| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game 18:49 - Feb 15 with 31911 views | Rangersw12 |
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| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 19:19 - Feb 16 with 2365 views | RuislipHoop |
Good luck with that | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 02:30 - Feb 17 with 2173 views | Benny_the_Ball |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:16 - Feb 16 by distortR |
If you want to talk to businessmen etc on anything like a level footing, if you want them to take you seriously, I think it's important to present yourself well initially.
I would like our DoF and Hoos to admit their mistakes, and the lessons learned. Not in terms of public castigation, but in how we go forward.
I think the people who own our club are doing what they can, but they destroyed it in their initial phase and rebuilding to what we were, within the confines of FFP and geography.... |
Yeah it's so important to present yourself well when dealing with such a smooth operator and slick communicator like our DoF.
All jokes aside, the bottom line is Les and Lee are not owners, they are merely employees. They are paid to do the owners' bidding, including making excuses for failure. There is no way that they are going to jeopardise their jobs by criticising the owners in public.
If the LSA want answers then they should target the people that count. Ruben, Tony et al. |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 05:44 - Feb 17 with 2145 views | Dixie_CT |
What is the ask here? What will a meeting achieve?
A meeting will reveal nothing new that hasn't already been said by Lee and Les in their recent interviews, making this a waste of time.
Now If the LSA, or any other group, want a change of ownership, then that is a different matter and. would take more effort, energy, and commitment as they need to come up with an alternative.
If things do get that serious, then their are enough intelligent, articulate and informed people on this messageboard, and the wider fan base, to create and present a different solution (in keeping with both Lee/Les ‘what do you think/what should we do mantra) to the current plan.
However, that means a lot of work, more than arranging a meeting or a one-off protest. Doing anything more considered and long-term will be the acid test for this to move from just a bit of noise to campaigning for actual change.
That being said, action has to start from somewhere, and this could be it. Do something, do anything, but do something. Won't somebody think of the children? |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:30 - Feb 17 with 2053 views | PinnerPaul |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 18:46 - Feb 16 by daveB |
If you take that attitude though whats the point of any fan communication, why bother with fans forums.
We've clearly hit a crisis point so I don't see the harm in one of the supporters group asking a few questions to the people running the club. I doubt it will achieve anything but fair play to them for trying |
There's no harm Dave, but no point either in my view.
Club know how fans feel, club know about form, they know what we need to do short term....win.
What revelations are we expecting from a meeting? | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:35 - Feb 17 with 2039 views | PinnerPaul |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 06:50 - Feb 16 by BrianMcCarthy |
100% behind the LSA in asking for a meeting.
And if I wasn't, it wouldn't be because of their poor spelling. |
Fair/witty response Brian.
BUT if you turn up late for a job interview, scruffily dressed and your application is littered with errors, not really going to get the job are you?
As you know I'm not a great advocate of the players not trying theory, but even that is all about 'presentation', if they at least look like they are having a go - eg Sheff Utd, we're all happy.
The meeting seems to want reassurance that the owners 'care' - again really that's 'presentation' - so not too much to ask for a request for such a meeting to be 'presented' well is it? | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 with 2029 views | davman |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:30 - Feb 17 by PinnerPaul |
There's no harm Dave, but no point either in my view.
Club know how fans feel, club know about form, they know what we need to do short term....win.
What revelations are we expecting from a meeting? |
Can see both sides, but fundamentally, the owners own QPR (not "custodians" as some will wistfully claim), so it's up to them how to run the business. Us customers (and that is what we are, like it or not...) either put up or talk with our feet.
They are NOT going to be happy in any way shape or form with the direction this has all taken and will want to get it sorted as much as we do.
My hope is that they do not pull the financial plug as we will be screwed if that happens.
Asking the board to explain themselves is folly as they will only give answers they want to give; there won't be revelations or any change in direction. BUT, on the other hand, what more can we do?
(FWIW my view on this is that it is the football side that has failed and balancing the need for immediate success on a shoestring with a partially firing academy system is impossible especially when combined with a collapsed transfer market. A revamp is needed - think how much could be saved by binning off the Academy, which isn't pulling its weight to justify continuing). |  |
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| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 with 2032 views | Northernr |
We're in a really awkward situation here in that the problem, and the solution, is the owners.
