Ipswich's Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

[BigFish 1,986]

By the way is there a FPA out there who can put a figure on what the Stowmarket 2 have invested and when?

[hogesar 9,619]

On 03/09/2021 at 10:45, Bethnal Yellow and Green said:

There are plenty of ways to derive a profit, many owners pay themselves very large salaries. Bloom runs Brighton as a personal project and not for profit. Arsenal have paid their owner around £100m already over the last 5 years.

I'd say it is much harder to make money from Premier League clubs as it is very difficult to increase their value - but doing it at lower leagues, especially from League One to the Championship is easier. That being said I'm sure when FSG etc look to sell their clubs they will make a healthy return, especially as they will have improved the infrastructure with loans that the club repays the owner - so they increase the value of their asset and get can income from loaning the club money! Think this is what the American investors at Palace are looking at also.

Ipswich's owners can lend the clubs some money and charge interest to improve Portman Road and the training facilities and then sell the club on for a healthy profit, especially if they are in the Championship. Or stick around and everytime they make money of the sale of a player, skim a bit off the top. 

Also, unlike many other businesses, football clubs retain an inherent value and don't go bust easily, even where a normal business would. Even if things go horribly wrong, there is always someone who will buy the club as it is a 'brand' or they are a supporter and value the club in a way that isn't related to its book value. 

Wealthy Americans wouldn't keep 'investing' in football clubs if there wasn't a way to profit from it.

 

There's more examples of wealthy investors losing money in football clubs than making money though, right?

I think there is a general viewpoint likely held from Americans outside of English football that because our sport has so much money within it, there must be an easy way to get hold of it.

But then Evans was running the club at bare minimum with an overachieving manager and it was still costing him circa £6 million a year. Thats how difficult it is to make money. Achieving what we have with young players etc is incredibly difficult which is why only a handful of clubs ever really manage it.

And because the pension fund has money you can bet the fans will be expecting investment should they get to the championship- else there'll inevitably be an owner fan fallout which is hardly going to help valuation.

[cornish sam 950]

8 hours ago, BigFish said:

By the way is there a FPA out there who can put a figure on what the Stowmarket 2 have invested and when?

I think on the past it has been quoted as c.£12m, but can't back that up. I do remember though that Delia said the only reason she did her last TV series was because NCFC needed the money...

Edited September 6, 2021 by cornish sam
Thinking about it it was probably her last book

[essex canary 492]

10 hours ago, BigFish said:

Exactly my point, S&J are pretty much in the hole to the order of millions with zero revenue atm. I think @Badger might be a touch high at £200m, but not by much. Still worth noting that S&J own barely over half the club, so there are others, including a mumber of posters on here, sitting on paper profits.

Based on my 2002 share price, £200m would yield a near 13 fold return. Then again if the returns to the Bond Scheme were compounded and projected over the same 19 years the equivalent for these lower risk and crystallised investments equates to an 87 fold return.

If the American investors used Norwich City's experience over the last 20 years as a guide to Ipswich Town's for the next 20 years it is clear why they may have marked it down as 'worth a punt' even if their lack of localised knowledge may have prevented them tuning into the fact that they are not quite the same animals or that the operating environment for Football Clubs in East Anglian provincial towns maybe different over the two 20 year periods. 

Maybe they will also have marked it as "not as safe as houses' but a basket of such investments on the basis of some you win, some you loose could still work very well for them.

As for NCFC, many of us prefer the tried and tested local model but then we are all mere mortals which is why the local business interest in the Club needs to be broader based going forwards.

[BigFish 1,986]

4 hours ago, essex canary said:

Based on my 2002 share price, £200m would yield a near 13 fold return.

Just for interest what are this calculation based on e.g. 2002 share price, number of issued shares etc?

I ask because if @cornish sam is right and S&J paid £12m, 13 fold would be £260m and club would be worth £500m+ is something isn't quite on the money.

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

18 minutes ago, BigFish said:

Just for interest what are this calculation based on e.g. 2002 share price, number of issued shares etc?

I ask because if @cornish sam is right and S&J paid £12m, 13 fold would be £260m and club would be worth £500m+ is something isn't quite on the money.

BF, I am not sure but I think Cornish's figure referred to all Delia had put in, including loans and perhaps gifts as well. If her 320,000 shares cost £12m that would mean she paid £40 per share, which I doubt. This post comes to you courtesy of the League of Alternative Fag Packet Accountants.

Edited September 6, 2021 by PurpleCanary

[cornish sam 950]

1 hour ago, PurpleCanary said:

BF, I am not sure but I think Cornish's figure referred to all Delia had put in, including loans and perhaps gifts as well. If her 320,000 shares cost £12m that would mean she paid £40 per share, which I doubt. This post comes to you courtesy of the League of Alternative Fag Packet Accountants.

