I don’t want Derby to go out of business but I detest the thought that they can wriggle their way out of this. Clear their debts. Then start spending again. It stinks if that was to happen.
We are a perfectly legitimate claim against them. They knowingly delayed releasing the “corrected accounts” as they knew it they had done so as swiftly as they should have done they would be playing League One football this season if any football at all.
Derby as a League One club without the ground included are worth about as much as a bus fair to Totteridge from the town centre.
Whilst in the Championship they at least have some reasonable income outside of match day revenues.
League One next season could be half full of ex Premier League teams who all believe that they should be still there or in the Championship at the very least.
I bloody hope we go up this season just to escape their “entitled “ views of the world
I cannot stress this enough their IS NO law suit from either us or Boro.
All we have done is file a claim in the administration.
The Administrators duty is to assess the claims merits and accept or reject them as ranking as creditors.
The Administrators have not rejected them out of hand (which was what I was expecting) so they are presumably taking legal and accounting advice on this to reach a decision, until they make their decision ALL of us are just speculating...
My own view is that they will attempt to negotiate a lower amount based on the relative merits of the 2 claims in the hope of reaching a settlement in the £5-10m range which would still just about leave their total debts in the range that someone might pay.
I don't want to drive them out of business but they do need to learn a lesson here. Sadly, many of their fans just want a big money takeover ASAP so they can get back to doing what they've been doing for the last decade - big money showbiz signings.
The view is pretty much that we should pipe down because we're 'tinpot'.
I've got friends that are DCFC regulars as I work in Derby and they are concerned and gutted as we all would be. But you can't behave as they have, mug off your creditors and then go back to business as usual. There is not one of them who didn't know that Morris was up to all sorts of tricks - you only have to look at their 'Mel Morris has got everyone on strings' crowing to see that.
It doesn't take too much searching to find that most of their supporters who loved Mel's games are the ones absolutely wetting themselves and appealing for help from the 'football family'. This is pretty typical
I find the follow extracts interesting in relation to our claim against Derby. Quotes taken from the EFL statement.
The current situation remains challenging as Middlesbrough and Wycombe Wanderers consider their claims should be protected under the terms of the Insolvency Policy. The Administrators disagree.
The EFL’s Insolvency Policy provides guidance on how the EFL will address issues that might arise with a Club in administration.
It seems to me that the second quote gives the EFL the wiggle to determine whether our claim should be protected but they are not using that power. This wouldn't affect the amount of the claim, which I'm sure could be negotiated. However, the Administrator seems to want it excluded from footballing creditors altogether without negotiation of the amount. If the EFL said "No, the claim has to be protected" then the Administrator would be forced to negotiate. Looks to me like the EFL is passing the buck - as always.
The EFL is a members’ club and seems to want to avoid acting as an arbitrator as far as is possible. One example is the use of ‘independent’ panels to determine punishments of clubs rather than these being determined by the EFL themselves.
I feel they don’t want Derby ‘punished’ further. And they don’t want anything to jeopardise a deal to buy the club out of administration and carry on as before.
@drcongo said:
There’s some truly bizarre posts in this thread. If you cut your own leg off and then I gave you a paper cut did I make you bleed to death?
Haha, fair enough. However, if there’s a surgeon stood there ready to save me and he refuses to do so until you remove the piece of paper. What would you do?
The doctor would be at fault. His oath would oblige him to treat you. In fact, if he did nothing and you bled to death I believe he would loose his medical registration.
To extend the analogy, let's say I cut you with a knife after you cut your leg off. I the arriving doctor will not approach you until the stabby guy with the knife moves away so that he feels safe to do so, what then?
@ReturnToSenda said:
We will not be a part of their demise. Their demise will be their fault and their fault only. It really is that simple.
Thank you. Derby fans still looking for a villain and not prepared to look closer to home. Last month some were discussing if Dele Alli would be a good signing ?
Dr Congo has nailed this in two sentences. But too much of this discussion is too binary. It's not a question of withdrawing our claim or not. It's not a question of our claim being the straw that breaks the Derby camel's back or not. As @Erroll_Sims has said, it's about the administrator taking a view of our claim and Middlesbrough's and deciding whether to fight them or, more likely, compromise them.
