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Foreign Ownership/Investment

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So foreign owners don''t love the game, don''t care about the team and just want to asset strip/launder money?

Xenophobia much?

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[quote user="king canary"]So foreign owners don''t love the game, don''t care about the team and just want to asset strip/launder money?

Xenophobia much?[/quote]Xenophobia muchIs he another Greek owner perhapsor are you just stuck for a cliche ?

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Let''s just say that they are not all good and anyone joining, would have to be totally vetted

As we all know that process is seriously flawed

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Amazing, isn''t it.  People talk about £250 million and realise that it is not enough to make a real difference to our chances of competing with some of the other clubs in the championship.   With £250 million you could do some long lasting good, like stadium improvements or Colney development, but with that much money, you couldn''t buy many £15m - £20m players and afford their ridiculous wages - and keep the wages going year after year.  All you would be likely to get is even more disappointment and resentment in the fanbase at how much the players are earning for their lack of value for money - even more distance created between fans and players. So what is the point?  Hold out for someone with a million million? Bottomless pockets? Is that very likely - or remotely desireable?  Countless clubs are now mega-rich and it hasn''t changed their long term fortunes - but it has p!ssed off their fans in many cases. Loyal fans, generations of families as supporters, watch as their club is hijacked by some nobody who happens to have pocket money to speculate with no affinity with either the club they have bought or it''s fans.I love the model the club has taken and am proud how it is staying true to principles of being self-financing after so many years of struggling to control debt and in danger of going under.  It may be fashionable to want mega amounts of money brought into clubs, but it is not sustainable or desirable in the long term.  Super rich non-affiliated owners will lose interest and pass the club to some new investor at some stage - then it will happen again a few years later - and again a few years after that. Sooner or later, even if the first investor is a good one, you will end up with an investor who wants to change the club for their own ends and end up ruining it like Cardiff and Hull.  Getting a super rich owner, unless you are one of the very top clubs or club with a rich owner who is a long term fan, is a long term disaster waiting to happen.  You might get a good one to start with, but down the line, just one bad apple and the club would lose everything that made it great in the first place.  Not worth it imo.

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The question that is constantly avoided is what is the motivation behind these so call investor ?Clubs being wrecked is not, in my opinion, an aberration but a almost logical consequence of their intent. Something fans seem to blindly ignore.I can understand the original chaps at Blackbiurn and Wolves, even Watling with us. But some unknown from China or Russia should set the obvious alarm bells ringing. You don''t make money, or front for those who do, in those sort of places by being some kindly old gent will to endulge his passion with an unlimited sum of money.There is no such thing as a free lunch as the old saying goes. Though a bit of coffee might wake up some on here.

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[quote user="king canary"]So foreign owners don''t love the game, don''t care about the team and just want to asset strip/launder money?

Xenophobia much?[/quote]Not Xenophobic at all - just a healthy concern about "footloose capital" seeking to make a Buck/ Yen/ Euro/ Pound wherever it can. The downside of such investment is that it will recover its costs and move on. Frankly the evidence is all around us - businesses uproot all the time for business purposes - the purpose of business is to maximise profit - if that means uprooting and closing down "unprofitable plant" - so be it. It''s not a route to I''d chose for NCFC - I don''t want us to be someone''s unprofitable plant with its tangible assets stripped to recover the costs of failed speculative investment.

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I can understand that many prefer the self-sustaining model that we are embarking on, I take a similar view by and large.

However lets have a bit of reality here. £250 million isn''t enough to make a real difference! Come off it do. Our wage bill next year is likely to be £20 million with even loan players like Gunn drifting out of our reach.

You couldn''t buy many £15m - £20m players with £250m? Really? Would 8 be classed as many? More than half a team.

It might not work and it would change the club and how it operates but for better or worse it certainly would make a difference.

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[quote user="Hairy Canary"]I can understand that many prefer the self-sustaining model that we are embarking on, I take a similar view by and large.

However lets have a bit of reality here. £250 million isn''t enough to make a real difference! Come off it do. Our wage bill next year is likely to be £20 million with even loan players like Gunn drifting out of our reach.

You couldn''t buy many £15m - £20m players with £250m? Really? Would 8 be classed as many? More than half a team.

It might not work and it would change the club and how it operates but for better or worse it certainly would make a difference.[/quote]

8 players at £20m would be £160 million, wages for those 8 players in the first year would be in the region of £20 million. If not promoted straight away, there would be more players needed, not to mention the wages of the other players that would want increased salaries/contracts to match the expensive incomers.   Your new investor may find himself £250 million pounds worse off in two or three years and have a necessity to invest more. If your investor can afford to do that he was not a £250 million pound invstor in the first place as he has more to invest.The simple truth is that to make any real long lasting difference, an investor as to be prepared to put in more like £500 million and be prepared to sit through years of battling to get out of the championship with the other mega rich owners there are around.  £250 million would get swallowed up in no time - and quite possibly with no real change in fortune on the pitch. 