You are correct PC, that was (I thought) the total they had put into Norwich of their own money. The inital share purcahse was for a relatively low amount (£300k is the number that jumps to mind but I may have made that up and remembered it as fact).

[BigFish 1,986]

2 hours ago, PurpleCanary said:

BF, I am not sure but I think Cornish's figure referred to all Delia had put in, including loans and perhaps gifts as well. If her 320,000 shares cost £12m that would mean she paid £40 per share, which I doubt. This post comes to you courtesy of the League of Alternative Fag Packet Accountants.

Thx @PurpleCanary, hopefully when @essex canary explains his workings I will understand, but until that time do you know how many shares there are in total, LAFPA allowing?

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

28 minutes ago, BigFish said:

Thx @PurpleCanary, hopefully when @essex canary explains his workings I will understand, but until that time do you know how many shares there are in total, LAFPA allowing?

Happy to answer that as I was anyway on a Zoom call with the other members of the LAFPA, discussing the mark-up on the scampi portions in Yellows, and whether to confer our prestigious Club Destroyer award on Marcus Evans.

There are (or were according to the last accounts) 616,913 A ordinary shares (the ones that give voting rights), with S&J having 327,109. That is 53 per cent, and although their holding has remained pretty constant that is well down (from memory) from more than 60 per cent at the peak. Foulger bought something like 80,000 new shares a few years back.

[essex canary 492]

7 hours ago, BigFish said:

Just for interest what are this calculation based on e.g. 2002 share price, number of issued shares etc?

I ask because if @cornish sam is right and S&J paid £12m, 13 fold would be £260m and club would be worth £500m+ is something isn't quite on the money.

£200 million divided by 640,000 shares =£312.50 per share. £25 per share was the price in the 2002 offer.

[Nuff Said 5,093]

7 hours ago, PurpleCanary said:

BF, I am not sure but I think Cornish's figure referred to all Delia had put in, including loans and perhaps gifts as well. If her 320,000 shares cost £12m that would mean she paid £40 per share, which I doubt. This post comes to you courtesy of the League of Alternative Fag Packet Accountants.

OT, but what is the relationship between the LAFPA and the previous LFPA? Like a rugby league/rugby union thing where you each play to similar but differing rules, or did the LAFPA split a bit like the Premier League from the Football League? Or is it more informal and just involves “meet-ups” in shadowy car parks with chains and knuckle dusters to claim supremacy for the last accountant standing?

[essex canary 492]

8 hours ago, PurpleCanary said:

BF, I am not sure but I think Cornish's figure referred to all Delia had put in, including loans and perhaps gifts as well. If her 320,000 shares cost £12m that would mean she paid £40 per share, which I doubt. This post comes to you courtesy of the League of Alternative Fag Packet Accountants.

Totalling up the Companies House entries S&J appear to have paid just over £7 million for their Ordinary Shares plus they have just over £300,000 of preference shares. The loans they made in the early years were subsequently converted into shares with interest waived. There were a handful of other smaller gift transactions. 

[chicken 2,605]

4 minutes ago, essex canary said:

Totalling up the Companies House entries S&J appear to have paid just over £7 million for their Ordinary Shares plus they have just over £300,000 of preference shares. The loans they made in the early years were subsequently converted into shares with interest waived. There were a handful of other smaller gift transactions. 

Didn't they sign/pay for Cedric Anselin or am I imagining that? 

[essex canary 492]

30 minutes ago, chicken said:

Didn't they sign/pay for Cedric Anselin or am I imagining that? 

I am relying on Companies House accounts filings which use accounting convention reporting styles which of course may differ from how things are reported by the Club itself or the press. They are publicly available if you put NCFC accounts in Google. Anything outside the subject of shares is reported towards the backend of the accounts under the heading Related Parties. Make of this as you wish but in the overall scheme of things there doesn't appear to be anything substantive beyond the £7.3 million.

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

1 hour ago, essex canary said:

Totalling up the Companies House entries S&J appear to have paid just over £7 million for their Ordinary Shares plus they have just over £300,000 of preference shares. The loans they made in the early years were subsequently converted into shares with interest waived. There were a handful of other smaller gift transactions. 

I haven’t had time to look at the CH filings, but I don’t think it is the case that all their loans were paid back by way of being converted into shares, or at least not into ordinary shares. For example in the financial year 2008-09 they lent the club 2m pounds. That cannot have been paid back in shares because their then ordinary shareholding of around 320,000 did not subsequently increase. That, roughly is still the amount they hold.

