The Albion Roar - 12 Jan

[Mellor 3 Ward 4]

Hi Mackenzie, contrary to popular belief we do like NSC, and we welcome feedback, criticism and have implemented loads of good ideas from NSCers(including Dick's Bar at the Amex; and the Harvey's, as John Baine, Roy Chuter and Martin Perry will vouch). What isn't helpful is the misinformation, speculation etc. Fans can always email us to clarfiy, or use Ask the Club on this forum.

Also, just to clarify, the comment I made about the £40 prices, was actually based on a conversation I had at the gym on the Sunday after the game with a fan who had read about £40 tickets on Twitter. So it wasn't actually a dig at NSCers. Take the point re the booking fee too, which is fair enough, but tickets were available for £28, or £30 if you include one booking fee.

The key to all of it, is that we all work together, club, fans, staff... to take this club where we all want to go.

But it comes back to the cheapest tickets not always being available online, or even if you phone up.

I hope that when ST prices are discussed, it will be remembered that most of the working population have had minimal, if any pay rises and that the current rate of inflation is 2.6%

(unless we get prompted of course!)

 

[Fourteenth Eye]

Thanks for the feedback

Early heads up, we have Ian Hard & Mike Ward on next weeks show

 

[Bigbelly]

Thanks for the feedback

Early heads up, we have Ian Hard & Mike Ward on next weeks show

Hard? Who's he?

 

[Beach Hut]

Thanks for the feedback

Early heads up, we have Ian Hard & Mike Ward on next weeks show

Jesus standards are lowering, Mike Ward is a complete joke

 

[Deleted User X18H]

Thanks for the feedback

Early heads up, we have Ian Hard & Mike Ward on next weeks show

Hard? Who's he?

I think he might be an aroused Lenny Rider.

 

[Freddie Goodwin.]

Well 'ard?

 

[Fourteenth Eye]

Damn autocorrect

 

[The Large One]

The show is up on iTunes, though is unfortunately listed under the date of '12th January 2012', if you need to search it out...

 

[Brovion]

Hi Mackenzie, contrary to popular belief we do like NSC, and we welcome feedback, criticism and have implemented loads of good ideas from NSCers(including Dick's Bar at the Amex; and the Harvey's, as John Baine, Roy Chuter and Martin Perry will vouch). What isn't helpful is the misinformation, speculation etc. Fans can always email us to clarfiy, or use Ask the Club on this forum.

Also, just to clarify, the comment I made about the £40 prices, was actually based on a conversation I had at the gym on the Sunday after the game with a fan who had read about £40 tickets on Twitter. So it wasn't actually a dig at NSCers. Take the point re the booking fee too, which is fair enough, but tickets were available for £28, or £30 if you include one booking fee.

The key to all of it, is that we all work together, club, fans, staff... to take this club where we all want to go.

Fair enough, but the impression you gave on the radio was that it was just ill-informed internet users falsely reporting that "the tickets are £40 and that's all there is" whereas that information came from the club's own site! If the ticketing website is saying "Only £40 tickets available" you can't really complain when this fact gets repeated on other sites.

 

[Tony Meolas Loan Spell]

But it comes back to the cheapest tickets not always being available online, or even if you phone up.

I hope that when ST prices are discussed, it will be remembered that most of the working population have had minimal, if any pay rises and that the current rate of inflation is 2.6%

(unless we get prompted of course!)

Yep this. They should put all prices up on tinternet or offer ALL prices and let people choose. Not start with most expensive.

They do it at gigs/arenas where you select your spot/price SO WHY NOT US.

 

[MattBackHome]

Interesting point in TSLR about how Dicks and Harveys are always being flouted as examples of the club listening to NSC, but how many fans actually benefit from these: only the relative few that use them.*

I personally am right behind Barber (ooh err) on almost all decisions taken so far, and thought he came across very well in the interview. But I'm beginning to tire of the 'we listened to you and now you can drink Harveys' line. There are going to be more examples needed going forward if the club want to be seen as one which responds to our gripes and groans.

*Full disclosure: I DO drink Harvey's but don't use Dicks Bar.

 

[ngood77]

Firstly, hats off to the Albion Roar chaps for doing what they do week in, week out. We are very lucky to have this show.

Secondly, I fully accept that I'm an armchair warrior and, unless I get off my backside to do something about it, then my thoughts are a bit weakened down by this position.