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They wouldn''t have to put in £500 million,. The truth is that they would just need to try and get us to the premier league and effectively underwrite the sustainable growth of the club til we got there. Even a relatively modest injection of cash in football terms could be enough to retain the likes of Maddison and/or Pritchard for an extra season thus making that likelihood greater.

i don''t think anyone denies that moving to a more sustainable model is a good idea and that long term operating on a sustainable basis is the ideal but I also think some people are massively in denial about what operating sustainably in the championship, with no parachute payments and under owners who are putting nothing in to the club at all will actually be like and how incredibly hard its going to be to compete for promotion under that model.

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Or in fact not even the sustainable growth but the status quo so we can challenge.

I really fear that if we do not go up this year, anyone half decent will be sold and there will be massive further cost cutting in other areas of the club including the academy.

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The xenophobia is in the assumption that foreign investment must come with bad intentions despite it not really stacking up with the evidence provided.

It was a Brit who bought Wimbledon and moved them to Milton Keynes.

Blackpool''s owners are locals yet have destroyed the club''s relationship with its fans.

Darlington were ran into the ground by a British owner.

Coventry have been taken apart by a hedge fund from the UK.

All ownership models and investment should be assessed with a level of scepticism, UK based or not. Yet I don''t see those who question the validity or viability of foreign ownership allying those same standards to our current owner in waiting.

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[quote user="City 2nd"]nutty nigel wrote the following post at 2017-11-10 4:20 AM:

Thats a thought though Duncan. We had the bluebirds play in red. We had all that Hull Tigers nonsense. Would we play in blue if that was needed to get Godolphin? Or perhaps the sheiks own colours which I think are more like Arsenal? How far would we be prepared to go. Does everything have a price?

Didn’t we originally play in Blue Nutty! Historian that you are, thought you would have known that! So what owner decided we play in yellow? Bearing in mind the colours we have used, (and played in) in our second and indeed third strips, I would suggest that’s the least of our worries![/quote]
Blue and white halves and we were known as The Citizens. 
I guess we could all get used to wearing blue again and we could be the Godolphin Colts rather than the Canaries. A Godolphin colt running powerfully across the ground would surely be a more powerful image than a namby pamby canary on a perch. It would leave that old suffolk punch in it''s wake. For a couple of miles it would anyway....
But if that''s the least of our worries I''m wondering how more much we''d accept before we came to the most of our worries.

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Sheikh Hamdan has 6 studs in the area and throws 10s of millions at them each year. He also has a house purposely built just outside Thetford. Obviously I’m not suggesting he would have any interest in buying the club, im just pointing out that these type of people are prepared to invest in the area irrespective of airports and roads.

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Another question is why would someone invest in us? For an investor, we''re not an attractive buy. We are debt free, so aren''t desperate for someone to come and save us by selling the land to them or Colney. Carrow Road isn''t the Leovegas Arena (admittedly parts of it are sponsored).

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This topic has appeared on this forum from time to time and highlights supporter''s concerns about our Club''s financial ability to achieve promotion and sustain a position at the top end of the football pyramid. The thing that strikes me is that the comments show how badly we want our Club to succeed whilst not endangering the future of Norwich City FC with hasty short term solutions. I really hope Club officials take the time to review these threads from time to time as this is one they should be reading and maybe even reacting to - feedback from the Club would be welcome.

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I sent an email to Michael Bailey today with some of your thoughts and mine about this topic as I think it would make a really interesting article or mini series of articles (you know how the EDP make a 100 stories out of one event).

Hopefully Mike will draft something up?

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[quote user="king canary"]The xenophobia is in the assumption that foreign investment must come with bad intentions despite it not really stacking up with the evidence provided.

It was a Brit who bought Wimbledon and moved them to Milton Keynes.

Blackpool''s owners are locals yet have destroyed the club''s relationship with its fans.

Darlington were ran into the ground by a British owner.

Coventry have been taken apart by a hedge fund from the UK.

All ownership models and investment should be assessed with a level of scepticism, UK based or not. Yet I don''t see those who question the validity or viability of foreign ownership allying those same standards to our current owner in waiting.[/quote]Footloose capital does not come with bad intentions - only to make money. It is not malevolent nor benevolent - it simply seeks profit. The problem is that speculative investors seek return and selling remaining assets to recover losses is simply a logical business decision if things do not work out.British capitalists are no better or worse than any other - perhaps better regulated than some - but with their eyes firmly on the bottom line, they will act against the interests of the local community without compunction if the business case dictates it. The investor model for football is a very poor idea for NCFC, particularly at this stage in its evolution.What we really require is a rich "patron," rather than an investor. A patron is more likely to have local connections. A Norfolk-based Sheik would have been nice, but Frank seems to have knocked that on the head. The search for Father Christmas continues...

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LDC

Nice try but....

8 players at £15m - £20m would be £140m, wages at £20m per year for three years is £60m so grand total of £200m - still £50m to play with. This sort of money absolutely dwarfs the £20m a year budget will are looking at for next year.

