Sorry, but you will see that I DO NOT blame the EFL, so "F the EFL" is not my mantra. Apologies if you meant the fans as a whole, but even so, it is the voice of of a noisy minority that feels that way. The story of Icarus is down to two men Dai an agent who goes by the name of Kia J--------, who I believe was also involved in Everton. Enough said. Just to inform you, I and a lot of my fellow fans were unhappy about the way Dai was spending all that cash on players as many of us could see what would happen. I think partly to blame for all this bad feeling between some Reading fans and others is down to the younger "fans" who have started to follow Reading in the recent years of success, and can't now get to grips with less successful years.
I don't mean to be mean, you have added a lot to this debate but when were your "recent years of success"? Probably long enough ago for it not to be kids talking this way but there's an odd streak of football fans at many clubs who think they are entitled to have a club at a certain level. Punching above your weight is a lot more admirable than crying over past fleeting glories.
Things for us started to go downhill for us about eight or so years ago, so if any child of about eight started to go before then, with their dad and is still going will be a teenager still. That means they are a youngster to me, I wouldn't be surprised if the dad now gives the games a miss because he was drawn to Reading when we were in the Premier League.
You can say many things about the Couhigs, but I doubt many other owners would sit down for an hour long 'cards on the table' chat, answering any fans q.
Not a huge fan of his chance to take digs at Reading fans, although I see where it's coming from, and you can argue some of his answers are a little misleading, but fair play for doing it
I think both the Heroes of HP12 & the WWTV interview were very good and show Rob C in a broadly good light, as others have said I am not sure there are many other owners/chairs would open themselves up like this.
For me whilst understandable, the only negative was his sniping at Reading fans. Most of his answers were clear and informative.
He was excellent throughout. We are lucky to have him. I can’t think of any other chairman/owner since my time supporting, 1990 onward, that was as engaging and open as Rob.
Rob is an interesting character, he is refreshingly honest but stubbornly naive about English football . I wish he would just run his ideas about dealing with other clubs in the football league past me before he made a decision then all I would have to do is come with different ways of saying it’s a toxic money pit don’t go fucking near it.
He presents well, but let’s look at the facts. Since he joined the club, the accounts show the club is now losing on average circa 3m a year. Considerably more than the 700k annual loss the club was making prior to Couhig joining.
In the year post-relegation from the championship, the club was able to utilise 3m profit from the championship season to fund its now regular 3m loss operation.
We can see from the recent accounts, the championship profit was burned through, and club losses are now being covered by Couhig loans, not cash investment. Each year the club has mounting debt, now running into the multi-millions.
There is a lot of bluster from Couhig but these are the facts.
I always find your posts interesting but you never post about games or players or much else related to games and the squad, it’s always about finance or castigating our finest ever manager who gave us 10 years of his life and some of the best memories we have of watching this club
Dennis Berkamp and associates were interested and still looking for a league 1 team…. “ It is still a dream of mine to develop players, run an academy, and use all our knowledge and experience to get promoted.
"Not with a foreign billionaire who puts in a lot of money just to go up quickly”
Personally think they would have done well deal fell through before Cohig took over.
I admire your confidence that there is a queue of reputable buyers stretching down Hillbottom Road just waiting to lose circa £3m a year. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.
As ever there is a lot of positive & negative hyperbole about the Couhigs ownership.
Let's all be honest, we had pretty much reached the end of the road as a fan trust owned club; none of us had sufficient funds individually or collectively to meet the operating costs far less the accumulated losses, so we were either going to default on payments, go into receivership or face points deductions or all three.
We should be grateful someone decided they were prepared to countenance digging into their pockets enough to not only buy the club but also cover the running costs. However that doesn't mean they get a free pass with our club, we must always hold them to account and seek transparency & openness (surely the role of the Trust?).
The annual losses we are currently seeing are par for the course for a moderately ambitious L1 club with an average gate of c5k, the only thing that will reduce that is to increase match day income (each additional 1,000 on the gate gives us probably somewhere around £50k extra per game or close to £700k per season), so to cover the current operating defecit we need to basically sell out the ground every game - not sure how likely that is in the short term or ever for that matter.
The Couhigs can do these sums too hence the urgency to get an additional "investor" on board and the push for the road & ground changes, as these combined with steady development of the squad are most likely to steadily increase the crowd and match day income.
Whilst I am here it strikes me Rob's definition of sustainable has morphed to "what am I prepared to reasonably put in each year" rather than anything else, I for one appreciate that he is comfortable with the curren tlevel of support albeit as predominately loans. In the WWTV interview with Phil he hinted that there is part of the accumulated losses he doesn't expect to recover either from improved financial performance or a sale, which means the club is potentially more attractive when he does decide to sell.
