WaccoeOnline

49 minutes ago, VillaChris said:

Was that at the time Warnock was your manager? I remember in his excellent book he said Ken Bates appointed him and the next week sold the club and the next owners barely had any money although I don't know Leeds ownership line of succession to know if that was GFH.

Always struck me as odd the success Warnock had in the past and now at Cardiff and yet he did nothing at Leeds the 18 months he was there and eventually the Leeds fans were chanting for him to be sacked.

Pretty similar to Steve Bruce!

Warnock is another story.  True that Bates stripped the club bare then sold to a bunch of chancers from a boiler room operation in Bahrain (who had managed somehow to get in on a much bigger deal that might have seen us bought by PSG level owners, but cocked it up so much the dare to dream prospective owner walked away leaving us with the brokers not the money).

To be fair it started out ok with Warnock, and he seemed to get on with the fans.  But it quickly turned sour as he refused to travel up to Leeds a lot of the time, preferring his cottage in Cornwall, spending only 3 days a week with the club and leaving the rest to the likes of Keith Curle to run for him.  He brought in some of his old mates - Michael Brown, Paddy Kenny, Michael Tonge - and played them regardless of performance (there were lots of rumours as to why), whilst neglecting the youth who were the talent at the club.  We - somehow - managed to loan a young Ross Barkley for a season and Warnock left him on the bench in favour of his abject mates.  

Final nail in the coffin was a deeply dodgy deal in which he swapped club icon/hero striker Luciano Becchio to Norwich for Steve Morison.  After Becchio had scored 20 goals for the club by Christmas.  Morison scored almost none for us, and we struggled for the rest of the season, with the crowd on his back, and him doing his best to alienate all those around him.

He probably hated it at Leeds.  He was recruited, then what remaining talent we had (Snodgrass, etc) were sold from under him, he didn't have much cash to spend on assembling a side.  But he didn't help himself,  and encountered a fanbase who thought he should feel honoured to be allowed to manage the club, whilst he thought we should be grateful for being blessed with his genius.  Given that only months before we were chanting "Warnocks a ****, his wife's a s**g" in his previous jobs, this may not ever have been a marriage that would have worked.

FWIW Leeds succession was

Ridsdale - crashed the club by overspending
Professor Mckenzie (from Leeds business school) - out of his depth, saw us relegated
Gerald Kranser "konsortium" - Leeds based consortium, headed by insolvency specialist, sold the ground, nearly got us out of trouble then lost their nerve and sold to Bates because he was willing to take the mess off their hands without inspecting the books (because -0 presumably - that didn't matter to his plans for financially engineering benefit to himself)
Bates - evil vampire.  A whole book could be written of the sickening stuff he inflicted on us, including dodgy admin, split fanbase, points deduction, numerous dodgy building deals,  asset stripping, failing to buy back ground, relegation to third tier, selling off all our talent shortly after promotion, condemning us to more time in championship when others - Leicester, Norwich, etc leapfrogged us, eventually extracted all the cash he could ran the wreck into the sand.  Indescribeably unpleasant and evil.  Had his own weekly radio show (on his own radio station) which he used to denounce the fanbase for being trouble makers, etc.
GFH - gulf based spivs who it first appeared were fronting for proper money and then grabbed us with no money and no plan beyond trying to "flip" us to the next bunch of marks.  No-one would buy us as we were a basket case, so they got their cash back by forcing us to pay them "management fees" for owning us, using money borrowed at high interest from partner companies of theirs.  At one point things were so bad, our CEO/MD who was an employee of theres was paying bills using his personal credit card (he was a problem case himself, what with Walter Mitty delusions, his own takeover games, spy cameras in the toilets, etc....).  They screwed things up so badly they were desperate not to sell to anyone sane, and managed to find and groom a mad italian who bought without doing sufficient due diligence.
Cellino - genuine lunatic - whether it was cocaine or mental balance issues was never wholly clear.  Sacked all the staff of the club. Employed David Hockaday as manager, bought appalling italian journeymen into the club and split the dressing room, cultivated a cult of personality using social media that split the fanbase into violently opposing factions, brought Verne Troyer into the club.  Ran out of cash and was eventually run out of town selling to
Radrizanni  - our first competent owner (it seems) since 2002/03.  Appears to have stopped the rot and appointed a decent manager (after a first season in charge fiasco).  But - for now - jury is out. 

Writing it all down (and its only partial) brings the full horror of my adult life as a football fan into perspective.  I've pretty much never known a successful Leeds United whilst of age.  If even half of what appears to be happening to you turns out as it might, you may have a long tunnel ahead.

