Ainsworth’s job is to use the resources made available to him as effectively as possible (whether that job has been done effectively this season is a different debate). I can’t think of an employee in any other business that would voluntarily ask for a lower budget.
An alternative view of this is that he got us a season in the Championship, without which our finances would be in even more perilous state!
I'd be staggered if the full zoom video goes out unedited - comments and all -due to the last 5 mins being a shouting match as people on Zoom realised their questions were being ignored and those not able to get in wouldn't be listened to at all.
Trust members should get a look at it in some form along with the slides, I'd imagine ordinary supporters might get a limited write up afterwards but the detail is for the members as it's essentially a deal between two owning parties, otherwise there really is no point in being a member. It'll leak anyway.
Whatever the greater complexities at play here, one thing is clear: Rob isn't going to waiver from his belief that we're a Championship club in the making - and that's the huge concern. Will he accept that no amount of spending can guarantee that before it's too late? I'm sure most fans would accept maintaining our current, natural level with the possibility of another miracle promotion somewhere down the line - but he clearly doesn't. I'm worried.
We will never be a long term sustainable Championship club without investment.
RC is not in a position to invest, that is clear. EFL League clubs are not sustainable because the system is broken by the greed of players and agents at all levels of the game
I was against the takeover from the start and never believed the nonsense that fan ownership can't work - just look at Exeter and Wimbledon.
I think RC has underestimated how much competition the larger clubs are for a club the size of WWFC. Gambling on a straight return to the championship was completely irresponsible. Planning a new stadium or expensive access road when we don't get close to filing our ground is crazy.
For those of you, like me, who went to Torquay away to say goodbye to WWFC, I think we will face that moment again within the next few years. I can't see any other way this will end up.
We should have balanced the budget, signed only young cast-offs, sold players to grow/sustain and hoped for a cheeky appearance in the playoffs.
@DevC Insightful stuff. I'd disagree about the lease, though.
The most striking thing for me from last night was when Nigel K said that the £20k p.a. negotiated for the lease was a good deal because members had settled for £15k when approving the original Couhig deal. This seemed to me entirely disingenuous. The members actually voted in favour of a lease attracting £150k p.a., but with an initial rent holiday, taking account of the ground improvements the Couhigs would fund, and for which the Trust would get credit (the latter bit being retracted mid-deal).
It still matters, I'd say, because that rent (the £150k) was sold to the membership by Trust Board members as being the means of building up Trust funds so that if the worst happened, we had something to use to take back ownership and keep the club going. We've now lost any sense of that, as £20k p.a. won't come anywhere near the funds we'd need to (ahem) take back control if and when the shit-or-bust experiment fails; as far as I could tell, it wasn't even going to be adjusted for inflation.
I share your and others' concerns about the £3m p.a. losses though. A massive surprise to me, as I reckoned we'd take at least 2 years to burn through the Championship windfall, and starkly at odds with the "sustainability" rhetoric. But you and others have covered that well enough.
Had a few hours to sleep and ponder the shambles of last night.
Firstly a lot of the animosity has been created by The Trust. The very people who are there to protect our interests. Not having the balls to shout out when they saw this financial trajectory is unforgivable. Not representing the 'tone' of the fans to the owners just simply jumping on the RC positivity train. And finally not being capable of communicating with the very people they claim to represent last night. Everything about The Trust screams unfit. Well meaning, innocents, staring at the headlights, whatever, the result is the same.
Onto Rob. I don't think he has bad intentions. On the contrary I think he has good intentions. Whether those intentions are possible in world he does not understand is my concern. And whether he feels the risks are relatively low, it's not as if he lives in Totteridge and the majority of the new debt he is planning will not be his.
At the end of the day we are passengers and have been since he took over. We are fortunate we still have a club but it is no longer our club, it his his club. Wether we are heading for a cliff we can't do a lot about it. We can try and express our wishes as a fan base but what are those wishes? The threads on this message board about who we should be signing next are always the most popular, so we have a hunger for success. I'm sure all fans do. So did Derby fans. At the end of the day Rob has simply tapped into this hunger and is offering to deliver. Why people are angry at that is confusing. Do we doubt him? Do we see that it is not possible? In our heart of ours do we know that our desire to sign a shiny new striker is a fantasy as we can't have that guy we can afford someone who has dodgy knees and is slipping down the leagues.
