lrm14

I thought we all understood that the squad and management were up against it and it was time for better or worse to stick with them? Didn't last long did it. 

I don’t blame Rooney for the way Sibley is playing particularly but I do blame him for only giving Sibley ten minutes a game last season when we were crying out for literally any spark at all. It is not fair to expect someone to make a difference when they are given limited time to do so. He is inconsistent but he has shown that at his best he will win points for Derby.
I wholeheartedly agree on Hughes. The whole situation with his sale was criminal and the minute Rowett said to Mel that he wanted to sell Hughes he should’ve been sacked on the spot. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see history repeating itself (if this is even true).

BBC used to be pretty much fair and neutral, the 'public service ethos' but not now. Majority of the senior posts are now taken by Tories and Tory Party funders.....hence next to no criticism of the current government.

My takeaway is the apparent lack of a rudimentary control framework at the club. 
Where were the budgets for playing staff? 
How much challenge and scrutiny did the amortisation method actually get? Any consultant opinion would usually include a benchmark analysis against the market so that you can see if you are an outlier and hence more likely to be challenged. 
Most recently the seeming lack of control design around messaging and communication. Looks like it is made up on the hoof. 

You see a lot of football fans who like to watch the game but seem to have no actual understanding of it at all. The kind of person that would say things like "Bradley Johnson is great, let's sign him", "Clough should never have sold Shackell", "We haven't had a decent right back since Wisdom left", "Blackman is top of the scoring charts, let's buy him", "Wayne Rooney is still a great player", "Nigel Pearson did a great job at Leicester, he'd be great here too".  It honestly feels like we're being run by one of those types.

Mel’s comments re the academy are contradictory to what has gone on during his tenure.
We sold Hughes for a pittance to fund a Dad’s Army brigade under Rowett.
Max Lowe was breaking through under Mac 2 then fell completely out of favour under Rowett and Lampard.
If Mel wasn’t happy, why did he back those two to bring in a bunch of ageing players on high wages?
And when he finally looked to go back to square one with Phillip Cocu, he immediately saddled him with Wayne Rooney and pulled the rug from underneath him.
I struggle to understand how somebody acting in the best interests of Derby could do such an appalling job given where we were in 2013-14, 2014-15 and the funds that were at his disposal. There is no malice on Mel’s part, just sheer incompetence and lack of planning/organization throughout his tenure.

I’ve being following this forum for years, finally wanted to be part of this amazing community, as although the current situation is dire we are all fans in this together! 

This can't be said enough. That was the time to suck it up and rebuild for a season or two before we go again. The dream was slipping away at that point, but instead of hunkering down for a longer project, it was that last glittering glimer of the big prize.
The last big roll of the dice with Lampard might even have succeeded, but as soon as it didn't we were in the poo.
The bit that baffles me is the bringing Rooney in part. There's clearly no room for anymore big swings at promotion, so give Cocu the breif (build the team, bring the kids through) and suck up a couple of sucky seasons whist we trim, rebuild and hopefully get some productive prospects out of the academy to either sell on or contribute to the 1st team. Oh but we've also spent all the budget on aging Rooney and promised himyour job. And you have to play him because sponsors.
We are where we are. It sucks. I hope the ownership and EFL issues get sorted sooner than later, obviously.
Never mind. It could be worse.

Bogle was a great spot by Lampard but there was no-one else who really featured other than Bennett, who had obviously been around the squad for a few years by that point.
My quarrel isn't with Lampard (or even Rowett) - their ambition was clear to see & the club could always have said no to their transfers. Bottom line is if you appoint managers like that, you have to accept their make up & can't simultaneously have a totally different strategy. Always believed with Lampard that Mel was totally seduced by the celebrity (a mistake he repeated with Rooney). After all, he told Rowett in the spring of 2018 that the plan was to restrict big name signings & to rely on the Academy more - which is the reason Rowett jumped ship to Stoke. That was the point at which we needed a Cocu-type manager - instead we had one last season of bingeing on high wages/big transfer fees & have been in decline ever since.
 

Whether we, as fans, knew the seriousness of the situation, were happy with the level of spending, should have seen the danger signs or considered it sustainable is irrelevant. The owner/commercial management of the club certainly should have and shouldn’t be influenced by the passionate expectations of the fans to the extent that has resulted in us finding ourselves in the position we find ourselves. I’d even go as far as saying that Mel himself wouldn’t blame the fans. 
 
