Derby County Administration (with the slight possibility of Liquidation still there)

[Alph]

Just now, atherstoneram said:

If somebody is that mad would you want them in charge of the club.

Nope, but we are in a position now where we are at the mercy of anybody who fancies it. 

I mean Alonso and his secret society of investors seemed like the road to oblivion at first. 

Now we're at destination oblivion you can almost find yourself thinking can you buy us please

[RadioactiveWaste]

5 minutes ago, TheresOnlyWanChope said:

I think City just dilutes the identity. Its Derby County not Derby City. May not be a big deal for some people but it wouldnt feel the same. Aside from that City is just a crap name for a team. That Hull chairman was right! 

The "County" comes from the origins being linked to Derbyshire CCC doesn't it?

[sawley_ram]

11 minutes ago, Tombo said:

I don't know, I mean we are a city club really, not a county one. We have fans across all of Derbyshire but I tend to find the strongest mutterings about the club from the city.

Plus we are still DCFC if it's Derby City.

Plus Bradley Johnson will come and play for us, he gave us his word

We are and should always be Derby County! Changing to an awful name like “Derby City” would alienate so many people, hundreds of thousands, who like I live in Derbyshire and always follow the Rams!

[Alty_Ram]

2 minutes ago, Alpha said:

Nope, but we are in a position now where we are at the mercy of anybody who fancies it. 

I mean Alonso and his secret society of investors seemed like the road to oblivion at first. 

Now we're at destination oblivion you can almost find yourself thinking can you buy us please

Yup, I think we are well past 'Beggars can't be choosers' at this point ?

[GenBr]

8 minutes ago, Barney1991 said:

I just hope it’s a consortium that buys us not just one person. Have a proper board made up who can challenge each other’s decisions. The one problem Mel had is he didn’t have a board to challenge him on his decisions. To say no we shouldn’t be doing this we should do that. Instead he had a yes man ceo finance supposedly guru who messed around with our amortisation and has got us crippled when instead of running along with it should have challenged Morris. If had been the case and Morris hadn’t of got a free reign I don’t think we would be in this mess. Instead Morris just did whatever he wanted and now we are in the doom

Mel did have a board, but they kept resigning. Probably a red flag in hindsight, but we are where we are

[TheresOnlyWanChope]

 

5 minutes ago, RadioactiveWaste said:

The "County" comes from the origins being linked to Derbyshire CCC doesn't it?

I am unsure, thought it was something to do with the county but they couldn't call it Derbyshire county due to cricket team so abbreviated it. I may be wrong. Whatever, I love the name, I love the club and will do any little I can to help keeping it going. I don't know who Derby City is but its not us. We are Derby County and now is the time to make ourselves heard and do what we all can to make sure we still have a club. I think the one thing that makes our situation salvageable is the amazing fans. Over 20,000 fans even season since Pride Park built around 25 years ago, how many clubs outside the top division can boast that??

 

[atherstoneram]

2 hours ago, GenBr said:

I also wouldnt buy the stadium back. I also wouldnt pay a penny in rent unless it was phenomenally low rates. 

Building a 30000 seater stadium isnt quite so simple as tripling the price of a 10k one though. I still think it could be done for less than 80 mill, but it wouldnt be cheap

But if it was built on a Brown field site on the outskirts of Derby alongside the A38, (just using the A38 as an example) which would give it good road access then it could be built at a reasonable cost.

[Tombo]

Don't get me wrong, I'm still in the fight to save Derby County. I just don't think being called City is the end of the world.

[jono]

17 hours ago, Miggins said:

Mel took on a club that was in a good position at the start of his tenure. He had a duty to our historic club and its large fan base to either maintain the status quo or take it forwards. I spent 31 years in primary education and I can only liken it to a school which was a good school with good results when the new head took over and then ended up in special measures so extreme that the school may have to close down. I know that schools are not football clubs but such mismanagement in education would have set alarm bells ringing very quickly.

I understand and in many ways agree with your sentiments, especially as we are now teetering on the brink. Mel has made a series of poor decisions that rest solely at his door, they have landed us where we are. 