Despite this (!)...a few ideas :-

1) I understand a balance has to be found so that guests like Paul B and C are not put off from coming back on the show but I can't help feel it was pretty much a platform for them to repeat ad infinitum their spin on what's happening at the moment. There was little robust challenge on most, if not all, points.

2) Would have been good to establish if the £8m 'loss' is purely operational i.e. solely revenue minus operating expenses, or whether this figure also includes any debt repayment to Bloom (or anybody else) or equity return/buyout.

3) Is the £8m figure the club's best, current estimate as to what our Fair Play Result would be ? Has it been verified by anybody independent yet ? Possibly not as the monitoring results for 2011-12 I don't think have taken place yet.

4) Does the £8m figure include any adjustment for equity investment and/or acceptable allowances, how close is it to what the club expect the Fair Play Result to be ?

5) As mentioned on other posts Insider's stance on the 'misinformation' re. Newc ticket prices was very disappointing (in a sea of usually fantastic engagement and interaction with the fans.). The clear message I took from the words and tone was that most fans live and act by what is said on NSC, and not the club itself ! Anybody who saw anything that suggested tickets were £40 and no cheaper in other parts of the ground, and then didn't actually check the club site themselves is silly at best. Insider was disingenuous to put partial blame on this 'misinformation' on non-club sources. 5,000 fans stayed away for various reasons, but all did so, I'm sure, after making sure they were properly informed of the cost of the game.

6) I think the club are using FFP too much as the reason/blame for the need to cut costs and increase revenues. They should be brave enough to say that we should be doing this anyway, purely from sound financial reasons, and not try and hide behind FFP. We should be doing these things as a club regardless of the existence of FFP. I think most fans would accept that.

Anyway, enough of me already. All intended in good, constructive spirit of course. You are all (Albion Roar, Paul B, Insider) doing great jobs, and we are very fortunate to be in this position, especially when compared to most other clubs. Gotta keep on challenging, though !

Cheers all.

 

[BHAFC_AMEX]

Was there any mention on how much season tickets will actually be going up by? I accept we need to make up some of our losses but IMO any significant increase would be unjustifiable unless we were in the premier league.

 

[Sergei's Celebration]

After all this time i have never figured out how to listen to it when i miss it live as i don't have iTunes. Now i do thanks TLO.

 

[The Large One]

Was there any mention on how much season tickets will actually be going up by? I accept we need to make up some of our losses but IMO any significant increase would be unjustifiable unless we were in the premier league.

No. Talking beforehand, I'm not sure they've actually decided yet.

 

[BHAFC_AMEX]

No. Talking beforehand, I'm not sure they've actually decided yet.

Ta, hopefully they'll be sensible about it.

 

[The Large One]

Firstly, hats off to the Albion Roar chaps for doing what they do week in, week out. We are very lucky to have this show.

Secondly, I fully accept that I'm an armchair warrior and, unless I get off my backside to do something about it, then my thoughts are a bit weakened down by this position.

Despite this (!)...a few ideas :-

1) I understand a balance has to be found so that guests like Paul B and C are not put off from coming back on the show but I can't help feel it was pretty much a platform for them to repeat ad infinitum their spin on what's happening at the moment. There was little robust challenge on most, if not all, points.

2) Would have been good to establish if the £8m 'loss' is purely operational i.e. solely revenue minus operating expenses, or whether this figure also includes any debt repayment to Bloom (or anybody else) or equity return/buyout.

3) Is the £8m figure the club's best, current estimate as to what our Fair Play Result would be ? Has it been verified by anybody independent yet ? Possibly not as the monitoring results for 2011-12 I don't think have taken place yet.

4) Does the £8m figure include any adjustment for equity investment and/or acceptable allowances, how close is it to what the club expect the Fair Play Result to be ?

5) As mentioned on other posts Insider's stance on the 'misinformation' re. Newc ticket prices was very disappointing (in a sea of usually fantastic engagement and interaction with the fans.). The clear message I took from the words and tone was that most fans live and act by what is said on NSC, and not the club itself ! Anybody who saw anything that suggested tickets were £40 and no cheaper in other parts of the ground, and then didn't actually check the club site themselves is silly at best. Insider was disingenuous to put partial blame on this 'misinformation' on non-club sources. 5,000 fans stayed away for various reasons, but all did so, I'm sure, after making sure they were properly informed of the cost of the game.

