I am pleased we are bringing through more and more of these players. His signings of Downing and Adarabioyo have been very good additions. Plus we have invested time and money into this European scouting Network so we have to give him time to make it work. Plus without Dack for half the season and us being so close this season means that with next season with a few good additions including an experience 1st choice keeper, partner for Lenihan and 1st choice left back I feel we can make the playoffs. With FFP rules and from what we can see in the accounts there does appear to be very little room for manoeuvre unless these FFP rules are change or relaxed for a season or 2.. Plus isn't our wage budget around mid table to lower half of the league.  

 

Have Nyambe, Lenihan and Travis improved under Tony's coaching though? I am not that sure, Travis is certainly no where near the player he should be. His natural box to box game seems to have been coached out of him and we will end up selling him for a lot less than we could have done.

The whole point of coaching should be to improve the value of the player both financially and to the benefit of the team and our set up is a long way from doing that.

The problem is that a lot of owners will have had to fund their main businesses through the crisis, so unless the owners have an affinity to the club, the football club will be the first to go before their main businesses.

If you look at Venky's, they are asset rich but not necessarily cash rich. In this pandemic that is a problem as you need lots of available cash to fund increased expenses and significantly reduced income. If you look at ourselves, we probably make £100k per home game which in an additional £6-700k Venky's will have to find for this season.

Alot of premiership and championship owners are going to really struggle to fund the club and rebuild their existing businesses at the same time. When you get down to League 1 and 2 with local business owners (and fans of the club) owning the club it is going to be nearly impossible for a lot of them to keep going with pretty much £0 turnover. I wonder how much Ifollow will pay each club for streaming rights and will fans want a streaming pass in the lower leagues etc

Rothwell is an interesting one, we only signed him for £100k so will make a profit if we sell, but the exciting scoring player of the end of last season seems to have been coached out of existence. The same seems to have happened to Travis's box to box game as well.

It seems you have to fit Tony's midfielder blueprint or else it is coached out of you.

Just now, nathan_rovers1 said:

4 points of play off places and you are sick and tired of it, would hate to know your thoughts if we were doing badly. 

Going nowhere in what sense?- what context, we are likely to end up with more points than last year and in a better league position? 

I am not sure there is really ever a circumstance where I would ever want my team to get hammered. 

exactly, 4 points of the playoffs and he sends that team out when we need to win.

Its like he gets a larger bonus for staying in the championship than getting promoted to the premiership

1 hour ago, chaddyrovers said:

Firstly, your post is of great detail, knowledge and enjoyment to read it.  

Brentford as a club is a model of how the sporting director and head coach does work similar to Norwich under Stuart Webber. 

The owners of Rovers have not invested in a proper management structure for a number of years since Allardyce, Williams and Finn left the club. We have tried director of football 3 times but never committed properly to the structure and way forward in a great detail plan ever. The club have a perfect chance to do this. I spoke to Paul Senior, he wanted to bring in the structure needed but I always felt the owners never wanted to invest the money need. Just imagine if they had 5 years ago or ever when they took charge of the club, we could have been similar to Brentford or Norwich in finding these gems. Instead we have wasted money on 2 strikers who so far not produce the quality or produce on the pitch to justify the fee paid. 

We knew about the Brentford model 5 or 6 years when we played there and they were a number of articles about them since then on the recruitment and identifying players with proper investment. 

Yes Mowbray is building the scouting from nothing and so far we haven't seen any end results from the European scouting yet. I get the feeling that we have only really had this working properly in the last few months before the pandemic hit the country. Why it has taking so long to bring in the network or people with the experience need to scout overseas.is the lack of funding from the owners that we only seen to have structure come in the place last 6/9 months? 

 Mowbray talks about signings players from overseas at the Supporters consultation meeting and from his comments I would expect the bulk of signings to be from overseas. I 

 

Both managers have good knowledge of the overseas but have good people around them in recruitment areas. But when the current owners take over they allowed our scouting and recruitment departments became none existed until Mowbray has rebuild them to a point. Investment in these departments could have saved The currents owners millions in wasted signings over the years. 

