Juggy

Message to LDC:You are a pr*ck.

I think Iwan has a point and if this article affects us tomorrow it will be because Hughton has played the wrong striker again.

At least if we go down you will feck off because you won''t be able to watch any streams and can''t listen to Radio Norfolk in Cumbria.

Was it really too much to ask to have a thread where as many people as possible could just give a simple answer to a simple question, so that we could identify the two or three top choices? Instead of the same old back and forth and essays and inner and outer arguments, from the same old four or five people? We have done arguments countless times. When Dubai Mark chips in with a paragraph on variables and about what division we will be in, and Chicken comes along and contributes four names, and LDC and Chicken make this a thread about what they think about me rather than just giving a name..... then this quickly becomes the three dozenth identikit thread about in, out, and who is rubbish and who is not.I didn''t want to start a thread for the purpose of LDC attempting to have an argument with me, or for somebody to start it into an inner or outer debate, and when you say:"Surely this is a forum where people can share their views on different subjects rather than just stating a name?"Maybe, just maybe, it would have be nice for everybody to share their choice without entering a thread which by the end of the third page had already descending into an argument which would lead to the entire thread being dominated by four or five big egos like LDC, me and Chicken.

Well thanks for providing the name of four managers Chicken. I asked a straight question and most people are capable of giving a straight answer.

"I''ve published my proof"Errrm... no you haven''t.

"Not very difficult to get the points table for last season and not very difficult to Google published accounts and dig out the key figures. Feel free to do it yourself if you doubt me- it does not take very long to find and process the figures" You want me to go and pay money to download accounts from companies house, and then spend hours trawling through data to prove that information that you claim to have found and analysed yourself but refuse to share to be incorrect? Errrrmmm..... no.It would be much easier for you to copy and paste your analysis. At least it would if you had any data to share, which you don''t. So yes in answer to an earlier question I am calling you a liar. Now prove me wrong.

So you are basing this solely on a 100% complete guess without any basis whatsoever, yet alone a sound one? Without being able to offer a single number of any sort?Well thanks for clearing that up. At least we know not to take you seriously. Not that I was anyway.

"The accounts are published so are available just not summarised. Very little guess work and where there is we know there is a very strong correlation between relative wages so very little guess work just those denying a reality which inconveniently does not fit their prejudices"And you have read the accounts of all 20 clubs and compiled this data have you?You wouldn''t mind sharing it with us then would you?A few hours ago you said it was McNally who had claimed we were 18th in the league on playing budget, now you are claiming to have read and analysed the annual returns of every club in the league and worked it out for yourself. Make your mind up!Great to hear that you have spent your time compiling this information for our benefit though, probably time for you to copy and paste it so that we don''t need to wait for The Guardian to publish it?

"I''m just pointing out objectively CH is outperforming"And all we are saying is that nobody knows whether he is outperforming because nobody knows what his budget is relative to other clubs, relative to last season, or the season before.Even if it does turn out that we are in the bottom three on playing budget (unlikely if you ask me) then we will still know that we have performed worse this season than last season, and the season before, with a likely larger monetary budget, a likely larger relative budget, and a likely larger wage to turnover ratio.In any business anywhere in the world if you give an executive a bigger budget you expect a better return. If you give a stock trader a £10m portfolio one year and he makes £500k for his institution, and you give him £20m the next year and he makes £250k, then they might decide to sack him and give his £20m to another trader. If a retail manager gets £50k to make improvements to their branch to increase sales and improve quality of service, and the branch then makes less money, then that manager has failed.You are the one saying that football is a business. If that is true, and the manager has delivered lesser returns with a bigger budget, then we should do what a business would do and give him the chop. His target was 10th this season, Bowkett admitted it. He spent big in the summer. He is not going to deliver on his target and may not even get close. That is an underperforming manager who has not met his target. Underperforming employees in corporations are moved on. If football is a business then he is failing.

"Ie if you do a league table by wages each season the league table will be 95pc the same as each season. Wages will go up but it''s the same for all clubs so theor relatively wage budget is similar each year"So now we are talking about ''relative wage budget'', funny because I was talking about footballing costs to turnover ratio, which is the relevant metric and the one that The Guardian analysed.Ours has increased from 49% to 68% (Purple Canary''s figure). If you are telling me that most other clubs had a similar rise then all I can say is... BS.

An even steeper rise then Purple! The failure to spend money in January led me to wonder whether we''d already hit our limit.

