Bolton Wanderers Forum The-Wanderer.co.uk

I'm writing to you to trying to gain some awareness for our unified national petition about football debts to stop this mess ever happening at your club. Bolton now face another season in the Premier League. How will you fare next year?

http://www.oi-fa.com/petition.aspx

As an Evertonian, I have teamed up with two Man'U fans and a Liverpudlian, to start a nationwide petition to get the F.A. to try to fix the way our clubs are saddled with leveraged take-over debts.

We would welcome your support – is this something that you could write about or link to in you Forum / Blog, and spread to your followers on Facebook and Twitter?

We have completed extensive financial research on all 92 league clubs in England, and as far as I'm aware, we are the only site currently offering this facility

(http://www.oi-fa.com/facts-and-stats.aspx).

We have been live less than two weeks and would like to add your support to the rapidly growing numbers (nearly 900) on our petition.

Regards

Alan Lee
www.oi-fa.com

If the Yanks drag Man United to destruction, I for one will be pissing on their grave.

Love Glazers, Hate United.

So no. I won't be signing.

Hi Puskas,

I understand local rivalries, as I am an Evertonian, but I wouldn't be sitting there too happy about things if I were you. Visit our website and look at Bolton's stats. You have a small ground by Premier standards and below-average occupancy levels. This combined with the high levels of debt would have me worried.

I'd hate to see any team going down for reasons off the pitch. On the pitch its fair game.

Alan

Alan Lee wrote:Hi Puskas,

I understand local rivalries, as I am an Evertonian, but I wouldn't be sitting there too happy about things if I were you. Visit our website and look at Bolton's stats. You have a small ground by Premier standards and below-average occupancy levels. This combined with the high levels of debt would have me worried.

I'd hate to see any team going down for reasons off the pitch. On the pitch its fair game.

Alan

Puskas is a reasonable man. If you promise to send 4 tins of Whiskas cat food per month to the Feline Home for Philospher Cats - he'll sign anything...

Thanks for the tip Bish.

We just passed 900 sign ups. If Puskas signs this weekend, I'll send the bones from my fish round to Old Trafford.

Aaln

Alan Lee wrote:Thanks for the tip Bish.

We just passed 900 sign ups. If Puskas signs this weekend, I'll send the bones from my fish round to Old Trafford.

Aaln

Haha.. Good comeback

A quick question Alan. Do you have the details of our debt? From a meeting that I attended (along with others from here) it seems that the bulk of the debt, was obtained by purchasing the stadium, on the cheap, from the company who built it. Would that not be considered a worthwhile debt? I know debt isn't a good place to be in, but this gives us a saleable asset (higher than the purchase value). This debt is also owed to a benefactor, rather than the banks. All things considered I believe we are one of the more better off clubs in the league.

Agree?

i was at the meeting when gartside said this, i agree we appear to be in a half decent position compared to other clubs...

Alan, we don't care

Go buy yourself an out of town shoe box - instead of that run down shitehole - and see how your financials look

boltonboris wrote:

Alan Lee wrote:Thanks for the tip Bish.

We just passed 900 sign ups. If Puskas signs this weekend, I'll send the bones from my fish round to Old Trafford.

Aaln

Haha.. Good comeback

A quick question Alan. Do you have the details of our debt? From a meeting that I attended (along with others from here) it seems that the bulk of the debt, was obtained by purchasing the stadium, on the cheap, from the company who built it. Would that not be considered a worthwhile debt? I know debt isn't a good place to be in, but this gives us a saleable asset (higher than the purchase value). This debt is also owed to a benefactor, rather than the banks. All things considered I believe we are one of the more better off clubs in the league.

Agree?

Indeed - as I recall we owe £40m to Eddie Davies. We do, however, own the stadium, the hotel, the car parks, the training ground at Euxton (Prime development land next to the Buckshaw Village development) and the Academy at Lostock (Prime development land once again).
It always makes me chuckle when some contributors to this very site start speculating as to how much is in our transfer kitty, or as to who we can and cannot afford. See, if Davies and Gartside say that we can afford someone/something, then I have absolutely no doubt that we can. If they say that we can't then you can bet a £Pound to a pinch of shit that we can't, and what's more - won't.
So print all the stats you like, fella.

Alan Lee wrote:Hi Puskas,

I understand local rivalries, as I am an Evertonian, but I wouldn't be sitting there too happy about things if I were you. Visit our website and look at Bolton's stats. You have a small ground by Premier standards and below-average occupancy levels. This combined with the high levels of debt would have me worried.

I'd hate to see any team going down for reasons off the pitch. On the pitch its fair game.

Alan

Fine Alan.

If you had a petition demanding that the football authorities did something about debt in general - and presented some sensible proposals for tackling it - rather than just for clubs that have been taken over by Americans, I'd possibly support it.

As it is, the petition only deals with the multinational corporations that play in red. If Manchester United went bust, it would be a good day for football.

Hi Puskas,

I am with you 100%. Our web-site is not anti-American. We want the FA to tackle football debt in general, by introducing some rules. In some clubs, there is a benevolent owner who turns all the debt into equity (Chelsea readily springs to mind), but what will happen when he tires of it and wants to sell it? He has just written off £350 million, surely he will want it back? Bruce Rioja also asked me a question which I will reply to later, but our point is that we would like to see something done about how much debt a club can take on. If you are spending a fortune on debt servicing (interest) every season, you have less available for transfers or developing your facilities.

A good example of taking on debt and handling it well is Arsenal, who took on the debt to build Emirates, but their income from the larger stadium and the pay-back from the property development at Highbury means that the large debt is well within their ability to repay it. Have a loomkl at the statistics on our web-site. generally speaking debt in excess of the annual turnover of the club is worrying and this is the case with Bolton. I understand that the debt was taken on for good reasons, but, as I said earlier, you have one of the smallest gounds in the division and attendance levels also below average, so your total income is stretched to support that debt.