So I guess it down to a little soul searching. Do we want the dream of success at all costs? In which case get behind Rob and support him all the way. Do we want a sustainable club in league 1 (occasionally league 2) then prepare to cut your cloth on and off the field.
And a final note. If anyone is aiming personal abuse at Rob on social media or even on the terrace when you have had a shandy just do one. Seriously, do one. You embarrass yourself and your club. And for what aim? Just don't
You talk about the 'tone of the fans', but I wonder if the most fans feel as the Gasroom does. This is a community of a couple hundred of long term supporters, I wonder whether the other thousands of fans are as outraged as we are. Perhaps the trust never passed on concerns because there hasn't been many generally. Easy to understand as we were in the playoff final a few months ago, and the match day experience has been improved.
There are only a vocal few who have said many times they feel disconnected with the club, and only a handful of others who have bothered to look too much into finances.
Not sure that comment is entirely accurate. Whilst the takeover may have been completed in Feb 2020 it was the injection of cash from RC in the summer before that enabled us to have a team at all that season
I was trying to look at dates, as I'm sure he started funding us before that date, and we actually brought players in swiftly, but couldn't find much to back up my perception.
However, I did find this... the premise of Yeovil being the "Most exciting experience in English football", has to be the most hilarious premise in...well to use similar outrageous hyperbole, maybe the history of the world?
The gasroom often doesn't reflect the overall tone of the club. That doesn't necessarily mean the gasroom is wrong though, as a few exceptions aside, it is where the most handsome, brainy legendary of our fanbase hang out.
I'm not going to engage in vicious abuse or condone it, but surely it's understandable that people will want to make their disapproval known? If nothing else, Rob has failed to deliver on multiple promises - sustainability being the latest and largest.
@our_frank , I had forgotten in truth (if I was ever aware) that the lease had had a £150k rent in it.
While I am disappointed with the finances as revealed last night, in truth I can understand the logic of the much reduced rent. Really the football ground would normally be in the football club and it is only separated in our case to protect it's ownership in the event of the football club failing. It is hard enough for a football club to compete with relatively small gates against its competitors while having a largely artificial £150k cost the others don't have. It would be very odd for the football club to be struggling financially whole the stadium owner in ten years time sat with £1.5m in the bank with nothing to do with it.
The higher rent kind of made sense if the club paid the trust who then reinvested it back into the club to cover costs as its 25% share of investment needs but if that is no longer the plan, I can see why the £150k would fairly fall away.
Two things seem at odds with each other. (A) Spending to improve the ground, capacity, etc etc on the basis that in the Championship this would be both desired and sustainable... Vs.... (B) Selling players, getting rid of high earners, etc due to current unsustainability - hence never again looking anything like L1 promotion contenders. If Rob is planning to do (A), then he can't really be considering (B). And if this is the case, then how much debt will be racked up by the time we call the dream off? Or to put it another way, how many dream chasing seasons is in Rob's plan? If it's just this season, then we need to see an immediate on-pitch turnaround - otherwise the question is what's the point of (A)?
After having a chance to get some sleep and look at things in the cold light of day, the situation looks bleaker than how it seemed during and immediately after the meeting.
For starters, the lack of details about the proposal before the meeting meant that no preparation could be made by members and get hold of stats and previous statements that could be used to challenge or query assertions made during the presentation.
The organisation by WWT of the online portion of the meeting was beyond shambolic. AV and online webinar management is far from my areas of expertise in IT, though I'm sure I would have run that far better. We must have a member (or even someone from the club's IT) who could do a vaguely professional job who could spare an hour to have sorted that out. Considering what is at stake for the club, this being brushed off as an amusing "bloody modern technology eh" gag was very disappointing to say the least.
On the content of the meeting, the revelation that WWFC were on course of run up an eye-watering £3m deficit trying to chase the dream of promotion to the Championship was scarcely believable. Not least from WWT and Rob Couhig who frequently claims to be running the club in a sustainable manner.
I don't know whether the serendipity of how things came together in the beginning of the 2019/20 season led to a hubristic attitude from the Couhigs that they had some sort of Midas touch and their gamble couldn't go wrong, this "plan" is naive in the extreme and at odds with all the pontificating about the need for financial prudence and sustainability. With there being so many club in League 1 this season that can easily outgun even the "Championship or bust" budget they are running, it beggars belief this route was chosen.
