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Bristol City Finances

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GollyGTFC
December 29, 2021, 9:18pm

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Quoted from HerveJosse


Competitive is not just about which teams finish in the first three each year it is about your 46 games a year and whether you are going to see a good game of football each week which either team can win  and if your team doesn’t turn up they are going to come a cropper. The fact that second tier football is watched by average crowds of twenty thousand  plus many times that of any other country speaks for itself .


Sorry, but if you have to lose £30m a season to compete on a level playing field then it's not competitive at all is it? And that's before the owners of AFC Bournemouth, Fulham & West Brom decide they are happy to lose money too and distort the competition even further.

You're getting competitive mixed up with it being entertaining.

When we successfully battled at that level (18 out of 23 seasons between 1980 & 2003) we could compete well enough to stay there and have occasional brushes with the top half of the table. Now even clubs getting 30,000+ crowds like Nottm Forest & Sheff Wed can't compete financially. The whole system is broken.
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HerveJosse
December 29, 2021, 9:21pm
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Quoted from GollyGTFC


Sorry, but if you have to lose £30m a season to compete on a level playing field then it's not competitive at all is it? And that's before the owners of AFC Bournemouth, Fulham & West Brom decide they are happy to lose money too and distort the competition even further.

You're getting competitive mixed up with it being entertaining.

When we successfully battled at that level (18 out of 23 seasons between 1980 & 2003) we could compete well enough to stay there and have occasional brushes with the top half of the table. Now even clubs getting 30,000+ crowds like Nottm Forest & Sheff Wed can't compete financially. The whole system is broken.

Your right my definition of competing is entertaining. How could it be entertaining if if it wasn’t competitive.
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HerveJosse
December 29, 2021, 9:27pm
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Quoted from GollyGTFC


Norwich made a profit of £21.5m last season when they walked to promotion again despite them losing £30m of potential revenue because of COVID and despite investing £5m in work on Carrow Road & their training ground. They are also owed £54 by other football clubs of which half is due this current season. Norwich's finances are just fine even with their likely relegation this season. They have invested mainly in young players with resale value.


Your comment would have been more balanced if you had mentioned there was an operating loss of £26m turned into a profit by three player sales  largely Ben Godfrey to Everton
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GollyGTFC
December 29, 2021, 10:15pm

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Quoted from HerveJosse


Your comment would have been more balanced if you had mentioned there was an operating loss of £26m turned into a profit by three player sales  largely Ben Godfrey to Everton


Are you seriously suggesting that Norwich intended to make a loss but just got lucky by selling players? That is the exact model they’ve used to turn themselves into a yo-yo club. Develop young players, give them a season on the PL and then sell them on and reinvest in more players with a resale value. It’s exactly how Norwich got themselves into a club that is not good enough for the PL but too good for the Championship.
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HerveJosse
December 29, 2021, 10:24pm
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Quoted from GollyGTFC


Are you seriously suggesting that Norwich intended to make a loss but just got lucky by selling players? That is the exact model they’ve used to turn themselves into a yo-yo club. Develop young players, give them a season on the PL and then sell them on and reinvest in more players with a resale value. It’s exactly how Norwich got themselves into a club that is not good enough for the PL but too good for the Championship.

You certainly seem to have it in for Norwich. You are not from Suffolk are you ? I am not sure what is wrong with the business model you take offence at . Perhaps you would prefer a provincial club from a low population area to wallow in obscurity which it is so easy for others to do.
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GollyGTFC
December 29, 2021, 10:36pm

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Quoted from HerveJosse

Your right my definition of competing is entertaining. How could it be entertaining if if it wasn’t competitive.


Well my definition of competitive is whether clubs can genuinely compete.

I just don’t think a league where 18-20 clubs having zero chance of automatic promotion before a ball is kicked is a truly competitive league however entertaining it is.

Since Blackpool the only genuine complete surprise promotion was Huddersfield.

The 90s provided Oldham, Swindon, Barnsley & Bradford as surprise packages. Clubs like that have no chance of competing now.
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GollyGTFC
December 29, 2021, 10:54pm

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Quoted from HerveJosse

You certainly seem to have it in for Norwich. You are not from Suffolk are you ? I am not sure what is wrong with the business model you take offence at . Perhaps you would prefer a provincial club from a low population area to wallow in obscurity which it is so easy for others to do.


I have no issue with Norwich. It was you complaining that they only made a profit because of player trading like that was some sort of obscenity.

Developing players to sell on is about the only way clubs can compete against parachute payments funded clubs. Brighton & Brentford have reached the PL using that strategy largely thanks to their excellent statistics based scouting. Google Brentford signing Vitaly Janelt from Bochum. Brentford had a better understanding about how good he was than Bochum did and they picked him up for next to nothing and he’s gone from hardly getting a start in 2.Bundesliga to being a regular starter in the Premier League and touted for a Germany call up.

What I do dislike is that the system is rigged so that clubs like Norwich, Fulham and West Brom have a huge financial advantage over their rivals by being repeat failures at a higher level and cashing in their parachute payments to distort what used to be the best league in English football.

If the system is fixed then the clubs who benefit from it will lose their advantage.
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Poojah
December 30, 2021, 3:05pm
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Quoted from GollyGTFC


I have no issue with Norwich. It was you complaining that they only made a profit because of player trading like that was some sort of obscenity.

