Finger in the air. I think you have a point.
Green and Gold till the club is Sold!
- Thread starter ralphie88
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After a Joga post, we need a little light relief.
The odd thing is. Cider says more in a line of wittiness than Joga says in a page of bollocks.
Stop attacking me, Brad, i don't like it when you say those nasty things to me.
Jesus H. Christ. That's the exact definition that I have been trying to get you to understand and you have still got it wrong!
What part of "deliberate" and "meant" in the two definitions do you not understand? The person or group who is lying necessarily has to know that they are doing so. That means that you have to be able to show that they are "deliberately" attempting to deceive with it.
Someone can be wrong and not know that they are wrong. That doesn't make them a liar, it makes them ignorant or sloppy. This is not difficult.
Therefore, as you can't show that MUST are deliberately attempting to deceive people, "wrong" and "misleading" is about as far as you can go.
As for why I defend MUST, I've only really done so when I've seen a particularly egregious attack on them. And I'd do exactly the same for you, but that doesn't mean that I have the time to scour the internet looking for every example. You're also here to defend yourself, of course.
In actual fact, I often defend both the club and Sir Alex in relation to transfers and various statements. If I had a particularly biased agenda (we all have an agenda of some sorts), it would be easy to allow that criticism to slide. And I have defended the Glazers against wrongful attack, although I cannot deny that I am less watchful of things that are said against them. But, by all means, point to dishonesty in relation to them and I'll condemn it.
'Duncan Dildo' wasn't witty the first time, never mind the umpteenth
Oh come on, it's got a good ring to it!
In my defense, it's sometimes easier to focus almost obsessively on something that, in the grand scheme of things, is largely irrelevant, because it forces the other person to face up to their attempt to squirm out of the mistakes that they have made.
Not doing so allows them to continue to repeat the same, long ago debunked falsehoods, which is basically what most of these threads contain from people on both sides.
I would contend that in the long run it will save a lot of effort, but we will soon find out.
You said yourself though, Joga, that the line was misleading once the context it was first published in was removed. Are you suggesting then that MUST only used it sans original context accidently; that the removal of context was not a deliberate act?
No, they removed the context deliberately in order to scare-monger. It was a deliberate attempt to deceive; a lie if you will.
No, they removed the context deliberately in order to scare-monger. It was a deliberate attempt to deceive; a lie if you will.
Oh feck off Joga. As you keep saying, people are responsible for what they say. The information has been trotted out in the press, on the telly and on their website (I presume in their emails too). In other words, they have repeated it over and over in many mediums.
They must know by now that it is bollocks but they make no moves to correct their mistake.
They KNOW it is bullshit. They KNOW it is a lie. They are DELIBERATELY misleading people with the lie.
Don't give me any shit that they don't read these forums. Ciderman will tell you in no uncertain terms that they do.
I could email them right now and tell them that they have made a mistake, will they apologise, remove it from their website and tell the press of their mistake? Will they feck.
The funniest (and by that, I mean not funny at all) part is that Duncan Drasdo is in the press again today telling everyone who will listen how the Glazers are about to take out £95million to pay off their PIKs.
£83million of this money has been included in their lie already! It's like two for the price of one.
Please, please don't tell me that Duncan Drasdo was not aware that £83million had not, in fact, been taken out to pay off the PIKs when MUST published those figures.
Oh, thank you, oh merciful arbiter of the internet. You have my eternal gratitude for your beneficence .
It's possible, of course, but I honestly don't know if that is the case. I'd be a lot more convinced if there was an unmistakable pattern of similar "mistakes" (probably dozens), because that would mean either that they were unbelievably incompetent, or that they really are trying to deceive people.
It's always difficult to distill something as complex as this issue down to a few words or sentences, so it's also possible that the person who is doing it is not taking things out of context deliberately, but that they are simply being very sloppy, and that, in fact, they don't actually understand the thing that they are trying to sell. That's bad enough.
The other side of the "scare-monger" accusation is that they would have to know that anyone who finds out that they are misleading people will be more than a little disappointed, and rightly so. In the long run, it's counter productive.
My belief is that MUST and the RKs were attempting to encourage a boycott.
Keith Harris specifically called for it and so did Andersred. These two are inextricably linked with the RK and MUST causes. They might not speak officially for them but they don't do a bad job of doing it unofficially, if that is indeed the case.
Without a boycott, there could have been no takeover because I believe that the RKs do not have sufficient funds to buy the club on a level playing field and only by undermining the current business-model could they hope to bring the Glazers to the table, willing to accept a lower offer than their asking price.
