Derby finally accept 21 point deduction.

[Carnero]

58 minutes ago, Ambitious said:

We will see, of course, but it seems like a daft way to piss £300k up the wall IMO. 

If there's even just a 10% chance of a successful appeal then it's well worth a shot given the £4m difference in solidarity payments between Championship & League One.

[Gritstone Tup]

Can we not at some point show some class and take our punishment!

[Carnero]

Just now, Gritstone Tup said:

Can we not at some point show some class and take our punishment!

It's nothing to do with "class" it's about being treated fairly by a truly independant arbiter.

[Crewton]

6 minutes ago, Gritstone Tup said:

Can we not at some point show some class and take our punishment!

What a brilliant idea. We can all hold our heads up high as our club disappears down the khazi.

 

[Pearl Ram]

11 minutes ago, Carnero said:

It's nothing to do with "class" it's about being treated fairly by a truly independant arbiter.

Yeah coz we’ll get one of them. ?

[Sparkle]

I am very pleased that we are appealing this - we have suffered a £20 million loss directly and factually from ticket sales due to covid from loss of sales of tickets - we were never in danger of administration prior to that - the EFL have stopped us from spending money because they know we simply didn’t have it coming in and they were constantly looking for guarantees of who is going to pay our bills before Administration. Our losses are provable due to Covid and what other clubs do is of no relevance to our appeal.

if the administrators believe we should appeal then they clearly believe we have a case and they are the money men! 
if the the EFL believe no one should ever win an appeal against administration then why have one available ?

[RoyMac5]

Edit: Said it above.

We are all Derby!

Edited October 11, 2021 by RoyMac5

[Stive Pesley]

20 minutes ago, RoyMac5 said:

I don't see what isn't believable about the fact that Mel was mostly financing the club from income from the club. He might have been making up the shortfall - which would have been less in the past couple of seasons. But he couldn't have expected to cover the shortfall and the missing income?

I think this sums it up

I suspect none of us have ever run a multi-million bound business, and especially not a football club where the stakes are so high, but fundamentally, whatever business you are in, you have to have a business plan, and it's totally reasonable for that business plan to be based on projected income over the next x years

The pandemic suddenly choked off the income stream for all clubs - and none of them could have foreseen it, hence the EFL offering the contingency loans to help clubs through it

The problem seems to be that Derby was a special case, as the owner was midway through trying to engineer a sale of the club, via various strategies (sale of stadium, MSD loans etc) - then with the EFL charges on top - covid threw the business plan out the window, and somehow we found ourselves unable to access the same contingency as everyone else. 

In the end we may just have to chalk that one up as bad luck

 

 

 

[Rev]

12 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

 

I suspect none of us have ever run a multi-million bound business,

I once ran a multi-millionaire bound business, but Max Mosley's death and Tories starting to prefer the opposite sex killed it off.

[PistoldPete]

1 hour ago, vonwright said:

I'm not sure it works to argue 'Yeah we were completely reckless and had run up huge debts but Covid tipped us over the edge and forced us into administration'. Putting aside the fact we weren't _forced_ into administration (which will be a massive issue in itself), the force majeure clause as drafted by the EFL states that we need to prove adminstration occurred 'solely as a result of a FM event'. 

It's not a great analogy but imagine our house is the only one on the street that gets destroyed after a hurricane. Turns out our house was built on terrible foundations and for years we'd failed to carry out the structural repairs necessary to make it more secure (in fact it had got worse). Plus the house didn't actually fall down - we just decided that the extra damage caused by the hurricane has made it too much of a money pit for us to continue with it, and we decided to pull it down ourselves. In that case saying the hurricane was the sole reason for the house coming down just seems... wrong. (And arguing that the other houses on the street were on almost-but-not-quite-as-dodgy foundations doesn't help either!)

It's not a good analogy because if the house had terrible foundations anyway it might have collapsed even without a hurricane.

A better analogy would be we buy a two storey house in Florida , every other house is a bungalow and ours is the only one that gets flattened by a hurricane. 

You cannot say its your fault for buying a two storey house in Florida.  It is still force majeure even if yours is the only house that is affected. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gritstone Tup]

36 minutes ago, Carnero said:

It's nothing to do with "class" it's about being treated fairly by a truly independant arbiter.

Sorry I have to disagree

[JABBA]

On 10/10/2021 at 09:23, JuanFloEvraTheCocu'sNesta said:

Waste of 300k that could have been used to keep people in jobs.

No chance we win this appeal given the state of our finances. To say COVID is the sole reason we are where we are is just false.

