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It's a **** version of Big Brother, full of no mark tosspots trying to be famous by being tosspots. Epitome of everything wrong with society today. None of them are coming over well because they're all self-obsessed ****wits. The only way any of us win is if Kim Jong-Un nukes the entire island.

They shouldn't be putting anything up at all in a season where our income has increased by nearly £100m. Certainly not for the sake of raising £300,000. If we are doing ok and they wanted to put ST's up by £20 or so then yes I would have grumbled because again its a drop in the ocean so seems unnecessary (most comparable prem clubs have cut season ticket prices for fans in recent years or certainly have them available cheaper than ours) but I doubt it would have been much more than a bit of grumbling from us usual suspects. Football clubs may be a business but we all know they are not like normal businesses and fans are not like normal "customers" as it takes an awful lot for us to walk away. Fine if that's how they want to operate but lay off the hypocritical, community club b**locks and the bleating about the greed of the premier league and bow badly the fans are treated. Bottom line is they have targeted 5,000 of their most loyal supporters to make a quick buck at a time when they didn't need to. That should open some people's eyes about how things are.

It wouldn't be a close season if Jimbo wasn't having a meltdown rant about something.🙃

That's the spirit! 😉

He was a key cog last season.

Well I must say the meeting notes released by the various fans groups are very disappointing. My reading of it is: 1. The Club are sorry for not consulting but don't appear apologetic for exploiting the fans for commercial gain. 2. The message is this is what you are going to get as we are "self funding." The alternative would have been increasing the costs of season tickets (£20 on ST's would have been fairer in my view (plus £35 instead of £30 for casual fans) although I don't accept any increase is justified). Wonder when Norwich City fans will really clock that "self funding" = we foot the bill whilst increasing the value of the owners asset for them, paying to rebuild their academy for them etc. If they meant what they say about being custodians of the club for the fans they would give a large chunk of the considerable (and currently very valuable) equity they have accrued in the club to a supporters trust when the time comes rather than passing it on to Tom. In the meantime we all pay more than other prem fans but will be told we cant compete financially. 3. The club no doubt thinks they have taken the heat out of the situation, banked the cash for this season (£300k if we've sold 6000 as they say) and can now move on and bring in some changes next season when they would have had to change it anyway. 4. The stats from the FtC notes are particularly damning. Show the club knew that they have 4600 fans in the 4-9 away game bracket who would be hit by this and who would undoubtedly buy the away memberships. when you add in the 750 in the 10+ bracket in my view it shows that the club have cynically targeted its 5350 (in the main) most loyal supporters here to make a bit of extra cash which is really a drop in the ocean in premier league terms. Its rank hypocrisy. The fact it was signed off by the whole board is damning. I could have been more forgiving if this was someone new on the commercial side of things overstepping the mark trying to make an impression by generating revenues but the fact this was signed off by the whole board is in my view disgusting unless the board members were in some way shielded from some of the details.

And tame our instincts to spend?

Yep. I mean, it could be that the actual panic over getting tickets might be misplaced. Tottenham and West Ham would be the two games initially that stand out as having the most potential for disappointments simply because they’re London and new stadia. That Spurs is midweek might help in that respect but we won’t know until it’s up and in action.

Odd then that you mention a car journey. Is that a northern thing ?.

Before long they'll be expecting other season ticket holders to pay for their halftime Bovril. If folk wanna stump up £50 to be more important than other fans that's their own choice.

No, we'd just be wondering what sort of idiot pays it.

At least there's less chance of Nuff Said finding out if you're quick....

I think it's traditional in such cases Fenway to inquire as to what they did for the other three and a half minutes................

That'd be 4 minutes too long for me

Oh, I thought you’d just had “ a moment” with Mrs Nuff Said

Neat GA47 - neat 👍

I believe the club came out with that figure, whether it’s a total for home and away memberships I don’t know

I'm 31 but I think that works. Would also have accepted 'Max is🙌' or 'Max is 💯'

