All play suspended
- Thread starter The Blobster
- Start date
I fancy us to beat them again.
Your probably right ivor. We've sold a lot of good players since then.
Behindthegoal
Key Player
I had a heartwarming phone call today from Lee Trundle who is calling senior season ticket holders. He asked if I was all right and was there anything he could do. I wasn’t expecting that!
That was a nice surprise, BtG. Anything he could do? He could make a comeback when we get playing again. We'll need all hands to the pumps with a lot of games to play in a short period of time. He'd be better than an unproven youngster and stranger things have happened! Mind you, I'm hoping that Liam Cullen will get a few games under his belt as well.
Yankee_Jack
Key Player
Rick Parry: English Football League clubs face '£200m hole' by September
We are getting close. Chickens are coming home to roost. Choose your cliche ... the shit is about to hit the fan. The link summarizes quite tightly the issues on the table, under the table, hovering around the table. Clubs are going to fold. Player contracts terminate by end of July; so no current season play is possible past that point. EPL is equivocating on the relegating the current bottom three clubs and permitting promotion from the Championship ... if this happens the lawyers are going to get rich quick.
I said here (All play suspended) back on March 13 that the season is done and that we're not going to play again. Nobody in authority seems to have the balls to state the obvious and inevitable and grapple with the natural repercussions ... yet, but again the shit is on the shovel and the fan is spinning.
We are getting close. Chickens are coming home to roost. Choose your cliche ... the shit is about to hit the fan. The link summarizes quite tightly the issues on the table, under the table, hovering around the table. Clubs are going to fold. Player contracts terminate by end of July; so no current season play is possible past that point. EPL is equivocating on the relegating the current bottom three clubs and permitting promotion from the Championship ... if this happens the lawyers are going to get rich quick.
I said here (All play suspended) back on March 13 that the season is done and that we're not going to play again. Nobody in authority seems to have the balls to state the obvious and inevitable and grapple with the natural repercussions ... yet, but again the shit is on the shovel and the fan is spinning.
Yankee_Jack
Key Player
This situation ... clearly seeing the inevitable and it not looking pretty ... reminds me of a day at the circus when I was a kid.
Billy Smart's circus would come to town and setup on the old recreation field just down from St Helens. It was a tented circus - the big top - with a single ring in the old tradition ... lions, bears, elephants, clowns, trapeze etc.
Around the ring were the box seats ... where the rich people sat. Outside that ring of box seats was a circular walk way and then the bleacher seats, where I was sitting high up .... thankfully.
During the elephant act, there were a series of pods placed around the ring. The band would play some waltz and the elephants would do a pirouette, walk a few steps forward around the ring to the next pod, sit on the pod, raise their fore limbs and trunk up in the air, get up and repeat.
Well in front of where I was sitting there was a pod. As the elephant got up from the pod it dumped a load ... right on the pod. A steaming pile of elephant dung. The elephants marched around and the next elephant to reach the pod sat, and not being a nimble fellow, slammed his arse down hard onto the pod. A shower of shit squirted out under extremely high pressure and coated those in the near box seats. It was a "shit show" of biblical proportion.
Of course, as the inevitable disaster approached, the sense of abject panic in the box seats and gasp of OMG from those of us in the bleachers was palpable. Some box seaters reacted, ducked or escaped just in time ... but the majority froze ... hopefully with mouths shut ... and were caught in the tsunami of effluent that came their way.
###
An apropos and unfortunately for the box seaters true story.
So here we are! Clubs, competitions and governing bodies have the box seats. The next elephant is on its way. And there's a steaming pile of virus induced shit right in front them. All that remains to be seen is who escapes, who ducks, and who gets a mouthful. I wonder where the agents, players and media/broadcast people are sitting.
I can see a path forward for the premier leagues in each country with good television support. They can play games behind close doors, operate a tight seclusion and testing regimen on the squads, and generate some revenue from the broadcast of these games. Clubs in the lower levels are basically cooked. Maybe it will be possible for the Championship clubs to survive playing games behind closed doors; selling video season tickets as the Swans have this past season; capturing a broad audience. But for clubs unable to do that and are absolutely dependent on match day revenue within / around the stadium, it's over! If they can't go into hibernation until the threat of contagion passes and proven vaccines are available on mass, they are out of business.
Football in the 2020's is going to be massively different. Pyramids will crumble and fall. The next two years will be a depression within which war like casualties will be taken for people and businesses. Players not able to get a place in a premier squad will have to get a job. Academies are going to fold.
Billy Smart's circus would come to town and setup on the old recreation field just down from St Helens. It was a tented circus - the big top - with a single ring in the old tradition ... lions, bears, elephants, clowns, trapeze etc.