What if a local business man who has assets that would be more valuable should Derby reduce the points deduction and stay up had put in the money to cover the cost of any appeal?

would that be a waste?

[Comrade 86]

41 minutes ago, Gritstone Tup said:

Can we not at some point show some class and take our punishment!

We've been quietly taking 'our punishment' for 2 years now! For our supposed crimes and misdemeanours I'd venture we've paid a massive price already and yet you and some others feel we should just lie down and take even more.

Tell me, what's classy about being a lamb to the slaughter, because for the life of me, I don't see your point. 

[PistoldPete]

2 hours ago, Ghost of Clough said:

You cannot use "need to have a competitive squad" as an excuse. If that's what the administrators use to defend out transfer activity then the appeal be flat out rejected.

Enough players should have been sold to see us through to the point where we can avoid admin. Certainly long enough to get through to the next transfer window where further sales can be made if needed. Remember, the club statement said we're approaching a "financially sustainable" position.

Since Lockdown, Derby sold Bogle, Lowe, Bennett, Evans, Holmes, Whittaker and Gordon, for combined fees well in excess of £10 million. Plus saving their wages (seven players there). Didn't renew contracts for Martin, Huddlestone, Carson, Waghorn, Marriott, Malone, Jozefzoon, and Wisdom, and only retained Curtis Davies on massively reduced wages. Huge savings in the wage bill there... sixteen players I have mentioned plus many more.  

We only missed relegation by one point.  If we had cut back any more last season we would have been relegated with severe consequences for revenue this year ... yet still had wages to pay for Lawrence, Bielik and co .. probably gone into administration in the summer.

We signed nobody this summer except for free agents on League Ones salaries. Our most valuable players,  Bielik and Knight were both injured during the summer so unsaleable.     

I think there is a strong case we did everything we reasonably could to cut costs.  

 

[PistoldPete]

11 minutes ago, Gritstone Tup said:

Sorry I have to disagree

No you choose to disagree.  

Put it this way, do you think that covid has finished with us yet? We are still affected by it financially, and we may still find no buyers as a result of the current situation. How much punishment do you think EFL should be allowed to dish out to us for losing money because of covid? Banishment from the League and extinction, as they did with Bury?

 

Is there no limit to the amount of punishment you think EFL should give us, because you think to resist shows a lack of "class"?

 

  

[vonwright]

1 hour ago, RoyMac5 said:

I don't see what isn't believable about the fact that Mel was mostly financing the club from income from the club. He might have been making up the shortfall - which would have been less in the past couple of seasons. But he couldn't have expected to cover the shortfall and the missing income?

I think the EFL's position will be that football owners are generally willing choose to cover losses, which may put them and their clubs in a precarious position but is done by choice. The extra financial burden of COVID was very real, and might have led Mel (or any other owner) to decide they wouldn't (or couldn't) cover the losses any more. But that wouldn't mean COVID was _solely_ responsible for us going into administration, since if we hadn't willingly run up huge debts before, we would have been able to absorb it. I don't think we have a good answer to the question why COVID losses were entirely responsible for forcing us into administration, and the (bigger) debts we had already run up before weren't responsible at all.

Edited October 11, 2021 by vonwright

[RoyMac5]

5 minutes ago, vonwright said:

But that wouldn't mean COVID was _solely_ responsible for us going into administration, since if we hadn't willingly run up huge debts before, we would have been able to absorb it.

Would we? It's not about the 'huge debts' (what are they?) Surely we had cash flow problems. Those were solely down to Covid. 

[basilrobbie]

I think trying to argue that you were never in danger of administration is a bit disingenuous. You didn't have to go into administration at all, did you? It was a tactic that suited the financial interests of MM to put you there.

I don't deny that COVID has hit some clubs hard, including Derby, but if you want to look at clubs who have really suffered go and have a look at what has happened to Dover Athletic.  In their case, they were made to choose between taking on a debt that they felt they couldn't sustain, or take a heavy fine and points deduction when they chose not to fulfil fixtures they couldn't afford to play. That's suffering on an altogether different scale. 

 

[Comrade 86]

50 minutes ago, Pearl Ram said:

Yeah coz we’ll get one of them. ?

Already had two, have we not! The former found in our favour, the latter saw the fitting post-appeal punishment as being nothing more than a paltry £100K fine. 

Frankly, you can roll your eyes all you like, but we're now in administration and I'd say that's ample punishment for using an amortisation policy that was neither outlawed under the EFL's own regs, nor FRS 102 non-compliant. These facts seem to have been lost in a tidal wave of fear and self-loathing that I'm totally at a loss to understand.

[Abu Derby]

The way these appeals work it’ll be well into next year before the verdict is reached.