The owners are incompetent. You only have to look at their record from the moment they got here, they don't know what they're doing. We had an incredible opportunity to cement our place at the top table just as the TV money was exploding again, and they blew it. We got a reprieve, and they blew that too. A catalogue of mistakes - binning Warnock, appointing Hughes, the money spent on wnkr footballers - that have got us into this position. Though it should be said there was plenty of support within the fanbase for everything they did at every turn. So, they're your problem, and if Les and Hoos go, Critchley goes, they're still here, they'll keep making mistakes because however well meaning they are, they're not very good at the job.
However...
They do pay for their mistakes. They pay for it every month to the tune of £1.8m every single month. And they don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what they actually mean is they want somebody to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us then we'd no longer be aa going concern as of the date of the next pay roll, because we can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying (£20m+) because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham, another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing.
A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things...
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys.
In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because it's a money pit.
I think, owner wise, we should be careful what we wish for and how we go about any protests.
This post has been edited by an administrator |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:06 - Feb 17 with 1980 views | distortR |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 02:30 - Feb 17 by Benny_the_Ball |
Yeah it's so important to present yourself well when dealing with such a smooth operator and slick communicator like our DoF.
All jokes aside, the bottom line is Les and Lee are not owners, they are merely employees. They are paid to do the owners' bidding, including making excuses for failure. There is no way that they are going to jeopardise their jobs by criticising the owners in public.
If the LSA want answers then they should target the people that count. Ruben, Tony et al. |
The letter is addressed to the board, though.
I'm not against the idea of a 'clear the air' meeting, whatever, I just think the initial approach should be a lot more professional. But yeah, it's by the by, really.
Brian - Cat A v Cat B, it may be harder to have players poached, and would allow us to do it to the other Cat B clubs, hmm.
But if we were Cat A and Arsenal came in for a 15 yr old, we say no - what then? I remember Dean Parrott's mum (Karli?) talking about the pressure put on her family by the 'bigger' clubs to get her son to leave us. | | | |
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| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:21 - Feb 17 with 1932 views | Dixie_CT |
Despite being a year old, I thought that this was a good article to understand our current turnover and expenditure:
https://gameofthepeople.com/2022/02/16/qpr-cut-their-losses-despite-matchday-hit
So £21m lost in the previous two seasons?
Can expect turnover to increase with post-covid gate receipts?
Based on the figures available, a predicted loss for 2021/22 of £8m?
Running total of £29m over three years? | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:29 - Feb 17 with 1909 views | PinnerPaul |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:21 - Feb 17 by Dixie_CT |
Despite being a year old, I thought that this was a good article to understand our current turnover and expenditure:
https://gameofthepeople.com/2022/02/16/qpr-cut-their-losses-despite-matchday-hit
So £21m lost in the previous two seasons?
Can expect turnover to increase with post-covid gate receipts?
Based on the figures available, a predicted loss for 2021/22 of £8m?
Running total of £29m over three years? |
That ties in with Simon's view that the problem is another year down the line. | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:48 - Feb 17 with 1863 views | Dixie_CT |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 by Northernr |
We're in a really awkward situation here in that the problem, and the solution, is the owners.
The owners are incompetent. You only have to look at their record from the moment they got here, they don't know what they're doing. We had an incredible opportunity to cement our place at the top table just as the TV money was exploding again, and they blew it. We got a reprieve, and they blew that too. A catalogue of mistakes - binning Warnock, appointing Hughes, the money spent on wnkr footballers - that have got us into this position. Though it should be said there was plenty of support within the fanbase for everything they did at every turn. So, they're your problem, and if Les and Hoos go, Critchley goes, they're still here, they'll keep making mistakes because however well meaning they are, they're not very good at the job.
However...
They do pay for their mistakes. They pay for it every month to the tune of £1.8m every single month. And they don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what they actually mean is they want somebody to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us then we'd no longer be aa going concern as of the date of the next pay roll, because we can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying (£20m+) because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham, another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing.
A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things...
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys.
In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because it's a money pit.
I think, owner wise, we should be careful what we wish for and how we go about any protests.
This post has been edited by an administrator |
Great perspective.
