Slightly Bemused

Fucking hell, two self proclaimed adult blokes picking on a lass. You’re both fucking retarded knobs who should feel ashamed to post such shit on a forum which can be viewed by the general public, childish wankers. I just hope for your sakes that nobody who knows the pair of you ever read the shit that you’ve posted on here because you look like tits of the highest order. You should feel ashamed at your attempts to bully a lass. I doubt that’s the case. It doesn’t matter if you have apologised, that doesn’t take away what has been said. And one of you asking for an acknowledgement of an apology is comedy genius, oh the fucking irony. He’ll be moaning like a bitch now because he didn’t get the acknowledgement he so rightly deserved, fuck off man and grow some balls you obsessed geriatric.

Fucking hell.

Champions League? Fucking hell, were as far away from that as we are from the moon but we're no further from it than we were before Ashley came, we might even be closer to it. I'm sure of one thing, if we do get a manager who gives us our best Champions League finish ever we'll not sack the bastard because he only finishes 5th top of the league. it will never happen under Ashley, or anybody else who tries to run a big club like us in the manner of a corner shop. So your observation is totally, utterly irrlevant. Do you think we were closer the the Champions League the day before Ashley bought the club than we are today? How and when would we have qualified if the previous owners had stayed and we'd kept Allardyce? You haven't been taken in by the shit Allardyce has been quoting to the press recently, have you?

I dont believe I am. The 2006/07 season would have ran from Aug 2006 to May 2007. Ashley bought Halls shares in May 2007 and Shepherds in the June so he came into the club at the end of the 2006/07 season ie directly after the end of the season being talked about by Deloittes. If the article means to report a profit in 2006/07 then thats badly worded to say the least but again I would imagine thats not the case seeing as how it wasnt written about until May 2008. I don't care what you believe or not, you're miles away and like I said a year out. The accounts which you are on about are not the last set of accounts of Shepherd and I know that because I've got them all in front of me since 2004. The last set of accounts under the Hall/Shepherd regime covered up to 30th June 2007 and was signed off by Chris Mort who had just become Chairman. The accounts which you should be looking at for the end of the previous regime were available from Companies House dated 26th January 2008. Those set of accounts were showing us making a loss, not a profit, all of the figures were going south and were always going to get worse ongoing. What about the profit Ashley made last season? Are these figures still current or did NUSC revise them? playing in the 2nd division ? Do you [stupidly I may add] deem that to be successful ? Hold on a minute are you seriously trying to have a go at me for a scenario you’ve just dreamt up in your fucking cluttered little head? Where did I or anybody else for that matter deem playing in the 2nd division to be successful?

What are you on about? Where have I tried to make out anything about the stadium debt other than to point out that it wasn't down to Ashley. Also, have you got any links to quotes that Ashley was whinning like fuck? The only time I have seen him mention the extra debt was when he said that he would have still bought the club if he had known about it. Not wanting to drag it up because it's in the past and we should be moving on....but to answer your question, quotes from mike.... "Before I had spent a penny on wages or buying players, Newcastle United had cost me more than a quarter of a billion pounds." "I then poured another £110 million into the club not to pay off the debt but just to reduce it. The club is still in debt. Even worse than that, the club still owes millions of pounds in transfer fees." "I am Mike Ashley, not Mike Ashley a multi-billionaire with unlimited resources. Newcastle United and I can't do what other clubs can. We can't afford it." The way you're trying to paint a picture I'm starting to think you're Decka himself. You're starting to think, that's a first.

What are you on about? Where have I tried to make out anything about the stadium debt other than to point out that it wasn't down to Ashley. Also, have you got any links to quotes that Ashley was whinning like fuck? The only time I have seen him mention the extra debt was when he said that he would have still bought the club if he had known about it. That would be the begging phone call he made to Deloittes the day after he bought the club, shouting at them to "ring the Chinese and see if theyre still interested". Horse shit, are you seriously trying to say that within 24 hours of buying the club he'd got his hands on that sort of information in London?

Try telling Happy face that it's not down to Ashley, he's the one who is struggling.

What are you on about? Where have I tried to make out anything about the stadium debt other than to point out that it wasn't down to Ashley. Also, have you got any links to quotes that Ashley was whinning like fuck? The only time I have seen him mention the extra debt was when he said that he would have still bought the club if he had known about it.

I'm sure you've heard the saying that you can take a Horse to water but you can't force it to drink. The facts speak for themselves, it just seems that facts are not a priority for you and you're just happy to trot out crap in an attempt to come over as if you know what you're talking about. The way you try to turn your lack of understanding of both basic English and Mathematics into my problem is class, did you keep a straight face while you were typing or did you go red? My guess is that you thought that you were right and are oblivious as to how stupid you've made yourself look. While I’m here, what is Ashley doing with the £7 million profit the club was making while we were in the Championship?