"Maybe you can help me mate as T appears to be ignoring me. Do you have wage bills figures for all Prem clubs for 12/13 season?"The Guardian published the 2011/12 version in April 2013. So hopefully we will get a 2012/13 version sometime very soon from The Guardian or a similar credible news source.Not sure whether they got that info from Deloitte or somewhere else, or if they compiled it themselves using public accounts.

Footballing expenditure in 2011/12 was £40.8m against turnover of £74.3m.Footballing expenditure in 2012/13 was £59.6m against turnover of £78.7m.Those two sentences have just completely obliterated your argument, nothing else needed to be added and anybody with half a brain can see that.

It wasn''t a hard task, it was a pathetically easy task that a reception class teacher could have asked their students to complete.

"The wage figures for 12/13 are in the accounts"The 2012/13 accounts cover a 13 month period, not a 12 month period, and that period starts 31st May and ends 30th June, so they incorporate one month of what is considered the previous season.What was the wage ratio for the 2012/13 season then? Why can''t you tell us this and explain it?The only figure I''ve seen is "footballing expenditure", which in 2011/12 was £40.8m against turnover of £74.3m.In 2012/13 it was £59.6m against turnover of £78.7m.So how does this equate to your veherment assertion that there is some sort of 95% correlation year on year? Looks to me like turnover increased by a single digit percentage and footballing costs increased by around 50%!You are talking out of your big farty bumhole and are about as much of an accountant as a numerically dyslexic special school student.

"Le J comments are just so sadly wrong. We can see the accounts for a number of years so we know there is a strong correlation between years"Our wage to turnover ratio has increased from 49% to a projected 57%, our league position has declined. How can I be the slightest bit wrong in that observation?

"Firstly brutal reality is professional football is mainly about money"And we are seeing the backlash against this with unhappy fans (Stoke & Pulish, Villa & Lambert, Norwich & Hughton, West Ham & Allardyce) who are getting sick to death of their clubs obsession with television money.Somebody somewhere has forgotten that the fans pay money for fun and entertainment and are struggling to find it in the Premier league these days. Why do we all donate £500+ a year to a business which has the objective of maximising Sky revenue (from where the prize money comes also).They are losing sight of the product, and the customer. A restaurantuer needs to offer up great food to get repeat business. One day the bubble will burst and the clubs will need the fanbase again. I disagree that professional football is mainly about money though, clubs in league one and two tend to be like families. James Beattie earns £50k a year as manager of Accrington Stanley and on several occassions has paid for coach travel to a game because there wasn''t enough money in the bank account.Outside of the top two leagues it isn''t all about money, it is about survival.

I''d be happy to finish with less points if we manage 11th or 12th in the league again.But it is more likely that we will finish lower in the table with less points, so arguing about which is more important is pointless and futile, measuring success against either metric yields the same result: Decline.

