NJS

We were doing an install at work in October after work and had kebabs from a Syrian place at the bottom of Shoreditch high St which was the best kebab I've ever had. Voted Indians.

Can someone (PP?) define the revenue streams which Shepherd exploited that Ashley hasn't?

So the club figures prove that the only way to survive is to have owners who guarantee loans or running costs with their own money - something Hall & Shepherd never did apart from one very early stage when I remember Hall guaranteeing an overdraft with Barclays briefly. In fact I'd say the motivation to sell was probably advice that that's the way clubs were heading and they didn't fancy it. Of course you can spend beyond your means as LM advocates but the results can be summed up by Portsmouth and Leeds who never seem to get a mention in LM's take on football finances. I wonder why that is?

If they had 5 or 6 points less I would have been quite hopeful but 38 plus the fixtures they have left should be enough unfortunately. I enjoyed listening to Allardyce sticking up for Bruce as well.

He made his debut in the last game of 85/86 I think but 86/87 was when he really arrived.

One good thing in 94 minutes

I'm not saying it's wrong to have the ambition you talk about - I'm saying that expecting it based on our history is wrong - we have never had the "right" like Liverpool think they have to succeed just because of their past glories. There was nothing wrong with the ambition shown by the club under Keegan and Robson - the reason I don't mention Hall is that I think the desire was driven by the managers and the fans given a taste of it more than the owners who only ever in my view cared about money - though Shepherd less so than Hall and his absolute cunt of a son. The thing is both before the emergence of Sky and the boom of football we had owners made up of small local businessmen who simply could not have funded any kind of sustained splurge on players. You still can't answer the simple question of where any money could have come from because there were no possibilities. Other clubs like Liverpool, Man Utd, Arsenal and Spurs all had much richer owners. As far as I can remember there were no rich benefactors available pre-Hall and even then his first attempt at raising money through flotation was an abject failure. You talk about the sale as if it was forced and they were ready to continue on with the same ambition - if that's the case why did they spend 3m trying to find new owners? They knew the game was up by 2007 and needed to get out. Things have now moved on again and you still can't come up with an actual suggestion as to how any stated ambition is achievable. So here's the question again - how would you suggest the club show ambition?

And if it hasn't been for Munich, Liverpool would never have been as successful. I don't see the point in hindsight - Liverpool got lucky with Shankly - I don't think the board had anything to do with it, as the Scouser said above, they were always pretty low key. Also I hate the way people like you have a go at previous Newcastle owners with no understanding of the times - especially since you were around then. They weren't rich men and football simply could not attract the finance that was available to the Halls. Yes they treat the club like it was the family silver and deserve criticism for being too parochial but I'd like you to name one team since say 1970 but pre-sky who followed your idea of financing an assault on the top clubs. Success pre-sky was pretty much marginal and down to managerial appointments - we had a good one in Joe Harvey who you can't say wasn't back within their means and within the context of the times but he wasn't top notch unfortunately. sigh. Who doesn't understand the times ? NUFC were one of the biggest clubs in the country pre and post WW2 man. Westwood etc dragged the club down into the also rans, just like Mike Ashley is doing. Joe Harvey was a top man-manager but would have done much better with a board like Liverpools [at the time]. This is the times. The big clubs who attempt to reach their potential have ALWAYS been the most successful, and always will be. The key phrase is "attempt to", if you don't attempt it you don't achieve it. NUFC do NOT belong among the also rans of ANY era of football, they belong with the top clubs and always have. Bloody hell.... Edit. by the way, it was ManU and Munich, not Liverpool I meant Man Utd would have dominated the 60s and beyond but for Munich. We were relegated in 1961 - and even after promotion did nothing in the league - a pattern which we have repeated with the odd blip throughout our history. We do have a proud history overall but saying Westwood dragged the club down is bollocks - from what? Compared with clubs that you seem to think we are above we always have been also-rans - we may be towards the top of the next level of clubs but suggesting we have only been robbed of our rightful place at the top by a couple of individuals is ludicrous.