I just wonder though .. how good was our underlying position really was before he came along. ? The Americans realised it wasn’t going to work financially. We had that blip with Mac 1 and the play off final but the underlying picture was frail. Prices of wages and players were going up. Losses were increasing. They weren’t prepared to splash any cash and wanted out. Mel came along and tried to keep the blip going by investing heavily .. to a certain extent he succeeded, for a while .. we had how many play off chances ? We flirted with the upper end of the league for large parts of his tenure … but was that because of inward money and support from him ? If that hadn’t happened where would we be and would we all be saying ? .. Here we are scrapping away at the bottom of the league and he never invested in any quality players, got cheap loans in. Didn’t have any ambition ? With hindsight that might have been better ! No argument. (Now …) 
 

We have been on a cliff edge since Cocu arrived I reckon. We might just have scrapped through but Covid threw us off the edge …. Now I am not saying we weren’t on the edge of that cliff for any other reason than leadership failings and choices; with prudent business conduct we should never have got that close to it, Mel should never have let us, he was in charge, it’s his failing but how we got there and where we might have been in another reality is a hugely nuanced story 

[DCFC Kicks]

How ridiculous does this look now?

He knew full well the amount of risk he was putting the club in at this moment.

[atherstoneram]

21 minutes ago, Alpha said:

Nope, but we are in a position now where we are at the mercy of anybody who fancies it. 

I mean Alonso and his secret society of investors seemed like the road to oblivion at first. 

Now we're at destination oblivion you can almost find yourself thinking can you buy us please

Out of the frying pan into the fire springs to mind

[Elwood P Dowd]

2 hours ago, Unlucky Alf said:

A Government Department which deals in Billions if not Trillions of £s, My Daughter is a Senior offshore VAT Investigator, The stories she tells me on the QT are shocking on how debts are written off as the owner/company have no assets allegedly, Her team worked on the Harry Rednapp tax case...they all thought they had won, Until the Jury fell for the "i'm not that clever and my dog ate all my invoices"

I'm currently being chased for my deceased Brothers tax(self employed)from 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, All because I had to go to his bank stop all payments and sign a form stating I was his personel representative.

PS they wont get a penny from myself.

 

The saying is

if you owe the bank £10,000 then you have a problem if you owe the bank £10,000,000 then the bank has a problem ?

I share your concern regarding how were Derby allowed to run up such a large Tax debt, I suppose with large salaries the the amount owed soon mounts up

 

[Jayram]

1 hour ago, rammieib said:

Except, if you were a potential owner coming in, would you buy the club if the Stadium asset wasn't included?

The Stadium (pre-covid) was creating circa £10m of income (excluding ticket sales). It's a huge revenue stream and if you don't own it, you're losing a lot of that revenue without a minefield of commercial contracts. For instance - say Greggs pay £50k a year rent, that'll go to the stadium, not to Derby County. Say the Yard, a business in its own right also pay £50k a year rent, now we're at £100k and so on....

It adds up and its money which could be going to Gellaw 202 or whatever they're called, not Derby County.

You can absolutely see why this is a minefield.

This happened to my local club Oxford United. The former owner of the club Firoz Kassam sold the club but kept hold of the stadium and all the revenue generated from the sales of food, drink, non football events etc. This has such a detrimental effect on the clubs finances they have been seeking a new location to build a ground for years. 

The ground must be brought back into club ownership if we are to prosper post-Morris.

[i-Ram]

34 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

If we have a sustainable model why would there not be a bank willing to support us?

A mortgage of say £30m against an asset valued at £80m +.

Once again there could be a clause of repayable immediately if club promoted.

As for MM/Gellaw paying off the MSD loans, why would they not want to do it? They have a charge against the asset anyway.

If they pay off the loans it costs £30m? If the club goes bust it costs them £80m.

As you acknowleged in your response to @The Scarlet Pimpernelabove, we dont know enough about the structure of the debts for anyone to answer accurately. In respect of the MSD debts, which I think will be in the Club's name, I fear MM would probably want the Administrator to seek redress from the club first of all, and he personally then might only settle anything still outstanding under the terms of the guarantee he has provided.

Morris suggested, ironically, that this has all come at a time when the club has a sustainable model. The model will be completely different when we are in League 1 or 2 in terms of TV revenues, sponsorship deals, season ticket and matchday revenues, etc.  Another reset of costs will be appropriate for that period, unless we have an Angel on a White Horse gagging to rescue us.

A long term mortgage to a football club is unattractive to most, if not, all mainstream lenders. The security itself is pretty unattractive because of limited alternative uses, and I cant imagine the land plus the stadium is worth anything like £80m on an earth, bricks and mortar basis. It is only really worth £80m on an investment basis when it is being used to optimum capacity; again unlikely when we are in L1 or 2. Secondly, there is reputational risk in respect of a Lender supporting a Football Club. No lender particularly a Bank wants to be seen to be winding up a 'Community Asset'. The work in dealing with the fallout from fans complaining, protesting, closing accounts, etc.

