Next years budget

[Shadrack the Red]

I have just read an article featured on Newsnow Barnsley which says the club are going to have a budget of ?3.5 million putting them in bottom few of division 1 budgets , so my point is that to all the fans slaughtering Hourihane for his recent comments might want to think again, yes he is a rookie as a coach and it shows but at least he has spat out the truth for the up and coming season , sometimes the truth is unpalatable and fans turn on the person telling it but for me he has got some guts to tell it has it is . This statement to me says the owners want now to run the club on a shoestring which will result in nothing but decline so to me they have two options with one being the inevitable administration or actively try to move the club on , personally I hope it is the latter but for crying out loud Hourihane or whoever is at the helm are not magicians and I am afraid trying to get a tune out of a sub standard squad paying peanuts is nigh on impossible , if fans are frustrated and upset then take it out on the owners and not someone who tells the truth and is faced with an impossible task.

[EthelRed]

This situation has been coming for several years.
The motivation of the current majority shareholders for putting money into the club to keep it afloat has had a secondary intention and that is to buy up more shares from the additional issue and further dilute the percentage ownership share owned by Lee and his cronies. My hope is that once they own a sufficient equity share, they do one of the following, invest for success or sell to an ambitious new owner. I suspect however that we will witness more of the same in terms of their management of the club and furthet decline.

The club is probably not unlike other clubs around the country in that they spend more than they earn. Exeter have had to be bailed out recently for example. This problem is endemic within football and we are not immune. There are two solutions, cut costs which is what the recent articles highlight or increase revenue.
The latter seems impossible when the product on the field has deteriorated to the extent that our performances are barely above relegation level. Fans are not going to engage with that and numbers will plummet, the signs are already there.
Sadly when the window of opportunity has been left ajar and a push for promotion has been on the agenda our owners have failed to find a scrap of investment to enhance that opportunity. This season for example we were in the hunt for a play off berth in January and their reaction was to sell our top scorer and replace him with a 33 year old who has a recent history of hamstring injuries. How you can plan for a season with only 2 strikers on your roster throughout the season is madness.
I remember the desperate days of the late 60's and 70's and we are heading back there rapidly.

Hourihane or any other coach has no chance of success under the financial constraints imposed upon them therefore we just become an outfit where wanabee coaches come and cut their teeth before they move on

In summary, its a **** show, Im pleased I spotted it on the day this lot took over and for those who lambasted Luke Goddard, youre getting exactly what he predicted and many more of us agreed with.

Radical change required!

[Shadrack the Red]

Good post Ethel , I also remember the dark days of the sixties and seventies as I started watching them in 1961 , of course I did not know anything then about the ins and outs of running a football club as I was only a young lad and the only snippets of info on the reds were either in the " Green Un " or the " Chronicle " but this day and age everything is aired publicly apart from our owners actually telling us what they are doing at Oakwell , what are their plans and what are their objectives for our club . I am totally mystified as to why they are at Barnsley and I am baffled as to what their objectives are , they are clearly running the club in a downward direction , they do not appear to have any plans for the future and under their tenure they are implementing a gradual decline strategy , they continually try to deflect the blame on to the HC who they incidentally employed and duly dispense with their services and we keep plummeting down the league ladder, in the light of Conor"s comments they should at least have the decency to to make a statement to the fans of what their intentions are and what is the grand plan going forward for the club , I will not hold my breath and my fear is that they will continue to drift along in an amateur fashion until we are watching even lower league football than we are suffering now.

[NerfHerder]

Unless someone high up from inside the club is leaking stuff, I’m not sure how our budget could be common knowledge? I think this is all from Alan Nixon. Like with everything he says, I would take with a huge pinch of salt.

I suppose we can all see though that the budget is getting smaller and smaller each year. It seems to be drastically shrinking recently though. I wonder why? Owners simply trying to cut their losses or I wonder if they are trying to sell us on.

In terms of Hourihane, my point about him writing off next season and me not being happy with that still stands. I know some are more realistic than others and I often have my red tinted glasses but what is the point turning up if we have no hope? If football is simply played on the balance sheets, why bother playing 90 minutes? Cardiff came to Oakwell a few weeks ago and their finances will massively dwarf ours. For the first 10 minutes, it looked like that. For the rest though, we actually had some fight and bottle and probably deserved the win. Again, Lincoln and Stevenage will not be anywhere near the top 6 in terms of finances in our division yet that is where they are right now. Lincoln will be playing championship football next season and, without knowing for definite, I would say their finances are similar to ours. When we got to the championship playoffs under Big Val, our finances will have been bottom 3 and I know Covid impacted that season but we were right up there on merit, going up against teams that absolutely dwarfed our finances, and we were beating them. Deservedly too. Hunger, discipline, desire and hope.

I am not saying I expect Hourihane to work miracles and have league 2/non league players at the top of the league 1. What I do want though is some hope going into a season and I want a team that will work harder than every other.