I am entitled to hold that opinion, Joga, whether you like it or not. I do not have to provide sources for arriving at that conclusion. That is my opinion based on my own independent thought.
I would keep repeating it but I don't think it will be necessary. MUST are fast becoming an irrelevance with nothing more to offer than nuisance value and the RKs never existed as a credible entity as evidenced by their complete failure to make a bid for the club which was supposed to be the reason for their coming together in the first place.
By all means, continue to accuse them of lying. I've done my best, but it's painfully obvious at this point that you don't actually have any interest in honesty, which is tragically ironic.
I think I have told you before. You wouldn't know honesty if it hit you.And you have the cheek to accuse me of squirming out of a mistake I have supposedly made?
Go back to your hole you horrid little turd.
You're trying to give credit to Gill for something that failed to materialise under the plc. If we had the sort of commercial revenue streams that we do now, then the Glazers wouldn't have been anywhere near as interested.
Sorry, but we were regularly outbid by Chelsea, we had the wage cap in place so couldn't get Boksic, Roberto Carlos, etc. so not completely true.
If the Glazers paid the whole debt off by 2017, which I think GCHQ would suggest they could do, then I think we'd have a fantastically powerful club at that point which could legitimately outspend anyone and not worry about Platini/Blatter driven regulations. The Glazers could take a regular slice of pie and we could stay at the top, whoever the manager was. Not going to happen though.
Probably the same, given the demand for David Beckham at the time. He was a brand in his own right and had an incredible draw. Add Ronaldo to that and you've got football's two glamour boy superstars playing for the same side. Under the old prices, we could have filled a 100,000 capacity Old Trafford.
Er, Bosnich v Taibi?
http://www.fcbayern.t-home.de/media/native/ticketing/preisliste_1011_060710.pdf
Agreed. Unless you think net profits are going to increase exponentially then the best case scenario is that the Glazers will pay off the PIK debt and be left to re-schedule the bond in 2017. Even that assumes revenues increase at the same rate they have done over the last five years for the next seven. It also assumes they provide 25m a year for the team (ha ha) but does not include paying themselves a dividend, fees or whatever which could amount to 50% of the profit. It could be a choice between dividends and the team as they pay down the PIK debt. Over to Fergie to try and keep us competitive on the proverbial shoestring.
You'll have to elaborate on that. I remember Taibi, of course and there did seem something odd about that whole transfer. Didn't he cost £5million (a lot for a keeper back then), played a handful of games, made a couple of horrendous howlers and was shipped out again sharpish. I'm not sure about Bosnich.
I just seem to remember it was all a bit of a mad period post-Schmeichel as Fergie tried to get the right man to take his place.
I could never understand why he didn't go for VDS years earlier - especially when he signed for Fulham.
I don't remember anything about the PLC over-riding Fergie on the signings though but I have slept a bit since then.
http://www.fcbayern.t-home.de/media/native/ticketing/preisliste_1011_060710.pdf[/QUOTE]
Cheers for that. Interesting. It looks like their 15euro price point seats correspond to our own East & West Lower stands The rest seem pretty much in line with our own prices to me (more expensive at the upper end in order to compensate, if anything) but it's hard to argue that a section of OT available at £15 wouldn't be fantastic and I don't think it would put such an enormous dent in the finances
I don't know off hand how many seats there are in East & West Stand Lower but assuming 10k seats at £15 rather than £27 over (say) 20 games per season (18 League and a couple of early-round FA Cup and/or League Cup ties) then you're looking at a "cost" to the club of £2.4million per season to do it that way.
Given the goodwill that such a gesture would go towards creating amongst the fans, I believe that it would pay for itself in other ways and should surely be considered.
They could even bump the other 65k tickets up by an average of £1 and recoup half the "loss" that way and so it would cost little more than £1million a year.
(My figures regarding the number of seats are just off the top of my head, I actually have no idea how many seats are in the areas I mention but I still think it is feasible to make available 10k tickets at these prices somewhere in the stadium).
Having said all this, I still keep coming back to the conversation I had with an Oldham fan recently who told me tickets to watch Oldham were £20 and I don't see how a Manchester United fan can reasonably expect to pay less than an Oldham fan.
Revenues don't have to grow exponentially (there's no way they will grow at the same rate that we have seen over the last five years unless the commercial side goes into overdrive because matchday revenue is pretty much maxed out now and media revenues appear to have reached something of a plateau) but they do need to grow a bit.
Most projections appear to assume a flat £100m EBITDA for the period from what I can gather.