He's much better than Max on Football Manager 😂

From a personal and very selfish perspective I'm just pleased that this decision has happened now, and not 10 years ago when I was going to a large number of away games. My biggest gripe isn't the cost, for most people who travel away regularly I don't believe £50 would break the bank (if it does, then maybe priorities need to change), it's the complete lottery and need to be able to buy tickets exactly when they go on sale. With the old scheme, if you were in the top couple of point categories you had a very good chance of getting a ticket and there wasn't the rush as long as you bought within your window. A teacher from Dereham, a doctor from Acle, a bus driver on the A47, they could all get their tickets later in the day with no issue, as long as they bought within the window. The new scheme massively favours those, like me, who have a desk job and can sneak online at 8.59am, refreshing the ticket website until tickets go on sale. I can picture now the calamity of the ticket system crashing at 9.01am on Tuesday 23rd July when the tickets for Liverpool go on sale. How anyone can argue that membership open to all like this is better than points is clearly living in cloud cuckoo land as far as I'm concerned. Maybe the points system needed an overall, but with points you can control priority and reward those who are at the top of the list. Football is a simple game and the winner of the league is the team with the most points. Maybe, just because Ipswich paid their membership fee, we should let them be promoted next season instead of us?

On tonight at 21.00hrs.

Apologies from BK from the way it was implemented and the lack of consultation....two of the most obvious things that should have been considered. You see it all the time in business and government - people in power or management coming up with schemes and ideas that they think are great and they ignore the very people that their schemes will affect. Then say they will learn from this and consult more......pity they didn't do that in the first place!!

It might help to explain what Ricardo and I are talking/arguing about if I quote all that Bowkett and McNally said to the EDP at the 2013 AGM, because it points up some significant potential differences between then and the near future: Chairman Alan Bowkett said rebuilding the City Stand for a capacity of 35,000 would cost around £30m, which would be mortgaged over 20 years and cost around £2.5m per year in payments, which should be covered by around £3m from new ticket sales each season. Mr Bowkett said: “You are forecasting for 20 years and you would have to achieve an average occupancy of 35,000 over the 20 years of about 94pc. “Now the key thing for us is staying in the Premier League, what keeps us in the Premier League is investment in what I term the software, back office, football management, football players, and I cannot guarantee that we are going to be in the Premier League for the next 20 years, no one can. “So that’s the big question we have to face ourselves with and I think having just taken a huge burden away from the football club, probably the board would prefer to invest in the software rather than the hardware at the moment and that’s what we are doing.” Mr Bowkett said the other problem would be how to seat season ticket holders in the City Stand for a whole season, with the club having the highest ratio of season tickets to seats in the league. He added that the potential winter break for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar could even help, continuing: “Then there’s the second question as to how would you do it and we cannot see taking the stand down and rebuilding it without having a full season of non-occupancy. “So as I jokingly said to David (McNally), well maybe if we drop back down to League One again we could do it, but he said ‘we still got 23,000 people turning up then’, so that’s the physical difficulty.” Chief executive David McNally added: “You’re more likely to be a consistent Premier League club with average gates of 35,000 then you are with crowds of 26,800 so it’s something that we would wish to do in the mid-term but we have the dilemmas of the practical solution of the accounting supporters, which seems really difficult, and of course the cash” Bowkett and McNally both assumed a 35,000-seat stadium. That would mean a 12,000-seat City Stand, so half the size again of the South Stand, dwarfing the rest of the ground. Neither is still at the club, so there is no certainty the plan is still to expand that much. I would be very surprised if it was, and I would not be in favour. Bowkett was assuming the whole of the then £30m cost would be funded by going that much into debt, having to pay off that debt over 20 years, and only using extra tickets sales to meet the annual repayments, because this was the era of “every last penny goes into the football side”, as he explains with that “software” analogy. On the basis of a 35,000-seat stadium and the financial realities the club was operating under then, linked to the “every penny” mantra, Bowkett and McNally were right to regard expansion as unfeasible. To think that in essence only continued membership of the Premier League would make the figures add up and that such continued membership could hardly be guaranteed. Indeed was unlikely. They were both talking in the immediate aftermath of all the external debt being paid off, and were understandably unwilling to go back into serious debt any time soon. But. Fast-forward to this time next year, and a perfectly possible scenario. We have stayed up, meaning another year of PL money and three years of parachute payments if we later get relegated. And Buendia, Lewis, Godfrey, Aarons etc have proved themselves PL class. Oh so reluctantly, we accept an offer from Spurs of £55m for Aarons. What to do with the money? There is no black hole to fill in the accounts, and no likelihood of one if and when we get relegated, because we have learned from the recent past. Colney is paid for, as Jim Smith says, thanks to the generosity of fans.😎 We will spend some money on upgrading the squad, but hardly all that £55m. Not least since we have already picked up Aarons’ replacement for £650,000 from Fortuna Dusseldorf Reserves. What about adding 4,000 or at most 5,000 seats to the Main Stand, at a cost of £35m? Suddenly those Bowkett figures become outdated. Putting £25m of the Aarons money towards the project means borrowing only £10m (to be clear, these rough figures are only to make the general point). Not only is there less debt to pay off, it is unlikely that the annual debt repayments would have to be entirely funded by tickets sales, let alone sales predicated on staying in the PL for two straight decades and selling every extra seat. If the club continues to be run as we are told it is going to be then there should be the odd million a year to put into debt repayment. In short less debt than had been envisaged six years ago, and quite manageable. And crucially not a project predicated on (unlikely) continued success. A project financially feasible and justified in terms of the extra seats even if over the next four or so decades we spend as much or even more time in the Championship than we do in the PL. And why extra seats? Because McNally, at the end, explodes the common misconception that tickets sales don’t matter in the PL, because of the TV money. “You’re more likely to be a consistent Premier League club with average gates of 35,000 then you are with crowds of 26,800.” Extra seats mean more money to give us an edge over clubs that get the same TV money and bridge the gap to those – ie the majority- that get more.

