What is success for us ?

This season is the same now as it was before the beginning of the season surely. It was to still exist and be in League Two at the least come next May.

With a manager like Holloway and a normal pre-season in summer 2021, we should be aiming for play-offs next season IMO.

Quoted from grimps

Our only trust involvement was to stab one of the few men that invested in the club with no strings and hand his gifted shares over to Fenty .
This club from top to bottom is full of nodding donkeys.
You can’t even blame the players or the manger this time , we’ve got what we’ve paid for .
When we was non league my mates who was a scout for Twon at the time always said we was 100-200 k short of promotion every season , that was exactly the amount we raised in the season we went up .
What’s the point of chipping in these days when the money is just being taken out and going to pay off Fenty ?

I’m not saying we should chip in. I chose not to do that this Summer when the appeal went out. Not after the previous way fans efforts have been regarded.

It’d be a different matter if the Trust were to come out and say we have a deliberate strategy to wrest control of the club from Fenty (and not sell it to any passing Mickey Mouse American entrepreneur). The money should go into a fund ready for when the time is right. Part of any deal should be that he gives those shares back that the Trust foolishly gave him. He shouldn’t get a penny for those.

At the moment success will be getting some players that are lg 2 / 1 standard  instead of  sunday league / incs league standard that we have at the moment. Ollie my dear  you cannot turn these young lower standard players in to consistant lg 2 players  they just dont have it . all you are doing is harming the club / team. And probably disrtoying the young players  in trying to.

The saddest thing for me is the acceptance most of us seemed to have slipped into. We have no expectation of getting a result or really being competitive when we play Exeter or Newport. I don't think we'll go down but the sum of our ambitions appears to be to stay up as cheaply as possible and pay JF back some money.

The whole club is run like a non league operation and one man has to be responsible for that - go on the website for the club shop and see how easy it is to work out sizes and buy a couple of kids replica kits......

I well remember my first rant on here against the Fenty dictatorship (because that is what it is) in October 2009 when we scraped a draw with Accrington at home.I had a different moniker back then but I felt then as I do now - we will never get anywhere whilst Mr Fenty is in charge.

Little did I know that a home draw with Accrington was as good as it was going to get.

In many ways I have come to accept it is not his personal fault. He simply does not know how to arrest the slide, it is not in his DNA. We all have our own personal failings, and I won't change mine and he certainly will not change his.

My observations come not only from being a lifetime fan, but also hearing things from people in business I trust, and my own sporadic business dealings with the club.

He will never be collegiate, he will never attract new investment that doesn't go sour, and he will never accept that he is mainly at fault for a litany of failings that have meant he had to lend us money that we have to pay back before we can begin to go forward.

In some ways he is quite astute, but only in ways it benefits him. His use of the word "benign" being a good example. It is sort of benign, in that he says he wouldn't put the club in danger by asking for it all back at once, yet it is not at all benign in reality and as I say his lack of investment (or ability to get and keep other investment) means the club has fallen so far behind in all areas (playing, stadium, technology, facilities) he has had no option but to add to his benign loans. He now is paying himself back from our money!  (astute from his point of view!)

We all know what the problem is, but what can we do about it? The best way would be to sell a player for enough money to pay him off in one go, if he would actually accept it and go that is. This is what I am banking on as I cannot see any other way out.

Whilst all that is panning out, we must avoid relegation at all costs or he might never get his money back.

Quoted from quebec38

This season is the same now as it was before the beginning of the season surely. It was to still exist and be in League Two at the least come next May.

With a manager like Holloway and a normal pre-season in summer 2021, we should be aiming for play-offs next season IMO.

Why has this narrative become acceptable among fans?

How can it be that Newport top the league and have been consistently above us since their scrape with relegation? Progressing in cup competitions and reaching play off positions.

Have they got more fans than us? No.

Have they got more money than us? Yes probably because they are capable of getting to round 3 of the FA Cup and extending their season to the play offs.

Are they better run than us? Definitely.

They also have a striker that scored 37 goals for us in a season and was then allowed to waltz out the door for buttons. They also took Matt from us, a striker who has scored 1 in 3 since he departed. Vernam and Clarke also gone because you know, they wanted to be paid what they were worth. Hess and Davis would also walk into this side right now.

Carlisle are in the play off places. They are out on a limb geographically like us and have about the same average attendance as we do. Not a very wealthy area either and I didn't see their fans "donating" north of £100,000 to the club pre season.

Are these two examples in imminent danger of collapse, or are they just getting on with winning football matches?

Can you see a theme here?

I'm 44 years old. I started going regularly around 1987. We had a couple of successive relegations to start me off, then Alan Buckley arrived and we went straight back to the second division where we had mostly plyed our trade. We spent many years in that division aside from one season in 2000 when we immediately bounced back.

It is not normal for this club to be in division 4 for so long, for us to have spent six seasons as a Conference club still hurts me to this day, we are barely hanging on again and relegation is certainly a possibility.

Success for us, is ridding ourselves of the one common denominator in our demise. John Fenty must go before we can possibly think of restoring some pride into this famous old and very underachieving club. I suppose nowadays, league one play off contenders is our level but we're a million miles away from that. We are a good sized club, with good support but we are so low at the moment and have been ever since John Fenty became involved.

This may be the stupidest post ever, but I don't know anything about how a football club is run, and it's something that just crossed my mind.

What if we, the fans, raised the money to pay back Fenty's loan's on condition that he left the Football Club permanently?  Now, I'm not sure how much he's owed, but if it's a ridiculously high amount, then red cross me and disregard this post.

Quoted from 123614

This may be the stupidest post ever, but I don't know anything about how a football club is run, and it's something that just crossed my mind.

What if we, the fans, raised the money to pay back Fenty's loan's on condition that he left the Football Club permanently?  Now, I'm not sure how much he's owed, but if it's a ridiculously high amount, then red cross me and disregard this post.

I believe it is around £1.4m. Can't be arsed to check last seasons account but it's in that region. So £300 each based on 4000 contributing.

Quoted from fishboyUTM

I believe it is around £1.4m. Can't be arsed to check last seasons account but it's in that region. So £300 each based on 4000 contributing.

Think it's more than that isn't it? According to a recent thread on here?