Even as someone who is pro-FFS, that is my only issue with Leazes, as I wrote in more depth last week. a blip on the pitch, appointing a poor manager ? Is that a long term decline, when you retain the ambition, desire and understanding of how to be successful ? Big difference. You could say that after the blip of Gullit and Dalglish on the pitch, relatively speaking after the previous high standards and we did reach 2 FA Cup Finals, the first few years of Bobby Robson was a catch up period too....but they re-grouped and bought Robert and Bellamy to top off the rebuilding. If Mike Ashley, or anyone else with limited ambitions, had been owner, we would likely have sold Shearer and Rob Lee to balance the books instead. HUGE difference in outlook isn't it ? My point about decline Stevie, is that it is a decline, because it is rooted in the aims being set differently ie lower. And the revenues have consequently and predictably fallen as a result. Edit I've said this before actually. I hope this is the last time somebody asks, one or two people may not agree because it suits their irrational hatred of a personality, but in my opinion it is correct and makes perfect sense, particularly as the facts show it to be true and our current chairman [whatever his title is] only confirmed it this week. By 2007 Chelsea had come along and Villa and Liverpool were spending more - your re-grouping would have hit a brick wall even if he could have funded it (which would have been impossible).

And if it hasn't been for Munich, Liverpool would never have been as successful. I don't see the point in hindsight - Liverpool got lucky with Shankly - I don't think the board had anything to do with it, as the Scouser said above, they were always pretty low key. Also I hate the way people like you have a go at previous Newcastle owners with no understanding of the times - especially since you were around then. They weren't rich men and football simply could not attract the finance that was available to the Halls. Yes they treat the club like it was the family silver and deserve criticism for being too parochial but I'd like you to name one team since say 1970 but pre-sky who followed your idea of financing an assault on the top clubs. Success pre-sky was pretty much marginal and down to managerial appointments - we had a good one in Joe Harvey who you can't say wasn't back within their means and within the context of the times but he wasn't top notch unfortunately.

I know I shouldn't but I just laughed long and hard at that. I'm glad to say I don't know anything about any of the fuckers who were at school with me.

I might not have anything nice to say but I don't hate the bloke either - I enjoyed arguing with him and thought he was/is okay most of the time.

Thorn, Hendrie, Beasant and Robertson. I remember speaking to an older lad the next day and he was telling me the toon fans on the bus going to Merseyside were singing we're gonna win the league. Cottee scored after 34 seconds, and that was that. Of them only Hendrie was any good, and they sold him 6 fuckin month later to Leeds and got Frankie Pingel in as his replacement. Thorn wasn't too bad once he got over a bit of rabbit in the headlights phase - he could have gone on to be decent if we hadn't gone down imo.

Possibly - I was trying to go as low as possible to make the point that there was shit amongst the good. The thing about Liverpool is that when the Moores were in charge and like Man U before the Yank, their ticket prices were extremely low compared with the rest of the league. I remember Hall saying he was looking at other clubs to see how they were ran but unfortunately he took the ST pricing model from the London clubs and not the more appropriate NW teams (in terms of fanbase type etc). I think this may explain a lower turnover - I could be wrong. I think if we'd won the league in 96 we would have become a bigger club than at any time in our history but I think in terms of worldwide size the ship has already sailed - Man Utd and Liverpool "own" vast tracts of the rest of the world and I can't see that changing if the latter didn't win the league for another 10 years - their history since the 60s is too much to overcome. Now on a day to day basis I agree with Leazes that Liverpool fans aren't as great as they think and taking away the Irish and Skandos from their crowds would hit them bad but I think to try and deny that they are still a much bigger club than us - especially in terms of pulling power - is very naive.

