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ign more players when we can t brabin s successor martin ling lasted roughly a week having signed a three year contract 19 the club citing irreconcilable differences between martin ling and chairman george rolls the next day rolls quit the club 20 as did vice chairman terry baker rolls declared lots of fans won t want to hear this but i m sure i ll be back one day owning the club i made a lot of bad decisions but it hasn t put me off yes it wasn t good business and i had no other option but to stand down i ve got no regrets just happy memories i m not going to cry over anything i ll be back there 21 i suspect most fans would hope not martin ling would presumably hope not he was promptly reappointed manager 22 rolls meanwhile was firing off as if in an exit interview warning of a 900 000 shortfall in revenues they have to start living within their means it s a sad day for me if the club wants to keep gambling all the time i kept forewarning the fans cuts would have to take place if it meant upsetting managers along the way because they were over budget and trying to sign people i ll take that i interfered but i m sure the fans would rather have me interfere than six months time the club go into administration 23 in a surprise turn of events well to me at least this time last year who should come on board at the abbey stadium but gareth baldwin late of histon 24 showing a multiplicity of till i die approaches is of course the norm for players but such a switch at board level between two local rivals is somewhat rarer in this case it turns out he admitted a lifelong love of united 25 gosh he must have been tortured during his time at histon shortly his wife became secretary at cambridge united a role she had previously held at where else histon 26 a bombshell at the end of february was the news that bideawhile remember the company owned by united s then vice chairman john howard who had bought the stadium for 1 92m in december 2004 had sold the ground to grosvenor estates for wait for it 3 5m 27 and no that s not a typo be warned there s a name to watch out for if appointed as a director in a club near you j o h n h o w a r d the supporters trust were to be fair given the opportunity to match the 3 5m bid in a time frame of er 18 days 28 john howard had finally stepped down at the request of the rest of the board because of his blatant conflict of interests in august 2006 29 sadly if not unsurprisingly they failed to manage that but they did raise over 1m in that very short period 30 definitely a new paragraph just to give you time to let that sink in that brings us more or less up to date save for the news at the beginning of this month that cambridge united itself is up for sale 31 baldwin has expressed an interest in buying the club 32 as have those mythical beasties forgive my cynicism but i am a pompey fan foreign investors 33 last night cambridge fans united decided they too would seek to buy the club my source for this is twitter i ll post a link in comments once the minutes of the meeting are online present at the meeting was kevin rye of supporters direct he offered me the following thoughts cambridge united fans need to recognise that they re at something of a crossroads to my mind they have three choices they could either take the chance with the same tired model of ownership where a small group of directors including cfu continue to keep the ship afloat every year but basically manage long term decline this hasn t worked already despite the best efforts of those concerned or they could wait for the mythical white knight to appear the less said about that the better the final and only real option left on the table is community and supporter ownership yes it seems scary to some people but the chance to create a vibrant outward looking club harnessing the energies talent collective wisdom and finances of the several thousand cufc fans out there is surely too good an opportunity to turn down cambridge fans united certainly are in with a chance they have existed for ten years and have recently raised 1m at very short notice may joy yet again be found at the abbey stadium food for thought there for plymouth argyle fans and indeed for fans at any club that hasn t yet established a supporters trust plymouth fans have now done so 34 i appreciate and good luck to the argyle fans trust but how different their position might have been with ten year s experience behind them share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading posted in assets benefactors insolvency investors ownership stadium trusts tagged assets benefactors insolvency investors ownership stadium supporters trust 6 comments lessons from plymouth posted by john beech on january 3 2011 the car crash that plymouth argyle is on the verge of turning into is a strange case yet many a club might well think that there but for the grace of god go they at the beginning of the nineties dan mccauley had become chairman with his predecessor peter bloom becoming vice chairman while the club did not have a particularly stable decade on the pitch three relegations in eight years seven managers the club was run reasonably stably if unsustainably on a traditional benefactor model shortly before mccauley finally stood down in 2001 debts were reported to be 2 7m with 1 8m owed to mccauley s rotolok holdings he was also advocating a new stadium the capacity of which was wound in from 23 000 to 18 000 but with scope to increase capacity as mccauley explained an 18 000 all seater stadium should be sufficient for us in the short term but it s important to have flexibility in the design to cater for success when plymouth argyle move up through the leagues sufficient is an odd choice of word average seasonal attendances throughout the decade had peaked at just over 9 000 in 1994 but had fallen to around the 5 300 mark the sort of figure mccauley was speaking of had not been seen at home park on a regular basis since the fifties 1 reaching the age of 65 in 2001 mccauley found buyers he felt would be good for the club the new board was led by local businessmen paul stapleton and peter jones and included the local mp michael foot and two london based businessmen nick warren and phil gill all pilgrim fans sources for the above paragraphs are newspapers mainly the western daily herald and are unavailable on the internet under the new regime stadium redevelopment proceeded but hit a snag when the council declined to carry on funding it 2 having already spent 2 6m it felt that it was difficult to justify further expenditure argyle vice chairman peter jones rather ungraciously argued people should not forget the council are the freeholder of the stadium given the fact that a revamped stadium will bring in more people more income and more rent they should be prepared to put in a proportion of the 5m we need from a business perspective the early years of the noughties were a success in 2004 they announced a profit for the third year running 3 and by 2005 the seasonal average attendance had reached almost 16 500 following a return to tier 2 for the first time since 1992 the ground was purchased from the council in december for 2 7m 4 how then did things start to go wrong the management of players proved problematic with continuing changes in who was manager the club managed to maintain their status in the championship