Takeover | Page 52 | Vital Football

Takeover

Never mind the land etc, if they played their cards right and gave Nick Powell a long contract we could be looking at cashing in big time for him. The way football finance is and what players have gone for in recent times then 15 million would not be a long way off. Thats a massive percentage of what theyve paid for everything paid back with one sale.
 
Im sure a casino and a hotel or even a china town could well be at the back of someone mind
With the football still on the scene think of the money they could generate
 
Thank you to all the folks who've been going through and doing their best to decipher what is a very time consuming and difficult document and sharing what they found.

I think that any suspicion around the new owners is understanable but may be misplaced, for the simple fact they need us to do well for them to make money. It's in both the club and IEC's best interst to have a prolific academy, an efficient recruitment system and success on the pitch . There is no doubt that they are a business and like any business they want to turn a profit, but every football club in the country has to make a profit in order to remain a viable entity in the long run - so we had to accept whoever bought us was going to expect a return in some manner. I think IEC will be desperate to see exactly the same things we want to see if they ever hope to see a return on their investment - so there is absolute mutual self interset in them running the club in a way we'd like to see. Plus with Royle involved and the much of the rest of the hierachy remaining in place we shouldn't end up with some of the shenanigans that other clubs have been through when they bring in all of their own people and not one of them has a clue about football in general or the club itself. Royle himself oversaw Evertons excellent youth system for years so i'm very pleased to have him here to help us grow and improve our academy.

Regarding the borrowed money it does sound from what's been shared like the money will be leveraged within the exisiting wider portfolio of those who own IEC - hopefully this means that we can recieve favorable interest rates and loan terms than if we looked to an external bank.

Nixon said the other day that it was Darren Royle who found the buyer rather than Gary Cooke - that would make sense as Royle seemed to appear from nowhere. So i wonder what Gary Cooke did in that regard, did he fail to find a buyer and Royle did, where they working together, i hope one day we can get a little insight into the whole process.

Like already mentioned i think a hotel next to the stadium where Shapies was is a good idea as Bolton apparently do well out of their hotel, so definetely another option considering IEC have other hotels.

Prior to this had anyone heard of Darren Royle or know much about him or who he represents as an agent? i had a look on line and couldn't find much.
 
One thing i learned about agents nothing but gread only care about themselves and use players like cattle at a market
 
Studds40 said:
Darren Royle’s main business seems to be setting up academies and partnerships with NPL clubs. Also read previously he had something to do with Prozone.
Click to expand...
He is involved with the Northern Premier League Football Academy who seem to be all about picking up kids who want to combine their football with their studies. We don’t know what his intentions are but it would not be hard to imagine that he intends to use Latics as a model for luring some of the top young talent that would normally go to the big boys to us with the opportunity to get first team football and progress their careers. We have seen at first hand what progress young Reece is making. Now if he goes back to Chelsea he won’t be anywhere near the first team. If he starts out his career with us he ends up in the full England squad by the time he’s 20/21.

Look at some of these other youngsters that are standouts in the Championshio this year - Harvey Barnes at West Brom, Mason Mount etc. They will go back to their parent clubs and hardly get a sniff. It makes sense to look to youth and we have seen what we can do when feeding off scraps from the North West’s big clubs, we have a decent academy with Gregor. Look at all the call ups we have had in the last few years at international youth level.

Now if we can integrate Geldhart into the first team picture that really will alert some of the young talent out there that the pathway works.
 
The academy has a lot to prove. I don’t buy into the relentless arselicking that goes the way of Gregor Rioch and his team. The bottom line is this, he’s still yet to turn one of his many youth team players into a first team regular and star. Two players this millennium have made the grade, it’s simply unacceptable and it’s costing us money.

In Gelhardt we currently have an England player said to be the best in the country at his age with all the big clubs after him. The club have done their bit and tied him down to a long term deal. If he doesn’t go on make it at Latics then for me it’s time for an academy clean out of staff and coaches. To be honest I’d also consider going the Brentford route and shutting it altogether. It’s not done them any harm, quite the opposite in fact as they now have a 15m international defender on their books thanks to their B team model.

I’m sure the Warriors won’t be that upset if the new owners take a car park and build on it. It’s not like we need them all anyway.
 
Since 2000, off the top of my head we've had a hand in Luke Joyce, Magno Vieira, Phil Edwards, Tim Chow, Thomas Powell, Jack Sampson, Chris Sang and perhaps one or two others who have slipped my mind, apart from the obvious one (Baines). Now I'm not saying that all of those would have made the grade here, but a few of them have crossed our paths now and again and I can't help wonder with a little more faith how they may have done in the end.

