We are bottom of the current form table folks..

Another way of looking at it, this is a 6 pointer against one of the two in the play off places we realistically could still catch. Hull doubled over us so...

West Brom have been unpredictable and we should have our tails up.

A draw slightly more likely than a home win with Rovers prevailing a distant prospect.

So got a L2 side at home AND a glamour tie.

Going to get punished for all this good fortune with Plymouth or Brentford away in the 5th round...

2 hours ago, joey_big_nose said:

Hmmm... JRCs got himself a bloody good agent if he's gone from a bit part academy graduate looking to be shipped out 12 months ago to our fifth highest earner!

While directionally I think the numbers feel roughly right, overall something doesn't really make sense. 

In total SalarySports adds up to Blackburn Rovers total salary bill is £13,203,840... But that is is massively less than the £24M listed in the most recent 21/22 accounts according to this swissramble article below. I can't see the entire staff and director wage bill being more than £3M absolute tops. So either we've chopped off £8m from our player salary cost (equivalent to £150k a week) since the end of 22 or there's something I am not getting.

https://swissramble.substack.com/p/blackburn-rovers-finances-202122

Rovers employ around 240 people.

The non-playing staff don't live on fresh air. Given the execs and highly trained specialists in the operation, they could add as much as 10m in wages and wage costs (remember employer's ERNI)

Hmm.

I have just posted that SWAG fails on judgement trust and integrity - the most basic requirements of a CEO.

BUT 

I acknowledged that he was plunged into a situation sometime in 2023 in which he had no idea when and how much the next lifeline cash would come from Pune..

Believe me that could have been handled much worse than he did.

AND

If no more Indian cash were forthcoming, keeping us in the Championship and the young player development were the basic essential requirements to make Rovers a rescuable proposition.

That was the stark reality we were facing and JDT getting us into play off contention until the protracted injury crisis took its toll was a phenomenal achievement using playing resources GB had rustled up out of empty crisp bags.

Look at all the new contacts.

Are they being signed with no wage increases?

There's your answer.

There is a lot of discussion of "our CEO" as JDT calls him elsewhere.

Swag has as hard a time managing the Venky's slashing of budgets as any at Ewood. Some of his decisions have been bizarre in the lack of sensitivity to his paying customers (closing the Blackburn End and Digital Day) but by and large he seems to have managed relatively well.

My objection to him is he has broken the two cardinal rules of being a CEO

1) Not standing up to take responsibility for an egregious error on his watch. Bad enough to be at the Birmingham game on transfer deadline day which is dereliction of duty but not to stand up and be counted for not having failsafe processes in place to avoid the January deadline fiasco last year (which cost us O'Riorden's fee in legal bills for the appeals) was totally unacceptable.

2) Even worse, to have undermined Broughton (who did stand up and dig SWAG and Silvester out of the mire last January) with not one but a series of comments in effectively a public forum in his meeting with Glen and co. is totally intolerable.

I maybe wrong but I get the impression he is miffed at the "sexy" football meddling part of his role has been taken away from him.

Doesn't take a genius to work out that Blackburn with Darwen is not unusually highly represented with people with debit and credit cards holding unspent balances in the first week after the Festive Season.

All Digital Day has probably done is send a message to the hard working fan facing people in ticket sales that SWAG would get rid of them if he could.

As Ennis and Telalovic have shown, we don't have the cash to buy a reliable Championship goal scoring striker. So we gambled on those two and it is no adverse reflection on the recruitment team the gambles haven't worked out yet. On the balance of probabilities, one or other of them will have a purple patch- with Ennis it is possibly behind him at Plymouth last season.

It is only 7 January and we are already two in, two out (or is it four in four our counting our junior loan recalls and sending outs). I suspect this month is going to be an exceptionally big jigsaw puzzle for January so I am not freaking out over stories of Leonard and Garret going out on loan much as I'd like to see them stay.

For what its worth, I think Hayden Carter will make a very useful PL central defender and is far more PL-ready than Adam Wharton.

My central prediction is there will be five first teamers in before the window closes which could rise as high as eight if the Carter rumours are true.

In Telalovic defence, the Cambridge lads were putting some excellent blocks in and every shot Telalovic hit got blocked. Even the neutral commentator said so at one point.

Ayari looked neat and tidy with two notable moments- a dribble past four Cambridge players in close attendance and a wriggle down the goal line.

The gulf in skill between the Cambridge players and our's was considerable so I would say promising, to be convinced.

If the Cambridge players' touch wasn't typically a yard from them, we would have been undone this afternoon. As it is the belief was flooding back in our players and we played some lovely stuff.

Very entertaining game and noticeable at the end that there was a 5 minute passage of play from both sides without a stoppage or ball out of play before Gamble and Finnernan could get on.

Leonard on for Telalovic

Coventry have just hit Oxford, a much better outfit than Cambridge, for 6.

