Bit of a random figure that, no? Where have you plucked that one from? Have you done your own personal little survey you can share to back this?
Anyhow whether you, I or anyone likes it or not, success on the pitch is what matters most, fans pay tickets and their TV subscriptions to see the team win, this creates the pathway to establishing your club in history. Would you really be willing to sacrifice our competitiveness for infrastructure and being “financially sustainable” as if we’re in any danger of not being.
It’s not and has never been about who can buy the most fancy players or spend the most millions, after Klopp we go back to being the side we were the 5 years before and then we’ll hear what the “other 25%” have to say for themselves why the club has been in turmoil.
What needs to be considered also… Unlike the manager of the Cheaters down the road, we seem to have a man in charge that takes pride in his performance and may well measure his own standing, by what he can achieve by his own abilities and experience to date - Yeah, anyone can go and throw millions at a problem to buy themselves out of trouble - but only the greatest of the great, can compete when so many of the odds are stacked heavily against you. Jurgen has achieved so much by trusting in his own belief, of himself.
Give me one Jurgen, for ten Pep’s or Maureen’s anyday
Agree somewhat, but ultimately its all about results on the football field, and if that isn’t happening due to lack of funding for players, then yeah fans are getting angsty.
We don’t win any trophies for having a spanky looking stadium.
Clearly their model has worked, because investing in the right manager and players has seen us win everything under their reign, so no real complaints from me.
Well, sure, but that is not really what is under discussion here. We know what the financial statements look like with LFC repaying the loan to build the stadium, that is what we have now. There was a pandemic-induced loss, but otherwise the club has done well.
Dutch’s contention is that FSG should have been willing to put more capital into the club in order to grow the value of their asset, given that the additional asset in question is not going to evaporate the way player value does. It is in fact going to appreciate, so it is really a question of who finances the cash expenditure to appreciate the value of FSG’s asset LFC, FSG or FSG’s asset LFC?
my argument of that would be… the value of an asset is ONLY realized upon sale. if the asset is never going to be sold, then that value doesn’t really come into the conversation.
If FSG agreed with you, they would not buy sports clubs. It is a point of pride for them that they do not draw down on the operating cash flow of their sports assets in order to produce a return on their investment.
Let’s say in 2011 you got a smoking deal on a 1970 Chevelle SS for $15000 because the owner needed the money. You put $10000 more into it because it needed updating. in 2023 its now worth $125,000 on the market. But you love the car, you’re not going to sell it. So the market value of the car is moot as you’ll not take $125k for it. you put maintenance money into the car to keep it running nice, that’s about it.
It’s unlikely that FSG bought Liverpool just for the satisfaction of owning it, though – meaning that someday the sale will come.
Regardless of the “value” of the club, realized or not, I for one have zero interest in the club being operated as a token representing “our” billionaires and being a cash toilet for them to get in pissing matches with nation states over. And once you open the door to welcoming “your” owner’s largesse, I fear that is the inevitable end point.
Is anything above LFC in the ownership structure published anywhere? I’ve often wondered whether their reluctance to use loans, or pay them off quickly is because of leverage used elsewhere in the structure.
Rewind the clock to a little under 15 years ago and you’ll see that’s exactly where we were, What do you think were the sequence of events that led us there? Well for one we lost our manager, then we lost Xabi Arbeloa Masch and Torres (4 of our best players) in the space of 6 months and then what do we do? We bring in the fucking horror show under Hodgson, our worst EVER side.
Now fast forward a couple of years down the line, when Salah Virgil Robbo are gone…when we lose our manager. Will history repeat itself? You can see why fans are anxious.
It is possible, but I doubt it is a huge concern. No, nothing published. FSG is a private concern with no requirement to make financial results public. They probably do have significant debt related to the real estate arm (quite normal), I’d be surprised if there were leverage concerns.
Their fundamental view is that the ‘clubs’ should not need to go outside FSG for debt capital.
There may well be people getting their knickers in a twist because of imagined similarities, but it is hard to take them seriously. We did not end up with Hodgson because we lost our manager and key talent, Hodgson was just the end of a chain of events that included losing manager and key talent, all stemming from the same root cause. There is no commonality at all to the two situations. FFS, G&H were so badly leveraged that at one point both were insolvent, and here we are arguing in this thread whether or not the ownership should have put the equity capital into LFC for the stadium expansion rather than using a debt instrument.
Let’s say in 2002 you got a smoking deal on the Boston Red Sox for $280M because the owner need the money. You put $100M more into it because Fenway needed updating. In 2023, the estimated value of on the market is $4.5B. But you love the Sox, you’re not going to sell them.
Do you really think that Henry thinks the market value of the Red Sox is moot?
The only real complaint I have against the owners is that they took a while to build a structure behind the scenes that was critical to our recent success and now that seems to have somewhat fallen apart.
Edwards to Ward to Jorg on a “trial basis” in the space of two years is quite the unravelling and points to issues behind the scenes. Mike Gordon vanishing and then coming back out the blue. Quite a turnover of other non-coaching staff and people in that analysis department is cause for concern.
I’d much rather their focus be on fixing that than anything else. That’s the platform we’ll need to be in place for when Jürgen leaves and not just a pot of money to throw at whoever replaces him.
Football doesnt have much room for advancement in most clubs, so people who do well in one role tend to have to move to move up. In that context, almost all of our turn over is completely normal.
Ward is the strange one and as long as we dont have a good explanation for that I understand that people may assume the worst and take the other exists as being problematic. And so I concede that there may actually be something there, but they dont need a big explanation other than people who do well at their job in roles like this tend to get offered better jobs elsewhere and so it becomes difficult to keep them.
