Rob Couhig's previous ownership of an (association) football club doesn't seem to have delivered a good outcome: bought a team, renamed it, relocated it, changed the home strip to entirely different colours then, after only a couple of years, suspended operations and closed it down.
Look up the history of New Orleans Storm if you want to see more detail.
@bookertease in the worst case scenario he strings us along for six months then decides not to go ahead with clearing the debt in December, walks away with very little loss for him; we have no one to turn to at extreme short notice, default on the debt, lose the stadium to the original American consortium - and then who knows what.
Better case scenario but not exactly ideal - he repays the charge, gets the vote - and so becomes majority shareholder for the princely sum of half a million pounds. Then without any promise of sustained investment we start losing money again, he lets us wither until writing off his minimal loss and walks away - and then who knows what.
There are a legion of more positive scenarios but until we see the colour of his money and detailed investment plans - which we can hold him to account over rather than simply hoping he fulfils - I remain wary.
Hello everyone. I'm new to this forum but hope to have the chance to meet a lot of you as the season progresses. I'm going to be involved in a project with Wycombe I hope you'll find exciting. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.
@Uncle_T said:
Rob Couhig's previous ownership of an (association) football club doesn't seem to have delivered a good outcome: bought a team, renamed it, relocated it, changed the home strip to entirely different colours then, after only a couple of years, suspended operations and closed it down.
Look up the history of New Orleans Storm if you want to see more detail.
I don’t think it’s wise to compare the two clubs. America has a strange obsession with moving sports clubs and the level they were playing at was closer to a regional non league division.
I'd be interested to find more about the football consultant guy, on face of it Yeovil after his help have been relegated out of the league, aren't doing great financially and rejected the takeover offer he is facilitating for us. Always wonder what the term means, would be interested to know any success achieved.
(No, I'm not anti everything btw, think its a reasonable thing to ask)
Real Ale (Done properly, goes off easily if not), then craft beer (has helped along the US and Aus no end but is too wide a term as explained above), then almost any lager in that order ( ok German stuff probably above most craft, Aussie stuff fit for nothing but cleaning drains)
Thanks for the clarification @aloysius. I agree it’s sensible to be careful (wary if you prefer).
Personally I think if your worst case scenario plays out that the original consortium wouldn’t immediately demand the ground - reputation-wise they have a certain amount to lose - but i agree we may have effectively stood still and lost 6 months.
Thanks @arnos_grove and @StrongestTeam for your comments regarding real and unreal ales. I don’t think I know either of you but I do know a man whose family gave us Liquorice Allsorts and I suspect he is a fully paid-up member of CAMRA. I shall continue my education with him when the opportunity next arises.
Meanwhile, my apologies to everyone else for this fleeting thread derailment.
It will be interesting to see the detail of the bid. Until then we can either celebrate investment with real ale or bemoan the probable demise of our club with craft beers.
aloysius You will be pleased to note time and ££ has been spent on a new big screen which will help generate much needed funds and instant match replays courtesy of bucks old uni
@OldEchoMan said:
Hello everyone. I'm new to this forum but hope to have the chance to meet a lot of you as the season progresses. I'm going to be involved in a project with Wycombe I hope you'll find exciting. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.
What a curious post.
I can only find one other person online under the username OldEchoMan, and that is former Times tennis correspondent Neil Harman, who was most notably apparently sacked for plagiarism and lives in Berkshire.
@Wendoverman said:
I hate that Mr Hilter and his Boncentration bamps. Calm down @James. snowflakes? Before you anger type 'fake Gasroom' or 'Will of the British Wycombe people' Don't worry Bozzer will be king soon and all will be jolly top hole again...
If ever there was a posting that deserved to be deleted by a Moderator then this is it.
Absolutely appalling.
Is it the reference to Monty Python's Minehead by-election sketch or my worry that @James was going to run out of populist cliches that appalled you so?
Never ever trivialise the Holocaust.
If you had any sense of decency you would reflect on the wording of this post and request via a Moderator that it is deleted.
BREAKING: after Couhig's acquisition the club will be rebranded as the 'Wycombe Lightnings' and the ground will be renamed 'The Stormcloud'. The 'uniforms' will feature a navy to purple gradient background with a dashing white lightning bolt streaking across the front and back.
As long as he brings authentic po' boys to Adams Park, I'm down.
@OldEchoMan said:
Hello everyone. I'm new to this forum but hope to have the chance to meet a lot of you as the season progresses. I'm going to be involved in a project with Wycombe I hope you'll find exciting. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.
What a curious post.
I can only find one other person online under the username OldEchoMan, and that is former Times tennis correspondent Neil Harman, who was most notably apparently sacked for plagiarism and lives in Berkshire.
Seems to be the correct identification going by his twitter account (@Neil_Harman57)
Recently followed the whole squad plus a certain Pete Couhig. I wonder what brings a former tennis journalist to start featuring Wycombe?
My starting position with anyone who wants to buy a football club is to ask what their motivation is. A lower division football club is a machine for losing money. I strongly suspect that there is no business plan, however clever, that can make a football club sustainable. The closest there is to it is perhaps Crewe and their academy. But that is something that took many years to build up.