We could argue the figures all afternoon but the simple point is surely that a quarter of a billion pounds would change things enormously (for better or worse) for a championship club.

Agree it may not prove successful on the pitch but different it most certainly would be. Eight players is not far off a full team!

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[quote user="Hairy Canary"]LDC

Nice try but....

8 players at £15m - £20m would be £140m, wages at £20m per year for three years is £60m so grand total of £200m - still £50m to play with. This sort of money absolutely dwarfs the £20m a year budget will are looking at for next year.

We could argue the figures all afternoon but the simple point is surely that a quarter of a billion pounds would change things enormously (for better or worse) for a championship club.

Agree it may not prove successful on the pitch but different it most certainly would be. Eight players is not far off a full team![/quote]My point was that although £250m would make some kind of difference - it would not be the end of what would need to be invested, in other words the said investor would have to invest even more at some stage. Even if 8 x £20m players were bought for a total of £160m, it may not make enough of a difference to make it worthwhile for a genuine investor - and that is what we would need - someone genuine, not, as been said many times, someone who is just out to speculate. Like it or not, £250m is small beer in the scheme of things - and getting someone to invest even that much would still require the club selling it''s soul, for what in the end might not make that much difference. 

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JF, surely Newmarket is the significant factor in Sheikh Hamdams decision making. Not roads and airports. We are not football''s equivalent of racing''s Newmarket. Not even the same page perhaps not even the same book. Newmarket would be the Brazil or Real Madrid of the horseracing world.

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[quote user="Hairy Canary"]I can understand that many prefer the self-sustaining model that we are embarking on, I take a similar view by and large.

However lets have a bit of reality here. £250 million isn''t enough to make a real difference! Come off it do. Our wage bill next year is likely to be £20 million with even loan players like Gunn drifting out of our reach.

You couldn''t buy many £15m - £20m players with £250m? Really? Would 8 be classed as many? More than half a team.

It might not work and it would change the club and how it operates but for better or worse it certainly would make a difference.[/quote]As I said before, "I think that it would be possible to make a big difference with £250m,

but I''m not sure that it would guarantee anything. As with our model, it

depends upon how well it is spent - although it does give you more room

for error!"You only have to look at QPR as a model for this - although tbf, their owners have been better than might have been expected (the West London potential is something which unfortunately we do not have.) Writing in May last year, Swiss Ramble says that,"
In the last eight seasons QPR have reported aggregate losses

of £207 million, but this rises to £274 million if exceptional debt write-offs

of £66 million are taken into consideration
.
"http://swissramble.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/queens-park-rangers-they-cant-buy.htmlGiven their wage bill, this is likely to have increased. They also face a huge FFP fine. They currently sit just below us in the table.The blog contrasts QPR with Burnley - who got promoted the same year (2013-14) Burnley automatically; QPR through the playoffs. In this season the Burnley wage bill was 15.5 million, the QPR wage bill was 75.4 million - about £60m more to finish two places lower.

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I actually think it’s his brother who owns Man City that has the studs in Newmarket. Hamdan owns a hell of a lot of land and property around Thetford and visits the studs occasionally. But yes, being close to Newmarket is obviously one of the reasons. I believe I read somewhere that he attended Cambridge university and became quite attached to the area as well. As I said, I’m in no way saying he is a potential investor as he probably has no interest in football but I’ve never bought the arguement that were an unattractive club because of location/airports/roads

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[quote user="JF"]I actually think it’s his brother who owns Man City that has the studs in Newmarket. Hamdan owns a hell of a lot of land and property around Thetford and visits the studs occasionally. But yes, being close to Newmarket is obviously one of the reasons. I believe I read somewhere that he attended Cambridge university and became quite attached to the area as well. As I said, I’m in no way saying he is a potential investor as he probably has no interest in football but I’ve never bought the arguement that were an unattractive club because of location/airports/roads[/quote]Why - is there compelling evidence against the argument?

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There is as much compelling evidence against the arguement as there is for it. None, it’s just opinion either way

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The other point about the airports and roads is do people believe that these billionaires are booking flights in and out on Thomson airways? It would be private jets and Norwich has an airport

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[quote user="JF"]The other point about the airports and roads is do people believe that these billionaires are booking flights in and out on Thomson airways? It would be private jets and Norwich has an airport[/quote]Yes and it''s really handy for the Premier Inn too, so he''d have somewhere to stay!

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JF i dont think location is a factor but it obviously is a factor in the horseracing industry. The centre of London would hardly be ideal for training centres and studs.

I don''t understand what is a factor. Just sitting here imagining that I''m a Chinese gazillionaire pondering over a glass of baijiu what to do with my yuans. How does playing father Christmas to a load of ungrateful football fans in another country ever become even a thought?

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If I’m worth £10 billion and wanted to buy a football club I’m pretty sure I could afford to build myself a luxurious home in the area for a few million quid. As I said Sheikh Hamdan has a place built just outside Thetford, fully staffed all year round just for a couple of visits a year

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