No doubt, others will produce better bad taste humour and apropriate analogies to the departing from t'Turf than I can muster at this time in the morning.

Stories in the papers this morning that McMahon will go to Burnley.

Quite a few Burnley fans seem to be unhappy at the prospect but at least they can look forwards to some good runs in the LDV Trophy.

Mahon certainly went for a transfer fee and I am not sure that Hignett wasn't out of contract when he went. Curtis might have gone for a fee or might have been out of contract.

Oestanstad went out on loan before Rangers took over his contract from us.

Grabbi was a free transfer.

Do you have any names on your list?

In any ordinary place of work, he should have been dismissed for what he did before the Leeds game.

Is this what has happened to Todd?

Looked at that de'd dingles site. Have to say I don't ordinarilly mock the afflicted but those player pictures on the web site heading...

I think that is taking self-parody to an unacceptable extreme.

He's not been fired- just not getting an extension to his contract.

Odds on a player-manager will be appointed to save on costs. So any suggestions of over the hill big name pros with an ambition in management?

Pity Chris Waddle is too old...

1864, we also sold Henchoz which was a massive loss when we went down.

Other than that, just glad its Leeds biting the dust and not us.

I do however think that Phillipl will look exactly like his Aviator)[/b]

Depends whose up front flying the Gulfstream old boy.

As I posted elsewhere, these bids are inevitable.

OK imagine you are Abramovich. You are just about to receive £2 billion in readies from the sale of a minority stake in Sibneft to Total having trousered £600m earlier in the year from selling the odd interest in Aeroflot and aluminium production.

The biggest risk to yourself comes from Putin cracking down on the oligarchs so apart from putting your cash beyond the Russian taxman what's the best bet?

Make yourself too public for Putin to be able to touch you- hence the smart move to buy Chelsea.

£250m later, Chelsea is probably still worth more than the cash you have splashed on it. So what now?

For the relatively modest outlay of £150m you can buy all of

Beckham

Ronaldo

Ronaldinho

And have the biggest marketing power in the world of soccer by far.

It will be nice having seen Abramovich stuff the chances of the middle ranking English clubs by buying their best players now to fillet La Liga of its three most marketable assets.

So what are you waiting for Roman?

That's a great post blue blood.

I would add the consistent failure to get results against battling (read bad) sides.

I hate saying this but I do feel that Souey is near the end of his effectiveness for the Rovers. It could be the best for all concerned if the board were to take a very brave decision this summer and move on to someone with better man management skills, sharper tactical awareness and an insistence on top fitness levels.

Cannot find the thread which reported that Rodney Marsh had said at least four times that this is Souness' squad which has put us in the mess we are in.

Suddenly struck me that Souness has got through £41m in outgoing transfer fees since we were promoted. That's about the same as Arsene Wenger has spent in the same period and only exceeded by Peter Ridsdale, Newcastle, Chelsea, Man U and everybody's favourite Frenchman at Anfield. One of that list effectively went bust, the others are lying in positions 1 to 5 in the Prem.

That is one measure of the enormity of this season's failure.

Another is to look at the sell on values. West Ham went down with a new stand round their financial necks but were able to sell the best part of £20m worth of players to survive and have enough cash in hand to buy a job lot of Britain's more promising young midfield talent from Wimbleton Keynes.

What is the sell on value of our players at the moment?

£2m Ferguson

£1.5m each Emerton and Neill (if anyone buys Opta stats)

£1m each Cole, Stead and Gally

£1m? Friedel

£1m??? Thompson

£500K each Gresko, Flitcroft, Reid, Yorke, Todd, Jansen, Douglas or McEveley

£500K the lot for the rest of the squad

That's £14.5m for the lot if we are lucky. Talk about value destruction!

I know this link has already been used.

The Board have the most unenviable of tasks.

They have a manager who has delivered three exceptional seasons at the club. They must feel deep down a loyalty to Souness and an enormous reluctance to do the dirty, especially as so many clubs have failed when making short term reaction decisions about Managers. They probably have given their word under a certain amount of duress that Souness will stay to the end of the season irrespective of what happens.

I posted that link because:

- when Souness could have been with his players trying to change things for the better during the most important half time team talk of the season so far, he was with the referee trying to change something that was impossible to change.

- Souness complains of lack of respect from officials (like when did Souness give respect to officials?). That comment smacks of someone desperate to be shown respect (as if that matters relative to results) and who is getting none from the people who should be giving him respect- the players.

If anybody from the Board is reading this, I just hope this post has just made it easier to take the decision which has to be made and acted upon.

PS Anyone else noticed that the dingles are saving their skins from relegation by beating the other clubs threatened by relegation from Div 1. For the third season running, we are losing games against relegation-threatened clubs.

If not before Souness should undoubtedly have been replaced a week ago allowing his replacement seven games in which to turn things around.

John Williams has already presided over us being relegated with the 5th highest wage bill now we're going down again with the 8th.

What does he actually do to justify his quarter of a million pound salary?