A couple of Qs/thoughts:
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
So the shareholders are putting in £22m per year for us to just tread water in our current position. Surely that isn't sustainable for many clubs at our level and the wages aren't in keeping with the revenue available in the Championship unless you have parachute payments.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
Could this be negotiated for the shareholders to pay off ahead of any takeover
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
What happened to the bonds? My impression was that this model made a big dent in cost to the club and how other clubs have financed similar developments. Either way, another point to negotiate with.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
Are we? Using the above, it looks like there is wiggle room for investment but I don't fully understand the fill picture.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
Not attractive and anyone who suggests this should look at the evidence of others who have tried it. Plus your pitching against clubs with more income, especially those with parachute payments.
Is the punishment based on how much you breach the limits or is it incrementally based on how much?
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
This is a big point. The breakdown in relationship is partly the clubs fault, especially individuals who have not been able to build a relationship with the local authorities hierarchy. However knowing H & F as I do, they are tricky customers; egotistical and behaving with a fair degree of omnipotence.
Even if H & F yield tomorrow and give the green light for a stadium at Linford Christe, that is still a huge bill to pay and selling Loftus Road won't cover much (25%?) of the cost.
One thing linked to the stadium which has gone super quiet, was our investment in property development at Oaklands. What is the current situation with this and who owns this? | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:52 - Feb 17 with 1853 views | joe90 |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:48 - Feb 17 by Dixie_CT |
Great perspective.
A couple of Qs/thoughts:
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
So the shareholders are putting in £22m per year for us to just tread water in our current position. Surely that isn't sustainable for many clubs at our level and the wages aren't in keeping with the revenue available in the Championship unless you have parachute payments.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
Could this be negotiated for the shareholders to pay off ahead of any takeover
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
What happened to the bonds? My impression was that this model made a big dent in cost to the club and how other clubs have financed similar developments. Either way, another point to negotiate with.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
Are we? Using the above, it looks like there is wiggle room for investment but I don't fully understand the fill picture.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
Not attractive and anyone who suggests this should look at the evidence of others who have tried it. Plus your pitching against clubs with more income, especially those with parachute payments.
Is the punishment based on how much you breach the limits or is it incrementally based on how much?
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
This is a big point. The breakdown in relationship is partly the clubs fault, especially individuals who have not been able to build a relationship with the local authorities hierarchy. However knowing H & F as I do, they are tricky customers; egotistical and behaving with a fair degree of omnipotence.
Even if H & F yield tomorrow and give the green light for a stadium at Linford Christe, that is still a huge bill to pay and selling Loftus Road won't cover much (25%?) of the cost.
One thing linked to the stadium which has gone super quiet, was our investment in property development at Oaklands. What is the current situation with this and who owns this? |
Reading this thread is like groundhog day.
The same questions are being asked and the same answers are being given.
Nothing is going to change unless we completely change the structure of the club or the EFL rules change.
The majority of people can't face the reality of the first option and the second option isn't likely to happen anytime soon. |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:56 - Feb 17 with 1820 views | Northernr |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:21 - Feb 17 by Dixie_CT |
Despite being a year old, I thought that this was a good article to understand our current turnover and expenditure:
https://gameofthepeople.com/2022/02/16/qpr-cut-their-losses-despite-matchday-hit
So £21m lost in the previous two seasons?
Can expect turnover to increase with post-covid gate receipts?
Based on the figures available, a predicted loss for 2021/22 of £8m?
Running total of £29m over three years? |
If we only lost £8m last season, then we don't have a problem.
The £21m loss over the previous two seasons includes a season when we only lost £4m, and we only lost £4m that season because we sold Eze. Take that Eze fee out and the loss increases by £20m, which is much closer to where the loss is going to be for last season IMO but we'll soon find out. | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:38 - Feb 17 with 1733 views | Esox_Lucius |
Currently extrinsic to this particular debate, but likely to become a factor in the future is the push from the government for an independent football financial monitoring body which the FA and chairmen of the clubs are pushing hard against. In an effort to clean up their own mess we have seen Chelsea's transfer model sanctioned and altered, we have 100 charges of Man City breaching financial rules about to occupy the sports pages for a long time and others in the pipeline. Now would not be a good time to be looking for potentially illegal loopholes in the current FFP regulations as has been suggested on various SM platforms. |  |
| The grass is always greener. |
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| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:45 - Feb 17 with 1704 views | daveB |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:30 - Feb 17 by PinnerPaul |
There's no harm Dave, but no point either in my view.