Fans of every club will always want the best players the club can get. It’s the owners responsibility to manage this and to make sure any such expectations are achievable and sustainable.
in terms of not cheering the owner for overspending, as my sarcastic examples highlighted earlier, do you really expect fans to challenge the spending proposed by the owner or try to reign him in? 
 
To return to the original question, no, the fans are not ultimately to blame.

I missed the word overall in front of running. 
My post was in support of Mel Morris who according to many document leaks on the internet had very serious health issues over the past 12 months including in one document which was headed as an "offer for sale memorandum"  which contained the statement that he was suffering from cancer earlier last year and undergoing treatment, I therefore get angry and take exception to assertions that he has gone missing has lost interest and is lacking in communication with a very hostile subset of supporters, all of whom appear to pile on without quoting anything other than their opinions which invariably are suppositions about conjecture.
Give the guy a break.
 

What really stings and gives life to the allegations of a vindictive nature in all this, is the “the EFL reluctantly” .. why reluctant ? There was some wrong doing, the Independent panel gave a sanction .. so that’s it .. why “reluctantly” ? It stinks as an attitude and is fundamentally wrong on so many levels. You have a system where there is a complaint and a system that provides for an independent panel to adjudicate but somehow the The body that represents the clubs, that drew up the system in the first place isn’t prepared to accept its outcome in an appropriate manner .. Why would you appeal or even reluctantly accept a verdict given by a system you designed ? The independent committee is designed to give a balanced view, to remove the partisanship the EFL shouldn’t be showing in any case , but clearly is. 

B) would appear to be the most arguable by virtue of imposing transfer windows. 
But I'll wager that implication was never thought through at the time. 
The whole thing stinks though. As a regulatory authority the EFL should be trying to provide guidance and interpretation ex-ante, not coming along ex-post and working backwards to find small print to fit their retrospectively determined desired outcome. 
This is why they are not fit for purpose. 

The way the rules are written, with just a blanket "you must comply with FRS 102", it basically feels like the EFL have decided to outsource that particular competence to the people that actually have expertise on it.  They know they don't have the manpower or knowledge to properly audit every clubs accounts, so they decided to just leave a requirement to comply and trust HMRC/auditors etc to do it properly.  Which honestly seems a fairly sensible way of doing things to me.
That's why it feels so weird and wrong that they're suddenly making very specific requests about how accounts are to be submitted, and they're passing judgments on things that they have no legal authority to pass judgements on.  To my knowledge, no legal body has ever bestowed on the EFL the power to determine whether accounts are compliant with FRS102 or not.

It's good to touch base on this now and again. Currently we are only guilty after appeal of not flagging up a different amortisation policy to everyone else. Not an illegal one just a different one. 
Now, in time, due to the acceptance of the charge, we may be guilty of failing P&S BUT only if in time our resubmissions fail. So, to repeat, at this time we are only guilty of not flagging up a DIFFERENT BUT NOT illegal amortisation policy. BIG DEAL! 
I have to keep reminding myself incase I'm going mad. 

A competent organisation wouldn't simply look at the bottom line figure, which is what you're suggesting. At the very least they should skim read the accounts for any obvious irregularities - the new amortisation being one.
It also has to be stated that the EFL made no attempt to clarify/understand the amortisation policy prior to the charge.
Also, the original DC revealed that the EFL claimed to have only been made aware of the different amortisation policy shortly before bringing the charges in January 2020. Please also note that Kieran Maguire wrote to the EFL regarding the amortisation policy in June 2018.
Incompetence.

Spot on, the guy was class and dignity personified in very difficult circumstances. He deserves all the luck in the world in his next job. 

Whatever his future intentions are he conducted himself with dignity and class whilst at our club …our first ever foreign manager and for me never really got the backing that other managers got like Clement buying poo ? 
had a lot to put up with it seems with the whole Keogh fiasco and a squad short of top quality when he took over but think he helped our youngsters a lot 
really wanted him to succeed here but think the whole Rooney thing helped derail things ….I wish the bloke every success in the future 

But the EFL actions are also driven by the pressures put on them by other clubs.
If they let up on Derby they get toy throwing from Wycombe and Boro.
It's not how it should work, but seems to be an element of how it does work.
And whilst I do generally think Derby are in the wrong "a bit" on some of this, the notion that we are uniquely bad, evil, wrong, worst cheats ever seems a bit far fetched but very popular in some corners of the internet.
 