Agreed. Mort was nowhere near as punchable as that pointy prick. I know things evidently weren't right behind the scenes when Mort was chairman but it's no coincidence IMO that the wheels fell off massively right about the time he was replaced by Llambias. I got the impression Mort did things like transfers and wages in a "standard" football way which Ashley has now decided was wrong and that he and the club were taken for a ride so he brings in someone who he trusts - though obviously not knowing anything about football - to run the business his way.

the East Stand opened in 1973 mate. It was years too late though, same as the Milburn, owned by small time people, with no vision, no ambition, nothing. They resigned in the end [some of them] because Barclays bank asked them for 16 grand each [something like that] to save the club from going bust or to pay some debtors [ I was young, somebody can find it], after years of milking the club they fucked off. It was THAT bad, that is what the Halls and Shepherd saved us from, eventually. Lord Westwood actually said on Tv that if Brian Clough walked through the door of NUFC as manager he would walk out. Can you imagine such an absolute buffoon saying that on TV, so pathetic were they ? I'm tired of this too. Some people just won't be told anything. What will it take for them to see ? 16k compared with the 100m some people took out of the club when they walked away.

I agree about the good and bad but you can't really draw a line in the sand as it doesn't take into account the outstanding debt and the legacy of a wage bill which wasn't producing on the field success. If Ashley had really written off the debt instead of claiming at various stages that it was a. gone b. unimportant or c. the sole reason for all the troubles then you could judge him completely on his performance since. My view is still the same - I think he's fucked most things he's done up but there is a begrudged underlying view that an interest free loan underpinning the club and a willingness to meet further running costs is a lot better than some of the other possible scenarios. LM goes between stating he doesn't care what the finances were under the previous regime to picking magic words out to try and argue the finances were better. I think our finances have been pretty much screwed for the entirety of my lifetime no matter's who's been in charge. A few good years of football shouldn't really blind anyone to that fact. my view is the same as it has always been. This is one of the biggest clubs in the country and ought to act like it, not like the Stokes and the Wigans etc. When we did, we had the best 15 years all of us on here has experienced so far in our lifetime. But as the above poster points out, far too many people have been brainwashed by the propaganda machine into thinking that we did it all wrong and could and should have done it without the expenditure involved, despite the absolute proof of history which shows if you want to be successful you have to spend the money. I don't know how many times it has been stated that the vast majority of clubs are in debt, yet these morons continue to peddle the line that for some reason we were the only ones facing certain administration and, despite enjoying every single minute of playing in the champions league and buying the players that we did, pouring scorn on the people who owned the club and completely transformed the club, and attempting to say they should have instead aimed for mid table survival at best and been grateful for that. Some of them have actually stopped going to games since the club under the new owner chose to take this path, the one they now advocate, the hypocrisy is staggering. At the end of the day, you go to watch your football team, you want to see it win, and you enjoyed it when it was winning, a damn sight more than now when it isn't. So don't bother spouting the bollocks you spout in your last comment ie "A few good years of football shouldn't blind anyone to that fact". This is precisely the rubbish the previous poster has highlighted. What has happened since Ashley took over is entirely his responsibility and nobody elses. The team is in danger of going down again and perhaps this will be the best season we will ever see under Ashley when he has now made it clear we will sell our best players, the club has gone backwards, the revenues are down, the ambitions and aims have been set at a lower level. This is nothing to do with the previous owners. It is Mike Ashley who has set up the club in this way, it is in decline and it will continue this decline until someone raises the bar again to where this club ought to set it and goes about doing it in the way the other clubs do it. Like Spurs are now doing, and Liverpool are attempting to do again. It's an absolute joke that some people appear to think we are getting it right and these clubs are getting it wrong. Try telling a Spurs supporter he shouldn't be enjoying the current run in europe, what a prize prick you would look if you did. No wonder people laugh at Geordies. Nobody else in my opinion would spout such utter nonsense, but we all get tarred with the same brush. Even Toonpack said once "enjoy today and don't worry about what may or may not happen". Typically, the mug had no idea how that could be taken. I thought we'd got you off mentioning Spurs and Liverpool? The latter have a billionaire owner and are a much bigger club than us despite your arguments on crowds - there's no getting away with it. Spurs have been lucky on transfers - you still don't get that. You mock Villa now because they have "failed" and because they were mentioned as a blueprint but fail to mention they did exactly what you advocate - they heavily backed their manager with 100m, and it failed miserably. You don't mention the Mackems who have spent millions and shown "ambition" for almost no reward and a probable firesale in the summer because the owner is sick of it. Would you rather Ashley say "We're aiming for the top 4" - that would bring a lot more ridicule than you mention as it would take 100s of millions at least - a thing you acknowledge. You should also stop using the magic word of "revenues" - as I said HF proved that's shit. "15 years of the best" is also utter, utter shit - we were good for 6 seasons at the most. As I've said before I did enjoy watching the team when we were "good" but I also enjoyed it when we were halfway decent when nobody expected us to be like in the Gazza years - I always resigned myself to the fact we weren't destined to be a "winner" and I think its you that's deluded to the level that people take the piss. This talk of being as big as you say we are is a load of shit. We have never been one of the top clubs in England (apart from maybe the Edwardian days) for anything like any decent period and to claim otherwise based on crowdsize is exactly the kind of stereotypical shite you criticise. I do think we're bigger than Stoke and Wigan but for the forseeable future there are 5 or 6 teams we won't better and no amount of unrealistic hot air will change that. Unless of course you can tell us all how to achieve that.