What he’s doing is a bit like knowing the answer and not the question so he’s making the question up in an attempt to justify something he hasn’t the first idea about.

I'm confusing you; do you want to shorten the length of the words that I'm typing? I've used an online dictionary definition as I thought that it would mean that you wouldn't pick holes in my personal understanding of what Debt means you numpty. I'm quite happy for you to come up with a more meaningful definition which isn't something dreamed up in your head. You're dangerous, you haven't a clue what you're talking about and you're trying to pass it off as fact, I can only guess that some people are taking your word for it as you seem to be getting away with it. Thanks for brightening up a dull subject, even if that wasn’t your intention.

I’m not trying to be a prick with this answer, I’m just trying to clarify something. I’ve not put any spin on the definition of debt, here it is from an online dictionary and the wording has nothing to do with me. An amount owed to a person or organization for funds borrowed. Debt can be represented by a loan note, bond, mortgage or other form stating repayment terms and, if applicable, interest requirements. These different forms all imply intent to pay back an amount owed by a specific date, which is set forth in the repayment terms. A mortgage has got to be classed as debt and the one I took out on my house was debt the day I signed for it and that will be the case until I have paid it off in full.

So you’re now saying that the debt in 2007 was £124 million and not £70 million as you had suggested earlier, this is laughable. If it was a loan then it was a debt, simple as that. Honestly, you can’t blame Ashley for debt which the club had before he arrived. Is this latest revision correct? We had £124 million debt at a time when we’d had Michael Owen basically free for a year and his huge wage was covered by the FA? I'm not trying to put words into your mouth, I'm just struggling to keep up.

You don't have to guess about wage to turnover, it was 75.2% in 2007, it went down to 70.4% in 2008 but it shot up again during our relegation season to 82.55% and this was due to a rise in staff costs and a reduction in income. The drop to 70.4% was due to an increase in income as the staff costs went up slightly. Do you not think the club have been trying to increase revenue? We do have Sports Direct all over the ground, my guess is that it's filling space and will go if anybody is prepared to pay for the space. Do you think Companies are trying to put money into the club and being turned away? I'll also ask you this question and it has nothing to do with the massive profits we were making in the Championship as you obviously have no intention of discussing it. What influence do you think Ashley had in increasing our debt from £70 million to £149 million in his first year at the club?

I think so. The £70m debt from 2007 became £124m immediatley due to clauses triggered from the sale. Are you seriously trying to put that across as fact? Where do you think this £54 million was hidden before the sale took place? Anything triggered by clauses due to the takeover was already in the accounts as debt. The only hidden debt was our sponsorship money from NR and Adidas showing up as future income when we'd already spent it. Other than that we had to pay an early settlement fee on top of the loan for the expansion, the mortgage as some people call it.

It looks a bit like this.... Nice graph, maybe you can explain why the jump during Ashley's first year, what did he do to more than double the debt? You show the debt as being £70,000,000 then going up to £149,000,000. What influence did Ashley have on that considering that we actually finished higher up the league than the year before and our gates were also up?

Champions League? Fucking hell, were as far away from that as we are from the moon but we're no further from it than we were before Ashley came, we might even be closer to it. I'm sure of one thing, if we do get a manager who gives us our best Champions League finish ever we'll not sack the bastard because he only finishes 5th top of the league.

I think its beyond doubt that he came in on a high. As for the contracts he granted, he didn't have much choice and he's not doing it now so I don't see the problem. Surely you're not going to say that the Hall/Shepherd regime wouldn't have backed the manager that they had appointed in the same way? What would have happened if they had and we were in the same situation with Allardyce when Mort sacked him? The players were about as low as they could possibly get and we were hitting a run of games that we were almost certainly not going to get many points from. Would we have stayed up under Allardyce with such a poor run of form and a terrible lack of confidence that the expected run of results would have brought? I know this is all hypothetical but we were shit and only going 1 way. I would hate to think what state we'd be in now if Allardyce had remained and we'd gone down with increasing debt, a pending credit crunch and owners who couldn't service the levels of debt that we were carrying. People have mentioned that the gates have dropped since they arrived. Well, the gates were going down before they arrived as a lot of people were pissed off at the way the club was being run. We were potentially in deep shit without Ashley and it may have been worse than the shit we’ve actually had to put up with. The gates were down around 2,000 in our last season with Hall/Shepherd and that was before people had started to be put out of work because of the recession. I agree Ashley has been a fucking idiot, I’m not sure if that’s so bad considering what could have happened. I’m not sure we’re still paying for his mistakes either because I think we’re in a better position than we’ve been in for years. We’ve off-loaded a load of the blood sucking bastards who were on our payroll and I mean both on and off the pitch. For the first time in a long time we actually look as if we’re going in the right direction and we don’t have a lead weight around our necks keeping us down. I know with Llambias we’re always capable of fucking up but for now he’s not doing that so I’ll wait and see how things go. We are currently playing good football and have a young hungry team who seem to want to walk out onto the pitch and play for us instead of turning up for a last big pay cheque and long may it continue. Sorry if that appears aggressive, it's not meant to be but the state of the club before Ashley arrived and the second year with him boils my piss. If we are on the up again then I'm not going to spend the time blowing out of my arse, I'd rather enjoy it before we're shit on again, as that always seems to happen at this club. Ashley has made pleny of mistakes but he’s also done some good and I think we’ll come out of this as a better club.

