If a guy goes into a pub every night and wants to drink 10pints… but can only afford 2pints…
He has to learn to do without.!!
If we have a football club with no fans contributing toward the income… we have to trim the fat accordingly…!
This season is a write off…
If we can win something to help boost the coffers, all well and good. In the meantime, we need to survive this Covid shit and still be about at the end of it
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Thanks.
I think we can add to this
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the TV rebate. I can’t remember how much this was, but it was definitely punted into the this season, wasn’t it?
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Further rebates on the TV deals, based on the product not being as valuable in 2021 (ie no fans and no atmosphere) just like in 2020.
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adjustments to the sponsorship deals to reflect the downgraded product being associated with.
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reduction in Commercial activity in general.
I think this pandemic might end up costing the club 200m by the time it’s run it’s course?
The problems looming for the club.
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a lot of the squad are starting to get into that 30yo zone. The plan may have been to try and ring the last bits out of the squad over the next couple of years and then invest in a rebuild. That now becomes much harder.
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If there was any plan to recycle some of the value in players like Salah or Mane, that’s now in doubt as everyone is skint and a club that they may have been interested in going to will now be struggling to afford a fee that is acceptable to us
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so if there were plans to go for a big signing this summer - an M’Bappe, Sancho, Haaland etc. than is just in doubt.
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Quite a few of the first team are entering the last two years of their contracts, and if we want to keep this team together, then that is going to need to be addressed. We already have one of the highest wage bills in the league, and this is going to need to increase.
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Fuck sake Mascot, could you just pipe down with your facts and sense…
Go pluck me a player name available for a curly wurly and a bag of Wotsits who can come in right now and push us to the title and premiership. Come on we did it with Klavan, piss of piece.
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On the clubs going bust thing, I’m not sure there is anything that can be done about this. And there is an argument that 92 professional football clubs just in England (and a few in Wales) is too many. Although I’m sure I wouldn’t think that if I supported a lower league club.
It won’t be taken, because the people who run football fear change, but there is an opportunity here to rethink the game for the better.
Having four national leagues makes no sense, and is a really inefficient model for the smaller clubs - a really interesting idea would be to look at regionalisation of the lower leagues - so you have Premier League 1 and 2, with maybe 16 clubs in the first and 20 in the second, and beyond this you have a regional league structure, backed with lots of trickledown money from the Premier League.
Regarding Liverpool, I’m sure we can keep afloat but the sad thing is that we were really well positioned to kick on into super-club territory, which I think will now stall and we may struggle to get back to in the lifetime of this team and Klopp’s tenure. We had a great opportunity, and Covid has really fucked it.
One note though, while FSG has certainly increased the value of the club, that value is not a fixed thing. For example the contribution to the overall value made by the playing squad is about to take a hit. Salah is only a £150m football player if someone is willing to pay us £150m for him, and that’s probably not the case anymore. I think player values in general are going through a period of downward readjustment. A sort of reverse Neymar.
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Things are definitely grim. They certainly look difficult for Liverpool and if they look difficult for us, one of the best run clubs in the world, there are going to be plenty of clubs right in the shit. Tottenham, Aston Villa, Everton, West Ham, Crystal Palace, Fulham, West Brom, Newcastle, these clubs are almost certainly fucked. Arsenal are unlikely to be immune either. Manchester United, unthinkably, could be royally screwed, particularly if they drop away.
Thinking ruthlessly, it’s almost worth FSG throwing a bit of money in just to try and help push some of these clubs over the edge. Denying United the title, for example, pushing Tottenham out of the top 4. But then you have other considerations - how much of a bonus do we have to pay our players if we win the league? Can we afford that? Maybe Edwards and Klopp are geniuses, making sure that we win the league but do so by winning as few games as possible thereby saving on all of the win bonuses, so that we can afford to pay the title bonuses 
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FSG got involved in LFC because it had potential…
More importantly, was available in the bargain basement price range.!