until last summer that is but the fans started to drift away attendances falling to just over the 10 000 mark on average in february 2008 the club recorded a record annual loss of 715 000 5 not only were revenues down but the club had locked itself into some rather expensive player contracts the wages revenues ratio which in 2001 02 had been at a very healthy 43 1 had by 2007 08 risen to a rather unhealthy 74 4 in april 2008 the club announced a surprise new investor japan s k k shonan management corporation headed by yasuaki kagami who joined the argyle board 6 argyle chairman paul stapleton said we are excited about the future possible revenue streams from the far east in particular and expanding the horizons of plymouth argyle while this agreement has only just been concluded it demonstrates the considerable appeal that plymouth argyle and our region has for companies with a global reach i suspect that few outside plymouth shared this optimism japanese involvement increased when yasuhiko okudera was appointed argyle s president 7 and there was talk of japanese players coming to home park 8 by the summer of 2008 things were beginning to crumble the transfer budget was reported as overspent 9 by march 2009 non playing jobs were at risk 10 by the summer of that year there was talk of not only further investment from japan but also of a takeover 11 phill gill sold his shares to kagami 12 and by july kagami held 38 of the shares and his colleagues sir roy gardner and keith todd joined the board with holdings of 13 the trio thus holding a small majority the appearance of gardner in particular a former chairman of manchester united raised hopes for some stabilisation paul stapleton said of gardner he s going to bring a no nonsense common sense approach and a business attitude to everything we do 13 the challenge was certainly there though they had for example inherited a squad of over 30 players 14 there was to be no magic wand in december that year the club was placed under a transfer embargo 15 for what the club dismissed as historic debts and kagami rode to the rescue with a loan sic of 1 5m 16 kagami was meantime being sued for 84 000 by former director gill 17 2010 opened badly with the first of a series of winding up petitions from hmrc 18 in march there was the announcement that the club was to sell off the family silverware the only recently acquired home park 19 a new world was heralded nevertheless 20 involving a 46 000 2018 world cup stadium rather than repeat my thoughts on this see a posting i made at the time called are we going stark stadium bonkers the year s financial figures which featured a loss of 2 9m were described by gardner with the kind of understatement that football club chairmen specialise in as disappointing 21 the relegation to league 1 was a bitter pill to swallow given the already worrying state of finances gardner however insisted that the new stadium was the way forward a new stadium is an essential part of our forward planning and reflects the scale of ambition at the club 22 oh dear the a word ambition perhaps the r word reality might have been more appropriate the scale of ambition was certainly enormous last august the board announced plans for a 150m redevelopment of home park 23 the following day it emerged that the club had not paid their long serving announcer since late in the previous season 24 things have just progressed from bad to worse since then and i will assume that any reader who reached this point is already familiar with the failed 2018 bid the further winding up petitions from hmrc and the worrying appearance of peter ridsdale i will spare you a repetition of his experiences at leeds united and at cardiff city but see here if you want to read my previous postings on the spinmeister less well remembered are his days at barnsley he took over in october 2003 25 when he left fourteen months later new chairman gordon stewart explained ridsdale s departure the club was running into a financial position that was less than comfortable and it was clear cash had to be injected 26 for the spinmeister himself to declare the situation at plymouth as dire and i can t even find the words to put into context how bad it is it is probably worse than you can imagine this is a race against time 27 one can only assume the situation is considerably worse than dire with the exception of bringing in ridsdale as a saviour all i can offer as hope to the green army here is the thought that this might just be a case of fourth time lucky although i don t think it actually will be the situation at argyle is one that could have happened at too many clubs benefactors who couldn t or wouldn t stay the course overpaid players cashflow insufficient to pay all staff on time a high turnover of managers a serious case of stadium envy a casual attitude to paying hmrc absentee investors an absence of fan power it encapsulates most of what is wrong with english football and offers a very depressing start to 2011 share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading posted in 2018 assets benefactors cashflow debts history hmrc insolvency investors ownership stadium tagged 2018 assets benefactors debts history hmrc insolvency investors ownership stadium 14 comments liverpool and manchester united posted by john beech on october 14 2010 i ve been abroad for work and then taken a couple of days leave the net result is a week of only occasional internet contact a week is a long time in football it would seem all my standard searches to keep up with football management affairs have resulted in a total overkill on the liverpool sale soap certainly it s a fast moving and ever changing saga i was interviewed on bbc news 24 this morning and already there has been a development oh and a non development it strikes me that the focus on liverpool understandable though it is has meant that some very interesting football management stories have been largely ignored for example there are stadium stories at bristol city and worcester city not to mention the 2012 stadium confrontation and the portsmouth cva and sheffield wednesday s plight should definitely not be ignored i hope to blog on at least some of these shortly the oddest of largely ignored stories is to me the reporting of manchester united s financial results 1 the club has certainly done stunningly well in terms of growing revenues and turning a profit turnover is more than twice that of cross city rivals manchester city wages have risen but the wages revenues ratio remains just a vague aspiration for most clubs all very commendable but there is the other side to the coin an 83 6million loss and overall debts of 521 7million for all the success with growing revenues debt management has been rather less successful given all the legitimate concerns of united fans regarding the glazers there is still room for a glance at liverpool and the thought that things could be distinctly worse the difference between the club s financial positions is nevertheless not so great even if the relatively small difference leads to quite different outcomes highly leveraged debt leaves a club worryingly exposed in the way that we are running out of benefactors with deep enough pockets we are also running out of investors with sufficient finds of their own to invest clubs seem to be convinced that the scenario at portsmouth could never possibly happen to the...