Around the ring were the box seats ... where the rich people sat. Outside that ring of box seats was a circular walk way and then the bleacher seats, where I was sitting high up .... thankfully.
During the elephant act, there were a series of pods placed around the ring. The band would play some waltz and the elephants would do a pirouette, walk a few steps forward around the ring to the next pod, sit on the pod, raise their fore limbs and trunk up in the air, get up and repeat.
Well in front of where I was sitting there was a pod. As the elephant got up from the pod it dumped a load ... right on the pod. A steaming pile of elephant dung. The elephants marched around and the next elephant to reach the pod sat, and not being a nimble fellow, slammed his arse down hard onto the pod. A shower of shit squirted out under extremely high pressure and coated those in the near box seats. It was a "shit show" of biblical proportion.
Of course, as the inevitable disaster approached, the sense of abject panic in the box seats and gasp of OMG from those of us in the bleachers was palpable. Some box seaters reacted, ducked or escaped just in time ... but the majority froze ... hopefully with mouths shut ... and were caught in the tsunami of effluent that came their way.
###
An apropos and unfortunately for the box seaters true story.
So here we are! Clubs, competitions and governing bodies have the box seats. The next elephant is on its way. And there's a steaming pile of virus induced shit right in front them. All that remains to be seen is who escapes, who ducks, and who gets a mouthful. I wonder where the agents, players and media/broadcast people are sitting.
I can see a path forward for the premier leagues in each country with good television support. They can play games behind close doors, operate a tight seclusion and testing regimen on the squads, and generate some revenue from the broadcast of these games. Clubs in the lower levels are basically cooked. Maybe it will be possible for the Championship clubs to survive playing games behind closed doors; selling video season tickets as the Swans have this past season; capturing a broad audience. But for clubs unable to do that and are absolutely dependent on match day revenue within / around the stadium, it's over! If they can't go into hibernation until the threat of contagion passes and proven vaccines are available on mass, they are out of business.
Football in the 2020's is going to be massively different. Pyramids will crumble and fall. The next two years will be a depression within which war like casualties will be taken for people and businesses. Players not able to get a place in a premier squad will have to get a job. Academies are going to fold.
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Yankee_Jack
Key Player
This now brings me to the nasty part of the iceberg within the football industry. Remember the articles and posts that I made a year or so back maybe that raised the specter of systemic risk within the industry because of the way in which transfers were being "financed".
Let me refresh.
Normally, in the real world, a buyer pays the seller at the time of sale. If the buyer only has part of the money needed then the buyer finances the balance. For large amounts, a mortgage is issued backed by some collateral by a bank or something like a bank. The seller gets the full amount; he is whole and carries no future risk. The buyer posts some collateral and carries the burden of debt service or risks losing the collateral. The bank carries the risk of default and may be able to hedge some of this through mortgage insurance paid for by the buyer, etc.
Football is not the real world.
In football, there is no collateral in the "asset" being purchased, viz the right to register the player in competition. The buyer has limited cash flow and it is punctuated by discrete revenue events (e.g. media payments towards season's end). So, what to do! Factoring receivable is the "innovation" that permits player transfers to flow. The seller agrees to issue an accounts receivable to the buyer. The buyer agrees to pay the receivable in a series of lump sums over the life of the player's contact with the buyer. The buyer has a great pay for use situation. But, the seller is short cash ... a lot of cash ... since there is typically no up front amount. To resolve this the seller goes to the bank and uses the receivable as collateral to obtain cash; usually the amount of the transfer fee less the factor rate (fees + interest) required by the bank. The bank takes payment directly from the buyer. In the EPL, the EPL issues guarantees to the bank based on the sellers media payments. The bank earns good money at a relatively risk free rate of return. The EPL is going to get payment from the media companies, so it carries limited risk. The seller can catch a cold if everything goes tits up; the bank will turn to the seller to be made whole. The seller carries the risk .... not acceptable in the real world.
As players move around, peter owes paul, who owes fred, who owes john, and so on, and you can quickly create a network of risk that becomes systemic or acquires systemic properties.
As far as I know, there has never been a buying club defaulting on payments. The EPL has never been required to assert its rules and make good to the bank. And as cash has continued to flow, everybody has become fat, dumb and happy with this situation .... like a game of musical chairs where the music never ever stops. But now it has, or could rather abruptly, and it's not looking like a skip of the needle on the record, but the power plug has been yanked out of the wall ... it has stopped and may not resume as expected as usual ... especially in the lower leagues. If the network of risk collapses, the house of cards will fall. Competitions may fail, not just clubs. Media companies may not make final payments, or may discount final payments since they've lost revenue generating content and their revenues have been compromised. It's a pile up of loss and cash flow restrictions or collapse of cash flow at various points in the value.