I would like to hear what you think of our web-site

Alan

Bolton Boris,

You asked about where the debt was from? The accounts don't show it specifically. The Accountancy firm, Deloittes, publish an annual report on Football Finance which seems to be the "bible" that the press uses for articles. It uses 2008 data and has not yet been updated, but they show Bolton's debts as £53,540,000. Usually they use the "Net Debt" value from the accounts, unless there are reasons for thinking it is different. Wanderers accounts show that Net debt in 2008 was £45,128,000 (more than £8 million less than Deloittes) and £58,421,000 in 2009. I also use a calculation which takes the difference between non-trade creditors and debtors, less cash. Frequently, this is the same as "Net Debt", but in your case, it came out at £71,700,000 in 2009. Our web site shows the Net Debt reported in the club's own accounts. The largest items of debt are to the owners totalling more than £72 million.

Alan

Alan Lee wrote:
As an Evertonian, I have teamed up with two Man'U fans and a Liverpudlian

i gave up at this point - what's he on bout?

Why is it in new members aswell, surely this is other footy, non?

Lord Kangana wrote:Why is it in new members aswell, surely this is other footy, non?

No, Cricket is in the other footy section.

Alan Lee wrote:Hi Puskas,

I am with you 100%. Our web-site is not anti-American. We want the FA to tackle football debt in general, by introducing some rules. In some clubs, there is a benevolent owner who turns all the debt into equity (Chelsea readily springs to mind), but what will happen when he tires of it and wants to sell it? He has just written off £350 million, surely he will want it back? Bruce Rioja also asked me a question which I will reply to later, but our point is that we would like to see something done about how much debt a club can take on. If you are spending a fortune on debt servicing (interest) every season, you have less available for transfers or developing your facilities.

A good example of taking on debt and handling it well is Arsenal, who took on the debt to build Emirates, but their income from the larger stadium and the pay-back from the property development at Highbury means that the large debt is well within their ability to repay it. Have a loomkl at the statistics on our web-site. generally speaking debt in excess of the annual turnover of the club is worrying and this is the case with Bolton. I understand that the debt was taken on for good reasons, but, as I said earlier, you have one of the smallest gounds in the division and attendance levels also below average, so your total income is stretched to support that debt.

I would like to hear what you think of our web-site

Alan

From an Everton fan

Nurse, nurse, I need me undies changing


We'd have even less available if we went down, hence the efforts of our chairman to come up with a way of restructuring the finance of the game

Alan Lee wrote:Hi Puskas,

I am with you 100%. Our web-site is not anti-American. We want the FA to tackle football debt in general, by introducing some rules. In some clubs, there is a benevolent owner who turns all the debt into equity (Chelsea readily springs to mind), but what will happen when he tires of it and wants to sell it? He has just written off £350 million, surely he will want it back? Bruce Rioja also asked me a question which I will reply to later, but our point is that we would like to see something done about how much debt a club can take on. If you are spending a fortune on debt servicing (interest) every season, you have less available for transfers or developing your facilities.

A good example of taking on debt and handling it well is Arsenal, who took on the debt to build Emirates, but their income from the larger stadium and the pay-back from the property development at Highbury means that the large debt is well within their ability to repay it. Have a loomkl at the statistics on our web-site. generally speaking debt in excess of the annual turnover of the club is worrying and this is the case with Bolton. I understand that the debt was taken on for good reasons, but, as I said earlier, you have one of the smallest gounds in the division and attendance levels also below average, so your total income is stretched to support that debt.

I would like to hear what you think of our web-site

Alan

The website is OK. Information drops as you go lower in the league - "information not available" appears rather a lot in the bottom couple of divisons, suggesting that you're only really concerned witth the rich clubs (a view supported by your petition - only rich clubs are really are risk from leveraged buy-outs. Anyone wanting to "invest" in football, and own a smaller club is probably rich enough to buy it outright). Smaller clubs face other problems which need addressing - and are far more important than a couple of multinational corporations getting into debt problems.

Analysis is fairly superficial - no information on who the debt is owed to, how it's structured, secured and so on.

Presentation could be better - have you thought about fixing the table headers to make it easier to know what the data refers to (yes, I know you can hover over the column - that's good, but you have to search for the column/row you want to hover over).

Sorry to be un constructive, but the sight of Liverpool and Stretford fans demanding their right to success after the way they've not given two flying shites about anyone else for decades has been one of the highlights of this century so far.

I know that the sport is dynamic & no-one would be unaffected if a big club went under (& nor will either if these two, more's the pity) but neither Stretford nor the scouse reds will go bust, it's just that they may find 'automatic success' will be less certain.

The Anfield lot aren't upset that their club's in financial hock ... just that they are in hock held by people who can't finance it. They wouldn't care less if the money was covered.

There is no clamour by either set of fans to get the finances right ... just to get it held by people with more cash. Indeed, their complaint is that they 'can't compete' with the big spenders.

So, all in all, & everything considered, I shalln't be signing.

In fact, if there's a "good, let them decend the financial stairs of hell" petition anywhere, can you direct me to it ?

Hi Puskas,

Thanks for looking and taking the time to comment on Oi! FA. I'll pass on your comments about the ease of using the data to the guys who put the website together. The data was my bit. I personally paid to download the accounts of all 92 clubs. There was no attempt to short-cut the smaller clubs. The truth of the matter is that companies below a certain size (turnover) have authorisation to only file partial accounts, which means you only see the balance sheet. With the balnce sheet, you can derive the profit or loss and make a reasoned stab at debt. Very few sets of full accounts show who the debt is to. Larger clubs show whether it is bank debt or is to parent companies but that is it.

Alan