A very odd post.

Hiring and firing the Maanager is the Board's decision, not JW's.

In case you haven't noticed, JW runs a very good operation off the pitch and its Souness' job to run a good one on it.

I have calmed down but I am now firmly in the Souness out NOW camp.

To those who disagree, let me ask what confidence you have that Souness will have the selection, tactics and motivation to beat Leeds next Saturday?

Right now, I am absolutely certain we will lose that game with Souness in charge.

In those circumstances, the arithmetic is not the cost of buying out his remaining contract but a gamble to avoid losing £20m in income from a relegation which we should NEVER have been in any danger of suffering this season.

How can Souness motivate his players now?

His selection and tactical ineptitude has reduced the defence to a shambles.

Craig Short implicitly criticised Souness for saying the wrong things last week.

The decision to drop Neill because the Anfield crowd would have a go at him was mindbogglingly stupid. Drop Neill for bad performances but not in a way that was tantamount to Souness saying the lad deliberately broke Carragher's leg.

Johansson had an excellent game to re-establish his career and was promptly dropped.

Gresko is probably suffering a massive crisis of confidence because of Souness' failure to play anyone who can operate effectively at left midfield.

Cole and Yorke- two senior pros you would ordinarilly look to provide backbone at this stage are so @#/? off that Souness chose to play too extreme youngsters at Anfield just at the moment their form was beginning to falter- MADNESS

I could go on...

Half the squad would spit in Souness' face gven half the chance. I know its not professional but players are young egocentric individuals with enough "f" you money not to need to give a damn about the shirt and the club and to be supremely indifferent to Souness.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, Liverpool are rubbish. There was nothing magical about their performance today. We just rolled over and died AGAIN.

So to Charlton, Fulham, Villa home, Brum in the Cup, Bolton home, Pompey home we add LIverpool away as performances which fall off the scale of being dire.

Well everything I predicted in the previous posting has happened. Leeds DID go into administration and will be liquidated but nobody in officialdom minds because the Krassner consortium picked up the pieces. The exception will be the directors of the old Leeds during the past three years who WILL be investigated.

Leeds financil position is still extremely tricky but it seems that Krassner and his backers have pulled off a major coup and paid absolutely bottom dollar. Getting the major creditors to walk away at 20 pence in the pound is an amazing achievement especially as there are no lingering claims over future revenue streams.

Trevor Birch's achievement in not selling in the January window and keeping the players who theoreticall are good enough to avoid relegation whilst keeping the club going to the point at which the Krassner deat could be done is equally immense.

Yes the Krassner consortium are going to have to purge Leeds of the extravagently high earners but this is surgery every Premiership club outside the top three are going to have to do. Expect to start hearing high levels of distress to start coming from Man City pretty soon. If they get relegated, they have very few assets to fall back on- if liquidation was a likely outcome for Leeds following administration, it is doubly likely at Man City.

The Berlusconi financial rescue package for Italian football has collapsed so I expect that Prem players in general are going to find their wages bubble has burst this summer.

The only upwards pressure will be in the G14/ perenial Champs League clubs and they will be paying more than they can afford in another bubble which will surely burst one day.

Geoffrey Richmond speaks out.

The structure of the deal as I understand it is that Leeds will go into administration. Elland Road's long term lease will be sold to one of the creditors or a third party for £20m and the Krasner consortium will immediately offer £25m+ for the rest.

In the absence of other interested parties, the administrator is expected to accept those offers very quickly.

The reason for going through administration is for the new owners to pick up the business without the hassle of dealing with creditors directly and to avoid thge risk of falling back into insolvency themselves burdened directly by all the debt.

If this is true, the issues now:

=Leeds will have gone through administration. Creditors will receive less than they theoretically would have done if the club had continued as the existing plc. Therefore Leeds will have gained an unfair financial advantage over more prudent clubs which is why points deduction penalties are supposed to be introduced.

=if they do go through a brief administration, it is quite likely there will be a DTI investigation into what went wrong at Leeds.

=without doubt the sale of Elland Road is to entrench the ability of the major creditors to cream off the season ticket and gate revenues for many years to come.

What should be a major force in English football, the club in Leeds, is going to be permanently dimminished.

Ken Bates to the rescue, or not?

Whether the egos of Ken Bates and Geaffrey Richmond would fit together in one desperately under-funded board room is probably a totally academic question.

The real give-aways in this article are:

- an admission that the Richmond consortium has not got the funds to buy Leeds. Ken Bates might be rich (at least £12m left after tax from the Chelsea sale) but he's not stupid and his money is a drop in the ocean compared with Leeds' debts. Expect the Krasner/Richmond consortium to disappear quite soon if this story is not denied by them.

- Alan Leighton back on the scene. I bet he is! He uniquely stands to suffer irreparable reputation damage if the DTI inspectorate get involved. The DTI have to report on every administration or liquidation.