I don't think we'll ever achieve sustainability if his goal remains establishing the club in the Championship. That will never happen unless we do Bournemouth and absolutely chuck money at it.
He's not realistic and that's my biggest worry with him.
I understand that @flymofrank but how do we do that from this current position? Do we move on our best players and be happy to drop down the leagues as long as we are sustainable?
Not being awkward here, just trying to understand what being sustainable is and staying in the EFL.
I think gradually reducing the wage bill is sensible - I'm sure quite a few of the current crop are high earners, although I'd expect Vokes and possibly McCleary to move on this summer.
We probably need some form of outside ownership to remain at this level, but I'm happy if we're 'only' a League One club for the foreseeable.
It is a very difficult situation that many EFL clubs find themselves in. I for one don’t know the answer that would enable us to continue in this league without any outside investment from someone like Rob who puts his own money into it.
I certainly wouldn’t put my own money in. Well not unless I won a massive jackpot on Euro millions that is.
My point was, I don't agree with people that say if the Couhigs hadn't come along on their shiny white horse we would've gone bust and had no team. We wouldn't, because somebody else would've took the reigns on and instead they would be lauded as our saviours.
I could be really petty and say, we've only been losing 3 million a year since Rob took over, but I won't.
I do however agree it's a mugs game, and who on earth would want to run a club these days when it is pretty much guaranteed that you'd lose money.
Comments
Sorry, but you will see that I DO NOT blame the EFL, so "F the EFL" is not my mantra. Apologies if you meant the fans as a whole, but even so, it is the voice of of a noisy minority that feels that way. The story of Icarus is down to two men Dai an agent who goes by the name of Kia J--------, who I believe was also involved in Everton. Enough said. Just to inform you, I and a lot of my fellow fans were unhappy about the way Dai was spending all that cash on players as many of us could see what would happen. I think partly to blame for all this bad feeling between some Reading fans and others is down to the younger "fans" who have started to follow Reading in the recent years of success, and can't now get to grips with less successful years.
I don't mean to be mean, you have added a lot to this debate but when were your "recent years of success"? Probably long enough ago for it not to be kids talking this way but there's an odd streak of football fans at many clubs who think they are entitled to have a club at a certain level. Punching above your weight is a lot more admirable than crying over past fleeting glories.
Things for us started to go downhill for us about eight or so years ago, so if any child of about eight started to go before then, with their dad and is still going will be a teenager still. That means they are a youngster to me, I wouldn't be surprised if the dad now gives the games a miss because he was drawn to Reading when we were in the Premier League.
I had always reconciled his chippyness down to being thin skinned, seems there must be some other condition at play.
You can say many things about the Couhigs, but I doubt many other owners would sit down for an hour long 'cards on the table' chat, answering any fans q.
Not a huge fan of his chance to take digs at Reading fans, although I see where it's coming from, and you can argue some of his answers are a little misleading, but fair play for doing it
I think both the Heroes of HP12 & the WWTV interview were very good and show Rob C in a broadly good light, as others have said I am not sure there are many other owners/chairs would open themselves up like this.
For me whilst understandable, the only negative was his sniping at Reading fans. Most of his answers were clear and informative.
He was excellent throughout. We are lucky to have him. I can’t think of any other chairman/owner since my time supporting, 1990 onward, that was as engaging and open as Rob.
Rob is an interesting character, he is refreshingly honest but stubbornly naive about English football . I wish he would just run his ideas about dealing with other clubs in the football league past me before he made a decision then all I would have to do is come with different ways of saying it’s a toxic money pit don’t go fucking near it.
He presents well, but let’s look at the facts. Since he joined the club, the accounts show the club is now losing on average circa 3m a year. Considerably more than the 700k annual loss the club was making prior to Couhig joining.
In the year post-relegation from the championship, the club was able to utilise 3m profit from the championship season to fund its now regular 3m loss operation.
We can see from the recent accounts, the championship profit was burned through, and club losses are now being covered by Couhig loans, not cash investment. Each year the club has mounting debt, now running into the multi-millions.
There is a lot of bluster from Couhig but these are the facts.
I always find your posts interesting but you never post about games or players or much else related to games and the squad, it’s always about finance or castigating our finest ever manager who gave us 10 years of his life and some of the best memories we have of watching this club
Are you actually a Wycombe fan?
Did you lay these concerns before Rob Couhig and if not, why?