A player acquired in January on a 3.5 or 2.5 season contract, has only played 2 months, and may not play 2020-21, and worst case scenario 2021-22. The buyer is trying like crazy to reduce never mind defer compensation due the player. The player through his agent and union is trying like crazy to say "fuck you" as politely as possible. The media companies are feeling the pinch as advertisers stop advertising; they now have dead air time that they can only fill with re-runs .... who watches re-runs of football ... how much of a discount in revenue does that produce. The buyer is likely to be short paid by the competition for media money. This is going to hurt their cash flow with respect to the bank. This is not a discrete problem with one club that can potentially propagate through the network, but is a pervasive problem across the network infecting and impacting all nodes in the network. This is like a reactor melt down. Think Chernobyl.
How does this get resolved. Is anybody actually thinking this through.
Let me refresh.
Normally, in the real world, a buyer pays the seller at the time of sale. If the buyer only has part of the money needed then the buyer finances the balance. For large amounts, a mortgage is issued backed by some collateral by a bank or something like a bank. The seller gets the full amount; he is whole and carries no future risk. The buyer posts some collateral and carries the burden of debt service or risks losing the collateral. The bank carries the risk of default and may be able to hedge some of this through mortgage insurance paid for by the buyer, etc.
Football is not the real world.
In football, there is no collateral in the "asset" being purchased, viz the right to register the player in competition. The buyer has limited cash flow and it is punctuated by discrete revenue events (e.g. media payments towards season's end). So, what to do! Factoring receivable is the "innovation" that permits player transfers to flow. The seller agrees to issue an accounts receivable to the buyer. The buyer agrees to pay the receivable in a series of lump sums over the life of the player's contact with the buyer. The buyer has a great pay for use situation. But, the seller is short cash ... a lot of cash ... since there is typically no up front amount. To resolve this the seller goes to the bank and uses the receivable as collateral to obtain cash; usually the amount of the transfer fee less the factor rate (fees + interest) required by the bank. The bank takes payment directly from the buyer. In the EPL, the EPL issues guarantees to the bank based on the sellers media payments. The bank earns good money at a relatively risk free rate of return. The EPL is going to get payment from the media companies, so it carries limited risk. The seller can catch a cold if everything goes tits up; the bank will turn to the seller to be made whole. The seller carries the risk .... not acceptable in the real world.
As players move around, peter owes paul, who owes fred, who owes john, and so on, and you can quickly create a network of risk that becomes systemic or acquires systemic properties.
As far as I know, there has never been a buying club defaulting on payments. The EPL has never been required to assert its rules and make good to the bank. And as cash has continued to flow, everybody has become fat, dumb and happy with this situation .... like a game of musical chairs where the music never ever stops. But now it has, or could rather abruptly, and it's not looking like a skip of the needle on the record, but the power plug has been yanked out of the wall ... it has stopped and may not resume as expected as usual ... especially in the lower leagues. If the network of risk collapses, the house of cards will fall. Competitions may fail, not just clubs. Media companies may not make final payments, or may discount final payments since they've lost revenue generating content and their revenues have been compromised. It's a pile up of loss and cash flow restrictions or collapse of cash flow at various points in the value.
A player acquired in January on a 3.5 or 2.5 season contract, has only played 2 months, and may not play 2020-21, and worst case scenario 2021-22. The buyer is trying like crazy to reduce never mind defer compensation due the player. The player through his agent and union is trying like crazy to say "fuck you" as politely as possible. The media companies are feeling the pinch as advertisers stop advertising; they now have dead air time that they can only fill with re-runs .... who watches re-runs of football ... how much of a discount in revenue does that produce. The buyer is likely to be short paid by the competition for media money. This is going to hurt their cash flow with respect to the bank. This is not a discrete problem with one club that can potentially propagate through the network, but is a pervasive problem across the network infecting and impacting all nodes in the network. This is like a reactor melt down. Think Chernobyl.
How does this get resolved. Is anybody actually thinking this through.
KVetch
Key Player
That's awesome, he's definitely a class guy
KVetch
Key Player
The FA and FIFA need to set aside some of the TV payments ticket sales kits whatever. Set it aside to make sure smaller clubs don't fold up. Don't have to reward the con artist owners but they can save the clubs.
Owners will want to cut costs everywhere. Loss of ticket sales but the TV contracts will grow higher with everyone watching on TV. The The game of football is too big to fail though. It is the most popular sport in the world. It will stay around.