What was WWT's role in deciding to go with this budget and not a more conservative one? The AGM will be the perfect platform for the directors to be held accountable as to why they seemingly have given the Couhig's their blessing to put the club's future in jeopardy.
If supporters had been told at the start of the season that we would intentionally run at a deficit of £3m for the year with the expectation we would be promoted, it would have been heavily criticised by those who have WWFC's long-term future at heart. Memories of Steve Hayes's tenure are still fresh in the mind, this feels like those times on steroids but without the "it's my money" reassurances.
With regards to the capital expenditure on stadium renovation/extension, facilities, 2nd access road etc., if I'm right in saying this would come to £8-10 million pounds and this needs to be funded through increased ticket, F&B, merch, commercial etc., how long would it take for these to pay off for WWFC? 10+ years? One poster seems convinced this is a golden ticket but where are the figures that 1) back up the assertion that these upgrades will pay for themselves, 2) even state how much these upgrades are projected to increase revenue by?
We are heading towards a repeat of 2012 all over again, and potentially at a far faster rate. The future of WWFC playing at Adams Park is at risk, especially if the Couhigs (or whoever the baton gets passed on to if they make an exit) decide to put WWT over a barrel to get their pound of flesh.
Clarification from WWT as to whether any further votes or discussions will be held before a decision is made (if it hasn't already been taken) would be greatly appreciated.
@ReturnToSenda The film rights to dramatise last-nights omnishambles. Or even chop the whole thing up into 6 parts, add some VO and b-roll and sell it to Netflix.
Comments
It's interesting what Andy Worbs says, about how we picked Budget A, Championship or Bust, in effect.
When the perception is that we had a pretty woeful summer transfer window!
Imagine if we'd signed a couple of top players and went Budget A+!
Ainsworth’s job is to use the resources made available to him as effectively as possible (whether that job has been done effectively this season is a different debate). I can’t think of an employee in any other business that would voluntarily ask for a lower budget.
An alternative view of this is that he got us a season in the Championship, without which our finances would be in even more perilous state!
I'd be staggered if the full zoom video goes out unedited - comments and all -due to the last 5 mins being a shouting match as people on Zoom realised their questions were being ignored and those not able to get in wouldn't be listened to at all.
Trust members should get a look at it in some form along with the slides, I'd imagine ordinary supporters might get a limited write up afterwards but the detail is for the members as it's essentially a deal between two owning parties, otherwise there really is no point in being a member. It'll leak anyway.
I would hope we get more than £500k for Forino.
Whatever the greater complexities at play here, one thing is clear: Rob isn't going to waiver from his belief that we're a Championship club in the making - and that's the huge concern. Will he accept that no amount of spending can guarantee that before it's too late? I'm sure most fans would accept maintaining our current, natural level with the possibility of another miracle promotion somewhere down the line - but he clearly doesn't. I'm worried.
#StopTheSteal
We will never be a long term sustainable Championship club without investment.
RC is not in a position to invest, that is clear. EFL League clubs are not sustainable because the system is broken by the greed of players and agents at all levels of the game
I was against the takeover from the start and never believed the nonsense that fan ownership can't work - just look at Exeter and Wimbledon.
I think RC has underestimated how much competition the larger clubs are for a club the size of WWFC. Gambling on a straight return to the championship was completely irresponsible. Planning a new stadium or expensive access road when we don't get close to filing our ground is crazy.
For those of you, like me, who went to Torquay away to say goodbye to WWFC, I think we will face that moment again within the next few years. I can't see any other way this will end up.
We should have balanced the budget, signed only young cast-offs, sold players to grow/sustain and hoped for a cheeky appearance in the playoffs.
@DevC Insightful stuff. I'd disagree about the lease, though.
The most striking thing for me from last night was when Nigel K said that the £20k p.a. negotiated for the lease was a good deal because members had settled for £15k when approving the original Couhig deal. This seemed to me entirely disingenuous. The members actually voted in favour of a lease attracting £150k p.a., but with an initial rent holiday, taking account of the ground improvements the Couhigs would fund, and for which the Trust would get credit (the latter bit being retracted mid-deal).
It still matters, I'd say, because that rent (the £150k) was sold to the membership by Trust Board members as being the means of building up Trust funds so that if the worst happened, we had something to use to take back ownership and keep the club going. We've now lost any sense of that, as £20k p.a. won't come anywhere near the funds we'd need to (ahem) take back control if and when the shit-or-bust experiment fails; as far as I could tell, it wasn't even going to be adjusted for inflation.