So what is that has attracted Mr Couhig to Wycombe Wanderers? Clearly, it's not his lifelong love of football. I suggest, therefore, that he's in it to make money.
It's possible that his interest in Yeovil was at least partly the result of the opportunity to make money from property development. There are references in the articles that the Gasman has found to developing the property around the ground. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we don't seem to be a likely target for a property developer, because we don't own any land except the ground.
One possible answer is that we seem to be collectively quite astonishingly naive about what the football club is worth. Because we struggle to break even and because we have debts, people assume we're worth nothing apart from the value of the ground. This is simply wrong - people are, whether it's bonkers or not, prepared to spend millions of pounds buying a football league club or getting a football club into the football league.
So my present supposition is that Mr Couhig thinks that the naivete of Wycombe's fan owners will allow him to pick up a majority stake in a football league club at significantly less than market value and then sell it on for a significant profit. I do not like this prospect, as we will have lost our one-time option to exercise control over the future of the club for less than we should. It's up to Mr Couhig to prove to me I'm wrong. And I have a vote.
I do not like Mark Palmer. He has mastered the art of talking bullshit without actually saying anything. I do not like the way he claims credit for Burnley being in the Premiership without in any way explaining how he contributed to that. I do not like the way he uses "roadmap" as a verb.
You make as many suppositions and assumptions as Aloysius. A football club, like a house, is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. You might think that WWFC is worth, say, £20m, but if no one is prepared to pay more than £10m, your valuation is irrelevant.
You’ve already written off Mr Couhig because of his politics and now you’ve condemned Mr Palmer because you don’t like his vocabulary. Your mind is clearly made up long before any details are announced.
It is your chosen method Alan to misinterpret and misrepresent what other posters say. You are the very master of the straw man.
I haven't "written off" Mr Couhig because of his politics. I have said that his politics matter to me. I haven't "written off" Mr Couhig because of my reasoning - yes a supposition, but not an assumption - about his motivations, but I have said that it is for him to persuade me as to what they are and that they are better than a reasonable chain of inference might suggest.
You on the other hand have been in favour of every attempt to end fan ownership, and if there's been a process of reasoning behind that beyond "we're going bust next week", you have failed to express it. I suggest your last sentence applies to you as much as or more than anyone on here.
Your second sentence is a platitude, true but meaningless. Your third sentence is is a mere paraphrase of the previous one.
I haven't condemned Mark Palmer solely for his vocabulary but for the substance of, or rather the complete lack of substance in, what he says. I'll give you that my last sentence was a snark, but in my experience the more people use meaningless buzzwords the less you should trust what they're saying.
Comments
Rob Couhig's previous ownership of an (association) football club doesn't seem to have delivered a good outcome: bought a team, renamed it, relocated it, changed the home strip to entirely different colours then, after only a couple of years, suspended operations and closed it down.
Look up the history of New Orleans Storm if you want to see more detail.
@bookertease in the worst case scenario he strings us along for six months then decides not to go ahead with clearing the debt in December, walks away with very little loss for him; we have no one to turn to at extreme short notice, default on the debt, lose the stadium to the original American consortium - and then who knows what.
Better case scenario but not exactly ideal - he repays the charge, gets the vote - and so becomes majority shareholder for the princely sum of half a million pounds. Then without any promise of sustained investment we start losing money again, he lets us wither until writing off his minimal loss and walks away - and then who knows what.
There are a legion of more positive scenarios but until we see the colour of his money and detailed investment plans - which we can hold him to account over rather than simply hoping he fulfils - I remain wary.
Keep politics out of sport.
By keeping politicians out of sport, or...?
Hello everyone. I'm new to this forum but hope to have the chance to meet a lot of you as the season progresses. I'm going to be involved in a project with Wycombe I hope you'll find exciting. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.
I don’t think it’s wise to compare the two clubs. America has a strange obsession with moving sports clubs and the level they were playing at was closer to a regional non league division.
I'd be interested to find more about the football consultant guy, on face of it Yeovil after his help have been relegated out of the league, aren't doing great financially and rejected the takeover offer he is facilitating for us. Always wonder what the term means, would be interested to know any success achieved.
(No, I'm not anti everything btw, think its a reasonable thing to ask)
Real Ale (Done properly, goes off easily if not), then craft beer (has helped along the US and Aus no end but is too wide a term as explained above), then almost any lager in that order ( ok German stuff probably above most craft, Aussie stuff fit for nothing but cleaning drains)
Thanks for the clarification @aloysius. I agree it’s sensible to be careful (wary if you prefer).
Personally I think if your worst case scenario plays out that the original consortium wouldn’t immediately demand the ground - reputation-wise they have a certain amount to lose - but i agree we may have effectively stood still and lost 6 months.
Thanks @arnos_grove and @StrongestTeam for your comments regarding real and unreal ales. I don’t think I know either of you but I do know a man whose family gave us Liquorice Allsorts and I suspect he is a fully paid-up member of CAMRA. I shall continue my education with him when the opportunity next arises.