We’re definitely a long way from sustainability. I don’t think this is a Couhig problem though, it’s a systemic football problem.
Without Couhig we wouldn’t have survived in League One (if at all) let alone had a season in the Championship.
Agreed and I would go one step further and say that without Rob coming on board we wouldn’t have a team in the EFL now.
Of course we would ! Makes me laugh when people say this. We were a league one club, someone would always buy us !
There was more than one interested party at the time, if they hadn't of come in, someone else wouldve.
Dennis Berkamp and associates were interested and still looking for a league 1 team…. “ It is still a dream of mine to develop players, run an academy, and use all our knowledge and experience to get promoted.
"Not with a foreign billionaire who puts in a lot of money just to go up quickly”
Personally think they would have done well deal fell through before Cohig took over.
How serious are they, if 5 years later, they're still just sniffing around for a team?
Exactly. He didn't buy Wycombe out of the goodness of his heart - we just happened to be there.
I admire your confidence that there is a queue of reputable buyers stretching down Hillbottom Road just waiting to lose circa £3m a year. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.
I have to agree in this one and it’s interesting to me why anyone would want to buy a league 1 club who couldn’t afford curtains or players.
I never really understood why the Andy Harman offer was so quickly dismissed. We never even got to vote on that one it was swept away so quickly.
As ever there is a lot of positive & negative hyperbole about the Couhigs ownership.
Let's all be honest, we had pretty much reached the end of the road as a fan trust owned club; none of us had sufficient funds individually or collectively to meet the operating costs far less the accumulated losses, so we were either going to default on payments, go into receivership or face points deductions or all three.
We should be grateful someone decided they were prepared to countenance digging into their pockets enough to not only buy the club but also cover the running costs. However that doesn't mean they get a free pass with our club, we must always hold them to account and seek transparency & openness (surely the role of the Trust?).
The annual losses we are currently seeing are par for the course for a moderately ambitious L1 club with an average gate of c5k, the only thing that will reduce that is to increase match day income (each additional 1,000 on the gate gives us probably somewhere around £50k extra per game or close to £700k per season), so to cover the current operating defecit we need to basically sell out the ground every game - not sure how likely that is in the short term or ever for that matter.
The Couhigs can do these sums too hence the urgency to get an additional "investor" on board and the push for the road & ground changes, as these combined with steady development of the squad are most likely to steadily increase the crowd and match day income.
Whilst I am here it strikes me Rob's definition of sustainable has morphed to "what am I prepared to reasonably put in each year" rather than anything else, I for one appreciate that he is comfortable with the curren tlevel of support albeit as predominately loans. In the WWTV interview with Phil he hinted that there is part of the accumulated losses he doesn't expect to recover either from improved financial performance or a sale, which means the club is potentially more attractive when he does decide to sell.
I don't think we'll ever achieve sustainability if his goal remains establishing the club in the Championship. That will never happen unless we do Bournemouth and absolutely chuck money at it.
He's not realistic and that's my biggest worry with him.
He is putting his own money in and getting us additional investors, which I very much doubt we would be able to do without him.
That doesn't mean it's sustainable
Maybe not but what other plan or option have we got?
To spend within our means and not spend excessively chasing a delusion
I understand that @flymofrank but how do we do that from this current position? Do we move on our best players and be happy to drop down the leagues as long as we are sustainable?
Not being awkward here, just trying to understand what being sustainable is and staying in the EFL.
I think gradually reducing the wage bill is sensible - I'm sure quite a few of the current crop are high earners, although I'd expect Vokes and possibly McCleary to move on this summer.
We probably need some form of outside ownership to remain at this level, but I'm happy if we're 'only' a League One club for the foreseeable.
If we genuinely "spend within our means" starting this summer, at what level would you expect us to be playing in 5 seasons' time?
Although you've then gone on to mention outside investment so what do you actually mean by spending "within our means"?
It is a very difficult situation that many EFL clubs find themselves in. I for one don’t know the answer that would enable us to continue in this league without any outside investment from someone like Rob who puts his own money into it.
I certainly wouldn’t put my own money in. Well not unless I won a massive jackpot on Euro millions that is.
My point was, I don't agree with people that say if the Couhigs hadn't come along on their shiny white horse we would've gone bust and had no team. We wouldn't, because somebody else would've took the reigns on and instead they would be lauded as our saviours.
I could be really petty and say, we've only been losing 3 million a year since Rob took over, but I won't.
I do however agree it's a mugs game, and who on earth would want to run a club these days when it is pretty much guaranteed that you'd lose money.