The Nostradamus file....

[BWFC_Insane]

By that thinking any season irrespective of what happens is a success. But every season bolton wanderers are in league one should be considered a failure by anyone who is wanting to see this club get back to where it should.

.................

I get some people don’t care. They’d be happy surviving in the national league. We can still watch the games type thing. But in the same way as we needed to escape in the 90’s we need to find a way to do so now. The longer we are down here the worse it gets.

Thats just not true. There is a significant middle-ground between "success" and what you described as both "failure" and "disastrous" =- staying in league 1 is in that middle ground, and probably more on the "success" side of the spectrum than the "we are all doomed" side....

However, in terms of where this club "should" be - it is exactly where we are. We've all said it before, there is nowhere this club "should" be as we've got no god-given right to be anywhere other than where we are now. We've got history, yes. We've got a (relatively) shiny fancy stadium, yes, but what else do we have that tells us we are automatically in the wrong place right now? Why should we be any higher up the pyramid than other clubs in League 1???

Ask HMRC - they'll probably tell you the club "should" be where Bury are now, so given that we're actually doing alright aren't we......

I want us to be back in the big time, I really do. We all do. I'll be pee'd off if we don't make it. I'm sure we all will. But I won't see it as abject failure and I really hope it isn't financially catastrophic either. I don't want us to languish here with no ambition, but equally, I'm more pleased we seem to have a sustainable club competing on several levels. This doesn't mean I don't want more of course, but I do think a bit of realism is often required as to where our natural place at the table is....

I totally get that but I don’t agree. We’ve had two (more than a season) spells in the lower leagues in our long history.

I do agree that nobody has a divine right but we missed our last season improved the squad, acknowledged the league was weaker this year and it was as Evatt said himself, and indeed repeated two weeks ago ‘the time to do it’. We’ve spent a lot of money. I think we have the better players too. And injuries have struck the top two as much if not more than us.

It is what it is. Evatt himself has said it. I don’t think a season we went into talking solely about automatic promotion can be considered anything other than failure if you don’t hit that. And I do think in the context that we have such a good squad in what is a relatively weak league missing out is a huge issue.

Will we ever have a better chance? I doubt it.

As for sustainability I’m not sure how a 5M loss (and that’s before we were spending money on likes of Collins) is in any way a representation of a sustainable club. We’ve admitted that we can’t be run at break even in this league.

[Worthy4England]

The Swiss investors are pulled together by Nick Lucock's brother and consists of around 25 families from Switzerland. I guess a £5m sum, split between 25 makes it more manageable coz it's only 200k a piece, and you can bet there's a tax loss deferring tax owed somewhere...What his brother said last month was...

“Everyone’s in for the journey and is aware that it costs more to run a Championship club,” said Ben Luckock. “You need to look at what you are doing with recruiting and trade sensibly,” he said.

[TANGODANCER]

The Swiss investors are pulled together by Nick Lucock's brother and consists of around 25 families from Switzerland. I guess a £5m sum, split between 25 makes it more manageable coz it's only 200k a piece, and you can bet there's a tax loss deferring tax owed somewhere...What his brother said last month was...

“Everyone’s in for the journey and is aware that it costs more to run a Championship club,” said Ben Luckock. “You need to look at what you are doing with recruiting and trade sensibly,” he said.

You can almost smell the Kalvin Klein aftershave..

[sonicthewhite]

With a return to the Championship potentially one game away, I, like a lot of you, will have been theorizing about different possibilities and scenarios should we succeed with promotion.

One idea that has come to mind has been the possibility of everyone upping sticks and buggering off. Sharon and her associates selling up to the first American conglomerate who shows an interest and Evatt basking in his Bolton managerial track record and jumping ship for a, ahem, "bigger" team, a bit like Schumacher did when he ditched Plymouth for Stoke.

Now I don't necessarily think that the above scenario would particularly come to pass. In fact I think a more realistic scenario would be new owners with Sharon remaining as the Chairman and Evatt believing his own hype in trying to get Bolton to do an Ipswich. However, I do think that IF we go up then Evatt could be one bad run of results away from picking up his P45. I certainly don't think our owners would be happy with us being a Rotherham model, I think they'd at the very least want us to be a Plymouth/Sheffield Weds in staying up and at the outside doing the aforementioned Ipswich.

Who knows what's going to happen though except that this is going to be a monumental summer regardless of which league we're in

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Interesting topic. Depends which Rotherham.

• In 2017 they ended a three-year second-tier spell with an awful season - 23pts (28 below safety!) under three managers (Stubbs, Jackett and Warne). That's not what we want.
• Warne bounced them straight back up and in 2019 they went down after the penultimate game on 40pts, 4pts off safety (but 8 above us). Not good enough, but not far off.
• Warne bounced them straight back up in the COVID season and in 2021 they only went down on the last day, 2pts off safety.
• Warne bounced them straight back up then left for Derby and they reverted to the "three manager shit season" model, finishing on 27pts – 24 off safety, and 4 of those points coming in the last 3 games under Evans.

Now, I don't know what the current board's view is, let alone what a future one might be. And I have long worried that our fanbase, some noisy portions of which have never taken to Evatt,might get very vocal if we're losing more than we win. But I would guess (and it is a guess) that Sharon wouldn't panic and pull the plug unless we were totally adrift. As long as we're in with a chance of avoiding relegation, I'd guess (again) that she would stay loyal to her man. And if we went down in April/May, she may judge him the best bet of getting back up.

I also doubt Evatt would jump. Although tactically he's much less rigid than he's sometimes painted - and, to my mind, has become more flexible as he's learned - he does need certain things in his favour: patient board, club with headroom to improve, players bought in. He has that at Bolton (including in tier two) and I'm not sure precisely who would tempt him away.

It's also possible that the Champo is not the death-strip I've often feared. The finances are still f*cked but it didn't stop Luton. Ipswich have shown it's possible [insert spending caveat] to excel. There's a lot of clubs treading water there. But also a lot of good oplayers capable of hurting us. It'd be a challenge, but I'd be up for it and so would the club.

[Worthy4England]

Agree with most of this as a "viewpoint," mate.

I think it would be interesting, in that we're often told, "doing this the way we're doing it is the best way, by far." I'm fairly sure some of the advocates of what we're doing are similarly vocal, in their beliefs as the great unwashed and have suggested that this squad is pretty much capable with a couple of additions.

If I put that together with recent pronouncements from Nick Lucock's brother around BMLL being in for the long haul and understanding what it takes in the Champo in terms of investment. It wouldn't be unreasonable for our "noisy portions," to perhaps expect a reasonably decent run at "one league up," at least in terms of staying clear of danger - we managed this bit very well coming up from the 2nd to the 1st Division. albeit had a few busy transfer windows, but I suspect there's significantly less differential on the money side.

So to IE. I actually thought he was having a bit of a wobble, when we went through a tough Feb/March, based on some of the things he said in the press (such as "I'm having a bit of a wobble." ) We've not seen him tested fighting at the bottom of a Division, other than perhaps the first 5 months of his tenure, when we shifted lots of player in Jan, for that "run" from about 19th in L2, to promotion. Kudos to him there, but it was a while ago and the decent player investments we made in the Jan plus his own acumen, propelled us upwards.

There is a possibility - if I account for the "maybe" - that there's more to the Champo, than perhaps L2 and L1 and that there could be a tougher, longer, struggle with a relatively low amount of investment, than say Burnley and their £19(?)m goalkeeper...

I mean we'll still be able to "trust the process" and "download plenty of content" but to wrap-up, I agree that Sharon probably wouldn't be too trigger happy (unless maybe you're looking at a 19 point season)...