The administrator will have taken legal and possibly Counsel's advice. To me, there is a clear nexus between Derby's offence and the harm we have suffered, so our claim is pretty well-founded. My guess is that a settlement of our claim will be negotiated somewhere in the 50-70% range. The Middlesbrough claim is much more tenuous and I'd be surprised if they were offered more than 5-10%.
Reading the EFL statement, it appears that neither Wycombe or Middlesborough have actually quantified their claims. Isn't that a major stumbling block in resolving the issue when prospective purchasers have no idea of their level of the limit of their potential liability. Wouldn't that be a step forward to name the figure?
@mooneyman I'm not sure that the EFL statement is saying that. I think it's saying that because the claims are "not yet determined" (i.e. a court hasn't decided their validity) a buyer would be taking on an unknown liability.
@our_frank said: @mooneyman I'm not sure that the EFL statement is saying that. I think it's saying that because the claims are "not yet determined" (i.e. a court hasn't decided their validity) a buyer would be taking on an unknown liability.
I agree it can be read that way, but I thought that the Administrator clearly stated that potential purchasers were not aware of their MAXIMUM liability in the event the claims were successful.
If for example ours and Middlesbrough's claims were £20m and £5m respectively then it is possible (although probably unlikely) that negotiated figures could be agreed with Ashley.
@drcongo said:
There’s some truly bizarre posts in this thread. If you cut your own leg off and then I gave you a paper cut did I make you bleed to death?
Haha, fair enough. However, if there’s a surgeon stood there ready to save me and he refuses to do so until you remove the piece of paper. What would you do?
The doctor would be at fault. His oath would oblige him to treat you. In fact, if he did nothing and you bled to death I believe he would loose his medical registration.
To extend the analogy, let's say I cut you with a knife after you cut your leg off. I the arriving doctor will not approach you until the stabby guy with the knife moves away so that he feels safe to do so, what then?
If I cut my own leg off I can hardly blame anyone but myself.
All parties really need to decide whether our claim has any merit so it can either be part of the bigger picture or not and it needs to be done quickly.
Once that is decided then hopefully the administrator can get a preferred bidder, including our claim and they survive.
We all know that they'll be spending a fortune come the summer and that is completely and utterly wrong. It is however the lesser of two evils in my mind.
There needs to be stronger rules in place about accounting deadlines, administration and then what you are allowed to spend coming out the other side. Free transfers for next 4 transfer windows only or something to that effect.
I'd advocate a double relegation for going into admin to try and get clubs to live within their means.
From what I've read on various forums there is a small percentage of reasonable people but they seem to get shot down immediately. It's all their previous owners and boards making.
Unfortunately, as with the PPG fiasco, we are an easy target and the media do not help stoking it all up.
I'd love to believe we will go to Peterborough and get a lovely friendly welcome from the locals and no-one will be threatened at all. I'd think long and hard about going to that first away game at Peterborough as I now would with any match against Derby.
None of this is our fault, I just don't like what the future could hold for us when we go to support our team away from home.
I frankly couldn't care less what Peterborough or Derby fans think, we've done nothing wrong. In Peterborough's case neither have they.
I agree with a double relegation for admin or something stricter is needed to stop teams from starting to repeat the cycle of overspending 6 months later after paying pennies in the pound, but if that doesn't come in, I could argue that Derby restarting in tier 9 may be the lesser of two evils compared to giving the green light for other clubs to cheat and rob businesses with relatively minimal consequences
@Username said:
I frankly couldn't care less what Peterborough or Derby fans think, we've done nothing wrong. In Peterborough's case neither have they.