Meanwhilst the Express and Mail have both reported that Leeds will be bought by the Krasner/Richmond consortium next week for £20m but they seem to disagree as to whether Richmond is part of the Krasner consortium or bidding against the Krasner consortium! Probably both are true with Richmond having a bet on the side as they say! Given those are the papers that are running that story and nobody else, I am sceptical.

Everything is predictably quiet at Leeds as the backroom negotiations drag on.

Geoffrey Richmond who is advising or funding the Krasner consortium depending on which version you read has an interesting history.

According to this Sunday's Observer:

Geoffrey Richmond, January: 'I've had my 15 years in the game and I've got my bruises. I've got absolutely no interest in Leeds whatsoever, though I wish good luck to whoever has.' And now? 'I have been advising the consortium, who requested my input from a football perspective, having more than 15 years' experience in the game. I was delighted to offer my advice, free of charge.' It's too generous: Richmond's eight years at Bradford defined prudence: raising the wage bill from £6.8m to £14.4m in six months; handing Benito Carbone - who loved that club - £40,000-a-week; borrowing against future earnings, the stadium and the £750,000 house where Carbone lived to pay Ashley Ward £880,000-a-year; withdrawing £10m in dividends for himself and his directors between April 1999 and August 2000; and paying himself a £250,000 consultancy fee in 2001. The result: £36m debt and administration. 'I'm insane according to Fleet Street,' said Richmond in October 2000 as he handed Stan Collymore £13,000-a-week. 'But we need a catalyst. Stan can be that.'

Peter Lorimer whom the consortium have induced to opine on the impressive naturre of its bid has a history of business failure and does not seem to have had the desired effect of calming the Leeds' fans' worries about the nature of the Krasner consortium.

Just makes us all realise how incredibly fortunate we were and still are with Jack Walker and his bequest.

The latest news percolating out of the talks is that "legal red tape" is slowing everything down and that a deal is unlikely for at least a week. Read that as meaning that even if (a big IF) a top level structure for the creditors has been mapped out and agreed, nobody likes or will agree to the detail and mechanics.

Meanwhilst, Publicity Pete's much lauded long term player contracts which expire in 2007 are under the spotlight. All players earning £30K+ a week are being talked to about relegation clauses and permanent salry reductions. No wonder Batty is training on his own in a remote corner of Thorp Arch!

This has the feel of a deal which will not happen in which case the time it has taken will have undermined Trevor Birch so much that the administrators or perhaps even a receiver and liquidator will be the only viable option if (when?) the talks collapse.

An excellent account of how Leeds got into their mess

It answers all the questions I had been pondering.

The Daily Telegraph speculating that administration is imminent.

Prof John Mackenzie severed all remaining links with the club today which suggests something is about to happen.

Here is the rub.

At the foot of the article, Krasner (the insolvency expert behind the consortium) says it will take a decade for Leeds to recover.

My guess is the consortium is playing a probabilities game. As an insolvency expert himself, Krasner will know the way an administrator would handle Leeds and the risks involved to the creditors in terms of Leeds falling into administration.

He will therefore try to create a copy of the likely results from administration adjusted for the amount his consortium are willing to invest and reduced to reflect the cost of a risk premium (i.e. the amount the creditors are willing to "pay" for certainty of eventually being paid).

There are three major stumbling blocks:

1) What certainty premium can a consortium ask for when it includes Geoffrey Richmond with his Bradford track record? In other words can the creditors believe the consortum wll deliver.

2) The major creditors have differing agendas. The small credtors just want cash as soon and as much as possible- they are in the weakest position but probably stand to lose enough millions to be willing to fight any agreement which unduly hurts them in the Courts. The major money is owed to major institutions which is another name for penson funds. They will "quite" happily sit back and let their money come back over a long period because they pay out pensions over a long period. However, the institutions are divided between those whose debts are secured against a long term deal for payment from season ticket sales and gate receipts and those whose security is the contract on footballers whose purchase they helped to finance- a much shorter term and riskier asset.  

3) Add in the uncertainty of being bottom of the league with twelve games to go.

The negotiations will now be entirely between the consortium and the various groups of creditors. All Trevor Birch can do is mind the shop and try to be nice to people.

It is required standard practise for a report on the activities of the board and management to be filed with the DTI if a company goes into liquidation.

If the directors and managers have acted responsibly and in the best interests of the business, that will be recorded. If, however, the directors were in any way reckless or failed to exercise their responsibilities properly they can face being disbarred and criminal procedings if appropriate.

As regards the rumours about an announcement tomorrow, at this stage they are just that. No newswire has picked up the story and it would have been grossly irresponsible of Trevor Birch to have said such a thing given that so many jobs and over £100m are in the balance. I therefore doubt that the rumour has any foundation in fact.

Back to Batty, I am not saying the players got Leeds into the mess- they simply opened their wallets and let Ridsdale get on with it- but they did effectively kill the only deal which would have kept Leeds going to the end of the season without either a forced sale, administration or worse.

Trevor Cherry says Leeds should go into administration.

Perhaps unhappy that his side had to back out and convinced they might get a better deal from an administrator?