calscot

Completely agree. I think he lent the money with no repayment date as he thought he'd have the board's balls in a vice and so didn't want it paid back in the normal fashion, and agree with Frankie that he wanted it in place, so that he could collect a the fat end of the income for Rangers merchandising for years to come. I believe he wanted to run us in a way where he would increase his influence in shareholding and lend us just enough that we couldn't easily pay it back (not with his onerous contracts and stooges on the board) - and therefore be unable to change the terms of the contracts with SD which would probably be renewed at expiration, and the club would also be forced into giving virtually free advertising to SD. At the same time the interest free nature would allow him to claim benevolence and being advantageous to the club - while he coins in millions a year in profits and benefits in kind. He seems to have pretty much completed that at Newcastle; however, I think he's reached the limit of the naivety (for want of a better word) of Newcastle fans who draw the line at renaming the stadium and are now understanding the nature of their situation - which could be compared to the boiling a frog analogy, and are now starting to revolt. Rangers fans seem to have seen him coming somewhat, with their eyes a bit wider open and he underestimated the resolve of high worth fans to retake the club when he took his eye off the ball. So with his lining up of ducks having been blitzkrieged by DK and the Three Bears et al, he's left with no influence on the board and the damage of a loan that he can't call in, make money on, or use much to his advantage. He still has his onerous contract, as well as securities, but is under increasing pressure to renegotiate due to the loan, and the low level of sales to Rangers fans. Even though it's pennies for him, he's the kind of guy that doesn't seem to see past the money aspect. I think he will press hard to get the best deal for himself to make the most money, but that will hopefully involve more beneficial terms for Rangers for him to achieve that. I think we'll be stuck with a hole in our income till the contract expires and we'll just have to suck that up in the meantime, but hopefully that will be a far smaller hole than it is now. For our part, I think it's best that we avoid spending any money on Rangers merchandise until the contract is adjusted, and I think we should all stop buying all other goods from Sports Direct period. Their business practices are unethical in any case and they are just a vehicle to make a fat man's fat bank account even fatter.

I'm not sure what that statement clarifies, except that all Mash likes to throw a bit of mud.

Sounds like a good idea but also an expensive job for no immediate income gain. It's about 2.5 times as expensive as a normal seat but normal seats are already paid for and installed and so cost £0. To put it in could cost something like a £100 a unit. We'd need a million quid for 20% of the stadium. Something we could do in the future when the stadium is back in shape, but not a priority for now.

IF it's payable on demand, then all MA has to do is demand it and we'll have to pay. So why hasn't he, why the bleating to the press and the EGM? Without a link, and referencing a newspaper which is always an unreliable source these days, it looks like you're just making mischief. I think DK is one of the few who know exactly what the terms are, and he's pretty comfortable in not paying up for the moment. It seems pretty obvious from the actions of both sides that there appears to be no pressing need to pay.

I think in a European sense, it could be an exercise in futility, as the most reliable statistic for a prediction of success in the EPL has so far been the size of the wage bill. And before someone says that it didn't happen for us last season, it's a correlation which doesn't necessarily apply 100% in every single case. There are obviously other influential factors - off-field money and boardroom problems, and disaffected fans being huge ones. There also seems to be the "Mike Ashley factor"... But it's obvious we also didn't finish in the bottom half. The three most expensive teams took the first three places.

It also may make us worse to watch - after all who could argue with our results stats in the third tier? I recall the start of it in Moneyball was a batter who could get to first base the most consistently, no matter how he got there - which can be done without hitting the ball. It's about buying undervalued journeymen players who are not good to watch but are good at some boring thing that statistically helps to win games. Applied to us and our football and you're not going to get the most beautiful of games. As previously alluded to, you'll probably get something like two seasons ago, or at best, Walter Smith's side who slogged their way to the Europa final.

I think while the conflict of interest looks obvious from our point of view of things, the lack of legal action suggests it's apparently difficult to prove in court due to the vagaries of what could be considered "good" for the club. However, that seems to me another massive flaw in our business laws where it seems easy to be a thief, a con man, a **** or a charlatan and be completely legal. Criminal masterminds have can easily bend the laws to rip everyone off for their riches without resorting to obvious and risky crimes like bank robberies and jewel heists.

PS Moneyball showed that the advantage gained comes from being the only team to do it, if you show it works and everyone starts doing it, the richest teams win again. If we open that pandoras box and it works, we'll soon be back to square one but then find it even harder to compete with the TV rich teams.

