Air Asia in financial trouble

Couldn’t give a **** if other fans like us or not. Didn’t do us any good when we were lots of people’s second team or favourite London side or whatever. Would rather be like Millwall in that respect.

 

Any of the billionaires living on the White City estate would be fine. The lad with the permanently brand new tinted window Range Rover must be doing ok.

 

I bet he doesn't even wear socks

 

No one interested in a majority fan owned club then, like most German clubs? Not surprised, then we really would only have ourselves to blame when things went tits up, it’s great having a ready made scapegoat in the shape of ‘owners’ who can be accused of everything from not investing enough, interfering, picking the wrong manager, not understanding the club ‘culture’ (whatever that particular myth might be) or simply being a crook. Or foreign.

 

We would certainly need some members with coin. I’m out cause the Oz dollars buys almost half of yours. Maybe l can pay my way by being the new mascot.
We’d need to get rid of the DoF position.
No window dressing if we’re going to run a tight shop.
We’d certainly need someone savvy with working the balloon payments in our favour.
As long as we have big hoops, count me in!

 

Just move the club down here
Win the a league every year

 

Aren't we lucky we are no longer like Bury, Sheffield Wednesday, Wigan, Reading or Derby.

So our owners are not doing everything wrong.

Personally I think they made two big decisions....and appointed Lee Hoos and SLF....

And then listened to them

 

Fans having to make cold hard business decisions that will upset the fans? You'll never square that circle in an age of profligacy. We had a fan as an owner when Chris Wright bought out the 'Terrible Thompsons', we've never fully recovered. It makes the Thompson years look quite golden in comparison. As they say 'Be careful what you wish for'...

 

Any of our financially astute members make sense of this? Are we doing a good job of startimg to balance the books?

 

I would say that this is definitely progress

Cutting the level of wages vs turnover is critical, and this is happening

It is pretty scary how much of our income is TV derived still

The club is doing a good job of cutting debt too, and it is good to see that all debt is due to our owners rather that third parties

However, and this is still a concern, we continue to trade at a loss and an operating loss of a third of turnover is pretty bad. Ultimately to break even we either need to generate more income or cut costs further. The one bright spot here is that we do have some (for us at least!) Valuable players. If Eze was sold (hypothetically) for £20m that would be equivalent to over half of our 2019 turnover!

I'm guessing that these figures cover last (18/19) season - we don't know what the picture is for 19/20. Could be improved through further cost cuts but turnover could be down too

 

We've made a lot of progress. 2020 will look marginally better given it will include Freeman, Luongo, Furlong sales (Smithies? Can't remember when he went), and a number of high earners off the books. So expect that wage bill to be under £20m and transfer revenue of c.£8m. The problem is that we lose £12m in parachute payments. So the combined wage reduction and transfer fees only make up for that £12m reduction in parachute payments, leaving us where we were - an operating loss of £12m. Hence the need to sell our best and continue to reduce wages and develop players we can sell on.

Happy to stand corrected on any of the above but that's my reading of it.

 

Why did we stop arranging events like concerts, boxing at LR? Was it just because we couldn't play on the plastic pitch anymore. I'd have thought it could be done by covering the parts of the pitch in use, but I guess there are plenty of other venues around London that make it hard to do.

 

I don't know if this has been a conscious decision by our owners - I'm not sure how much profit these events might generate given the costs of staging them - or whether it is lack of opportunity. Loftus Road certainly isn't the best facility for non football events - cramped public areas and poor facilities - and there are undoubtedly much better locations elsewhere in London

 

I agree. Although things turned sour under Bernie and Flavio at least they bought Loftus Road back. If Tony was forced to sell I would hope that the Mittels would buy his stake, or at least some of it.

 

I remember watching the Barry Mcquigan fight on TV.