If you want a proper laugh about terrible owners out of their depth.  When GFH - the skint dishonest Arab bank owned us, one of their hapless senior executives Salem Patel - joined Waccoe, our equivalent of VillaTalk under the very secret username “Melas” pretending to be an ordinary fan asking questions like “if you were the owner of the club what sort of players do you think you would buy?”

They were too cheap to employ people who knew anything about football so we’re reduced to asking a messageboard what they should be doing...

Oh how we laughed...Of course within a year when they couldn’t pull off the flip they were hoping for post takeover they were stripping cash and assets  and sending them back to Bahrain.  But we did laugh at the time...

Wonder if Tony has a secret account on VillaTalk?  And which poster he might secretly be.

5 minutes ago, Rob182 said:

There’s a difference between ‘mocking/insulting/dismissing’ and deciding not to believe every report that leaks out of the arsehole of the gutter trash. As I’ve said all along, there are things we can’t refute, such as Keith’s sacking, the missed tax bill and now a €1.75m Carlos Sancez loan payment being cashed in 1 month early (for half, 6 months early for the other half). But I’m still inclined to wait and see what transpires before I start calling Xia broke.

The fact that someone disagrees with you, and doesn’t appreciate the constant scoffing (oh, and sarcastic comments?) at that different opinion doesn’t make it ridicule. 

To be fair as a relative expert in seeing a much loved club fall apart, doing a deal to bring forward £1m of cash from 5 July to mid June suggests that you are in very serious trouble.  This isn’t normal behaviour and suggests you’ve maxed out overdrafts (or had facilities suspended) and already spent the season’s season ticket cash.  Given high season ticket sales your match day walk up income will be lower. Meaning even more problems through the autumn. Another fun experience we had with the incompetent vampires who wrecked out club.

This is the Companies House document most recently filed.  It isn’t an overdraft.  Rather it’s confirmation you’ve  sold your future rights to income from Carlos Sanchez Moreno transfer to Macquarie.  https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02502822/charges/wJGR7sRMqGKJRm9YT_T8bQEcIHw  I’m not sure this is news anyway, is it?

Cash must have been tight this month-end as it doesn’t look like it brought forward significant cash.  Basically signed over the right to £1m expected on 5 July 2018 and £750k due on 5 Jan 2019.

Of course that leaves you £1m down on expected cash flow for July.  And who cares about January.  Even before you consider the sort of fee Macquarie will have extracted for advancing you the cash.  Eerily familiar from a Leeds perspective.

If there is any consolation, Ken Bates did much the same at Leeds stripping out pretty much all releasable cash before he finally flogged the club.  So you might be about to sell.  Mind you so did GFH before nearly taking us into another admin because there was no money left to pay our bills.  Have you had any reports locally of contractors not being paid? We ended up with half of our training pitches out of action when we had enough money to get them dug up but not enough to get them relaid...

Presumeably your brilliant season ticket sales (compared to us) won’t help as you’ll have spent it already, meaning that at the one point in the year when you should be swimming with cash you’re already skint and things can only get worse.  Although iirc at Leeds the finance company doing the loans to fans for our season ticket sales only paid out in tranches as the season went on to avoid any liability if we went bust mid-season and were unable to fulfil our fixtures.  That was comforting at the time...  

1 hour ago, DCJonah said:

Its like the trump mentality all over again. 

"There was no collusion with russia" turns to "we don't care that there was collusion with russia"

"Of course xia is wealthy and honest" turns to "who cares if it wasn't true, he is trying to pay the bills each month"

This is a man, who when he bought the club, said on the record that he was worth way more than a billion. Who now needs outside investments, or seeking other ways to pay £5 million bills. And some think thats a reason to defend him. 

Amazing.

You are speed running what happened to us. Exactly the same behaviour by the more deluded/smug/complacent sections of the fan base. No evidence. Oh there is evidence but actually it proves everything is ok.  Those worrying are the problem not the heroic owner/leader.  Those to blame are the leakers.  And the press, just recycling old stories and hoping Leeds Villa fail.  Whatever, I’m willing to give Ken David Massimo Tony (why do those idiots always refer to them by their first name? Do they imagine some sort of personal relationship?) a chance.  Repeat until the season is wrecked before it begins and the club sliding towards being bought by the next one in line willing to buy without due diligence because they are (1) another lunatic or (2) an even bigger crook.  

