EB could you explain why the consortium felt that using 2M of future income (the sainsburies money) to avoid administration when administration would have ringfenced the debt and possibly allowing a rebuild, was to the clubs advantage.
It was my understanding that the presence of the consortium prevented administration and as such forced RM to use money that may have been available to rebuild after administration.
Should RM not be able to find the money by next week
All deferring administration has done is wasted 2.2M , and cost us 10 points next season.
The consortium didn't know what Ron's position was or his access to funds. Please also read my earlier post for the history of how they came about. To summarise, various fans saw what was gradually coming out (although denied by the club at the time) about the club's state and got together and made an offer to save the club in case Ron didn't have the money to take the club forward.
They said it would be great if Ron had the money and could avoid administration. Alternatively, they said, the consortium could step in to avoid the club having to go into administration and lose 10 points, which would inevitably put the club in a relegation battle and no one wanted to see the club go down to League Two. It's easy to say now that we were going to go down anyway whether or not we went into administration, but this wasn't clearly the position at the time when we were mid-table.
After administration was averted in November, the consortium then made Ron a very good offer which would have seen him walk away with a lot of money, so it could be argued that if he'd accepted that the club could have had a "normal" season from that point. Even after the Sainsbury's deal had been done.
I have no idea why you think Ron was going to put the club into administration but for the consortium coming on the scene? Do you know what he was going to do? What he would have done would only be known by people in his circle.
If we assume your suggestion is right and that Ron did choose to borrow the money from Sainsbury's just because the consortium was out there, that was still entirely Ron's decision. If he did a bad deal to secure funds then no one forced him to do that. That was still his call. The consortium did not know what money he had access to or what the terms of getting that money were.
To be clear, borrowing even more money from the future (whether from Sainsbury's, season ticket money with the World Cup offer, or from the Trust) is certainly NOT something that the consortium or any other possible investor would have wanted to see happen. Quite the opposite. It didn't help the club they support and it didn't make it any more attractive to invest in.
At some point, the people financially running the club have to take responsibility for these issues and they can't be deflected onto someone else who wasn't involved:
1 Making an annual loss of £2.4m on turnover of £5m.
2 Failing to prepare financially for the not unlikely relegation from the Championship.
3 The squad size.
4 The issue of paying staff and the effect this has had on morale.
5 The transfer embargoes.
6 The Revell fiasco.
7 The failure to sign a permanent centre half in however long.
8 The lack of continuity in playing staff with constant revolving doors of loan players.
9 Players having to play out of position or when just coming back from injury.
10 Accumulating such massive debts.
11 Borrowing from future revenues, including season ticket monies, the Trust, and the Sainsbury's monies.
13 Not trying to do a deal with the consortium when there was a good one on offer.
14 The Paul Brush situation.
15 The David Webb situation.
16 No work starting on the stadium yet.
17 The story about Pizza Man.
18 The falling out with Spencer Prior.
19 The Echo situation.
The list could go on.
I've not yet seen even any form of personal acceptance of responsibility or apology for what's happened to our club. What I have heard is blame attached to current and former players/management team, the Echo, previous regimes, HMRC, the Government, etc.
With hindsight, knowing that Ron's other companies would borrow future money from Sainsbury's possibly on bad terms, maybe you could argue that the consortium's tactics were not the right ones? Who knows. That may be right or not. No one other than Ron's circle knew what he was going to do at the time, though. If Ron did do a bad deal to keep it all for himself rather than negotiate with potential outside investors, that's his decision.
I'm not on here to argue blindly that the consortium got their tactics right. What I do know is that they had the best of intentions to take the club forward if Ron Martin didn't have the money to do so and my opinion was that they would have done a great job.
But the responsibility for the awful mess the club's in should not be pointed at them. The man in charge has to take at least some of the blame!