6) I think the club are using FFP too much as the reason/blame for the need to cut costs and increase revenues. They should be brave enough to say that we should be doing this anyway, purely from sound financial reasons, and not try and hide behind FFP. We should be doing these things as a club regardless of the existence of FFP. I think most fans would accept that.

Anyway, enough of me already. All intended in good, constructive spirit of course. You are all (Albion Roar, Paul B, Insider) doing great jobs, and we are very fortunate to be in this position, especially when compared to most other clubs. Gotta keep on challenging, though !

Cheers all.

You raise some interesting points...

With regard to point 1, you make it sound like those guests coming on to explain what is happening a bad thing. We give all our guests a free platform for comment.

You also appear to have pre-supposed that FFP isn't the big issue the club is claiming, and that in fact the club is over-playing its importance. Indeed, you called it 'spin'. Do you have any evidence to support your pre-supposition? If so, it would have been good to have heard it before we recorded the show (FFP has been in place for quite a while now), in order to know to ask the right questions.

In researching FFP (the information is freely available on t'interweb, and it is a brain-fryer to a non-accountant), I couldn't find anything to say that it's not important to the Albion, and to football in general. Therefore, in the absence of any information to infer that the club is lying, what sort of challenge would you expect the show to make? What sort of challenge to the club's assertion that FFP is important would you make now?

With regards point 2, as has been stated, the accounts are not with Companies House yet, so no-one knows how the figures were arrived at, and where the expenditure was. When they are lodged and published, there are several people on here who will go through them with a fine tooth comb, and ask the relevant questions. However, as has also been stated, Tony Bloom has not received a penny in repayment.

Point 3 - I'm not sure of the point you're making. The £8m deficit is the club's headline trading loss figure. At present, that figure falls within the rules of FFP. In two years, that figure of £8m wouldn't fall within the rules; the maximum allowed would be £5m. Paul Barber was very explicit on that, several times.

Point 4 - again, I'm not sure of the point you're making. But as it looks like an Accounts question, again, we'll have to wait for the published figures.

Point 5 - I don't disagree we could have challenged a bit more about the contention that the cheaper seats weren't so easy to find online.

Point 6 - No-one, it appeared to me, was trying to hide - or hide behind - anything. In fact, the fact that they stated where they're at at present smacks to me of a level of openness. If you're challenging their honesty, let us (or better stiil, them) know where and how you think they're spinning us. Of course the club should be striving for better efficiency - that's a given - but they've still got to find savings / higher income that is minimum £3m better than they're trading at at the moment.

Anyhoo, thanks for listening in, and for your comments.

 

[ngood77]

You raise some interesting points...

With regard to point 1, you make it sound like those guests coming on to explain what is happening a bad thing. We give all our guests a free platform for comment.

You also appear to have pre-supposed that FFP isn't the big issue the club is claiming, and that in fact the club is over-playing its importance. Indeed, you called it 'spin'. Do you have any evidence to support your pre-supposition? If so, it would have been good to have heard it before we recorded the show (FFP has been in place for quite a while now), in order to know to ask the right questions.

In researching FFP (the information is freely available on t'interweb, and it is a brain-fryer to a non-accountant), I couldn't find anything to say that it's not important to the Albion, and to football in general. Therefore, in the absence of any information to infer that the club is lying, what sort of challenge would you expect the show to make? What sort of challenge to the club's assertion that FFP is important would you make now?

With regards point 2, as has been stated, the accounts are not with Companies House yet, so no-one knows how the figures were arrived at, and where the expenditure was. When they are lodged and published, there are several people on here who will go through them with a fine tooth comb, and ask the relevant questions. However, as has also been stated, Tony Bloom has not received a penny in repayment.

Point 3 - I'm not sure of the point you're making. The £8m deficit is the club's headline trading loss figure. At present, that figure falls within the rules of FFP. In two years, that figure of £8m wouldn't fall within the rules; the maximum allowed would be £5m. Paul Barber was very explicit on that, several times.

Point 4 - again, I'm not sure of the point you're making. But as it looks like an Accounts question, again, we'll have to wait for the published figures.

Point 5 - I don't disagree we could have challenged a bit more about the contention that the cheaper seats weren't so easy to find online.

Point 6 - No-one, it appeared to me, was trying to hide - or hide behind - anything. In fact, the fact that they stated where they're at at present smacks to me of a level of openness. If you're challenging their honesty, let us (or better stiil, them) know where and how you think they're spinning us. Of course the club should be striving for better efficiency - that's a given - but they've still got to find savings / higher income that is minimum £3m better than they're trading at at the moment.