I share your and others' concerns about the £3m p.a. losses though. A massive surprise to me, as I reckoned we'd take at least 2 years to burn through the Championship windfall, and starkly at odds with the "sustainability" rhetoric. But you and others have covered that well enough.
Fan ownership evidently wasn't working for us - and Exeter have had the massive boost of a highly successful academy.
Had a few hours to sleep and ponder the shambles of last night.
Firstly a lot of the animosity has been created by The Trust. The very people who are there to protect our interests. Not having the balls to shout out when they saw this financial trajectory is unforgivable. Not representing the 'tone' of the fans to the owners just simply jumping on the RC positivity train. And finally not being capable of communicating with the very people they claim to represent last night. Everything about The Trust screams unfit. Well meaning, innocents, staring at the headlights, whatever, the result is the same.
Onto Rob. I don't think he has bad intentions. On the contrary I think he has good intentions. Whether those intentions are possible in world he does not understand is my concern. And whether he feels the risks are relatively low, it's not as if he lives in Totteridge and the majority of the new debt he is planning will not be his.
At the end of the day we are passengers and have been since he took over. We are fortunate we still have a club but it is no longer our club, it his his club. Wether we are heading for a cliff we can't do a lot about it. We can try and express our wishes as a fan base but what are those wishes? The threads on this message board about who we should be signing next are always the most popular, so we have a hunger for success. I'm sure all fans do. So did Derby fans. At the end of the day Rob has simply tapped into this hunger and is offering to deliver. Why people are angry at that is confusing. Do we doubt him? Do we see that it is not possible? In our heart of ours do we know that our desire to sign a shiny new striker is a fantasy as we can't have that guy we can afford someone who has dodgy knees and is slipping down the leagues.
So I guess it down to a little soul searching. Do we want the dream of success at all costs? In which case get behind Rob and support him all the way. Do we want a sustainable club in league 1 (occasionally league 2) then prepare to cut your cloth on and off the field.
And a final note. If anyone is aiming personal abuse at Rob on social media or even on the terrace when you have had a shandy just do one. Seriously, do one. You embarrass yourself and your club. And for what aim? Just don't
POTW @TheAndyGrahamFanClub
We're doomed!
I can’t believe for a minute anybody thought about recording it sadly.
If there is a recording, I suggest someone encases it in concrete and buries it somewhere remote.
Nonsense. RC took over in Feb 2020, we won the league one playoffs that season with a trust built team.
The Moon!
You talk about the 'tone of the fans', but I wonder if the most fans feel as the Gasroom does. This is a community of a couple hundred of long term supporters, I wonder whether the other thousands of fans are as outraged as we are. Perhaps the trust never passed on concerns because there hasn't been many generally. Easy to understand as we were in the playoff final a few months ago, and the match day experience has been improved.
There are only a vocal few who have said many times they feel disconnected with the club, and only a handful of others who have bothered to look too much into finances.
Most of the fans probably don't know what is going on and I doubt if they care until its too late.
No, it's not. We only had that squad because of funds Rob had already put in. We were haemorrhaging money under the Trust.
Not sure that comment is entirely accurate. Whilst the takeover may have been completed in Feb 2020 it was the injection of cash from RC in the summer before that enabled us to have a team at all that season
I was trying to look at dates, as I'm sure he started funding us before that date, and we actually brought players in swiftly, but couldn't find much to back up my perception.
However, I did find this... the premise of Yeovil being the "Most exciting experience in English football", has to be the most hilarious premise in...well to use similar outrageous hyperbole, maybe the history of the world?
https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/sport/football/yeovil-towns-future-owner-rob-2563085
Key point there.
The gasroom often doesn't reflect the overall tone of the club. That doesn't necessarily mean the gasroom is wrong though, as a few exceptions aside, it is where the most handsome, brainy legendary of our fanbase hang out.
I'm not going to engage in vicious abuse or condone it, but surely it's understandable that people will want to make their disapproval known? If nothing else, Rob has failed to deliver on multiple promises - sustainability being the latest and largest.
@our_frank , I had forgotten in truth (if I was ever aware) that the lease had had a £150k rent in it.
