duncanjwitham

Because they were made to look very, very stupid by the original decision. They made a massive song and dance about how naughty we'd been, dragged us through the mud for years about it, and then when it came down to it, it turned out we were right all along. They'd employed two experts who knew absolutely nothing about the subjects they were supposed to be experts on, and got called out for it in a big way. Wasted years of people's time and who knows how much of the league clubs money. After all their shouting, we basically ended up with a slap on the wrist for a very minor deficiency in our record keeping. Of course they were going to appeal that. And that's not to mention the pressure being put on them by 'Boro and co.

They were always going to appeal if they could find a reason. And likewise, if the original decision had gone against us, we would have appealed too.

I have no memory of us pulling an expert at the last minute (and I read the IDC reports very thoroughly at the time). There was something to do with their expert witness producing a report at the last minute, and we were offered the chance to delay the hearing and prepare a counter argument to it, but we declined to. Not sure if this is what you are thinking of? Presumably we thought our arguments were sound enough and didn't want the whole thing dragging out even more. From what I remember (and my retelling may be slightly biased...), we put our accountant up as a witness to explain what our policy actually was, and there was a qualified accountant on the panel, who is supposed to be there to understand the accounting stuff. We presented our policy, we believed it clearly met the accounting rules as they were written, so further expert witness testimony was not needed. The EFL effectively put up an expert witness to argue that standard accounting terms didn't mean what everyone thought they meant, that up is down, the sky isn't blue etc. So the original panel basically ignored their expert witness on the grounds he was clueless, took the evidence of our accountant and the guy on the panels own experience to rule in our favour. The expert witness didn't even understand the rules he was there to give evidence on. Then the appeals panels basically said you can't do that - your accountant is there as a factual witness not an expert one, and the panel member is there as a judge, not a witness. So the only expert in the room says up is down, so for the purposes of this decision, up is officially down. Basically, we screwed it up. If we had found any independent expert witness to stand there and say what we did was fine, it would have been he-said she-said on expert witnesses and the appeals panel would have left the original decision as is. And given that even the EFL's own choice of forensic accountant on the panel agreed with our policy, it shouldn't have been difficult to find some else to agree with it. But I stand by that we shouldn't have had to do that. The purpose of having an expert on the panel is to deal with stuff like this.

That was certainly one endgame, but it was by no means a certain one. I really hope we weren't banking on that as our only plan. Maybe we had some other accounting trickery lined up that we never saw play out. There was plenty of potential value in the academy that we could have cashed in on if we hadn't been forced into flogging them on the cheap during admin - Ebosele, Ebiowei, Plange, Buchanan, Kellyman, Williams plus Cashin, Bird, Knight etc.

I don't think it was anything to do with that. From what I understood at the time (so my memory could be a bit flaky on this), it was basically a way of re-valuing the stadium as an asset the club held. We went from having a stadium valued at ~£40m (or some similar figure, I can't remember exactly) to one valued at ~£80m, meaning the club had made a paper profit of £40m without doing anything. But those type of profits were explicitly excluded from FFP calculations, so to actually be able to use that profit for FFP, we had to physically sell the stadium out of the direct ownership group. So that £40m profit basically offset the amortization on the purchases of Johnson/Butterfield/Ince etc for a few years (because of the rolling 3-year FFP windows).

I think if the stadium had been sold off to a 3rd party because we needed cash into the club quickly, then absolutely that should have set off alarm bells. What actually happened was basically shuffling bits of paper around. The ultimate owner of the stadium never really changed, it was still Mel Morris's to do with as he wanted. We made a paper profit to offset the paper losses from the amortization on player purchases a few years earlier. And the only reason we were doing that is because the FFP rules insist on tracking profit/loss over everything else. I'm not claiming it was a good thing or anything, but it's not necessarily a flashing red alarm that we were going into admin or anything. Part of the problem with this stuff is we never really got to see what the actual endgame was. The amortization policy was basically shifting paper losses further into the future (and if you are going to claim anything is dubious about the accounting methods, then this is the thing to look at, not overvaluing assets). We never really got to see if and what the plan for dealing with those future-problems actually was, or if we were just going to end up with a big points deduction for failing FFP in a few years time. The EFL basically rewriting years of our accounts by retroactively cancelling the amortization policy, and then COVID blowing everything up, meant we got hit with all those problems before we had a chance to put anything in place to deal with them. Maybe we had a plan, maybe we didn't, but we'll never know. And as an aside, there's definitely an argument that the stadium sale turned out to be a good thing in some ways. If the stadium had still been in our ownership when we went into admin, the very first thing Quantuma would have done is sold it off for as much as they could to get some cash into the club. And that's not a slight on Quantuma or anything, it would have been legally the correct thing for them to do. So there's a decent chance we would have ended up with the stadium being owned by some random Panamanian loan sharks, and it would have cost us a whole lot more to buy it back than we ended up paying Morris/MSD for it. Ironically, I seem to remember Morris making that argument when the sale occurred - something about wanting to prevent a potential unscrupulous owner from flogging the stadium to make a quick buck and screwing the club. I'm not sure he ever thought he would kind of end up being that owner.

Surely that would decrease the value?

It's not what it's "worth", it was valued on the basis of what it would cost to replace it with a new one, less the wear on it, which is an absolutely standard way to value assets like this. When you consider Brentford have just spend ~£70m building a 17k stadium, and Brighton spent ~£90m on a 32k one pretty recently, those figures look more than reasonable. Neither the EFL's independent commission, or the appeals into that decision, could find anything wrong with the valuation. If you want a detailed explanation of exactly how and why it was valued at the figure it was, I suggest you read the report from the first tribunal hearing. There's a very detailed breakdown of everything in there. And consider that the EFLs inexperienced valuer, who basically valued it on the basis of it being equivalent to a 3-sides-terraced stadium, still thought it was worth £50m+.