Meanwhile, my apologies to everyone else for this fleeting thread derailment.
I gather Mark Palmer was brought in by Yeovil in 2017 to improve their fortunes on and off the pitch.
Let's hope he's learned a lot from the experience
It will be interesting to see the detail of the bid. Until then we can either celebrate investment with real ale or bemoan the probable demise of our club with craft beers.
indeed Wenders
As with the previous "bids" we should all keep an open mind until we see the details.
That never happened last time of course, so in the end all the back and forth discussions as to their relative merits were futile.
My political views are a closely guarded secret.
As for Mr Couhig, if his money wins games then all will be forgiven.
aloysius You will be pleased to note time and ££ has been spent on a new big screen which will help generate much needed funds and instant match replays courtesy of bucks old uni
Three cheers for the Varsity. Hip hip...hoo...ouch.
What a curious post.
I can only find one other person online under the username OldEchoMan, and that is former Times tennis correspondent Neil Harman, who was most notably apparently sacked for plagiarism and lives in Berkshire.
Another Harman bid????
God I hope not, if we can’t recognise a spoiling bid after the last time we don’t deserve to survive.
Never ever trivialise the Holocaust.
If you had any sense of decency you would reflect on the wording of this post and request via a Moderator that it is deleted.
@Its_Cold_Up_North @James mentioned the war first..but I think he got away with it.
BREAKING: after Couhig's acquisition the club will be rebranded as the 'Wycombe Lightnings' and the ground will be renamed 'The Stormcloud'. The 'uniforms' will feature a navy to purple gradient background with a dashing white lightning bolt streaking across the front and back.
As long as he brings authentic po' boys to Adams Park, I'm down.
Vegetarian muffuletta would do me.
Gasman has been busy, interesting interviews with Couhig and Palmer.
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=31465;article=790414;title=gasroom.co.uk
Seems to be the correct identification going by his twitter account (@Neil_Harman57)
Recently followed the whole squad plus a certain Pete Couhig. I wonder what brings a former tennis journalist to start featuring Wycombe?
Perhaps he meant to join the AFC Wimbledon forum?
My starting position with anyone who wants to buy a football club is to ask what their motivation is. A lower division football club is a machine for losing money. I strongly suspect that there is no business plan, however clever, that can make a football club sustainable. The closest there is to it is perhaps Crewe and their academy. But that is something that took many years to build up.
So what is that has attracted Mr Couhig to Wycombe Wanderers? Clearly, it's not his lifelong love of football. I suggest, therefore, that he's in it to make money.
It's possible that his interest in Yeovil was at least partly the result of the opportunity to make money from property development. There are references in the articles that the Gasman has found to developing the property around the ground. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we don't seem to be a likely target for a property developer, because we don't own any land except the ground.
One possible answer is that we seem to be collectively quite astonishingly naive about what the football club is worth. Because we struggle to break even and because we have debts, people assume we're worth nothing apart from the value of the ground. This is simply wrong - people are, whether it's bonkers or not, prepared to spend millions of pounds buying a football league club or getting a football club into the football league.
So my present supposition is that Mr Couhig thinks that the naivete of Wycombe's fan owners will allow him to pick up a majority stake in a football league club at significantly less than market value and then sell it on for a significant profit. I do not like this prospect, as we will have lost our one-time option to exercise control over the future of the club for less than we should. It's up to Mr Couhig to prove to me I'm wrong. And I have a vote.
I do not like Mark Palmer. He has mastered the art of talking bullshit without actually saying anything. I do not like the way he claims credit for Burnley being in the Premiership without in any way explaining how he contributed to that. I do not like the way he uses "roadmap" as a verb.
You make as many suppositions and assumptions as Aloysius. A football club, like a house, is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. You might think that WWFC is worth, say, £20m, but if no one is prepared to pay more than £10m, your valuation is irrelevant.
You’ve already written off Mr Couhig because of his politics and now you’ve condemned Mr Palmer because you don’t like his vocabulary. Your mind is clearly made up long before any details are announced.
The beer will be cold?!? Disgraceful craft talk!
It is your chosen method Alan to misinterpret and misrepresent what other posters say. You are the very master of the straw man.
I haven't "written off" Mr Couhig because of his politics. I have said that his politics matter to me. I haven't "written off" Mr Couhig because of my reasoning - yes a supposition, but not an assumption - about his motivations, but I have said that it is for him to persuade me as to what they are and that they are better than a reasonable chain of inference might suggest.
You on the other hand have been in favour of every attempt to end fan ownership, and if there's been a process of reasoning behind that beyond "we're going bust next week", you have failed to express it. I suggest your last sentence applies to you as much as or more than anyone on here.
Your second sentence is a platitude, true but meaningless. Your third sentence is is a mere paraphrase of the previous one.
I haven't condemned Mark Palmer solely for his vocabulary but for the substance of, or rather the complete lack of substance in, what he says. I'll give you that my last sentence was a snark, but in my experience the more people use meaningless buzzwords the less you should trust what they're saying.
I thought your last sentence really synergised and going forward this will be my key takeaway.