"Football is a competitive sport it is your position against your peers that matters. Prize money is paid for position not points so points are irrelevant"Yes and our position against our peers will be worse this season than it was last season, and worse than the season before that, meaning that we will be given less prize money relative to several other teams this season than we did last season, or the season before that, if we don''t finish 11th or 12th. So if you want to go along the lines of prize money then we can t alk about how we have gone backwards this season can we? "You can estimate this season''s wages from last season''s because as I stated there is a very high correlation between a clubs relative wages for each season."Right, two points here:a) If I look at the 2012/13 accounts it tells me absolutely nothing about the wage bill for the 2013/14 season. Period. Full Stop. End of Discussion. b) Our wage bill to turnover ratio was 49% in 2011/12 at £37m against a turnover of £75m. At the AGM Sam Gordon said that costs this season are projected at £47m against an increased turnover, projected ratio of 57%. If you consider yourself to be some sort of financia analyst (unlikely, as apparently you just make up numbers and can''t read accounts) perhaps you can tell us all now what the wage to turnover ratio will be in the 2014/15 season, based on the current projected ratio of 57%, by using your made up formula which apparently makes you pyshic. Like I said... I prefer to deal with facts, and the facts presented are 49% in 2011/12 and 57% on a bigger turnover. An increase from £37m to £47m. "THE correlation as I''ve always said is with the wage budget, these figures are readily publicly available"No, they are not readily available, they are available at a specific point in the future. Based on what we do know, and what you are making up, we can conclude that wage to turnover ratio is increasing and league performance is declining. "THIS debt has been used to provide cash to subsidise the operations"No. The loan from directors has been used to pay off historic bank debt associated mainly with stadium redevelopment. The debt still exists, it is just owed to an internal party not an external one. Two clubs with very similar turnover numbers, neither with any external debt, one above the other in the league. You seem to be struggling to understand the point. Stoke and Norwich are in a very similar position financially. The players are not being paid by the owner. They don''t have to pay interest to the bank on their historic debt, that is all it means, and neither do we. "Cash has gone out to repay loans unlike stoke"Yet again you show that you are making this up completely as you go along, Stoke make repayments to the very man that you claim is subsidising them! "The McNally claim on our wage budget is in his recent interview with archant/radio norfolk which was on the club''s website"Two things:1) He has also said that we''d budgeted for 16th2) He has absolutely no way of knowing whether we have the 16th biggest budget or the 18th biggest budget, nobody does until all clubs have published their accounts. We can take a guess when the 2013/14 accounts are released. We won''t know for certain until 2015. No person anywhere knows this, no matter who you are. I am a shareholder of Norwich City and I don''t know what the exact wage budget is for this season, so why would Peter Coates know what the Norwich wage budget is unless a director at the cluh told him? Why can''t you understand this? "I''ve seen all the club''s accounts as they are publicly available and have worked on the acquisition of a premier league football club and seen the deloitte report findings"I suppose you also have a 17 inch third leg, are the 3rd richest man in Britain, have four mistresses, served in the SAS, are born into the aristrocracy but passed on being a heridatory member of the house of lords, and studied at both Oxford and Cambridge simultaneously - sitting of your exams while juggling walnuts with your toes. You have not seen any accounts which give any indication at all of the playing budget for this season, because accounts which cover any of the relevant trading period do not exist.

Neil Lennon

Every time somebody makes a suggestion they get shot down in flames, often by people who don''t offer an alternative. Let''s try an expirement. Write the name full name of the manager that you would like managing us next season, whoever that is. Don''t give any reason, don''t question anybodies choices, if you want no change then just write ''Chris Hughton''.Not a hard task is it?

"but there''s no reason why you couldn''t tell us which players you unearthed and are now (or have been) playing in the higher leagues"Maybe that''s why he isn''t scouting now, he couldn''t find any!

Even I know that RVW is at least a slight improvement on Simeon Jackson at this level.A better question would be whether we should have our top scorer on the bench right now, whether we could have done with Kei Kamara this season instead of Becchio or Elmander, and whether Becchio should be given some football.If you want to look at recently released/sold strikers then the one who is performing is Chris Martin, who we all know has a lot of talent but really needed to leave the club to show it. He was ineffective on loan to Derby last season, it took him 13 mediocre games on loan last season at Derby followed by a good pre-season to achieve the level of fitness and confidence needed to achieve a high level of performances that he has this season, he wouldn''t have achieved that by warming our bench (and same can probably be said of Becchio, too rusty now, chance is lost).

"You can estimate wage budget from prior year public financial statements"No you can''t, you ascertain last seasons wage but from prior year financial statements. You cannot estimate this seasons wage bill using last years accounts. "How do you think the stock mkt works"Listed companies offer up quarterly accounts and have other procedures like profit warnings! "It is not revenue that ultimately counts it is the wage budget you pay as this largely determines player quality"Suddenly we are talking about wage budget are we? What about ''playing budget'', which is made up of two components - amount spent on transfer fees + annual wage bill? Our summer spending will have moved us up a notch in terms of playing budget this season. Some teams spent next to nothing. "Stoke are heavily subsidised by the owner of bet 365"This is a baseless lie and not supported by their accounts, which you have clearly not read (I have). He has converted external debt into director debt. This means that the club don''t have to pay interest to banks and are free of external debt. SO ARE WE.  He is not gifting them money, he paid off bank debt and converted it into a debt owed to him. Stoke have a smaller revenue and neither cluh have external debt so neither club has interest or debt repayments to make. "McNally said our wage budget is 18th or 19th this season"Source/citation? Where or when has he said this? Link to article or video please? Also explain how he would know this, why has he been made privy to information that even minority shareholders of the other 19 clubs themselves won''t know until accounts are published? "and is outperforming this season"How do we know this without knowing the playing budget for every club in the league?: "CH critics are like daily mail readers - we know their criticism is based on ignorance"I''ve read Stoke City''s accounts, you have not. You are making stuff up, I am not. And my criticism is based on ignorance?