ED good memories or good riddence?

[BWFC_Insane]

Sports shield started talking with the club in September. They satisfied all demands on a number of occasions. Only for the demands to change each time. They were ready to sign contracts mid January when once again the demands changed.

Had the deal gone through earlier there might have been a chance or even half a chance to save this season.

Talking about possible groups buying earlier or speculative but we ended up selling to sports shield anyway.

[Lost Leopard Spot]

small quibbles are the best kind of quibble!

I'll throw this in for your perusal:
a right tossbag of a shonky consortium are the shonkiest of tossbag consortia

[Hoboh]

The real elephant in the room is the originally stated £25 million Breeze Block stadium, the one that mysteriously landed us with a bill between £42-48 million!
Someone fcuked that one up!

Along comes Eddie Davies, Big life time Bolton fan,
The first thing you know old Ed's a millionaire, going to sort out the debt situation, pay off the stadium bill and fund us day to day, but he needs to pay 'now't' for the club.
lets make shed loads of shares and sell them to him, matters not very much everyone else's, whilst worth not a lot then, would become totally fcukin' useless!
Jobs a good 'un.

THE MAN responsible for our high life in the top league continues to refine his blue print, it ain't cheap involving a huge backroom staff packed with expensive experts, progress up the league continues, no massive signings but large outlay on wages to get players you never thought you'd ever see in a Bolton shirt, formula works.

Manager has big plans and ambition, who can blame him? Club feels his ideas and theirs don't meet financially, he leaves, now comes the crunch.
The hop on any football board he can get on chairman starts to show he's not really much of a football man after all and got lucky with BSA, he with the help of the owner continue with very poor football decisions whilst totally taking their eye off the financial plight using The-Wanderer motto, "It'll be reet".

Every passing season proves "It'll be reet" not to be the case.
Now comes the nub of things, hero Phil G's decisions slowly get worse, Davies fails to heed the signs and lets him continue, club starts to decline even with Davies slowly cutting out various 'fees' and interest on loans, he starts to listen to people/advisors who tell him he is at risk of losing serious money if he keeps propping up the club.

Eddie calls time, determined to get the best deal for 'the club' in press releases anyway, unfortunately this is about 3 seasons to late and he really has problems taking his 'investment' back out with any deal available, it goes to the wire, the club enters another period of uncertainty, Eddie potentially gets his cash back and he wants hero status to go with it.

That's were I'm at with all this mess, Eddie is not quite the sharp business cookie everyone thought, perhaps slightly blinded by being a fan, I'll give him that, the man in my eyes truly responsible for where we are is no longer with us!

[jonnycooper]

Now I've seen quite a few examples of payments from BWFC to Eddie Davis,or Moonshift,but I've yet to see actual documented evidence of payments to BWFC from Ed or Moonshift. Have I missed anything? Please help!

[boltonboris]

I put in £100 next month as a loan, then the month after take out £150 with interest.

Next month I put that £150 back in, then take £200 out with interest..

I then put the £200 back in and take £250 out with... you can see where I'm going with this

Fact is, I only parted company with 100 quid.. And if I did that several times a year over a number of years, then left the final figure in growing interest for another number of yesrs, the "debt" owed to me, would be significantly higher than what I'd put in at the beginning.

Davies let it spiral, but from what I believe, he's 'only' written off about £20 million of hard cash, the other £180m that he's owed was a mad dash accumulation of interest and some creative accounting

[thebish]

all in all I'm fairly gruntled with what ED has done for the club over the years and now I look forward to our future plans to build Deano a statue after our next UEFA tour...

[jonnycooper]

Gruntled? Is that chuffed or unchuffed!?

[thebish]

Gruntled? Is that chuffed or unchuffed!?

I think PG Wodehouse - imitated by Terry Pratchett played with the word "gruntled" - imagining that it was the opposite of "disgruntled" (thus, Gruntled: fairly happy / Disgruntled: a bit peeved)

that was my intention - the pratchettian and Wodehousian (imagined) positive sense of the word largely because I like using the word "gruntled"!

I think Grammararianistologists might argue that the "dis" of "disgruntled" is not an opposite-prefix - like DISappear or DIScontented - but an older english "intensifier" - making an existing sense stronger - so DISgruntled would mean MORE THAN just gruntled - so that both gruntled and disgruntled would mean "peeved", but disgruntled slightly more so!

then.. as the excellent site World Wide Words puts it:

Now a second grammatical term, frequentative (or frequentive if you prefer). This is a trick of word formation, now obsolete, in which an ending created a verb to suggest that some action is often repeated. The one used for this most often is -le. So curdle is the frequentative of curd, gamble that of game and sparkle of spark. The verb gruntle is the frequentative of grunt.

The first sense of gruntle was of a repeated grunt, especially the noise that pigs make in company. An example is in The Life and Death of Mr Badman, by John Bunyan, of 1680: “After this his speech went quite away, and he could speak no more than a Swine or a Bear. Therefore, like one of them, he would gruntle and make an ugly noise, according as he was offended, or pleased, or would have any thing done.” It is rarely used of humans, but an example occurs in a 1922 book, The Covered Wagon, by Emerson Hough, “They dismounted. The two Indians, short, deep-chested, bow-legged men, went to the packs. They gruntled as they unloaded the two larger mules.” Gruntle appeared in the fifteenth century; by the end of the next century it had begun to be used to mean grumbling or complaining. I imagine it as old-retainer mumble, the noise that someone fed up with their condition will make under their breath all the time.

If we put the intensifier and the frequentative together in one word, disgruntled has its current meaning, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as a state of “moody discontent, sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humour”.

you might say BWFC_Insane is disgruntled... I couldn't possibly comment!

