Morecambe 1 [Brown] FGR 2 LIVE thread

[redrobo]

People have short memories.

Before Derek, we were regularly just keeping above the drop zone, attendances were falling year on year, sponsorship/advertising/hospitality revenues were falling, etc. Jim may have been a sound bloke but the club was stagnant and declining. The club was selling off land just to finance the losses! Jason/Colin didn't put shedloads of money in - their money was spent on buying the shares from Lemos/Carlos/Abdul/PMG and on repaying loans. Player wages budget only slightly increased when Jason/Colin took over.

Would be interesting to try and find out the actual amount of money involved....but doubt there is any info that can be found that is not classified as being confidential.

IF a figure can be found it may go some way to guess estimate the current asking price as Jason / Colin will want that amount plus significant interest back.

[shrimpsontoast]

Our lot is going to improve in one of two ways. (1) Wait for someone to come with a big pot of money and pay JW what he wants. (2) Try to get us as close to self sufficiency as possible so that reliance on the owner is limited. 1 is not within our control (or the club’s) and we might be waiting until the first of never. The second is within the control of the club to some extent, but for the reasons Ken gives, entering the spiral of low expectations is absolutely not the way to go about it. We went around that loop previously with Jim until the directors / owners quite sensibly drew a line under it. On the manager front, the options are binary: “stick” or “twist”. Based on what we’ve seen in the entended interview of c30 games, stick is starting to look like a big gamble - can the club afford to take it? This VAT issue is obviously entirely unrelated and is an existential concern and it may be that the club ultimately has to resort to the begging bucket if it can’t get the money back from wherever it went. First port of call with that would be JW, but is he morally obliged to pay up? Does it matter who dropped the ball? (unlikely to be JW in that case I would have thought, assuming that he doesn’t involve himself in the day to day management of the club). Remember the club did decide to go “hostile” with its statement of no confidence re the takeover…

[shrimpsontoast]

Maybe on the other hand JW does instruct the directors to do certain things and that puts them in a very difficult position. It’s impossible to know.

[Keith]

We went around that loop previously with Jim until the directors / owners quite sensibly drew a line under it. On the manager front, the options are binary: “stick” or “twist”. Based on what we’ve seen in the entended interview of c30 games, stick is starting to look like a big gamble - can the club afford to take it? This VAT issue is obviously entirely unrelated and is an existential concern and it may be that the club ultimately has to resort to the begging bucket if it can’t get the money back from wherever it went. First port of call with that would be JW, but is he morally obliged to pay up? Does it matter who dropped the ball? (unlikely to be JW in that case I would have thought, assuming that he doesn’t involve himself in the day to day management of the club). Remember the club did decide to go “hostile” with its statement of no confidence re the takeover…

You're skipping over COVID. The way football was supported financially, and playing in front of empty stadiums, the entire League became more levelled out. And, arguably, playing away from home, in an empty stadium, was helpful to smaller clubs. Morecambe FC were probably much better off during the first season back, during the pandemic, without fans, than they are now.

We're not just back to Jim's days, we're even worse than that.

[BerlinWaller]

Agree with you 100% Keith. I can't believe what some people expect in the situation we are in.

I honestly believe some of our fans prefer it this way. They prefer to support a club with no ambition and enjoy the misery of the sob stories. We must have the most morbid fans in the country.

Derek dragged this club and it's fans in to League 1 and they weren't happy about it. One of our Chairmen said he would have given Jim a 6 year contract before he left, imagine 6 more years of that?

The dog poo picking, the constant twining about budgets and owners. It's depressing but some revel in it.

Show me the difference in budgets in Jims last season and Dereks first. Show me the facilities Derek had that were better than the ones Jim used?

[shrimpsontoast]

Not sure i understand the relevance of covid here. The club had gone stale and was sliding into the abyss in the last couple of seasons under Jimbo, hardly anyone wanted to come and watch and there was little hope of a brighter tomorrow because the objective each year was to finish third bottom. The board did something about it by not renewing the contract and Derek came in with some ambition (a fine choice by the board, they did superbly well to get him). Yes Derek may have had some luck with COVID (Berlin I think Keith probably means that larger clubs had their income reduced by more than we did and so the financial gap narrowed briefly), but he really did make the most of it, didn’t he? Do you think if Jimbo had been in place during covid, he would have said at the start of that promotion season “this is a fantastic opportunity to get promoted, let’s go and grab it” (seems very unlikely to me) Would you and others have demanded more of him if he hadn’t?