At what point should he have started this transfer embargo? He had a manager who wanted players in and we'd released 5 first team players at the end of the previous season. If he had waited until he knew the costs of running a club then we wouldn't have signed anybody because it was always going to take more than the time we had left. In hindsight, I would have loved him to knock back Smith and Barton to name two but hindsight is a lot easier than doing something which didn't look too bad at the time. The alternative that I see is a situation where we'd be panic buying at the last minute. Anyway, it’s late.

Without doing anything...but staying up. I'm not sure what qualifies you to comment on the accounts but if pinching a graph off another site is the limit of your expertise then we’re not going to get far, are we? Our Operations loss had gone up from around £6 million to almost £26 million in 1 year. The losses would have been worse the year before if we hadn’t changed our financial year end to the 30th June. The overdraft had almost doubled during the last year in which we had income from Europe which wasn’t likely to something we were going to see again any time soon. We had received a one off payment of £6,750,000 in compensation for Owen while these figures were all going tits up. This effectively reduced our losses as Owen was virtually taken off the wage bill for the best part of a year and was always going to become a future drain. Graphs don't tell the full story without having the figures behind them. Also, the first set of Accounts were heavily impacted by what went on before him as wage increases were decided before he arrived apart from when Ashley rubber stamped signings which were made during the takeover. And, he had to really make as he would have been in no position to do anything once he'd taken over as it would have been too close to the end of the transfer window and he'd be starting from scratch. I know he gets blamed for those shit signings, he was in a no win situation as the club had to be run with the new season approaching. He would have been rightly taken apart by us if he’d came in and blocked transfers.

During our last year under Hall/Shepherd our wages were 73% of our turnover, up 9% on the previous year which was actually only 11 months because we went from reporting at the end of July to the end of June. During the year which has been wrongly attributed as being the last of Hall/Shepherd we'd finished 7th, however in the actual last year of them we'd dropped to 13th which reduced income from the Premiership. Income was boosted in the last year because we qualified for Europe the year before and benefited in the actual last year.

Aye it is just a fraction, the problem is that it's roughly 1/8 which is quite a big fraction for one year and it was just the start. I guess you've noticed which direction that line was heading in.

Thanks I’ve just quadrupled it.

I dont believe I am. The 2006/07 season would have ran from Aug 2006 to May 2007. Ashley bought Halls shares in May 2007 and Shepherds in the June so he came into the club at the end of the 2006/07 season ie directly after the end of the season being talked about by Deloittes. If the article means to report a profit in 2006/07 then thats badly worded to say the least but again I would imagine thats not the case seeing as how it wasnt written about until May 2008. I don't care what you believe or not, you're miles away and like I said a year out. The accounts which you are on about are not the last set of accounts of Shepherd and I know that because I've got them all in front of me since 2004. The last set of accounts under the Hall/Shepherd regime covered up to 30th June 2007 and was signed off by Chris Mort who had just become Chairman. The accounts which you should be looking at for the end of the previous regime were available from Companies House dated 26th January 2008. Those set of accounts were showing us making a loss, not a profit, all of the figures were going south and were always going to get worse ongoing. What about the profit Ashley made last season? Are these figures still current or did NUSC revise them?

You're using the wrong end point for Shepherd and the wrong starting point for Ashley. The accounts you have highlighted as the last set of accounts for Shepherd were the second last set. A year later and the profit was turned into a loss and the outlook was terrible as we didn't look like we were capable of changing anything going to a probable and well forecasted credit crunch which was certain to reduce income from the corporate sector. And before anybody claims we weren’t in a credit crunch, it was coming and the only uncertainty was when. I thought that NUSC had claimed that the club was making a £7 million profit per month in the Championship? Have those figures been revised down?