It does appear that the Glazers will need to take every penny of dividends that they can in order to pay off their PIKs in full before 2017 (if, indeed, this is how they intend to pay them off - something we should always remember is not absolutely cast in stone) but assuming that this is the way then, yes, it looks like being a tight squeeze.
However, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that if it came to a choice between dividends and team investment then they would go with team investment. Obviously not every year for the full seven years but now and again, as necessary (again, I am assuming that the PIKs are being paid off from their dividends here with shortfalls being made up with funds from elsewhere - I do believe that it is a fallacy that Manchester United is their only source of income and means of obtaining funding).
It would be false economy to take short term profits at the expense of long term growth.
I think we could well need the net 25m spend as an average over the next 7 years with so many top players reaching the end of their United careers. That said, I'm sure we'll make some more money selling off those that haven't made it - a couple of the young strikers for example, as well as whoever is in the pipeline.
Apparently Bosnich was signed by Edwards because he was a freebie and Fergie had to let him go years ago due to permit issues. Turns out Fergie hadn't really wanted him back at the club and made a point of signing another keeper. Obviously no sources on that but it was the grapevine news at the time.
Oldham have virtually no other revenue streams than match day traffic. They have to charge what they do to stay afloat. We've got the whole brand to flog globally. Subsidising cheaper seats at Old Trafford at the expense of dearer ones would be a good idea - upping the £49 to £60, while lowering the others in East and West Lower. Personally, I'd move the disabled section from where it is round to South Stand and have the two filled. The away fans where they are kills the atmosphere a bit too.
What other forms of major income do you believe, or more importantly, know that they've got that could service the PIKs?
Also, the £2.5bn revenue that you mentioned. I mentioned that we've got £1bn+ in debts to find in that period if we're to become debt free. Do you think that there are "only" £1.4bn ish of other costs in that period - is it realistic that we could clear the debts by 2017 and the Glazers could then milk the club at a level that everyone is more comfortable with?
Sounds feasible actually. Fergie stubborn to a fault and ends up buying a duffer!
I appreciate that but it does nothing for the "Glazers have priced out the core support" argument does it? Our cheapest tickets are not wildly over and above what people up the road have to pay to watch third tier football.
We get to watch top quality players, playing top quality football against top quality opposition week in and week out.
You get what you pay for and all that.
What it does show, as I have always said, is that football generally has become stupidly expensive across the board.
In an ideal world, we should be able to offer tickets at £15 and Oldham should be able to offer tickets at under a tenner.
We'll get it sorted!
FC United went into the 10th tier charging £7, a commonly accepted price at that level apparently...
Bury is £16 for League Two football yet Bayern is €15. Sounds like the whole country is a bit screwy over here.
I don't buy the get what you pay for argument. You pick a team and you stick with them. If you can't afford to go, don't go; don't change teams because one is cheaper than the other - it's not like getting a 24 pack of Fosters instead of Carling because it's cheaper.
Revenues under the Glazers have gone like this, as far as I am aware:-
2005/06 - £200million
2006/07 - £212million
2007/08 - £257million
2008/09 - £278million
2009/2010 - £300million????
Obviously, that is pretty spectacular growth - 50% (ish) over five years. We're not going to see that again (would be nice if we did though!).
I was working on a basis of around £300million for 7 years plus a minimum of inflationary growth which gives you not far off £2.5b. It was obviously a throwaway figure though. No one knows what the revenues will be by 2017. All kinds of things could happen between now and then.
It was just that interest payments of around £315million over the next seven years, taken in isolation, looks horrendous and I think you have to weigh it against what is likely to come in over the period in order to put it into some kind of perspective.
We don't have to find the £500million that the Bond has covered, this will be refinanced, perhaps with a further Bond Issue in 2017. There's no doubt about that whatsoever in my mind.
The thing you have to get your head around is that it is not the Glazers' intention to become "debt free". The very idea would seem ridiculous to them. Why bust your balls trying to find £500million when you can just increase revenues to cover the interest and forget about the principal amount?
If they had £500million sloshing around, they would probably use it as a down payment on other assets/businesses.
I just believe that the Glazers have personal wealth. They might not like to use it, they prefer not to expose their own money to risk and prefer to use Other People's Money as much as possible.
People like Anders would have us believe that because they don't use their own money to fund their businesses then that means that they have none.
I can't see it, personally. Malcom Glazer has been a businessman for the best part of seventy years, if he pops his clogs without leaving a bean, I'd be very surprised.
It doesn't look likely but there is always the option to sell the Buccs (or a part of it or whatever) too.