It may be that some loans made much earlier on, in the first few years of their reign, were turned into shares but not as far as I can see the later ones, such as that 2m pounds.

My memory is that their shareholding, which wasn’t a majority to start with, became so mainly because they underwrote share offers that didn’t get fully subscribed.

[essex canary 492]

The £2 million loan appears to have been fully repaid by the Club by 2016 though there is an additional £0.25million outstanding as per the last set of accounts which is then additional to the £7.3 million previously quoted.

[dylanisabaddog 4,892]

People seem to think that the value of shares in the accounts is what Smith and Jones put into the club. That's not the case at all. A huge chunk of it is what they paid Chase (via Watling) to acquire the shares to start with. Chase bought his shares for around £60k and sold them for several million. 

[TIL 1010 4,722]

13 minutes ago, dylanisabaddog said:

People seem to think that the value of shares in the accounts is what Smith and Jones put into the club. That's not the case at all. A huge chunk of it is what they paid Chase (via Watling) to acquire the shares to start with. Chase bought his shares for around £60k and sold them for several million. 

So are you saying Geoffrey Watling paid Chase ' several million ' to get him out of the club ?

[Jim Smith 2,314]

12 hours ago, essex canary said:

I am relying on Companies House accounts filings which use accounting convention reporting styles which of course may differ from how things are reported by the Club itself or the press. They are publicly available if you put NCFC accounts in Google. Anything outside the subject of shares is reported towards the backend of the accounts under the heading Related Parties. Make of this as you wish but in the overall scheme of things there doesn't appear to be anything substantive beyond the £7.3 million.

Thats pretty much in line with the figure I got when i did the same calculation a while back. Pretty good value for a majority shareholding in a club the size of Norwich!

[Jim Smith 2,314]

11 hours ago, PurpleCanary said:

I haven’t had time to look at the CH filings, but I don’t think it is the case that all their loans were paid back by way of being converted into shares, or at least not into ordinary shares. For example in the financial year 2008-09 they lent the club 2m pounds. That cannot have been paid back in shares because their then ordinary shareholding of around 320,000 did not subsequently increase. That, roughly is still the amount they hold.

It may be that some loans made much earlier on, in the first few years of their reign, were turned into shares but not as far as I can see the later ones, such as that 2m pounds.

My memory is that their shareholding, which wasn’t a majority to start with, became so mainly because they underwrote share offers that didn’t get fully subscribed.

I agree Purple. More recent loans were paid back (interest free). Earlier loans were converted into shares and they acquired a furter chunk when they underwrote the share issue. 

[Kenny Foggo 1,116]

1 hour ago, Jim Smith said:

Thats pretty much in line with the figure I got when i did the same calculation a while back. Pretty good value for a majority shareholding in a club the size of Norwich!

An excellent investment! Bright people...

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

1 hour ago, Jim Smith said:

I agree Purple. More recent loans were paid back (interest free). Earlier loans were converted into shares and they acquired a furter chunk when they underwrote the share issue. 

Jim, having just looked at this, you and Essex are right that the early loans were converted in shares. If I have read the accounts correctly they converted around £1.6m of an outstanding loan into about 80,000 shares in that 2002 shares issue, although they had become majority owners some time before that.

[nutty nigel 7,514]

2 hours ago, Kenny Foggo said:

An excellent investment! Bright people...

Maybe not bright enough to cash in. I assume you would Kenny?

Many of the shares they own came because nobody else wanted them including those from Geoffrey Watling. (How much did he wallet btw?🙃)

The thread when the bonds were first issued was a revelation about what posters would do with their own money.

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

2 hours ago, Kenny Foggo said:

An excellent investment! Bright people...

Bright or idiotic? The Daily Mirror 2007

 

 

Since becoming a club hero by saving it from falling into administration in 1996, Delia Smith has ploughed millions into her beloved Norwich City.She even gave fans a bizarre ticking off in 2005 at half-time during a clash with Man City, accusing them of not showing enough support and yelling: "Let's be 'aving you!"

But when the board was criticised at this week's AGM, she astonished the crowd by snapping back: "Anyone who can find idiots like us to put money in and get nothing back can have this club tomorrow."

The cookery queen's outburst came as the Canaries face a fresh crisis - manager Peter Grant was sacked last week and they are in the bottom three of the Championship.

And after supporter Keith Roads claimed the Canaries' board was giving out "lots more spin" Delia, 66, fumed: "New investment would be very nice, but where are we going to find people to invest?

"With the Turners (fellow directors Andrew and Sharon Turner) we have invested £3.1million this year for nothing to come out.