I agree with a double relegation for admin or something stricter is needed to stop teams from starting to repeat the cycle of overspending 6 months later after paying pennies in the pound, but if that doesn't come in, I could argue that Derby restarting in tier 9 may be the lesser of two evils compared to giving the green light for other clubs to cheat and rob businesses with relatively minimal consequences
The upshot of a high-profile football club not paying their debts to the local economy is that it'll hurt all other football clubs with the general reputational damage to the game. Which is yet another reason why it's absolutely the business of the Football League to severely punish malfeasance on the scale of what Derby have done so as to discourage it in future. Letting them choose when they take their points deduction through deliberately delaying the submission of their accounts was spineless beyond belief. If that had happened in Germany, they would have been denied a licence to play in professional football the following season.
Always worth reminding yourselves that all of that money Derby is trying to get out of paying is affecting thousands of people's lives. There will be businesses struggling to stay afloat, each with employees worrying about being able to feed their families - if you've never been in that position you have no idea what that does to your mental health. The tax they owe HMRC should be paying for schools, hospitals, roads and so on. Every one of the fans playing the "poor us" / "Wycombe are the baddies" cards has enough of a problem with empathy that they'd be considered sociopaths by the DSM-5, or they're too thick to actually think it through that far. Mind you, seems there's some of our own fans unable to empathise or think it through too.
Having read every post on this forum on this topic, I personally don't give two hoots what fans of other clubs may or may not think about us if we send DCFC down. We were wronged, very badly, by MM representing DCFC. By his own admission he submitted the accounts too late to avoid the points deduction, with the subsequent outcome. If other fans think badly of us, so what? Look at Millwall, "no one likes us, we don't care". In a few years time, they will be back as AFC Derby competing in L1, what will their fans think if they made the Championship & got relegated by another club doing the exact same thing? By not pursuing the claim because other clubs fans "might not like us", we are in effect endorsing the behaviour of MM & it will only encourage similar actions by others.
@drcongo said:
Always worth reminding yourselves that all of that money Derby is trying to get out of paying is affecting thousands of people's lives. There will be businesses struggling to stay afloat, each with employees worrying about being able to feed their families - if you've never been in that position you have no idea what that does to your mental health. The tax they owe HMRC should be paying for schools, hospitals, roads and so on. Every one of the fans playing the "poor us" / "Wycombe are the baddies" cards has enough of a problem with empathy that they'd be considered sociopaths by the DSM-5, or they're too thick to actually think it through that far. Mind you, seems there's some of our own fans unable to empathise or think it through too.
I couldn't agree more. If they go bust no-one gets any of the money they are owed. If they get a stay of execution those businesses and livelihoods maybe get to keep trading, even if it is a fraction of what they are really owed. Something is better than nothing.
We all know what they've done, what Wigan and Leicester before them have done and many others are in the process of doing - it is complete madness. It just rides roughshod over peoples lives and businesses.
The rules need tightening, how can a loss of £39M over three seasons even be an acceptable target for losses? It's crazy.
@eric_plant said:
good points about the local businesses being put at risk by Derby's mismanagement, it's absolutely awful.
Of course Wycombe are currently looking to push ahead of all of them in the queue for a payout as we would be classified as football creditors
If they hadn't cheated us out of 7 million, I expect we'd be employing a fair few more people here. Just because we didn't go ahead and do that without the means to pay for it secured doesn't take away from that
The amount they owe HMRC works out to be around 30p for every man, woman and child in the UK!!
If I here another Derby fan bleating on Talksport about how they are such a part of the community and the income it brings to the county in general I might start screaming.
By paying non-football creditors as little as they can get away with then five minutes later start handing out £5K+ a week contracts to footballers how is that helping the wider community?
They will be literally p*ssing all over the feet of the local community and suppliers that keep any business afloat.
Another point to make is that it is being framed by a lot of fans as "Derby cheated and cost us a place in the Championship" which seems reasonable but is actually speculative. No-one knows how Derby would have performed if they hadn't done what they did. It's reasonable to assume not as well but we don't know.
What we can say with certainty is that had the points deduction been applied to last season then we would have stayed in the Championship so it's that which has cost Wycombe, and the action taken by Derby to delay that judgement. A minor semantic point perhaps, but important in the context of the discussion.