While I am disappointed with the finances as revealed last night, in truth I can understand the logic of the much reduced rent. Really the football ground would normally be in the football club and it is only separated in our case to protect it's ownership in the event of the football club failing. It is hard enough for a football club to compete with relatively small gates against its competitors while having a largely artificial £150k cost the others don't have. It would be very odd for the football club to be struggling financially whole the stadium owner in ten years time sat with £1.5m in the bank with nothing to do with it.
The higher rent kind of made sense if the club paid the trust who then reinvested it back into the club to cover costs as its 25% share of investment needs but if that is no longer the plan, I can see why the £150k would fairly fall away.
Two things seem at odds with each other. (A) Spending to improve the ground, capacity, etc etc on the basis that in the Championship this would be both desired and sustainable... Vs.... (B) Selling players, getting rid of high earners, etc due to current unsustainability - hence never again looking anything like L1 promotion contenders. If Rob is planning to do (A), then he can't really be considering (B). And if this is the case, then how much debt will be racked up by the time we call the dream off? Or to put it another way, how many dream chasing seasons is in Rob's plan? If it's just this season, then we need to see an immediate on-pitch turnaround - otherwise the question is what's the point of (A)?
After having a chance to get some sleep and look at things in the cold light of day, the situation looks bleaker than how it seemed during and immediately after the meeting.
For starters, the lack of details about the proposal before the meeting meant that no preparation could be made by members and get hold of stats and previous statements that could be used to challenge or query assertions made during the presentation.
The organisation by WWT of the online portion of the meeting was beyond shambolic. AV and online webinar management is far from my areas of expertise in IT, though I'm sure I would have run that far better. We must have a member (or even someone from the club's IT) who could do a vaguely professional job who could spare an hour to have sorted that out. Considering what is at stake for the club, this being brushed off as an amusing "bloody modern technology eh" gag was very disappointing to say the least.
On the content of the meeting, the revelation that WWFC were on course of run up an eye-watering £3m deficit trying to chase the dream of promotion to the Championship was scarcely believable. Not least from WWT and Rob Couhig who frequently claims to be running the club in a sustainable manner.
I don't know whether the serendipity of how things came together in the beginning of the 2019/20 season led to a hubristic attitude from the Couhigs that they had some sort of Midas touch and their gamble couldn't go wrong, this "plan" is naive in the extreme and at odds with all the pontificating about the need for financial prudence and sustainability. With there being so many club in League 1 this season that can easily outgun even the "Championship or bust" budget they are running, it beggars belief this route was chosen.
What was WWT's role in deciding to go with this budget and not a more conservative one? The AGM will be the perfect platform for the directors to be held accountable as to why they seemingly have given the Couhig's their blessing to put the club's future in jeopardy.
If supporters had been told at the start of the season that we would intentionally run at a deficit of £3m for the year with the expectation we would be promoted, it would have been heavily criticised by those who have WWFC's long-term future at heart. Memories of Steve Hayes's tenure are still fresh in the mind, this feels like those times on steroids but without the "it's my money" reassurances.
With regards to the capital expenditure on stadium renovation/extension, facilities, 2nd access road etc., if I'm right in saying this would come to £8-10 million pounds and this needs to be funded through increased ticket, F&B, merch, commercial etc., how long would it take for these to pay off for WWFC? 10+ years? One poster seems convinced this is a golden ticket but where are the figures that 1) back up the assertion that these upgrades will pay for themselves, 2) even state how much these upgrades are projected to increase revenue by?
We are heading towards a repeat of 2012 all over again, and potentially at a far faster rate. The future of WWFC playing at Adams Park is at risk, especially if the Couhigs (or whoever the baton gets passed on to if they make an exit) decide to put WWT over a barrel to get their pound of flesh.
Clarification from WWT as to whether any further votes or discussions will be held before a decision is made (if it hasn't already been taken) would be greatly appreciated.
If anybody has a copy of last night's get-together, I'd love to get a copy because I can't believe what happened actually happened.
The film rights alone, if monetised correctly, should make us financially sustainable
It will interesting to see if anybody resigns ahead of next week's Annual Jamboree.
Are we still looking to have 12 Trust board directors to represent our 10% shareholding?
What film rights?
@ReturnToSenda The film rights to dramatise last-nights omnishambles. Or even chop the whole thing up into 6 parts, add some VO and b-roll and sell it to Netflix.