Couldn't agree more but what they fail to realise is that by dragging all this on they're preventing/slowing down a takeover which will see them rid of Mel.
Also, it doesn't help that the other 2 clubs are now in the Prem so he is the only chairman remaining who initially went against them.
Off the back of this we also moved away from the EFL's ifollow platform and had ramstv.

Mel and Derby county were one of the ring leaders along with Villa and Leeds in terms of telling the EFL they could not negotiate their way out of a wet paper bag.
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/efl-sky-tv-Derby-leeds-2209661
Looking at the fall out of a clearly bad TV deal, the media said "Morris is the only chairman of a Football League club to lift his head above the parapet and suggest that the Football League should have negotiated a better deal for its clubs, but those pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears."   Mel's view was that SKY should have paid £300million not the £120million that they eventually negotiated.
The championship is an exciting league, I would argue more exciting than who will finish second to Man City
This whole thing with the EFL and Mel is in my opinion, nothing to do with how to amortise your depreciation, they just want to remove him from the Football League as they regard him as a trouble maker who questions their competence to run the third most popular league in the world, DCFC will be just collateral damage
 

I wrote about this before …
amortisation works like this. A transfer fee for a 5 million pound player with a contract length of 5 years would “amortise” at 1 million pounds per year if you used a straight line method.
In simple terms that’s one million pound of loss per year for 5 years.
if you imagine that you might extend a contract or sell the player in years three four or five then you might decide to use a different method. So if you think you could sell the player for 4 million pounds after 4 years then the total balance you need to write off is only 1 million pounds. Which would be a loss of 250k per year over 4 years.
The problem in the original panel is that we changed policy without properly disclosing it in our accounts. So we might have changed for example from the straight line method to the residual value one above.
The appeal seems to now suggest that the new policy that we used was against accounting standards completely.
Either decision in my view is very much objective. The residual policy is ok in my view if you can predict the value of a player - and there are plenty of places now where you can predict a future value of a player. So I’m not sure it really is against accounting standards.
 
In the first panel that suggested we changed accounting policies without disclosing it, well i suspect that practicing accountants would be able to debate as to whether this really is a change of accounting standards or just a change to a part of the policy. For example you might argue in the case above that we were just changing the residual value from nil to 4 million pounds, but the underlying policy is still a a straight line method. So no need to disclose a change in accounting policy.
Im conclusion, I think Derby could easily appeal this decision again and win. Unless someone comes to the table with a compromise arrangement, the costs for the EFL and us will continue to rise until someone finally loses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the EFL that loses. I think that Mel has the deepest pockets.

No, that's your continued insistence on interpreting the sentence "at best confusing at worst seriously misleading"  and re-stating it ipso facto as "Derby were found to have mislead the EFL",
You're stating the 'at worst' scenario as the absolute truth and disregarding the 'best' scenario (whilst still not good) or anything and everything in between.
I'm not even saying that your interpretation is incorrect, but even so, regardless of the panel's personal feelings or what "the evidence indicates" (so... indicates, in your opinion, doesn't confirm), we haven't actually been found guilty of misleading anyone - we've been found guilty of using, on closer inspection, a non-compliant amortisation method.
...in the opinion of an 'expert witness', although duck knows how or whether his ruling that our method is non-compliant is actually any more accurate that the original panel's ruling, it seems that him simply having an opinion makes him automatically correct because we didn't have our own expert witness to contest it.
Anything else is by the by, conjecture, not fact.
 

Its blatantly obvious that the EFL thought they had something serious on us only to find out it was nothing more than a minor accounting procedure that they had originally passed as ok. Then the cry baby whinging of Gibson (who had previously "restructured" Boro's debt with his own business) made the EFL want to appear to look strong after years of turning a blind eye to a multitude of others misdemeanours, only for them to be thwarted by our accounts being nowhere near as dodgy as they had been led to believe.
Someone high up in the EFL has promised Gibson that he'll deal with Derby and now he's desperate to save face.
Duck 'em all.
 
 

The problem is that if the governing body do not state the approach that must be taken, then people will be creative in order to gain an advantage - particualrly whereby the rules prevent owners from competing with others that seem to have an unfair advantage (as is the case with parachute payments) - being creative may be questionable ethically, but it's quite clearly not cheating if the governing body has been too lax to set out (in advance) what is and what isn't allowed. A one line change to the rules when we first started with our 'unusual' depreciation method would have sorted this - the EFL were too incompetent to think through the implications and let it go for several years. We have not breached their rules because their rules are badly written/implemented and allowed us to take the approach that we did.....