I understand why so many are supportive, we have a very valid argument. But if either way (ie pursuing the claim or dropping the claim) ends in the same result - Wycombe not getting any money - then I would prefer the scenario where Derby can continue as a football club and fans don't lose something so important to them.
Others seem to think they've done wrong and they must be made to pay even if it means the club dies. As with so many things, I doubt we're ever going to agree.
I understand why so many are supportive, we have a very valid argument. But if either way (ie pursuing the claim or dropping the claim) ends in the same result - Wycombe not getting any money - then I would prefer the scenario where Derby can continue as a football club and fans don't lose something so important to them.
Thereby, allowing a free pass for other clubs to do the same? No, you're right, we will never agree.
@eric_plant said:
Another point to make is that it is being framed by a lot of fans as "Derby cheated and cost us a place in the Championship" which seems reasonable but is actually speculative. No-one knows how Derby would have performed if they hadn't done what they did. It's reasonable to assume not as well but we don't know.
What we can say with certainty is that had the points deduction been applied to last season then we would have stayed in the Championship so it's that which has cost Wycombe, and the action taken by Derby to delay that judgement. A minor semantic point perhaps, but important in the context of the discussion.
I understand why so many are supportive, we have a very valid argument. But if either way (ie pursuing the claim or dropping the claim) ends in the same result - Wycombe not getting any money - then I would prefer the scenario where Derby can continue as a football club and fans don't lose something so important to them.
Others seem to think they've done wrong and they must be made to pay even if it means the club dies. As with so many things, I doubt we're ever going to agree.
The argument that the Derby players might not have tried as hard on the pitch is irrelevant
Comments
I don’t want Derby to go out of business but I detest the thought that they can wriggle their way out of this. Clear their debts. Then start spending again. It stinks if that was to happen.
We are a perfectly legitimate claim against them. They knowingly delayed releasing the “corrected accounts” as they knew it they had done so as swiftly as they should have done they would be playing League One football this season if any football at all.
Derby as a League One club without the ground included are worth about as much as a bus fair to Totteridge from the town centre.
Whilst in the Championship they at least have some reasonable income outside of match day revenues.
League One next season could be half full of ex Premier League teams who all believe that they should be still there or in the Championship at the very least.
I bloody hope we go up this season just to escape their “entitled “ views of the world
I cannot stress this enough their IS NO law suit from either us or Boro.
All we have done is file a claim in the administration.
The Administrators duty is to assess the claims merits and accept or reject them as ranking as creditors.
The Administrators have not rejected them out of hand (which was what I was expecting) so they are presumably taking legal and accounting advice on this to reach a decision, until they make their decision ALL of us are just speculating...
My own view is that they will attempt to negotiate a lower amount based on the relative merits of the 2 claims in the hope of reaching a settlement in the £5-10m range which would still just about leave their total debts in the range that someone might pay.
I don't want to drive them out of business but they do need to learn a lesson here. Sadly, many of their fans just want a big money takeover ASAP so they can get back to doing what they've been doing for the last decade - big money showbiz signings.
The view is pretty much that we should pipe down because we're 'tinpot'.
I've got friends that are DCFC regulars as I work in Derby and they are concerned and gutted as we all would be. But you can't behave as they have, mug off your creditors and then go back to business as usual. There is not one of them who didn't know that Morris was up to all sorts of tricks - you only have to look at their 'Mel Morris has got everyone on strings' crowing to see that.
It doesn't take too much searching to find that most of their supporters who loved Mel's games are the ones absolutely wetting themselves and appealing for help from the 'football family'. This is pretty typical
If Derby dissolves, how will this affect the structure of the EFL? Consequential impact on promotion/relegation spots across Championship-League 2?
I find the follow extracts interesting in relation to our claim against Derby. Quotes taken from the EFL statement.
The current situation remains challenging as Middlesbrough and Wycombe Wanderers consider their claims should be protected under the terms of the Insolvency Policy. The Administrators disagree.
The EFL’s Insolvency Policy provides guidance on how the EFL will address issues that might arise with a Club in administration.