C_Latic hits the nail on the head. It was something I alluded to when I was looking over the business model - it is costing us money. Pretty much all of those players left for nothing, with the exception of Baines and Chow, the latter going for a nominal fee. However, I'd rather see a few players a season offloaded for £50k-£100k and one or two bigger sums for more established players than a number of players going for free after investing time and resources into them.

I agree with the sentiments regarding Gregor Rioch, it seems we've produced players just shy of the first team now for about 4 seasons or so, Burke being an obvious one, started brightly then faded off into loan deals before eventually being released. I hope that this trend stops with the likes of Weir and Gelhardt and that we catch the players in the Academy merry-go-round early enough for us to really develop them. I'd hope that the manager trusts in the young players, I haven't seen enough of that (maybe one or two making the bench, for example, certainly if relegation is avoided) yet, although Cook has signed good young players.
 
It's hard to produce good accademy graduates if you aren't investing in your academy properly. We are accademy C status in a very crowded catchment area. Good coaching and facilities are important but picking up the raw talent is the biggest part and that is an area we are well up against it.

We have huge glamerous clubs like Man City, Man U, Liverpool, Everton all scouting for the best young lads in this area and after them Blackburn have oustanding facilities and are also category A and even Bolton and Crewe have Category B status. And that's not even counting clubs from further afrield having scouts watching lads from this areas. So realistically we are talking about having realistically being a kids at best 6th -8th best choice on the face of it - so after so many other clubs have taken the pick of the litter and then another few had the best of the run offs a few times you are left with quite frankly a very shallow talent pool to pick from - all lads who other clubs deemed not good enough.

So it's easy to say the academy should be doing better but you can only work with the talent that is available and due to our area and academy status we are always going to be drawing from a talent pool already dredged by the other clubs and hope amongst the cast offs are some gems that every other system somehow missed.

If we want to get access to the best talent we need to have Cat A or at least Cat B status and even then it will still be hard with the amount of big clubs in the area, and that will be very expensive and take a long time for the investment to pay off. So it's easy to see when money is tight that clubs like ourselves haven't invested large sums into the youth set up. But with the cost of signings and wages sky rocketing i think it's something that is essential.

I think our academy has actually been gradually improving over the last few years. Baines, Mitchell and McMannaman being the obvious exceptions over the last 15 years or so, but other than those 3 absolutely no one even got near the first team. More reccently we've had Chow, Nicholls, Flores and Burke all not good enough but they were all deemed good enough to get a crack in the first team, which hasn't happened since McMannaman. All of those lads will likely go on to have a career as a pro footballer at some level, then we've had Cosgrove do the same, then it looks like Lang, Geldheart, Golden, Weir, Evans all have a decent chance to go further than the previous graduates. It does feel like it's getting closer to delivering a first team regular than it has in a long time.

Joe Royle knows the academy system very well from his time working in Evertons, there is no doubt he will help us to improve things in that area if they currently aren't being done right. Also with his previous relationship with some of the lads in Evertons youth system maybe we can start to attact some of their better cast offs ahead of the other academies. It still wont be the pick of the litter but maybe it will help us get a few of the more talented lads ahead of some local Cat A or B accademies. Also hopefully the new scouting network we plan to build will help us to pick up better young lads maybe from non league who completely missed out on any youth system or abroad - there could be a lot of young lads with big potential who would love a chance to get into a English accademy from overseas and like Peterborough find some top talent who everyone seems to have missed.
 
Last edited:
Don't forget that the loan system encourages us to develop other clubs talent whilst encouraging us to send out our talent to lower league clubs, its a vicious circle.
Another thought is that managers are not encouraged to bring through players from their youth ranks because the Board and fans want instant success. Just imagine the outcry on here if a youth player was to play regularly in the first team and make a few mistakes. Talk about scapegoating. (Nicholls for instance.)
 
The problem you also have is that in the past the "big clubs" used to release their youth players at 18 - now they keep hold of the better ones until they're 23ish. They also pay these 18-23 yr olds a lot of money & not the YTS wages they were on back in days of yore. Bloody hell I was reading about some Everton kid the other week & at 16 they were paying him £4k a month & by the time they terminated his contract at the age of 20 (he had drink & gambling problems) he was on £110k a year.
£110k a year???? for a 20 year old who was never near getting a 1st team spot. How are Latics ever gonna compete with the other local clubs if that's indicative of the amount they pay their 20 yr old development players?
They're the major reasons why Latics don't produce as many youngsters - 1) we can't offer them as much money, 2) we can't pick up some of their promising cast offs at 16-18 like we used to coz the big clubs hoard them & 3) by the time they do get released at 23 they've earnt that much money they're not interested in grafting down in the lower leagues.
Its having even more of a bad knock on effect in non-league where players used to go in the past (e.g. Bullard) to try & build a career from the bottom whereas now they think they were on £1000's previously for being a development player, so they're not gonna slog their guts out in a full time job to then train 2 nights a week to turn out in a Ramsbottom United v Prescot Cables game
 
