Players in / out

[Blackdogblue]

Haw All,

Been quiet on here about players in for the coming season after the released list.

How’s the squad looking for you? Are you happy or see some big gaps?

We have just re-signed Ian Henderson after he was released from Salford 💙😀

[griff]

There’s been a couple more in over the last few days that I haven’t bothered mentioning but generally it’s all been a bit ordinary. I’d prefer to see them playing then mention how s­hit/underwhelming/out of position they are.

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

The club broke even last season, probably because it had received the last of the substantial add-on fees for a couple of large transfers.
In an average season with no exceptional items of income the club makes a loss of £500,000. The forthcoming season is set to be average in financial terms. However, Manager Paul Simpson took the job on the basis of him being allowed to re-build the club. Thus the extra expenditure of a player recruitment system has been allowed. Of course the club should have this facility but at the moment it is an extra expense for a dying club. The fundamental problem is of insufficient revenue and the enormous extra cost of the various utility bills not only hitting it but also hitting the discretionary spending of supporters.

The club can pay parsimonious wages and be involved in a relegation battle. Or it can pay decent wages, become insolvent and cease to exist. In order to function as a proper football club it needs consistently more revenue. The owners and operators of the club have not had any ideas for such schemes during their entire tenure. In fact they failed to face the fact of their fallibility and in 2015 stymied an offer to inject money and top class business experience into the club. The folk thus rejected have continued to turn s­hit into gold. Meanwhile, the club has one debt of £2.8 million to someone who is not known to be gracious, well, to a company controlled by him. Another debt is to the company of the largest shareholder of the club. It is at least another £400,000. The non-gracious bloke has made it clear that the time to pay this debt in full is now. He (his company) has an ongoing Charge on all the club's assets including cash and there are also Personal Guarantees for this debt made by the owners of almost 75% of the club's shares. Clearly this is a somewhat challenging situation.

A large percentage of the club's supporters are so besotted with Manager Paul Simpson that they are anticipating a very competitive team. Whereas I feel that I am the little lad in the Danny Kaye song from the film 'Hans Christian Andersen', 'The King's New Clothes'.

[Blackdogblue]

Not like you to moan Griff 🤣

As you will probably know Stefan, we are not the richest of clubs and to date have only sold 1,800 season tickets for the coming season, the majority of these I would presume are kids / other concessions. In addition it has now been a year since the EFL started a inquiry into the share issue by departed board members and let’s not forget the pending High Court Cases against members of the current board & all the Dale Trust volunteers personally.

Going to be an interesting 6 months off the field, we have a few strong players come in but worry overall about the squad ability and if we go back to getting thumped every week support will decline.

[_Stefan_Kuntz]

As at first thing today we have sold 1,850 season tickets. Bearing in mind your 1,800 was 2 days ago the two clubs have sold very similar numbers of season tickets.

We are accustomed to such mundane numbers. But the current date is nearer to the start of the League Two season than is traditionally the case, so perhaps a few more could have been expected.