"Nobody is queuing up to buy our shares. We have not been approached once"

[essex canary 492]

At the current juncture their tenure appears to divide into 2 halves. In the first 13 years or so came the loans followed by the share acquisitions. Aside from the Nigel Worthington period, the Club struggled on the pitch. That said no serious damage was done given the turnround in the League One season though they needed the McNally/Bowkett/Lambert triumvirate to turn it round which in the last 12 years has been highly successful in an overall context. The current regime is now picking up on some of those strategic failures concerning the training facilities etc. and supporter consultation. So a challenging environment, a little outside help and some good judgements have turned £10 million or so into £100 million. An excellent maybe outstanding result overall but still needs a succession strategy.

[dylanisabaddog 4,892]

6 hours ago, TIL 1010 said:

So are you saying Geoffrey Watling paid Chase ' several million ' to get him out of the club ?

Err, yes. The money originally paid by Smith and Jones to buy the club went to Chase for the value of his shares. None of it went to Norwich City. They later made loans some of which were converted to shares but Bob walked away with a small fortune in exchange for his original £60k investment. 

[Kenny Foggo 1,116]

2 hours ago, nutty nigel said:

Maybe not bright enough to cash in. I assume you would Kenny?

Many of the shares they own came because nobody else wanted them including those from Geoffrey Watling. (How much did he wallet btw?🙃)

The thread when the bonds were first issued was a revelation about what posters would do with their own money.

No I would look for a professional football person to expand and grow the club to reach it's full potential. I am all for investing in Norwich City not taking money out... Delia bought the club when no one else would and it's worked out well for her and us... Good on her!

[TIL 1010 4,722]

2 hours ago, dylanisabaddog said:

Err, yes. The money originally paid by Smith and Jones to buy the club went to Chase for the value of his shares. None of it went to Norwich City. They later made loans some of which were converted to shares but Bob walked away with a small fortune in exchange for his original £60k investment. 

I am afraid i am going to give a diferent chain of events dylan. Chase resigned in May 1996 having sold the majority of his shareholding to Geoffrey Watling. In fact to this day Chase still owns shares in Norwich City.

Watling then invited Delia, Michael and Michael Foulger onto the board and made the statement that nobody would own more than 10% of the club and for the next 18 months attempted to sell Chase's shares but got no takers and towards the end of 1998 Watling sold his shareholding to D&M.

You are correct that no money went into the club from the sale of those shares except for  the money paid by Delia and the two Michael's for a seat on the board the rumour being half a million each at a time when the club badly needed money.

How much Watling paid Chase in 1996 went with Geoffrey to his grave and it then begged the question in 1998 how much did Watling wallet by selling them on to Delia.

I doubt several million ever came into the equation anywhere along the line between May 1996 and late 1998 in relation to the transfer of shares.

Edited September 7, 2021 by TIL 1010

[nutty nigel 7,514]

20 minutes ago, Kenny Foggo said:

No I would look for a professional football person to expand and grow the club to reach it's full potential. I am all for investing in Norwich City not taking money out... Delia bought the club when no one else would and it's worked out well for her and us... Good on her!

Where in earth would you find one of them? I guess Stuart Webber would qualify. He's also expanded and grown our club. 

If you actually meant professional football owners then you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with more experience than Smith & Jones.

I like you Kenny but you'd make a rubbish custodian of a football club. You would be worth a few bob though 

I think I'm about to lose my house on Arsenal this weekend. If the worst happens could you lend me a couple of quid?🙃

[PurpleCanary 5,555]

26 minutes ago, TIL 1010 said:

I am afraid i am going to give a diferent chain of events dylan. Chase resigned in May 1996 having sold the majority of his shareholding to Geoffrey Watling. In fact to this day Chase still owns shares in Norwich City.

Watling then invited Delia, Michael and Michael Foulger onto the board and made the statement that nobody would own more than 10% of the club and for the next 18 months attempted to sell Chase's shares but got no takers and towards the end of 1998 Watling sold his shareholding to D&M.

You are correct that no money went into the club from the sale of those shares except for  the money paid by by Delia and the two Michael's for a seat on the board the rumour being half a million each at a time when the club badly needed money.

How much Watling paid Chase in 1996 went with Geoffrey to his grave and it then begged the question in 1998 how much did Watling wallet by selling them on to Delia.

I doubt several million ever came into the equation anywhere along the line between May 1996 and late 1998.

Yes, it was half a million each. It shows up in the accounts for that time. The story, as told later by Delia, was that someone approached her with the idea of her giving 500,000 pounds for a seat on the board and she said why don't you include Michael because then you can have double. But these were not for Watling's shares. They were interest-free loans later converted into new shares.