Club know how fans feel, club know about form, they know what we need to do short term....win.
What revelations are we expecting from a meeting? |
The point is the LSA are trying to defuse the situation and avoid people in the streets, banners etc screaming for everyone to be sacked like we did under Thompson and partly under Flavio which wouldn't end well as Clive points out on this thread |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:46 - Feb 17 with 1703 views | Blue_Castello |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:52 - Feb 17 by joe90 |
Reading this thread is like groundhog day.
The same questions are being asked and the same answers are being given.
Nothing is going to change unless we completely change the structure of the club or the EFL rules change.
The majority of people can't face the reality of the first option and the second option isn't likely to happen anytime soon. |
Very true but I think it's important that people see the facts in black and white because on Tuesday night there were some Muppets behind us in R block singing sack the board, now I don't know if they can read but if they can then they need to see Clive's very informative information, which we all knew but some people are just totally blind to the reality, in their defence they didn't know what else to sing and were as disappointed as everybody else in the ground.
Must admit when I read everybody saying the owners are incompetent that filters through to the masses and they don't read the finer detail just the headline. There is absolutely no disputing the owners made mistakes during their initial tenure, they were blinded by the bright lights of the Premiership and the profile it gave to the club worldwide. The first massive mistake was hiring Phil Beard to run a football club a man with no experience of the intricacies involved, a man who had some decent project management experience but then to be honest so have I, he just said yes to everything but then the owners obviously gave him free rein and didn't say there were budget limitations. The hiring of Hughes and Redcrap was a total disaster as we all know now, hindsight is a great leveller, at the time there were plenty of people on this board excited by the new managers and the big name signings.
So we just kept spending money like it was no tomorrow in the hope we could stay in the Premiership, never any thought about relegation and the consequences , the final straw as I remember was Redcrap buying Sandro who was past his sell by date for £8 million and a crock to boot, honest Harry then wanted more players and finally Tony said No mate the cupboards bare, with that Harry developed dodgy knees as he's not a coach and only knows how to spend money to bail himself out of mistakes.
That's the point where Fernandes got himself a DOF and a CEO to run the football club properly but by then we were in deep doo doo and just waiting for our overspending punishment.
Since 2015 the football club on the Finance front has been run very sensibly , we have got Burnleys ex CEO doing three year projections on spreadsheets to try and keep the books balanced, something that should have happened virtually from the start of the current owners tenure. So my gut feeling is that the owners made massive mistakes at the beginning and they have owned up to those and are paying massively from their own funds for their mistakes, but I don't think they are incompetent, they are successful businessman who have invested heavily in a London football team and have appointed people to run the club in their absence.
From a purely selfish point of view I don't want to see the owners walk away, I've invested in the Bond and the only way any of us get our money back is if the current owners keep funding the madhouse of a club we all grew up with, other people have mentioned the Bond on this thread but for clarity it's just an Investment vehicle backed by the owners and will pay out all the time the club has rich benefactors as owners..... [Post edited 17 Feb 2023 10:07]
| | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:55 - Feb 17 with 1683 views | Monkey_Roots |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 by Northernr |
We're in a really awkward situation here in that the problem, and the solution, is the owners.
The owners are incompetent. You only have to look at their record from the moment they got here, they don't know what they're doing. We had an incredible opportunity to cement our place at the top table just as the TV money was exploding again, and they blew it. We got a reprieve, and they blew that too. A catalogue of mistakes - binning Warnock, appointing Hughes, the money spent on wnkr footballers - that have got us into this position. Though it should be said there was plenty of support within the fanbase for everything they did at every turn. So, they're your problem, and if Les and Hoos go, Critchley goes, they're still here, they'll keep making mistakes because however well meaning they are, they're not very good at the job.
However...
They do pay for their mistakes. They pay for it every month to the tune of £1.8m every single month. And they don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what they actually mean is they want somebody to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us then we'd no longer be aa going concern as of the date of the next pay roll, because we can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying (£20m+) because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham, another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing.
A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things...
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys.
In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because it's a money pit.
I think, owner wise, we should be careful what we wish for and how we go about any protests.
This post has been edited by an administrator |
You just laid it all out there.
Really informative.