It seems to me that the second quote gives the EFL the wiggle to determine whether our claim should be protected but they are not using that power. This wouldn't affect the amount of the claim, which I'm sure could be negotiated. However, the Administrator seems to want it excluded from footballing creditors altogether without negotiation of the amount. If the EFL said "No, the claim has to be protected" then the Administrator would be forced to negotiate. Looks to me like the EFL is passing the buck - as always.
The EFL is a members’ club and seems to want to avoid acting as an arbitrator as far as is possible. One example is the use of ‘independent’ panels to determine punishments of clubs rather than these being determined by the EFL themselves.
I feel they don’t want Derby ‘punished’ further. And they don’t want anything to jeopardise a deal to buy the club out of administration and carry on as before.
To extend the analogy, let's say I cut you with a knife after you cut your leg off. I the arriving doctor will not approach you until the stabby guy with the knife moves away so that he feels safe to do so, what then?
Thank you. Derby fans still looking for a villain and not prepared to look closer to home. Last month some were discussing if Dele Alli would be a good signing ?
Dr Congo has nailed this in two sentences. But too much of this discussion is too binary. It's not a question of withdrawing our claim or not. It's not a question of our claim being the straw that breaks the Derby camel's back or not. As @Erroll_Sims has said, it's about the administrator taking a view of our claim and Middlesbrough's and deciding whether to fight them or, more likely, compromise them.
The administrator will have taken legal and possibly Counsel's advice. To me, there is a clear nexus between Derby's offence and the harm we have suffered, so our claim is pretty well-founded. My guess is that a settlement of our claim will be negotiated somewhere in the 50-70% range. The Middlesbrough claim is much more tenuous and I'd be surprised if they were offered more than 5-10%.
Reading the EFL statement, it appears that neither Wycombe or Middlesborough have actually quantified their claims. Isn't that a major stumbling block in resolving the issue when prospective purchasers have no idea of their level of the limit of their potential liability. Wouldn't that be a step forward to name the figure?
@mooneyman I'm not sure that the EFL statement is saying that. I think it's saying that because the claims are "not yet determined" (i.e. a court hasn't decided their validity) a buyer would be taking on an unknown liability.
You'd have to be pretty out of your mind to buy Derby, wouldn't you?
I agree it can be read that way, but I thought that the Administrator clearly stated that potential purchasers were not aware of their MAXIMUM liability in the event the claims were successful.
If for example ours and Middlesbrough's claims were £20m and £5m respectively then it is possible (although probably unlikely) that negotiated figures could be agreed with Ashley.
If I cut my own leg off I can hardly blame anyone but myself.
All parties really need to decide whether our claim has any merit so it can either be part of the bigger picture or not and it needs to be done quickly.
Once that is decided then hopefully the administrator can get a preferred bidder, including our claim and they survive.
We all know that they'll be spending a fortune come the summer and that is completely and utterly wrong. It is however the lesser of two evils in my mind.
There needs to be stronger rules in place about accounting deadlines, administration and then what you are allowed to spend coming out the other side. Free transfers for next 4 transfer windows only or something to that effect.
I'd advocate a double relegation for going into admin to try and get clubs to live within their means.
From what I've read on various forums there is a small percentage of reasonable people but they seem to get shot down immediately. It's all their previous owners and boards making.
Unfortunately, as with the PPG fiasco, we are an easy target and the media do not help stoking it all up.
I'd love to believe we will go to Peterborough and get a lovely friendly welcome from the locals and no-one will be threatened at all. I'd think long and hard about going to that first away game at Peterborough as I now would with any match against Derby.
None of this is our fault, I just don't like what the future could hold for us when we go to support our team away from home.
I don't think Peterborough fans are really that arsed about that anymore, are they? I reckon they'll stay up anyway.
No one knows until we go there!
I frankly couldn't care less what Peterborough or Derby fans think, we've done nothing wrong. In Peterborough's case neither have they.