Anyhoo, thanks for listening in, and for your comments.

Hi TLO - thanks for replying. I'm assuming from your profile that you are a member of the Albion Roar team, in which case let me say again hats off to you for putting the show on the airwaves.

Some briefer comments from me this time...

1) I didn't intend to suggest it was a bad thing for guests like these to be coming on the show, of course it's not. It's a great opportunity for them to present their news, information, opinions etc. Likewise, it's also a great opportunity to constructively challenge the guests, and put to them questions from fans that they may not have covered in their broadcast. I do accept, if I had been aware of the show before yesterday, I could have sent my comments into you beforehand.
Also, I can't see how I have suggested that FFP is not important to the Albion, but clearly this has been perceived so, just to clarify, FFP is real, will happen, and the Albion have to abide by it. The point I was trying to make is that it appears, to me at least, that the club are 'blaming' the cost and revenue drives, solely on FFP. The club, as with all clubs, should be running the business in this way regardless of FFP being in place or not. They should be brave enough to admit as much, I think most of us would totally accept that.

2) Quite. So, it's a bit of a cheeky way of putting forward an argument by the club in the sense that they are telling us there is an £8m loss but yet there is no further detail behind it. If they have arrived at this figure then clearly there is much more detail available which they could have released now. Either give us all the detail now, or leave the announcements until they are available.
I was not aware that Bloom hasn't received any penny of his money back yet, so this confirms that the £8m loss does not contain any debt repayment, or servicing, to anyone ? Out of interest, could you point me to the source re. no repayment being made yet to Bloom ?

3) I'm not sure that Barber made it clear whether the £8m loss is the loss as normally understood by standard accounting, or whether it is the Fair Play Result i.e. the figure that would be used to judge our FFP position. It sounds like the former. They are not the same thing and, if the £8m is the standard understanding of loss, then we can't really say that this figure relates to the FFP thresholds we've got to keep within. The loss figure would be adjusted to take into account allowable equity investment, and acceptable allowances re. certain types of expenditure, to arrive at the Fair Play Result, which will then determine whether we would be sanctioned or not.

4) Covered in 3) above.

5) Ok.

6) Covered in 1) above.

All the best, and keep up the great work

 

[The Large One]

Also, I can't see how I have suggested that FFP is not important to the Albion, but clearly this has been perceived so, just to clarify, FFP is real, will happen, and the Albion have to abide by it. The point I was trying to make is that it appears, to me at least, that the club are 'blaming' the cost and revenue drives, solely on FFP. The club, as with all clubs, should be running the business in this way regardless of FFP being in place or not. They should be brave enough to admit as much, I think most of us would totally accept that.

I take the point I believe you're making (correct me if I'm wrong) that, if FFP didn't exist, the club might be prepared to trade at a 'sustainable' (for want of a better word) £8m annual loss until such time as we reach the Premiership, and that in the future FFP wouldn't allow that. Of course, FFP shouldn't be held up as the excuse - the club ought to be trading far more efficiently than that.

So while it's quite correct the club should always be more considerate in expenditure and more imaginative in acquring greater income (a central part of Barber's remit, I suppose, irrespective of FFP), the club has had a fairly drastic debt reduction target imposed upon it - though arguably much smaller than many, if not most, Championship clubs.

They can't reduce this deficit by, say, £500,000 a year - they have to do it by a minimum £1.5m a year. Of course it would be great to reduce the trading loss to zero, but not having seen the figures (not that I'd necessarily understand them if I did), it's not immediately obvious where those savings need to be made.

So I think that 'blaming' FFP is a bit cynical - it is what it is - though I guess it depends on your perspective.

 

[ngood77]

I think that 'blaming' FFP is a bit cynical - it is what it is - though I guess it depends on your perspective.

Ok, putting it a slightly different way, doesn't it come across as quite a media offensive to place all of the cost/revenue drive at the door of FFP ?

There were five pages in the programme yesterday all stamped with 'FFP', and the radio and print media has pretty much all centred around FFP.

It's a useful way of saying 'Hey, guys, look what is being imposed on us by external bodies. We can't do anything about it so don't complain about the actions we take.'

This is an ultra-cynical representation to help with the point, see what I mean ?