I suspect MSD only took on the Loan for a short-dated period, and at 9% interest I read somewhere, not because they thought they were secure having a stadium or training facilities in support, but because they took the view that there might always be a mug out there who would take on the club and buy out Mel (the Administrator) or worst case they could fall back to the guarantee offered to them by one of the richest men in the UK. There is a third possibility. MSD, or Michael Dell, wants to own a football club.

[Alph]

It's the loss of the history associated with Derby County that would do it for me. Even hating 99.99% of football there's still that bond to Derby that pulls at you. Even if you haven't watched any match in a year, you still look up to see how Derby are. 

"It's in your DNA"

It actually is. 

You can't name exactly what it is but an important part is how it runs through families and ties generations together. How the past inspires the future. 

You feel part of something that began almost 140 years ago and feel emotions for events and people that lived and played before you were born etc. 

Being born again..  I think for some it would feel kind of hollow. Like, it is Derby County, but it isn't. 

Anybody who's tired of football will lose their interest entirely I think if Derby County as we know it die

[Ramarena]

1 hour ago, curb said:

Groundshare with Mickleover?

i wouldn’t be surprised if Don Amott would consider changing the name of Mickleover FC to Derby City or something to cash in on a new fan base. 

They’d have to stop playing in red for me though. 

There’s absolutely no infrastructure around there for an increased amount of fans.
 

With station Road and Radbourne Lane being bad at the best of times and everywhere else in the surrounding area just being housing. It’d cause chaos locally if the club as it stands or a Phoenix club ground shared there 

[Alph]

8 minutes ago, atherstoneram said:

Out of the frying pan into the fire springs to mind

What choices do we have? Out of the frying pan and into the bin seems the alternative. 

I think we passed the stage where we were in a position to seek sound minded people looking to invest in football. 

[Ram-Alf]

21 minutes ago, TheresOnlyWanChope said:

 

I am unsure, thought it was something to do with the county but they couldn't call it Derbyshire county due to cricket team so abbreviated it. I may be wrong. Whatever, I love the name, I love the club and will do any little I can to help keeping it going. I don't know who Derby City is but its not us. We are Derby County and now is the time to make ourselves heard and do what we all can to make sure we still have a club. I think the one thing that makes our situation salvageable is the amazing fans. Over 20,000 fans even season since Pride Park built around 25 years ago, how many clubs outside the top division can boast that??

 

Just switch 2 letters...Derby County FC***FC Derby County

[atherstoneram]

1 hour ago, DCFC1388 said:

I may have got this completely wrong but from what I have read don't the new owners only need to pay 25-35% of the debt to creditors such as HMRC, Cocu & maybe even Keogh?

If so, if they were originally interested in buying us and clearing the £60m rumoured debts which is the deal Mel was wanting, they could potentially get us by only having to pay maybe half of that debt, maybe even less?

So as an investor looking at it, you would see we're likely to get a point deduction anyway for P&S breaches which would likely put us in League 1, so why not wait for us to go into administration which confirms relegation but potentially starts the P&S from scratch with no looming point deductions (that's what the negotiations were about) as well as saving money towards covering the debts.

Doing it now also means no fire sale of players meaning we may actually get more money for any players we do sell.

So for example, they were willing to originally pay 60m. Now they pay off 30m of debts (25% of which needs to be paid within 2 years to avoid further points deductions), they're 30m up. Loss in revenue for relegation covered by that initial 30m and then if we sold a couple of players maybe for 10-15m (with it not being a fire sale) that could potentially give the new owner 40-45m to cover relegation losses, the admin charges, day to day running which the monthly cost will reduce if debts cleared/reduced + rebuilding the squad ready for League 1.

Don't think it works like that. HMRC and football related matters are 100%. The 25% relates to other secured creditors who must receive at least that percentage within Two years , thats how i understand it from listening to KM's podcast

[GenBr]

12 minutes ago, atherstoneram said:

But if it was built on a Brown field site on the outskirts of Derby alongside the A38, (just using the A38 as an example) which would give it good road access then it could be built at a reasonable cost.

Could it? The cost of land will not be as significant for us as it would be for somewhere in London, but i dont think you'd get much change out of £60 mill to build a 30,000 seater stadium. Thats if you could even do it for that.

There aren't many stadiums of that size even built outside of London, so hard to even compare costs.