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Investment thread
- Thread starter ghost of hughie reed
- Start date
I think that's a different argument when the chairman has made clear from day dot that he will not preside over a club spending money it doesn't have. If that's too bad, you're probably better off going to support Manchester City at this point.
Finn Azaz is earning anywhere between £1.6 million and £3.5 million Pounds a year at Middlebrough, depending on who you read on here or talk to in the concourse at Rotherham. That's essentially a different sport to the one we're playing.
Your idea of taking £5 million from the Brickfields plans would pay for slightly more than one Championship player's transfer fee and wages for a single season. And at the end of that season, then what?
EDIT: Should have said good luck to Finn Azaz, he deserves every bit of whatever sum he's getting.
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Agreed. Not to mention that if we tried to match boro's wages, what would the likes of Morgan, Ryan, Coops, Bali and Gibson think about it? They'd all want higher wages.
Getting relegated wouldn’t be a disaster for us in the same way that it would be for a Birmingham or a QPR. We currently have the financial clout to be a yo-yo club like Rotherham. That isn’t me being defeatist or me saying that I want us to go down, I’m desperate to see us stay up, but that’s about where we are at the moment, we need a dose of realism.
At the Tesco down the road from the hotel I stayed at in Rotherham, the guy serving me said "we're down, we've been down since September, we're a yo-yo club" and he didn't seem like it was the end of the world. Same with the people I spoke to in the pub later on. It's not about ambition, passion or any of those things, it's just how the world is for now.
As you say Cobi, we're all desperate for Argyle to stay up, but the long term journey is more important than one season.
I don’t think it’s black or white though.
It isn’t “spend money we don’t have” or “have a small budget that is balanced”.
They aren’t the two only possible options.
A bigger budget and a longer time frame for the Brickfields development would have been an option.
Clearly Azaz would have been out of reach but we would have been able to invest in a number 10 and striker that would have kept us up.
Rotherham have been promoted or relegated 7 of the last 8 seasons. That is a lack of ambition.
I don’t know what they’ve tried but why aren’t they improving like Luton, Brentford, Sheff Utd etc.
They don't have the money, just like Argyle don't have the money. How is it a lack of ambition when real life dictates that you can't just spend things that do not exist?!
Look at the insane sums people spend in this league to tread water. WBA with their £46 million wage bill to finish ninth last season, Blackburn with their £173 million cumulative losses over the last decade to go backwards.
Look at how mad it is at the bottom of the table. Nobody can say anything "would have kept us up" when it changes so much game to game.
This number 10 and striker would have cost millions that the club doesn't have, what do you propose to buy them with? It has to come from somewhere.
But in Argyle’s case we are the last sleeping giant. We could dominate the football landscape across the entire SW. We are potentially very attractive to investors.
My point is that within his 5 year reign I’m disappointed that SH hasn’t managed to find someone prepared to drive the club further forward to its potential.
I accept no chairman before him has managed this either but note how Brentford, Luton, Burnley etc have managed to drive forward.
You lost me with the initial post I saw when you said Simon Hallett's failure to find a new investor was a stain on his tenure, but this sleeping giant talk idea is not even credible enough to be a fantasy.
Where are the people who care about dominating the entire football landscape in the south west that have the resources to make it happen? He has said many times that people enquire about buying the club all the time, but he won't just let anyone come on board. How many other clubs do you have to witness go the way of Reading to realise how lucky it is to have this man as the chairman of your club?
Why do they need to improve?
What's so great about the premiership - a league with 3 distinct divisions in it?
There is too much money in football, and it is concentrated at the top of the pyramid. Clubs are financially ruining themselves chasing a dream they have no hope of sustaining. Why bother then, if the financial commitments are ruinous and the rewards so little? It doesn't make any sense to me. Rather have a yo-yoing sustainable club than one that bankrupts itself on every level (not just financially) to get into a division that isn't actually that beneficial to anyone outside of the top 5 clubs in the country.
Yes. He is a good chairman.
I’m disappointed that he hasn’t found the resources to drive us forward. Ipswich have shown what can be done.
Check out some of the owners of the clubs you just mentioned.
Sheffield United - one of the most important people in Saudi Arabia
Brentford - Very well run but it helps that Matthew Benham has a net worth 4 times that of Simon Hallett.
Luton - the exception in that they haven't got an owner vastly wealthier than the Hallett's and probably the model the follow but even they significantly increased wages and spending to levels that would be unsustainable if they didn't get promoted:
I'm sure both Argyle and Rotherham would be more than happy to accept outside investment if it presented itself.
However, there seems to be an assumption from some people that there's a queue of rich people just willing to throw away millions at a football club. Plus any investment would likely come with some significant strings attached.
Likewise another assumption is that there's excellent players just out there in January that could have been signed by Argyle unopposed for reasonable cost.
Does running the club massively into debt, spending money on players for the sake of it (Kenny Cooper comes to mind) or accepting money from an investor who doesn't have the best interest of the club in mind show ambition?
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