I think it is probably true that Wilder gets the nod because he is English. Our game is dominated by foreign managers and I think first sniff of an Englishman and the media love it. But it doesn't matter a hoot.

He is.

You have to follow it up with "Norwich will finish 3rd"

Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man 104 Members 104 1,947 posts Report post Posted 16 minutes ago OK, stadium debate aside, I just want to say how someone of Ricardo's vintage using this phrase made me smile 🙂 The phrase "What's the beef" has been around since the end of the 19th century. N.B. I am not suggesting that Ricardo is that old 😜

That isn't always the case, though. Man City finished top of the Premier League in each of the last two seasons, but you can make a case for other managers doing better jobs based on the fact that they have fewer resources and lower expectations. This isn't the case with Farke and Wilder though: I'd say they started off the season on a similar footing. Ultimately you could make a case for either of them being manager of the year as the jobs they did were both equally fantastic.

Harrison Reed?

You do realise that Norwich City are a business don't you Jim Smith? Every business 'exploits people for commercial gain' as you put it, because that's what businesses are set up to do. In my opinion the rest of your post is way, way over the top.

It doesn’t smack of that at all - it smacks far more of Farke being overlooked as he’s not British/English. Our side came through largely unexpectedly and won the title - for the manager/head coach of such a side to be so consistently overlooked is rather weird. Of course Wilder did a good job, but he finished second.

I can categorically deny that it is me. 😀

I've seen better things the last time I had raging diarrhoea, and the s**t probably had more brain cells than that lot on Love Island have, put together. My other half watches it, and she loves it though. Crazy times, but she gets wound up for it

No, I think it is very early days on this. It seems Norwich are exploring whether he’d even be interested in coming. I would guess the fee would be small, because Farhmann has quite a long (2022) and quite an expensive (€35k - €45k a week) deal at Shalke, which will be the major issue if Norwich do try to sign him. It could be that Norwich are only interested in a loan deal for a season as Farhmann’s contract is a big problem.

Deano, our mantra is ' not how much we spend, but what we spend it on'. I sincerely believe that there are players out there that would improve us, but not at the silly prices that feature in the press football rumour sections. Don't ask me to name them, I am not a Scout or expert but have great faith in our current recruitment policy. Our opinions and angst will have no bearing on what the Club decides. The Club is building something .

With the bizarre way world politics is going it feels like we are currently living in an experimental reality show. The only trouble is that we regularly vote to keep the twats in rather than kick them off.

Which is why nobody knows what the potential is..... except that it's way over 26,000.

God it's a slow time in football.

Nor does Brexit . Plus it’s more interesting.

Interesting that lots of people saying they see us in for a number 10 to challenge Stiepermann and that may well be right but am I the only one who thinks long term that might be Buendia's best role for us. Most of the things he makes happen tend to be when he drops more centrally. I know that to a degree he creates that space by coming in off the flank but long term I've always seen a potential role for him playing more centrally with two quicker wingers out wide.

I'd be disappointed to lose Tettey this summer. OK, he isn't going to play much, but he's good for cover and good to have around the place. Also, loyalty works both ways. He could've left on a free last summer and we begged him to stay, so he signed a new contract. Unless he actively wants to leave, it would be a classless move to discard him now.

We’re doing it the only way we can - we aren’t in a position to pee money away a la Fulham, nor would most supporters want us to - and IMO it’d be as likely to fail as to succeed. What others like Villa do doesn’t/shouldn’t really concern us, we’ll go about things in a relatively low-key/quiet way as per usual.