Best of luck.  A good rule when you’re in this sort of hole is that it’s always worse than you first thought.  That owners who claim to be billionaires with little external evidence to verify it usually have closer to zero cash.  That the owner who got you into the mess almost definitely shouldnt be trusted to get you out of it (why would anyone rationally think this?). And that white knights don’t tend to swoop in to buy clubs haemorrhaging cash when they could wait until someone else cops that loss.

A lot of Leeds fans watching this forum from Waccoe with jaws dropped at the extent to which some of the deluded on VillaTalk are almost carbon copies of the “no problems here, move on, move on, stop causing trouble by worrying” idiots in the Leeds fan base during our endless car crash.  Feel for you as a lone voice who seems to actually get what is happening to your club.

4 minutes ago, dounavilla said:

What's your agenda on here ?

Nowt, mate.  Villa are a decent club, steeped in history like ours is/was.  Down on its luck like we were.  Frankly think its shocking that community institutions that are vulnerable can be bought by chancers and borderline crooks and then senselessly trashed.  Just sharing insight from our plight - we've gone through three owners who should never have been let near us and wasted fifteen or so years at the bottom of the pile.  Lots of clubs go through difficulties, but few become laughing stocks/pity cases like we ended up.  Looking from the outside, it looks like you guys are being lined up to be the next big club shafted by bad owners (the only question outstanding is how bad), so offering views from a fanbase thats been there.  Happy to leave you to it, if you'd prefer.

13 hours ago, PompeyVillan said:

We don't have enough information to make any accurate judgements. We know the financial situation is less than ideal but we don't know the true extent of the issues. To suggest it's a Leeds type scenario is making assumptions. I wouldn't say it was a totally unfair assumption, but an assumption nonetheless.

That's not defending the owner, because I've criticised him massively, I want him gone. 

To put the club in a shit or bust situation is crazy, I can't believe he has. Equally we don't know how 'bust' we are. 

Let's wait and see what happens eh, there's not a huge amount we as fans can do anyway.  

13 hours ago, av1 said:

Absolutely. 

At this point we know that he is a shit businessman who clearly hasn't got a clue about running a football club. 

However, with the information available, to call him a crook, a fraud, chancer, conman etc is premature and complete conjecture.  

 

You see this is the stuff that “sensible” voices kept saying at Leeds.  And then it turned out - repeatedly - we were way more ****ed than even the worst worriers were worried about.

Looking back those saying “no proof so far”, “too early to be certain they are lying crooks”, “it’s all conjecture and conspiracy”, “I’m willing to give them a chance” were as wrong and as damaging to fan unity as those who cynically threw in their lot with the varied ****ers who were ruining us.

It made ramping up the pressure to move the scum who wrecked us on much harder and allowed them to get away with degrading  our club for that much longer.  It also fed the idea that those who wanted change were somehow disloyal to the club - “just causing trouble”, “support the club or **** off home” and the idea that somehow journalists teasing away at the truth had an agenda to damage the club (when often the reverse was the case), etc.

Im sure those “sensible heads” got a whole load of satisfaction from showing how much more mature and stable they were than those desperately worried about the future of our club.  Looking back, they were the idiots getting it very wrong.  Although as ever these types in time move on without shame to find other things to be smug and superior about on their forums of choice (though hopefully in our case with our crises seemingly over, stuff that is less important to the future of our club).

Sorry to continue to pop by.  But its fascinating seeing you guys go through pretty much all the stuff we've done multiple times in the last 12 years.  Bottom line is that you have - at best - a chancer of an owner who looks like he gambled more than you could afford to lose and now cant dig you out of it.  With a fair likelihood that the reality of the situation is far worse than what has yet been publicly revealed (in our experience it almost always is).  Given that, it seems laughable that any of you are sticking to defending your owner and suggesting blame doesn't ultimately lie with him for the state you are in.  He owns the club, chooses the senior employees, is responsible for your clubs financial health.  And has clearly messed it up so severely you're going to have to sell your best players, and probably half of your car parks just to get to the end of the year.  

Unfortunately, for some fans its like stockholm syndrome with owners.  No matter how objectively terrible, crooked, incompetent or evil, a section of the fanbase (unfortunately for us quite a large one when we were dealing with the likes of Bates, Cellino and GFH) will continue to find excuses for them or even support them even when everything is falling at part.  At times seeming to value loyalty to the idiot wrecking owner than to club or fellow fans.  Making it harder for decent and sensible fans to push together to get them out and the club able to start to rebuild.