I agree with a double relegation for admin or something stricter is needed to stop teams from starting to repeat the cycle of overspending 6 months later after paying pennies in the pound, but if that doesn't come in, I could argue that Derby restarting in tier 9 may be the lesser of two evils compared to giving the green light for other clubs to cheat and rob businesses with relatively minimal consequences
I'll have to dig the 1.74 flag out
The upshot of a high-profile football club not paying their debts to the local economy is that it'll hurt all other football clubs with the general reputational damage to the game. Which is yet another reason why it's absolutely the business of the Football League to severely punish malfeasance on the scale of what Derby have done so as to discourage it in future. Letting them choose when they take their points deduction through deliberately delaying the submission of their accounts was spineless beyond belief. If that had happened in Germany, they would have been denied a licence to play in professional football the following season.
Always worth reminding yourselves that all of that money Derby is trying to get out of paying is affecting thousands of people's lives. There will be businesses struggling to stay afloat, each with employees worrying about being able to feed their families - if you've never been in that position you have no idea what that does to your mental health. The tax they owe HMRC should be paying for schools, hospitals, roads and so on. Every one of the fans playing the "poor us" / "Wycombe are the baddies" cards has enough of a problem with empathy that they'd be considered sociopaths by the DSM-5, or they're too thick to actually think it through that far. Mind you, seems there's some of our own fans unable to empathise or think it through too.
good points about the local businesses being put at risk by Derby's mismanagement, it's absolutely awful.
Of course Wycombe are currently looking to push ahead of all of them in the queue for a payout as we would be classified as football creditors
Having read every post on this forum on this topic, I personally don't give two hoots what fans of other clubs may or may not think about us if we send DCFC down. We were wronged, very badly, by MM representing DCFC. By his own admission he submitted the accounts too late to avoid the points deduction, with the subsequent outcome. If other fans think badly of us, so what? Look at Millwall, "no one likes us, we don't care". In a few years time, they will be back as AFC Derby competing in L1, what will their fans think if they made the Championship & got relegated by another club doing the exact same thing? By not pursuing the claim because other clubs fans "might not like us", we are in effect endorsing the behaviour of MM & it will only encourage similar actions by others.
I couldn't agree more. If they go bust no-one gets any of the money they are owed. If they get a stay of execution those businesses and livelihoods maybe get to keep trading, even if it is a fraction of what they are really owed. Something is better than nothing.
We all know what they've done, what Wigan and Leicester before them have done and many others are in the process of doing - it is complete madness. It just rides roughshod over peoples lives and businesses.
The rules need tightening, how can a loss of £39M over three seasons even be an acceptable target for losses? It's crazy.
If they hadn't cheated us out of 7 million, I expect we'd be employing a fair few more people here. Just because we didn't go ahead and do that without the means to pay for it secured doesn't take away from that
The amount they owe HMRC works out to be around 30p for every man, woman and child in the UK!!
If I here another Derby fan bleating on Talksport about how they are such a part of the community and the income it brings to the county in general I might start screaming.
By paying non-football creditors as little as they can get away with then five minutes later start handing out £5K+ a week contracts to footballers how is that helping the wider community?
They will be literally p*ssing all over the feet of the local community and suppliers that keep any business afloat.
Another point to make is that it is being framed by a lot of fans as "Derby cheated and cost us a place in the Championship" which seems reasonable but is actually speculative. No-one knows how Derby would have performed if they hadn't done what they did. It's reasonable to assume not as well but we don't know.
What we can say with certainty is that had the points deduction been applied to last season then we would have stayed in the Championship so it's that which has cost Wycombe, and the action taken by Derby to delay that judgement. A minor semantic point perhaps, but important in the context of the discussion.
I understand why so many are supportive, we have a very valid argument. But if either way (ie pursuing the claim or dropping the claim) ends in the same result - Wycombe not getting any money - then I would prefer the scenario where Derby can continue as a football club and fans don't lose something so important to them.
Others seem to think they've done wrong and they must be made to pay even if it means the club dies. As with so many things, I doubt we're ever going to agree.
Thereby, allowing a free pass for other clubs to do the same? No, you're right, we will never agree.
The argument that the Derby players might not have tried as hard on the pitch is irrelevant