Put it on Twitter Clive, there's a lot of education needed on there, amongst QPR fans, about our financial plight. |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:55 - Feb 17 with 1682 views | Northernr |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:55 - Feb 17 by Monkey_Roots |
You just laid it all out there.
Really informative.
Put it on Twitter Clive, there's a lot of education needed on there, amongst QPR fans, about our financial plight. |
I'm long past engaging with people on Twitter. Links and jokes only on there. Like walking into a room full of people that hate me. | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 10:20 - Feb 17 with 1643 views | daveB |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:55 - Feb 17 by Monkey_Roots |
You just laid it all out there.
Really informative.
Put it on Twitter Clive, there's a lot of education needed on there, amongst QPR fans, about our financial plight. |
was told on twitter yesterday that there would be loads of people wanting to buy as we are in London | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 10:30 - Feb 17 with 1609 views | Wegerles_Stairs |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 10:20 - Feb 17 by daveB |
was told on twitter yesterday that there would be loads of people wanting to buy as we are in London |
There is truth in that; we're one good season away from being a London-based Premier League club. For all the factors Clive has listed, the main one is they're incompetent, which will never change. With them in charge, we will keep getting everything wrong. All it takes is someone to come in with some brains, football smarts and a plan, and we shouldn't keep ruling out that prospect simply because the current owners have spaffed everything up the wall. | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 10:37 - Feb 17 with 1603 views | kernowhoop |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 by Northernr |
We're in a really awkward situation here in that the problem, and the solution, is the owners.
The owners are incompetent. You only have to look at their record from the moment they got here, they don't know what they're doing. We had an incredible opportunity to cement our place at the top table just as the TV money was exploding again, and they blew it. We got a reprieve, and they blew that too. A catalogue of mistakes - binning Warnock, appointing Hughes, the money spent on wnkr footballers - that have got us into this position. Though it should be said there was plenty of support within the fanbase for everything they did at every turn. So, they're your problem, and if Les and Hoos go, Critchley goes, they're still here, they'll keep making mistakes because however well meaning they are, they're not very good at the job.
However...
They do pay for their mistakes. They pay for it every month to the tune of £1.8m every single month. And they don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what they actually mean is they want somebody to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us then we'd no longer be aa going concern as of the date of the next pay roll, because we can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying (£20m+) because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham, another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing.
A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things...
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys.
In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because it's a money pit.
I think, owner wise, we should be careful what we wish for and how we go about any protests.
This post has been edited by an administrator |
Well put, Clive. Sadly, most fans will not want to read that analysis. As for the owners, they will be looking continuously at ways to get out of the fix that the club is in. But, the answers are hard to find and there is no strategy that is a dead-cert winner. | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 11:12 - Feb 17 with 1540 views | joe90 |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 09:46 - Feb 17 by Blue_Castello |
Very true but I think it's important that people see the facts in black and white because on Tuesday night there were some Muppets behind us in R block singing sack the board, now I don't know if they can read but if they can then they need to see Clive's very informative information, which we all knew but some people are just totally blind to the reality, in their defence they didn't know what else to sing and were as disappointed as everybody else in the ground.
Must admit when I read everybody saying the owners are incompetent that filters through to the masses and they don't read the finer detail just the headline. There is absolutely no disputing the owners made mistakes during their initial tenure, they were blinded by the bright lights of the Premiership and the profile it gave to the club worldwide. The first massive mistake was hiring Phil Beard to run a football club a man with no experience of the intricacies involved, a man who had some decent project management experience but then to be honest so have I, he just said yes to everything but then the owners obviously gave him free rein and didn't say there were budget limitations. The hiring of Hughes and Redcrap was a total disaster as we all know now, hindsight is a great leveller, at the time there were plenty of people on this board excited by the new managers and the big name signings.
So we just kept spending money like it was no tomorrow in the hope we could stay in the Premiership, never any thought about relegation and the consequences , the final straw as I remember was Redcrap buying Sandro who was past his sell by date for £8 million and a crock to boot, honest Harry then wanted more players and finally Tony said No mate the cupboards bare, with that Harry developed dodgy knees as he's not a coach and only knows how to spend money to bail himself out of mistakes.
That's the point where Fernandes got himself a DOF and a CEO to run the football club properly but by then we were in deep doo doo and just waiting for our overspending punishment.