 

With Brentford, it is not just about a Director of Football (although they have 2) but a whole philosophy that the owner has implemented into the club based on Brentford not being able to compete with other London clubs. They have taken the strengths they have and blended these in such a way as to be competitive and self sustaining. 

Also their owner owns several data analytics and sports data companies that they also use to guide their recruitment process.

This is a relatively old article but it covers most of the philosophies and why they implemented their approach. Also goes into a lot of detail on their scouting approach and data file they create on each signing. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2718752-. With this approach i can buy into a long term strategy and taking 5 years to get to the premier league with a structure built to keep us there but the Mowbray longterm approach is just a waste of 2 seasons and 4 transfer windows so far with no end to our mediocrity insight.

I would agree that we should go down a similar route to Brentford if we had good owners but we haven't a chance with Venky's, our best bet would be to get Warnock or Mick McCarthy in with a £m promotion bonus and let them get to work now. The only problem would be that we would be a yoyo club for a couple of seasons.

So looking at it, we need to sign 7 first choice players this summer and a couple of squad players?

Do we know if our loan for Cunningham had a commitment to buy him in the summer, as that should at least sort the left back position. 

You would have thought with any other club that now would be the time to change manager and allow the new man 5 games to determine who should stay and what we need to mount a challenge for next season, abit like when Souness was appointed.

Also if we are going to use Brentford as our new template for transfers etc, we will need a whole new back office setup, so you would think trying to poach Rasmus Ankersen from Brentford to set it all up would be a good idea or at the very least someone similar.

So with the Bank Of India having liquidity issues at the moment due to the pandemic, how exactly are we going to have any type of transfer budget or wage budget next season? When Venky's won't be able to increase their mortgage borrowings or may even have the loans called in to prop the bank up?

I am expecting us to have to get to balancing the books for the season, so expecting sales and a very small squad for the year before we have any chance to get any incoming players.

11 hours ago, arbitro said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/52790371

An interesting piece from the Huddersfield owner who reckons 50 or 60 clubs could go bust. I haven't a clue on the numbers but I can see some clubs going to the wall or perhaps part time. The salary cap proposal for Leagues 1 and 2 is really sensible going forward but the defining period for lots of clubs will be between now and the time that paying customers can come back. Worrying times for football.

 

A very good article indeed. I would not be a 100% certain that we won't be one of those clubs.

Rumours in India are that the Government is going to have to inject significant amounts into Bank of India to keep it going so I can see the Raos being very short of cash pretty quickly in the next few months.

This is the best possible scenario for the football club as it stands, we'd buy season tickets tomorrow if this happened as I'm sure would many.

What really baffles me is the constant line that Venkys are going to 'make things right' because they got sold a 'pup', if you believe that you'll also believe they're buying Phil Nevilles house in Bromley Cross and paying for the flights of fans that made their own way over for the game in Pune, and buying everyone a pie a Wolves

Look its quite simple, if I was a billionaire looking to save face and get a few quid back:

1) I'd move Bowyer in to the backroom and bring a manager in on a contact with incentives to get us promoted, even Allardyce, whatevers best for the football club

2) I'd sack Shaw and make Tom Finn and John Williams offers they couldn't refuse, if that failed I'd go after the best possible options on the market.

3) I'd give all current season ticket holders free season tickets next season and let the Blackburn public into Ewood for the rest of this season for free, lets all pull together.

4) I'd sell Rhodes to get us out of embargo, loan structured deal to Boro maybe and splash the cash in January if exiting from embargo is possible. If not possible this season then we'll do it next.

5) Marketing campaign to get the feel good factor back, tell the fans I mean business, lets pull together.

Venkys could do this very very easily, they'd have sky money coming through the door in less than 3yrs, guaranteed, but they won't, why won't they?

I do have a quick question, if we do get relegated to League 1 this season, how quickly do we have to comply with League 1's rule that you can only spend 60% of your turnover on player wages? As if it is immediately we'd need to get rid of an awful lot of players very quickly, increase season ticket prices and cut the max we can pay per week to a player to around £5k