Mighty Bongsmon said:
The problem you also have is that in the past the "big clubs" used to release their youth players at 18 - now they keep hold of the better ones until they're 23ish. They also pay these 18-23 yr olds a lot of money & not the YTS wages they were on back in days of yore. Bloody hell I was reading about some Everton kid the other week & at 16 they were paying him £4k a month & by the time they terminated his contract at the age of 20 (he had drink & gambling problems) he was on £110k a year.
£110k a year???? for a 20 year old who was never near getting a 1st team spot. How are Latics ever gonna compete with the other local clubs if that's indicative of the amount they pay their 20 yr old development players?
They're the major reasons why Latics don't produce as many youngsters - 1) we can't offer them as much money, 2) we can't pick up some of their promising cast offs at 16-18 like we used to coz the big clubs hoard them & 3) by the time they do get released at 23 they've earnt that much money they're not interested in grafting down in the lower leagues.
Its having even more of a bad knock on effect in non-league where players used to go in the past (e.g. Bullard) to try & build a career from the bottom whereas now they think they were on £1000's previously for being a development player, so they're not gonna slog their guts out in a full time job to then train 2 nights a week to turn out in a Ramsbottom United v Prescot Cables game
Click to expand...

A good example of that was Jerome Sinclaire who we briefly had on loan from Liverpool. He was meant to be the next big thing but hadn't played a game for Liverpool yet ended up in a contract dispute with some reports at the time even suggesting he was after 60k a week. He ended up leaving to Watford who pressumably were willing to pay more than Liverpool and he's hardly started a game in 3 years since.

You know Liverpool would've offered him a decent wage yet the lad felt he was entitled to top wages without proving anything.

In days gone by you had to work hard and prove yourself over years to get the type of salaries clubs will pay kids who've not done anything. It's no wonder so many young footballers end up not fulfilling their potential or going off the rails. It'll never happen (it would probably be against the law) but football could do with capping the amount of money youth players can earn. No one is going to turn any of the crazy money down but a lot of these kids just aren't able to cope with so much, so young, so fast and it does a lot of harm to so many careers.
 
What a miserable lot of doom and gloom merchant we have on here.
unbelievable.
for goodness sake be positive for once in your lives, and be ready to enjoy the future. You cannot do anything about this so sit back and see what happens. If it goes up in smoke enjoy your moment of "I told you so" In the meantime stick to baking the manager and the players with positivity.
 
Taff57 said:
What a miserable lot of doom and gloom merchant we have on here.
unbelievable.
for goodness sake be positive for once in your lives, and be ready to enjoy the future. You cannot do anything about this so sit back and see what happens. If it goes up in smoke enjoy your moment of "I told you so" In the meantime stick to baking the manager and the players with positivity.
Click to expand...
Need a spade to help bury your head in the sand any faster?
 
I cannot do anything and neither can you. So st being stupid and making things up just to fill in your weary life.
 
To be fair i think we should be a lot more positive than we are. We all knew Whelan wanted out and was no longer willing to underwrite our loses. A tiny club like ours in the position we are in was always going to find it hard to find another buyer so we were facing potentially a bleak future without someone coming along soon. If no one came along eventually Whelan would've had to slash the budget massively and we'd find it even harder to compete and a relegation would become inevitable and then the crowds would drop and the tv money plummet and then the budget would have to drop again.

IEC are our olive branch they aren't sugar daddies looking to blow their fortune on an expensive hobby - but those type of chairman with that type of money to burn would likely buy a glamerous big name established Prem club. But they are going to enable us to do the 2 things our club is crying out for and the only thing we can do to ever allow us to survive without a benefactor - drastically improve the academy and scouting system (plus would the hybrid pitch have been laid if they weren't coming in?).

That wasnt going to happen under Whelan at this point and without IEC it probably wouldnt happen at all. So realistically IEC are about as good as we could expect and we shouldn't be so negative about them as if we didn't have them i suspect we'd in the not too distant future really know what negativity is.
 
I was wondering if anyone knows how the £6.8 million championship payment is paid to the club. Is it a lump sum or monthly/quarterly instalments? This led me to wonder whether DW will keep a proportion of the period of when he was still the owner (subject to the sale completion).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.