Developing players to sell on is about the only way clubs can compete against parachute payments funded clubs. Brighton & Brentford have reached the PL using that strategy largely thanks to their excellent statistics based scouting. Google Brentford signing Vitaly Janelt from Bochum. Brentford had a better understanding about how good he was than Bochum did and they picked him up for next to nothing and he’s gone from hardly getting a start in 2.Bundesliga to being a regular starter in the Premier League and touted for a Germany call up.

What I do dislike is that the system is rigged so that clubs like Norwich, Fulham and West Brom have a huge financial advantage over their rivals by being repeat failures at a higher level and cashing in their parachute payments to distort what used to be the best league in English football.

If the system is fixed then the clubs who benefit from it will lose their advantage.


Brentford’s recruitment strategy is impressive, no argument there, but they’ve still benefited from huge investment.

Brighton currently owe their owner almost half a billion pounds. Again, another formerly unfashionable club to admire, but money is the reason they went from the Withdean to the Amex and the Premier League.

To your earlier point, club’s rarely kick-on without inorganic investment these days.  


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GollyGTFC
December 30, 2021, 3:30pm

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Quoted from Poojah


Brentford’s recruitment strategy is impressive, no argument there, but they’ve still benefited from huge investment.

Brighton currently owe their owner almost half a billion pounds. Again, another formerly unfashionable club to admire, but money is the reason they went from the Withdean to the Amex and the Premier League.

To your earlier point, club’s rarely kick-on without inorganic investment these days.  


You do Brighton a huge disservice. Their owner was the original moneyball owner in English football. The guy is a genius and the Brentford owner is his biggest fan. Just because he's injected his cash as well as his expertise into Brighton it doesn't lessen the huge achievements he and they have made.

Is there any industry anywhere where you don't have to speculate to accumulate? Our greatest season since I've supported Town (1998/99) was funded on transfer fees received rather than gate receipts or TV money. Does that make anyone feel like the season was tainted?
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Poojah
December 30, 2021, 5:36pm
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Quoted from GollyGTFC


You do Brighton a huge disservice. Their owner was the original moneyball owner in English football. The guy is a genius and the Brentford owner is his biggest fan. Just because he's injected his cash as well as his expertise into Brighton it doesn't lessen the huge achievements he and they have made.

Is there any industry anywhere where you don't have to speculate to accumulate? Our greatest season since I've supported Town (1998/99) was funded on transfer fees received rather than gate receipts or TV money. Does that make anyone feel like the season was tainted?


I’m pretty familiar with Brighton’s story as it happens. Brighton, like Brentford (and Bournemouth) have recruited very intelligently but their success wouldn’t have been possible without a staggering injection of cash from their owner, Tony Bloom.

Don’t get me wrong, as owners go I think what Bloom has done for Brighton is absolutely brilliant. He’s a local boy, a life-long fan and part of a family that has been involved with the club for decades. He also happens to be extremely wealthy, and that bit’s the key.

What this whole thread really touches on the challenges our current owners face. Hand on heart, I believe John Fenty wanted the best for GTFC. For a man with such overt ego, it would have been of great personal significance to have been revered by the town for positively transforming the football club.

Sadly there were two fundamental problems as I see it. One, he lacked the vision and / or the talent to create positive, transformative change, and two, he took control of the club in financially uncertain conditions. The club he took over needed managing austerily in order to survive, but once those financial black clouds had dissipated he could never get out of that mode of thinking. The notion of speculating to accumulate simply wasn’t in his book of tricks; he could only manage the club within strict and safe financial parameters.

In terms of finances, there can be few clubs that have been as stable as us over the past decade or so, rarely making a substantial loss or turning a noticeable profit. But there’s a reason such stability isn’t seen as a footballing case study; and that’s because the policies employed by the club during that period we’re so flagrantly risk-averse that they suffocated the life out of the club and its fan base.

And so this is what the new owners have inherited. A club at least a decade behind the times in terms of infrastructure and in a division which at this time is dominated by clubs with disproportionately large and unprecedented levels of wealth for this tier in the football pyramid.

We’ve already seen that improvements in facilities and match day experience can improve crowds (increasing our disposable income in turn), but without meaningful success on the pitch this is unlikely to be totally sustainable. The gate against Halifax on Monday will be the lowest of the season so far, and whilst there will be lots of mitigating reasons for this, results are by far the most significant.

My worry, given how challenging this league can be to get out of, is that without major, inorganic investment in the playing side we will struggle to achieve the momentum needed to ascend to our natural potential in the modern football environment.

This isn’t a criticism of our new owners - to the contrary I think everything they’ve done so far has been very positive and long overdue. The issue is that we find ourselves in this condition and in this division in the first place - the blame for which sits firmly with JSF and his cronies.

The harsh reality though is that money wins football matches. We can see this at every level of the game, not least the National League.

Our promotion chances this season already look shot; if we did make the play-offs would anyone realistically fancy us to overcome at least one of Wrexham, Stockport or Chesterfield (not to mention any of the other contenders)? So what about next season? And the one after that if we don’t go up?

I just feel the owners have major headache on their hands with the club having failed to avoid relegation last season, and the state of football (and in particular the National League) in general. Maybe things will change when Fenty has his money back, who knows, but I can’t help but think that we need to at least temporarily abandon the underlying strategy of break even and sustainability if we we are to crack on and begin to realise our potential as a club.

TLDR? The club has been subject to such massive under-investment over the last decade and a half that the new owners are going to have to underwrite an equivalent over-investment over the next few years to get us back on track.


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