Got a feeling, during and post Covid, there will be plenty of opportunities for new owners to snap up a bargain and inject new blood and emphasis in the Premier League.
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Maybe a stupid, obvious question to someone like @Arminius but decreases in revenue aren’t going to necessarily match/equal losses are they? We need to wait to see the club’s actual accounts for the financial year to know them aren’t we?
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I see J-Lingz is available on loan.
Do you think he could play CB?
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In 6 months different (and I would say objectively better) players will be available.
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Tottenham are the ones I really fear for. They could find themselves in all kinds of trouble.
Imagine spending £850m on a stadium, and then not being able to get a soul through the door for a year. All that cheese just going mouldy.
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I would caution against assuming that business-as-usual deals are readily available in the current market, one way or another. The January 2021 looks nothing like any other window we have seen.
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I strongly suspected that was going to happen anyway, but the values are likely to be less ‘sticky’ due to the pandemic effect, meaning it will happen faster. It is at least possible that FSG just don’t want to buy right now because they think all player values are in freefall.
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The total rebate owed by the Premier League to domestic and international broadcasters for the 2019/20 season, is a minimum of £330 million. (£223m to be repaid to domestic broadcasters and a further £107m to international broadcast partners).
Out of this, a £170 million rebate is owed to Sky. This repayment has been deferred until the 2021-22 season.
I haven’t seen any mention of additional rebates for the 2020/21 season so it impossible to say to what degree this might affect the club.
Commercial revenues for the 2019/20 are, according to Deloitte, up by £27.6 million. Whether this trend will continue is debatable given the decline in general economic activity worldwide, but I have no idea by how much it might fall in the current season.
And I don’t think we can put an accurate figure on the club’s possible loss of TV revenue as we have no idea when the pandemic will abate sufficiently for crowds to return and normal service resume, or where the club might finish in the PL and Champion’s League.
If, however, we assume no crowds for the current season, it is almost certain that revenues for the current season will fall by a minimum of £84 million in lost matchday revenue alone.
If we add this to the loss of revenue indicated in the Deloitte report, we can assume a minimum loss of revenue, over the two seasons, of £127 million.
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But if we can’t afford now we are unlikely to be able to afford then either. It would only be the first payment on this year’s accounts that you’re skipping. So if we can’t afford something now I don’t see us affording something more then without player sales.
We won’t see the full effect for over a year, the next accounts are going to show YE May 2020, which is going to have a significant Q4 shock on what would otherwise have been a good year. The real hit will be YE May 2021, no ticket revenue, reduced commercial, plus that is likely where we will see the TV rebate actually take effect.
However, my guess is that the losses will be larger than the decrease in revenue. Of the businesess I have some knowledge of over the past year, most of them have seen increased costs, while the revenue effect has been all over the place - some increasing. LFC has reduced its labour costs, largely related to match-day revenue, but you can assume that some other costs have gone up.
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This was an explicit consideration in my posts.
Basically, that there are mechanisms by which FSG could complete a signing if the situation demands it. But 1.) wages might be a less flexible constraint than we imagine (my speculation) and 2.) generating a sizeable outlay for a stopgap player now instead of (potentially) for a blue chip player in the summer could do more harm than good.
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They owners have assets and are worth a lot of money but a lot of their businesses are probably all struggling for cash at the moment so I’m not sure how liquid.
We are perhaps in a position to ride this out but there are many other clubs that would go bust without a lifeline.
Covid is probably costing us more than £200M by the time this is over… possibly even as high as £300M. But let’s stick with the lower number… Can the owners back us to losses of £200M plus add on significant transfer funds for a CB above that?
I can’t see us splashing major money in the summer. That is probably a pipe dream.
Were we not already loaned a fair bit for expanding Anfield?
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Pretty much like Risk, worth investing in sinking your opponents.
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A key strategy in Risk is delaying until the right moment to turn in your cards for maximum effect rather than acting too early and watching your push die out.
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