Since 2015 the football club on the Finance front has been run very sensibly , we have got Burnleys ex CEO doing three year projections on spreadsheets to try and keep the books balanced, something that should have happened virtually from the start of the current owners tenure. So my gut feeling is that the owners made massive mistakes at the beginning and they have owned up to those and are paying massively from their own funds for their mistakes, but I don't think they are incompetent, they are successful businessman who have invested heavily in a London football team and have appointed people to run the club in their absence.
From a purely selfish point of view I don't want to see the owners walk away, I've invested in the Bond and the only way any of us get our money back is if the current owners keep funding the madhouse of a club we all grew up with, other people have mentioned the Bond on this thread but for clarity it's just an Investment vehicle backed by the owners and will pay out all the time the club has rich benefactors as owners..... [Post edited 17 Feb 2023 10:07]
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We're just going around in circles. The information is there for anyone that wants it.
We all know why we're in this situation, we all know that any attempts to move the club forward comes with risks. Meeting with the board is a waste of time. As I've said, they'll just say what has been said a million times before.
If anyone is serious about sending a message to the club cancel your season ticket. The only leverage fans have is the money they put into the club. Nobody cares if your family are 20 generations deep into supporting the club, if you don't pay you're irrelevant. [Post edited 17 Feb 2023 13:19]
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| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 11:30 - Feb 17 with 1495 views | Dixie_CT |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 08:56 - Feb 17 by Northernr |
If we only lost £8m last season, then we don't have a problem.
The £21m loss over the previous two seasons includes a season when we only lost £4m, and we only lost £4m that season because we sold Eze. Take that Eze fee out and the loss increases by £20m, which is much closer to where the loss is going to be for last season IMO but we'll soon find out. |
Thanks, Clive.
By my maths, that means we have exceeded £39m.
Shucks! | | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 11:57 - Feb 17 with 1450 views | Padulas_Shampoo |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:42 - Feb 17 by Northernr |
We're in a really awkward situation here in that the problem, and the solution, is the owners.
The owners are incompetent. You only have to look at their record from the moment they got here, they don't know what they're doing. We had an incredible opportunity to cement our place at the top table just as the TV money was exploding again, and they blew it. We got a reprieve, and they blew that too. A catalogue of mistakes - binning Warnock, appointing Hughes, the money spent on wnkr footballers - that have got us into this position. Though it should be said there was plenty of support within the fanbase for everything they did at every turn. So, they're your problem, and if Les and Hoos go, Critchley goes, they're still here, they'll keep making mistakes because however well meaning they are, they're not very good at the job.
However...
They do pay for their mistakes. They pay for it every month to the tune of £1.8m every single month. And they don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what they actually mean is they want somebody to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us then we'd no longer be aa going concern as of the date of the next pay roll, because we can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying (£20m+) because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham, another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing.
A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things...
1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far.
2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly installments.
3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development.
4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because it's right on the FFP line already.
5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back.
6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at leats ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators.
That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys.
In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because it's a money pit.
I think, owner wise, we should be careful what we wish for and how we go about any protests.
This post has been edited by an administrator |
Lovely stuff, thanks.
By counter-point - Wasn't the switch to the DoF model and the appointment of Les their recognition that they don't know what they're doing? And wasn't Les charged with sorting the football side out under an entirely new budgetary approach? That's how I perceived it anyway.
If that was the idea / strategy then aren't we in a far clearer situation whereby we have owners that are able and willing to swallow inevitable losses, a modest budget relative to competitors and a football operation which has failed for years on end save for a few bright spots (Eze, basically)?
If so, surely the moving part that needs to be held accountable - and therefore changed - is the Director of Football, isn't it? |  | | |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 12:55 - Feb 17 with 1347 views | BrianMcCarthy |
| Potential LSA Protest Blackburn game on 07:35 - Feb 17 by PinnerPaul |
Fair/witty response Brian.
BUT if you turn up late for a job interview, scruffily dressed and your application is littered with errors, not really going to get the job are you?
As you know I'm not a great advocate of the players not trying theory, but even that is all about 'presentation', if they at least look like they are having a go - eg Sheff Utd, we're all happy.
The meeting seems to want reassurance that the owners 'care' - again really that's 'presentation' - so not too much to ask for a request for such a meeting to be 'presented' well is it? |
Fair comments, Paul. |  |
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