[Lost Leopard Spot]

Grammararianistologists

I let lie the gruntled, but I'm not standing for that. No way, Jose. They are, as you are well aware of, actually called Grammarariangnosticologists

[midlands exile]

Do what you want fella - your life.

I'm just laying out where BWFC have been during mine. Maybe you want to put £xm into a football club with little prospect of getting it back - some people do you know? I'll be delighted if you do - I won't even ask you to run it properly as long as it gets into Europe - you can make the debt whatever you can afford to as long as you take most of it with you...

I am of the opinion that there's been far greater meltdowns - given that whether the debt was £10m, £100m, or £500m, it's only debt until someone pays it or you go bankrupt/into Admin etc. If neither those two options need to occur then you're just servicing it. We've not done the latter - gone into Admin- it's been paid off in large part - even if there were some still hanging around (which I don't think anyone's sure of yet).

Surely having a debt of £1m, not being able to pay it and going into Admin is more embarrassing than having a debt of £200m, not being in Admin and paying it off?

I think maybe we're getting crossed wires via the back and forth of messages on here. But in my lifetime, BWFC have had a global profile for two reasons: 1) the Allardyce galacticos, and 2) one of the biggest debts in football*. The first was good, the second was/is an embarrassment.

Embarrassment stemming from the apparent squandering tens of millions we didn't have, not even in the pursuit of success but instead chasing mediocrity and ultimately failure on the pitch (maybe relegation to 3rd tier). The board lurching from bad decision to disaster, both in the appointment/support of managers to the recruitment/remuneration of players, all the while we have been told "it'll be reet" and "ED won't pull the rug". Rounded off by an abrupt change of mind by ED, followed by staff expecting an unpaid Xmas, and then escaping from administration by the skin of our teeth - I'd say it's not been our finest hour, regardless of the bad times that may have happened earlier in our history.

*I still don't believe the reported debt figures that ED and PG produced were ever representative of "real debt" - not in the way you're interpreting it (as "soft loans"), but more from a perspective of accountancy jiggery-pokery for offshore/tax purposes. Which is why ED was fine to write that £185m off, as opposed to his personal loan of much less which I suspect was "real money" and thus was non-negotiable.

[thebish]

I'm not sure why having a debt is an "embarassment" unless that debt then becomes a problem and you can't pay it back and you go tits-up. In our case - it got paid off/wiped/massively reduced and seems not to have been a problem for the new buyers. As Worthy has pointed out more than once - it's a LOT more embarassing to have a £1million debt that sinks you then a £200million debt that doesn't sink you, isn't it?

[Abdoulaye's Twin]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

[StaffsTrotter]

I'm not sure why having a debt is an "embarassment" unless that debt then becomes a problem and you can't pay it back and you go tits-up. In our case - it got paid off/wiped/massively reduced and seems not to have been a problem for the new buyers. As Worthy has pointed out more than once - it's a LOT more embarassing to have a £1million debt that sinks you then a £200million debt that doesn't sink you, isn't it?

because it does become the issue the club is known for and helps reinforce a view that we bought our relative success and now have had our come uppance. I've said on here previously that given it 'was not real (external) debt and only to Eddie' that I think it would have been better if he had wiped it, as plenty of other rich backers have, just for pure PR if nothing else.

Having said that, many other clubs are in the shit and are still gambling, we just happen to have been caught in the perfect storm of events, magnified by our current position. Nobody would be wittering on about this even if we were half a dozen places up the league.

[LeverEnd]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

Really? There was a Wigan fan laughing at us on Twitter because they're buying Euxton.

I cried.

[twilight]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

Really? There was a Wigan fan laughing at us on Twitter because they're buying Euxton.

I cried.

Yeah saw that, he called us "minnows". I felt sad too

[Abdoulaye's Twin]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

Really? There was a Wigan fan laughing at us on Twitter because they're buying Euxton.

I cried.

Really? They're not able to develop their own facilities so they have to buy. I really couldn't care less. Honest.

[TANGODANCER]

A couple of things occurred to me: What happened to all the supposed money from shirt sales etc, abroad when we had first Takata, then Chungy on our books? Were'nt we supposed to do well out of that?

[TANGODANCER]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

Really? There was a Wigan fan laughing at us on Twitter because they're buying Euxton.

I cried.

Really? They're not able to develop their own facilities so they have to buy. I really couldn't care less. Honest.

That's my view. Wigan are second raters, always will be. Their turn will come around. Minnows, that's hilarious.

[midlands exile]

I'm not sure why having a debt is an "embarassment" unless that debt then becomes a problem and you can't pay it back and you go tits-up. In our case - it got paid off/wiped/massively reduced and seems not to have been a problem for the new buyers. As Worthy has pointed out more than once - it's a LOT more embarassing to have a £1million debt that sinks you then a £200million debt that doesn't sink you, isn't it?

As I have been trying to point out more than once, it's an embarrassment when you rack up one of the world's biggest debts for a football club whilst simultaneously turning the team into shit and heading for multiple relegations, regardless of going bust or not (which it appears we only just avoided anyway, despite years of public reassurances it would never happen). It's not just about the debt but the whole mismanagement of the club. Leaving the non-playing staff uncertain over their Xmas wages left a sour taste in the mouth too.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

I can assure you that BWFC don't have a global profile when it comes to the debt...at least not in this part of the globe. I suspect most other places too. Unless the news is about Man U et al then it isn't news.

Anyway, I couldn't give a shiny shit what others think of our club.

Really? There was a Wigan fan laughing at us on Twitter because they're buying Euxton.

I cried.

Yeah saw that, he called us "minnows". I felt sad too

They seem to have a thing about size. It's because they were non-league.