I agree about the good and bad but you can't really draw a line in the sand as it doesn't take into account the outstanding debt and the legacy of a wage bill which wasn't producing on the field success. If Ashley had really written off the debt instead of claiming at various stages that it was a. gone b. unimportant or c. the sole reason for all the troubles then you could judge him completely on his performance since. My view is still the same - I think he's fucked most things he's done up but there is a begrudged underlying view that an interest free loan underpinning the club and a willingness to meet further running costs is a lot better than some of the other possible scenarios. LM goes between stating he doesn't care what the finances were under the previous regime to picking magic words out to try and argue the finances were better. I think our finances have been pretty much screwed for the entirety of my lifetime no matter's who's been in charge. A few good years of football shouldn't really blind anyone to that fact.

Didn't he say he thought the Cockney Mafia Flag showed a lot of effort had been put in which was what had made the twat smile?

We do actually have a dyke receptionist who does that.

Poor. The POINT is that Mike Ashley has presided over a club which has cut costs, sold players, players contracts, staff cuts....show me where either myself or UV in this instance has mentioned an INCREASE in revenues, the point is that they have FALLEN. Therefore, all he had to do was retain the old revenues and the "debts" would be decreased, but they have actually increased. How can this be ? As said, how come anybody with half a brain can't do any better than his hopeless predecessor he's replaced, especially when he is paid a lot of money to do it ? Perhaps Mike and Dekka should ring their predecessor for some tips and ask him how he did it HF proved to you the revenues fell under Shepherd and rebounded just as they have under Ashley - you ignored it - see my comment about facts being ignored. The debts mainly have increased because of the absolute cunt's trick of having a clause that insisted on paying off the mortgage on ownership transfer - do you have an opinion on how anyone who gives the slightest fuck about NUFC could put such a clause in knowing full well it would fuck any new owner? How would Shepherd have refinanced loans in the crunch?

Okay you're Shepherd at the end of 2008 speaking to the bank manager BM: Your cash flow is shot - what's you plan? FS/LM: Increase revenues BM: How? FS/LM: I'd take future sponsorship and spend it up front BM: You've done that already, you cant do it again. FS:/LM I'd increase the cost of season tickets BM: You've already squeezed them enough, they won't pay much more FS/LM: I'd finance some new new players to increase revenues. BM: We can't lend you any money - how the fuck are you going to pay for them? FS/LM: I'd increase revenues etc. etc.