I just see how Anders likes to suggest that they have always been "lucky" - how they always seem to have "just enough" to scrape through by the skin of their teeth. I can accept a bit of luck here and there but when they continually enjoy so much luck and do the same thing over and over again, I have to wonder if some of it is accident or design.
They move money here, they refinance there - they just always seem to have options open to them and I believe that they know exactly what they're doing.
Maybe I'm giving them far too much credit though. Time will tell, I suppose.
They move money all right TMRD and all of it in one direction, out of Manchester United. Cant believe that GCHQ is predicting they could pay off the debt by 2017 I honestly didn't think I would laugh today and he claims to be a financial whizz kid, my god.
To be fair, I didn't say he had, but there seems to be a lot of money coming into the club - I was questioning whether we could become debt free.
Hopefully there will be legislation put in place soon to force clubs to reduce debt.
That's not what I meant at all.
I just meant that being a Manchester United supporter is a double-edged sword in a way.
On the one side, we have a fantastic squad of players that compete at the very highest level year in and year out but on the other hand, these players have to be paid for and they're not cheap. We have one of the highest wage bills in world football.
Would you prefer to pay less but have a lower quality team?
Personally, I think it's worth paying the extra to have a better squad but I'm probably one of those glory hunting gits who prefers to see United win games than lose them.
You said yourself that a 10th Tier team charges £7 a ticket. Would this not suggest that the better the team, the more you can expect to pay and vice versa?
I don't know how you get away with some of the things you say Crerand. If I said something like that, I'd have Joga Bonito onto me with a War & Peace sized post in ten seconds flat.
How can you sit there and say "all the money goes out of Manchester United"?
The wage bill alone is more than any money they have taken out of the club.
The vast majority of the money that comes into United, stays in United. Fact.
(Now look what you've done, you've made me go all Rafa again!)
Never said you had, I knew you were quoting GCHQ. It will be good for football when the debt regulations are enforced and I am hoping that loopholes, knowing FIFA, have not been left. The FA also needs to look at its proper person rules again to make sure that people like the Glazers cant buy into football clubs
Not necessarily. Each club has to price at a level that they feel is right for their fans while covering costs of running the team. In the 11th tier, you can pretty much walk into most games for free - Manchester Premier League games at places like Prestwich Heys for example. For one tier different to go from free to £7 is interesting.
I used to watch United home games stood on the Stretty in the late 80s then pop up to Bury with mates who were Shakers when United weren't at home. It was £2.50 on Stretford Terrace, £3 on the Manny Road End. Go figure.
Let me rephrase, all the money that they are able to take out. We are predicting £95m to pay their personal loan liability in the next set of accounts. Yes they have to pay their day to day bills but that is all they are doing
Get on it, Joga, time to save TMRD's skin like you said you would and tear Crerand a bible length arsehole!
Well, I'll have to stop you right there, I'm afraid. It's one or the other.
The wage bill is around £130million and matchday revenue is £110million at the moment.
As you can see, what we are being charged now doesn't even cover the cost of the team (transfer fees for new players aren't even included in that either, remember) but it is, apparently, still too high.
What I believe we have at the moment is a pricing system (supply and demand) that DOES attempt to discover what the fans "feel" is right but I'd still go along with what I said earlier about making some really cheap seats available - it's feasible.
I believe you could have bought United itself back then for less than £20million. Go figure, indeed. Times have changed, my friend. Whether for better or worse is up for debate in itself.
Now now
Once the PIK's are stabilised then the club will truly be financially secure; i thought that's what we wanted?
Brace yourself, fool, the Jogaman's gonna open up a whole can of whoop-ass on your narrow behind!
To be fair Crerand, the actual amounts they have taken out directly for themselves since 2005 have actually been relatively small. £13million if memory serves me correctly plus a £10million "loan" (whatever the hell that was).
The other money has gone on interest payments.
It certainly does look like they'll be making up for lost time this year, though.
I was thinking along those lines myself just then.
The Jogeyman is what we will now threaten all naughty posters with!
Manchester United will never be financially secure under the Glazers IMHO, look at their other business's, we are the only business they own that is cleaning its face and the money we make will always be siphoned off with as little investment as possible. You have to realise we are dealing with ruthless businessmen ( not even good at that either) not Manchester United fans or even soccer fans. They looked bored when they watch a match and cant wait to get their money bags filled and back on a plane to good old USA
You have to remember that the interest payments are for their debt and they and they alone are getting the benefit. What have the fans got ? Lost their best player, the ACS, increased ticket prices etc etc. Sorry I forgot we get one free beer and one free pie providing of course we drink an hour before the match. The beer is also terrible by the way
Wheres Bin laden when you really need him...
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