[Shadrack the Red]

Unless someone high up from inside the club is leaking stuff, I?’m not sure how our budget could be common knowledge? I think this is all from Alan Nixon. Like with everything he says, I would take with a huge pinch of salt.

I suppose we can all see though that the budget is getting smaller and smaller each year. It seems to be drastically shrinking recently though. I wonder why? Owners simply trying to cut their losses or I wonder if they are trying to sell us on.

In terms of Hourihane, my point about him writing off next season and me not being happy with that still stands. I know some are more realistic than others and I often have my red tinted glasses but what is the point turning up if we have no hope? If football is simply played on the balance sheets, why bother playing 90 minutes? Cardiff came to Oakwell a few weeks ago and their finances will massively dwarf ours. For the first 10 minutes, it looked like that. For the rest though, we actually had some fight and bottle and probably deserved the win. Again, Lincoln and Stevenage will not be anywhere near the top 6 in terms of finances in our division yet that is where they are right now. Lincoln will be playing championship football next season and, without knowing for definite, I would say their finances are similar to ours. When we got to the championship playoffs under Big Val, our finances will have been bottom 3 and I know Covid impacted that season but we were right up there on merit, going up against teams that absolutely dwarfed our finances, and we were beating them. Deservedly too. Hunger, discipline, desire and hope.

I am not saying I expect Hourihane to work miracles and have league 2/non league players at the top of the league 1. What I do want though is some hope going into a season and I want a team that will work harder than every other.

All good points Nerth and now we have a statement from Mr Flatman which waffles on and basically says nothing, I want to hear from the organ grinder and not the monkee , I want the owners to make a statement and tell us exactly what their intentions and plans are for the club , so far they have made no comment about Conors outburst which to me speaks volumes , Conor is taking a good kicking from every direction but they stuck a microphone under his nose just after we had lost a match, a match where he had little or no options in his threadbare squad , a match which saw the fans turn on him and he burst out some home truths , people do not want to hear that they want to hear positive spin and they want to hear that the future is bright but he was virtually saying that he has been dealt a bad hand and the dealer is going to deal him a hand next season which could well be worse but the sheer fact that these owners have not responded says it all and Conor was telling the truth , mark my words they will sack Conor before the end of the season, not because of his outburst but because it will pacify the mob and they will be able to sell the season tickets with the promise of a new coach and new ideas to take us forward , the thing is that this happens every year and the sheep will once again have the wool pulled over their eyes, when are the fans going to wake up and see what the root cause of the problems at the club are , they wear suits and sit in the directors box !!!!

[NerfHerder]

All good points Nerth and now we have a statement from Mr Flatman which waffles on and basically says nothing, I want to hear from the organ grinder and not the monkee , I want the owners to make a statement and tell us exactly what their intentions and plans are for the club , so far they have made no comment about Conors outburst which to me speaks volumes , Conor is taking a good kicking from every direction but they stuck a microphone under his nose just after we had lost a match, a match where he had little or no options in his threadbare squad , a match which saw the fans turn on him and he burst out some home truths , people do not want to hear that they want to hear positive spin and they want to hear that the future is bright but he was virtually saying that he has been dealt a bad hand and the dealer is going to deal him a hand next season which could well be worse but the sheer fact that these owners have not responded says it all and Conor was telling the truth , mark my words they will sack Conor before the end of the season, not because of his outburst but because it will pacify the mob and they will be able to sell the season tickets with the promise of a new coach and new ideas to take us forward , the thing is that this happens every year and the sheep will once again have the wool pulled over their eyes, when are the fans going to wake up and see what the root cause of the problems at the club are , they wear suits and sit in the directors box !!!!

I agree about wanting to hear from the owners, they seemed to have dodged too many interviews now themselves and seemingly passed the baton on.

The statement was a lot of words without too much actual information but I felt like there were some small tidbits. The part about “potential investors” confirms to me that they are trying to sell the club. I could be reading incorrectly into that though. You would think Neerav would come out with either a statement or an interview shortly to, as you say, outline the direction we are wanting to go in.

In terms of Hourihane and his outburst, I feel it was either massive naivety from him or simply frustration from the game and how the fans reacted. I thought the crowd during the game against Donny was one of the better ones this season in terms of support, but that was not replicated on the pitch sadly.

Given how weaker our squad gets season on season, I do not think there will be many fans who actively back our owners in terms of their decision making. Investing money? Absolutely, they have invested a quite ridiculous amount. But there have been many strange decisions from them, which will no doubt have impacted why they have had to invest so much money.

I have no idea what the solution is moving forward. I guess the best answer would be new owner(s) who have a set out plan and know what they want to do. But I feel like the chances of getting that, at this stage, are probably really slim.

In terms of Hourihane, I am really not sure. He seems to back himself personally to no end. But he himself has made many strange decisions this season and there have been some incredibly poor and/or frustrating games. He has also had some very good moments too.

I guess these next few months we will find out what happens to the playing staff, if anything, and how our squad looks.

[EthelRed]

No mention in Mr Flatmans statement of JAQ putting any money into the club to offset losses.

Where has she gone?