I wonder where U V thinks the money could come from, maybe he'll answer the question. I'm too busy with the conundrum of where the money we used to generate with a terrible chairman has gone such that now we're run by such a great businessman we managed to double the club debt in 3 years even though TV revenues shot up when he bought the club and we've made £50m+ profit on selling players. It's completely bizarre and unexplainable how revenues have dropped when everyone can see how well Mike is doing by putting the best possible people in charge, selling players and cutting costs. I wonder if Toonpack, or his chums on skunkers, can shed any light on this mystery ? What's the point when as soon as someone with half a brain actual produces an analysis of the figures they are dismissed with insults and any half-baked opinions like this with no back up are quoted by you here and on Skunkers. Doesn't matter what the subject, actual facts are ridiculed under the guise of "but we were in Europe" as if that's some kind of ultimate joker which trumps anything. For starters this lad can either break down his "50m profit" (which I guess includes Carroll which has no bearing on current financial figures) or we could try some actual facts or questions you can't answer like how would Shepherd have refinanced loans since the credit crunch.

One my mate suggested for himself was "None the fucking wiser". I always fancied my sort of life mission statement but people might think it referred to the manner of my death - "It seemed like a good idea at the time".

That simply isn’t true. £135m was a stupid price to pay for a club that was apparently about to cease to exist, and we all know why he paid way over the odds. It’s ironic a man renowned for bargain buys should get so well and truly ripped off. Ashley gambled and lost. The bottom line is in close to four years the club’s revenues have dropped, attendances have dropped and its status has dropped. The only key business indicator that has gone up is the amount of money it owes, which has near enough doubled and now stands in excess of £150m. It’s a shocking state of affairs and there is only one person to blame. The local media need to grow some balls and scrutinise the data, not just regurgitate the club’s absurd spin. I don't get this - are you saying Ashley thought he was getting a bargain and thought he was shafting the "daft Geordies" only to find the joke was on him when the debts were revealed? Nobody comes out of the mess well apart from maybe Shepherd himself who at least tried to stop the sale. The cunts who sold their shares among shite about "handing over the reigns to the right man" while sniggering behind his back about the mortgage terms and future liabilities (while their mate was seriously ill BTW) on one hand and the stupid cunt who didn't do due diligence on the other. That key indicator you mention has gone from 110m to 150m and relegation is a factor in that as is falling performances all round but the idea that the extra 40m wouldn't have had to be found anyway to finance Shepherd's debt driven cash flow model is naive - especially as I doubt he would have attacked the wage bill. Personally, I think that Mike Ashley wanted to look for an outlet, for want of a better word, to sit alongside his Sports Direct. A big football club, with huge support [we won't go into that I've said my bit] fitted the bill perfectly. He was naive, or stupid, or both, for not doing his diligence etc. There isn't much doubt that he was shocked at the costs involved in football - naive and stupid - which wasn't what he expected at all. He has set about running it as a business as he thinks it should be run. He is well known for being a maverick sort of figure, so may even be aware now that his approach is not what went before, but isn't really bothered so long as he makes some money out of it, although there is a case for him not making money and sacrificing that if he made it up as a vehicle sitting alongside Sports Direct. I'm guessing, none of us know, but I'm absolutely certain that he - now - has no intention at all of doing what is required to make it a success on the pitch and try to get the money from the Champions League because although it is a gamble, its the sort of gamble that just does not appeal to him. His naivety about football, which was obvious from the very start, is unfortunate and it is us who are the ones who have to put up with the frustration of it as supporters of the club. Maybe I haven't worded this perfectly, I'm sure others will have their say and expand in different ways. Now that I agree with - the saddest element for me is the schizo way that one minute he talks about it being "properly run" and 5 year plans and the next (though not so much recently) talking about enjoying the thrills of the actual game as if he'd bought it as a "plaything". Even though it was just another piece of bullshit I think his "20m in per year above and beyond running costs" would be a way forward if he stuck to it (plus allowing sales profits as well) but I don't suppose that's a starter either.