Stevenage also challenging for promotion to the Championship lost at National League South Maidstone.

1 hour ago, Brian-Potter said:

That’s correct. The precedent relates to the decision on whether or not funds can be released and not any pre-requisite information required to support the application. So if they do exactly as they did at the last hearing then it’s highly likely the ruling will go in their favour. If however, for example they added a further say £5m to the application for transfer funds then no precedent would exist for that scenario.

@tomphil I see your point that in a normal situation this would neither be acceptable or sustainable. However, this is Venkys. We already know they’ve spent huge sums of money on legal fees just to get this to the High Court and in addition to that remember as well as the two court orders made for circa £3.5m and £11m of funding it is actually technically costing them double those amounts as they are giving bankers guarantees for the same amount to the Indian Authorities.

It seems crazy but when you think they’ve thrown over £200m into Rovers for absolutely no return you realise the sums of money available to them.

I’ve tried to do some research into the structure and funding of their empire but being based in India means factual information is limited. From a couple of ratings agencies I’ve managed to find that there is one particular company in the VH Group that has a huge cash reserve and seems to proved most of the funding for the other members of the group.

 

 

 

 

Thanks- great stuff!

I believe the land holdings are outside of their operating business structures unless you saw anything in there with rental income and property development earnings.

The land is where the real wealth is.

Glad we have gone with that XI.

A chance for a few to redeem themselves after some less than stellar performances recently.

That said, play like we did at Huddersfield and we are out.

Give the kid a chance.

Clean slate and all that.

9 minutes ago, wilsdenrover said:

I don’t imagine you do but in that case was there any reason why the previous permission couldn’t have been ‘until told otherwise’ (rather than having to go back to court every 3 months).

What it tells me is the Court doesn't exactly trust the Venky's so the Judge is requiring them to come back again after 3 months.

But the precedence has been set so assuming there are no changes in circumstances or buggaloos in the paperwork, the next hearing ought to be a formality in clearing the next transfer funding Rovers.

Batth has had 9 appearances in a miss firing Norwich defence so we got lucky with that one.

Even with all the injuries and rubbish results, few people posting were including Travis in the their starting XIs in game previews.

Looking forward and hopefully with injuries clearing up, I cannot see Trav displacing either Adam Wharton or Tronstad and if we find ourselves needing to replace either of those two, is Trav going to be ahead of Buckley if Wharton is unavailable or ahead of Garrett if Tronstad needs replacing? Obviously JDT is unsure to say the least but until all the hand wringing about Trav going out on loan, the balance of opinion on BRFCS was Trav would have been 4th or 5th choice for one of two places and a risk whenever he was a makeshift fill in out of position.

Hope his Ipswich loan goes really well for him and we get either a revitalised Travis or a few million in the summer. 

2 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

I thought I read elsewhere that each and every item of expenditure had to be itemised by the Club  and approved by the Court on it's own merits?

The exact opposite of "a precedent".

Nope.

The precedent is that all operating expenses are itemised and justified as operational and approved for funding.

If Chris Sutton is right, stayaways will be missing the biggest Ewood goalfest since we tonked West Ham 7-1.

If...

We are apparently going to make less than the 10 changes JDT made at Harrogate.

The transfer policy which has cost us is not so much individual player selection as the finances which restrict numbers.

Show me a club which gets ALL its player purchases and loans right.

Show me a Championship goal scoring forward signed permanently this summer for under 1m.

We took a gamble in balancing between quality as reflected in transfers and wages and quantity then got hit by an abnormal if not unusual prolonged injury list. Almost all of the season we have had at least 5 unavailable and at least 8 and sometimes 10 during the current bad run of results which also coincided with being on the wrong end of bad referees. 

My issue with Venkys is their cavalier stupidity in their first seasons with us not only cost us a superb club organisation and Premier League status but Indian jurisdiction found them to be lawless and the consequences of a property purchase and a birthday party a dozen years ago are a severely damaged 2023/24 season.

Poking holes in a Director of Football who picked up a lower league midfielder for a relative pittance who is now the runaway Championship leading scorer and a coach as respected and dare I say it, loved, as much as JDT is not helping anybody.

https://www.rovers.co.uk/news/2024/january/05/chrisene-completes-rovers-switch/

Defender comes in

Just now, wilsdenrover said:

Would Luton have tested our resolve if TK had still been first choice?

Yes. The financial heft of even newly promoted clubs in the PL means they can winkle out pretty well any Championship player they want.

And TK yielded nearly as much as Raya did in terms of initial payment- we have no idea whether there are sell on provisions but TK has his admirers at other PL clubs. If he avoids any more bloopers between now and season end, not beyond the realms of possibility he would stay in the Premier League if Luton go down.

If it is any consolation, Cambridge have an injury crisis and their new boss has said the next League game takes priority.

Like a helping of humiliation with our embarrassment at losing?