dna

[DollyLongstaffe]

I joined AberDNA because I live in the states these days and it's a way to help the club I have loved since the 60s. I suspect the money will be used for signings for a simple reason. If they use it for something else and people find out, then next year they will be lucky to raise enough to buy back Darren Mackie.


Sorry to be so negative but sometimes I think you guys need a draft of ice cold reality.

OK here's a draft of cold reality.

There will be no way of telling whether or not extra money raised by dna will be used for signings or on the football side. So the idea that fear of being caught would keep Milne honest has no real basis.

Let's assume no dna. The club would have income from the usual sources. Say £10m. Let's also suppose it would have been spent, football budget £6m, admin £2m, contribution to the new stadium out of ordinary income £2m. All figures plucked out of the air for illustation purposes.

Here's the rub: no one will ever know what those numbers would have been. Even if there are some forecast budgets nominally drawn up, they were at the mercy of events and changes of mind. Say new signings are a disappointment and we have a couple of long term injuries and are struggling come Christmas: football budget goes up. etc etc.

Say dna raises £1M. The club spends its £11m, £6.5m on the football budget, £2M admin, £2.5m stadium. The club will argue that without dna the football budget would have been £5.5m. No-one will know whether that is true - possibly not even the club itself. The club may even genuinely believe it, because it didn't know that £6m would have been spent without dna.

I'm not saying this is all hocus pocus and the intention is to spend the dna money on things other than players. Frankly I don't know. But I do think there's something not quite right when the club makes a promise when it must know that there is probably no way of telling whether it was kept, and certainly no way of proving whether it was kept. I think anyone saying "give me £x and I guarantee Y will happen" should be able to demonstrate whether or not Y did in fact happen.