I mean, we're basically in that position now. Maybe Pearce should resign in protest at the horrendous way Clowes is running the club? I'm sure that would make a few heads explode on here. (I'm sure I don't need a sarcasm tag, but just in case... /s)

2 mistakes is definitely pushing it though…

I've always assumed it was less of a loan vs permanent pot, and more of a this season vs next season onwards pot. So we can spend the money we know we have this year (we know what league we're in, how many season tickets we've sold etc) but we're more restricted in terms of committing to spending money we might not actually have next season. It's just easier to describe it as a loan pot vs a transfer pot because loans tend to be this season only, where as transfers are normally going to be multi-year contracts. *If* that's the case, then a contract until the end of the season should fall into the "loan" pot.

As far as I know, the positional stuff is all automated. All the player positions are tracked throughout the match anyway, which is where sites like whoscored are getting their data from. Players wear monitors IIRC, that tracks their position, as well as heart rates etc. They are then basically comparing each chance (in terms of attacker position, distance and angle from goal, keeper position, defender positions etc) with thousands of similar chances from other games and seeing what proportion of those chances were actually scored. This is where the discrepancies come in - how do you decide what’s similar enough to factor into your comparison, or which individual elements matter the most (is distance from goal more important than the angle or not etc). This isn’t being done for each goal individually though, they will come up with a model where you can feed the player positions in and it will churn out an xG at the end. Individual player abilities aren’t supposed to be factored in - it’s supposed to be how likely is an average striker (for the level we’re talking about) going to score this chance against average defenders and keeper etc.

I think you're misunderstanding what they mean by "expected". It's not saying "a player in this position is expected to score", it's more like "if a player had this chance 100 times, how many would you expect them to score". It is factoring in keepers and defenders because their positions etc all feed into calculating what that expectation is. Using "expected" in this sense isn't really branding, it's a really basic statistics term that used all over the place, both in sports stats and stats in general.

To be fair, 8-10 weeks, until the playoffs and min 2 months are all basically the same thing…

You know all those times when we cross the ball into the box, but there's nobody there, because Collins is stood by the touchline for some reason? It's just going to be like that all the time.

I suspect you're not entirely wrong. Which creates an even bigger problem for next season, given the number of out-of-contract players that will need replacing.

Your entire argument was not worrying about the roof until you've build the walls though. I can't imagine you're advocating people just build the walls and then worry about the budget for the roof after that...

Yeah, I'm not saying he's definitely going to be awful or going to be great. But he's been here a nearly month and has contributed absolutely nothing so far. Surely the intention of signing one of the most productive wingers in the league this season, was that we could just drop him into the side and he would carry on being productive? Not giving him a couple of months to get fit, and maybe we'll see something before the end of the season. That's what's feeding into peoples disappointment with him.

Not sure what that's got to do with what I posted 🤷‍♂️. The point is, while you personally might not be bothering with the roof until the walls are built, someone somewhere is thinking about what type of foundations they need, how the walls are laid out, how the roof will be supported by those walls and so on. Likewise, Warne might not personally be responsible for getting us to the Premier League, but someone somewhere should be thinking about what we need to do (long term) to get there and making sure that the people currently working on the project are sticking to that plan (be that using a style that can be effective at higher levels, signing players we can develop for higher levels, introducing youth players into the first team, or whatever).

To be fair, I think that's a standard clause that FA rules require to be in those type of loan agreements.

But I bet the architects plans for the houses involved something more than "we'll worry about the roof when we've built the rest of the house"...

I think that's kind of part of it. He was supposed to be the big marquee signing, the hotshot in-form goal-scoring winger, the missing piece of the puzzle to kick us on a level (or it certainly felt like that was the intention from the outside). Now, instead of that, he's suddenly not fit, then he's injured, then he's playing but not really fit. Plus he doesn't really seem to fit the gas-out, aggressive pressing type of football that we want to play either. So it kind of feels like, instead of blowing our budget on a difference-maker, we've wasted on it on someone who's struggling to even get in the side.

"Crossing for crossings sake is pointless. I'll never forget when we played Reading a few weeks ago, and put in 26 crosses. NML made the most crosses during the match in the history of forever. We were absolutely toothless upfront that night." etc etc etc.

I don't think it's a crazy assumption to make... A fair chunk of the league will have parachute payments, meaning they can spend way over anything we can. The majority of the rest have established Championship-level squads that they have been building for years. The bulk of our squad is either unproven at that level, or older players who have stepped down a level to keep playing. We may end up with a mid-level Championship squad, but even with that, we aren't going to be winning many games pretty much by virtue of having better players, like we have multiple times this season.

That's certainly my take on it. We overcommitted financially, with Morris was happily covering the shortfall each month, up until he decided he couldn't afford it and stopped. The EFL issues (on top of accumulating debt) basically prevented a sale, and then a combination of those 2 factors plus COVID pushed us over the edge. There's no super secret conspiracy, or pots of missing money to find or anything. Regarding Pearce, the only major issues you can have with him are the overcommitting and the amortization method stuff. If Morris had committed to covering the shortfall, then I'm not sure what Pearce was supposed to do about it. Almost every football club in the country is reliant on their owner putting money in to keep the lights on, we weren't unusual in that respect (and are still in that kind of position now, to some degree). And for what it's worth, I suspect the NDAs are mostly around this stuff - what guarantees Morris gave to the club about putting money in, and whether he stuck to them or not. And of course, the amortization method was signed off by at least 4 separate sets of accountants, including the EFL's own choice of independent forensic accountant, so it's hard to pin blame on Pearce for that.