The thing to be careful about is that there is a massive difference between baseball and football. Baseball is all set pieces and a lot of what players do can be isolated and a "golden" metric found to measure their effectiveness. A first base man will pretty much do the same thing, no matter who else is in the team. Football is a far more fluid game where everyone can interfere with everyone else and is more reliant on how each team plays together as well as how they cope with the other team. A golden metric for each position could be pretty hard to work out. The threads on Boyd are an obvious example of this. Players who play badly for a team and go on to play better for another, or vice versa, are other examples that don't tend to be so stark in baseball - therefore if you trade a player for the Mets from the Red Sox then it's likely his statistics won't change so much. No so much in football. Your stats could be impeccable but the team you build pretty crap. I would be confident in asserting that doing it all statistically like this, our squad would have been predicted to win the Championship.

I think until the retail agreement runs out is probably long enough, otherwise I think we would lose income. But yeah, I think that's pretty much the threat to Ashley from the board. Renegotiate the contract or we're keeping your money...

I'm not sure I understand the question but one obvious reason is to protect the borrower. Being able to demand repayment at any time would give a lender the power to put a company out of business if they don't have the liquidity to pay at the time of the demand. I personally think that Ashley was a bit slapdash here, as at the time he believed he owned the board. King blind-sided him.

Can't see it being true "donations", more like loans converted to equity later.

That seems to look like a "customer" viewpoint rather than a "supporter" viewpoint. The club needs fan investment, no matter who the playing staff are. It's a chicken an egg situation - the more fans we have, the more money we have for players... And with the way fans disagree on all of this, there is no way the board can please everyone, especially with the over-inflated expectations in juxtaposition with where we are in financial and sporting terms at the moment.

I think it would be very disappointing if King came in for the love of the club, ousted all the parasites that were sucking out the life-blood, gives it a transfusion of over 10 million of his own money matched by others who back him, sends out a rallying call to the fans come out and support to help get the club quickly back to the top of Scottish football, and it's all met with a, "meh..."

He is too enmeshed in our retail operations to remove his influence in the short term. The guy puts his fingers in the pies and doesn't let go easily...

Seems to me that we need to keep as strong a hand as possible - our main business leverage is the non-return of the money and low kit sales. So if the loan is interest free and has no-repayment date then I don't think we shouldn't repay it until the SD contracts are renegotiated or expired. Also fans should refrain from buying kit and retail stuff until either of those two events happen. We need to force Ashley into a business decision, where his track record actually seems to be to take the route that makes more money.

Eh? Weird reply again... Please do rise to the challenge to put together an objective and well reasoned reply. Nobody gives a crap whether you get any sort of rise or not...

Bit of a weird reply as usual, you do always seem to struggle badly with understanding what is actually being said, but I understand how you can't resist even the most tenuous reason to have a go at McCoist. Yes, the results were much, much better after your perceived "massive improvement" in fitness under McCall... Oh wait...

I always wanted to get my handicap "down"... I can see there's other ways of looking at it. I always found "fuel consumption" difficult to talk about in that way so now I just say "better" or "worse".

BTW On the training meme, I'm not sure if Ally was training the players to an optimal level or doing something badly wrong, but ironically most of his critics on here would have us vastly over-training the players causing excess-fatigue and injuries. "Fitness and freshness", "fatigue", "form" (or "condition"), "periodisation" and "tapering" are the things you need to know about in modern training, and also pertinently, "rest" and "recovery". There is an article about a Dutchman's view (Raymond Verheijen) of football training here (although I know it's the BBC) that might be interesting and informative: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/9239342.stm

Ally gets blamed for lot but surely not for making the players worse at golf?

I somewhat agree with you but feel a truly professional journalist with any integrity for his position, would put aside petty biases and try to report what he sees as objectively as possible. He should be self aware enough to recognise his feelings which blind the real view on things and counter them to give his audience a fair and accurate picture, if nothing else. There are special columns for opinion. People have to do this in all professions - you should never let your prejudices taint your work. The problem with these "journalists" is that they are not fit for purpose - they don't deliver news at all, they deliver lies instead. That's a completely different profession.

Signing players before a manager is the sign of a poor board who are playing Football Manager rather than doing their job.

Biased journalist seems to me to be an oxymoron. If you're biased, you're not a journalist - maybe that's what distinguishes a "columnist".

So if a player does ok for us and badly elsewhere, that makes our coaching brilliant? Seems some people haven't yet learned that football is not that simple. It's a very complex game and one player can do well for one team and not so much for another - it happens all the time for a vast variety of reasons. It's also a bit naive to base everything on one one isolated metric such as number of goals scored - you'd think that the debates on Boyd would have been instructional on that matter...