Of course from the outside its darkly funny to see others being lined up to suffer as badly as us (or even a fraction as badly as us).  But if you really love your team, you'll learn from all the crap we went through, and at least try to stay united as a fan base, and recognise that if there is blame for what is going wrong it sits fairly with the guy who made the decision to buy your club and who has for whatever reason (idiocy? criminality? walter mitty delusions? money laundering? utter incomptence) left you on the edge of what could be a very deep hole.

Oh yeah, and if your owner is lying to you about small things, it usually means he is lying to you about almost everything else, including the really important stuff.  If an owner starts lying to you about anything, however trivial, alarm bells ought be going off all over the place.

5 minutes ago, JAMAICAN-VILLAN said:

According to some Villa fans on here he is the best Manager you or us could ever hope to attract and he's done it 4 times you know?

Would be a coup.

Laughing now.  If we end up with the fat faced failure, wont be laughing then.  The look on his face at Elland Road when we all started singing about him...  "Jimmy Saville...he's fingered Steve Bruce..."  If it started to go wrong, it almost certainly wouldn't end well as relationships go.

Some rumours that if Leeds don't get Bielsa, we'll end up with your fat dinnerlady in our dugout.  Wouldn't be popular - a dinosaur of a coach who seems to need lots of money to deliver and walks away too easily from failure.  

2 minutes ago, sne said:

We kinda know this from earlier trying to flog Gabby, Richards, Hutton, N'Zogbia and so on.

This is nothing new for us, rather the opposite.

Aye.  Was just slightly surprised by the happy story told in the post I was replying to.  Its pretty horrible being on the end of where you are at the moment.  Frankly criminal that big clubs who have roles as community institutions and sources of identity can be bought and wrecked by idiots, criminals and chancers (we’ve had all of them, not sure how many of those boxes you can tick yet).   

4 hours ago, AvfcRigo82 said:

Gone: Terry, Johnstone, Tuanzebe, Samba, Hutton, Agbonlahor, Snodgrass, Onomah, Grabban, Bunn, Amavi freeing up alot of wages.

Sold: Gollini. £3.8m

Sell: Richards, Elphick, De Laet, McCormack, Tshibola, Gil, Lyden, Gardner, Whelan, Lansbury, Hogan potenitally bringing in a further £15m-£20m and freeing up huge wages.

Would leave us with:  Steer, Bree, Elmo, Chester, Taylor, Bjarnasson, Grealish, Jedinak, Hourihane, Green, Adomah, Kodja, Davis and needing to sign/loan/use youth in 11/12 players over 6 positions.

Youth to nurture in: Steer, Suliman, RHM, Doyle-Hayes, Green, O'Hare, Davis.

 

Having been through multiple fire sales at Leeds United don’t assume getting rid of fringe players to free up wages is easy.  Particularly when they and the clubs they might go to know you are desperate.  

Who for example would buy Ross McC given his recent record?  If you want him off your books you won’t get a fee and might need to find most of his wages for the remainder of his contract.  At this stage of his career and with his history getting in the £££ will be a priority.  So expect to have to buy some  out of their contracts at some big cost.  

And others you might sell down the league who’d be willing to go, you might have to either let them go on a free or agree to pay a proportion of their wages going forward to get the deal done.  As they/their agents won’t want a pay cut just to bail out the club that is selling them.  We ended up paying most of the wages for the likes of Danny Mills even after we’d sold him to Manchester City.  It barely made financial sense but we were desperate so it happened.  Remember at the time Mills was playing for England and what you would have thought was a saleable asset.  But our desperate situation let to us being totally screwed over.  This site takes a while to load but gives the basics on the history of that shambolic deal and us doing the same for Nick Barmby and Robbie Fowler. https://web.archive.org/web/20061020080048/http://www.givemefootball.com/display.cfm?article=8390&type=1  

Finally, there will be some players - the ones you could get real money for - who will stitch you up because they/their agents can.  Read this story from back during our first meltdown https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2407449/Leeds-fury-as-Kewell-pockets-4m.html. Would Grealish or Chester do the same to you that Kewell did to us?

Have a read of this as well https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/jan/17/newsstory.premierleague200203 - if I were you I’d focus on the wages off the books and halve that saving for the first couple of years.  Assume you’ll be paying a lot of departing players wages for a while hitting your wage budget for next season and the one after that.  And reduce your expectations on transfer income.  Experience at Leeds is any deals you do will be gut wrenchingly worse than you could ever imagine.

26 minutes ago, Villa Stu said:

So would that make you, as a Villa fan, not want to play for Villa?

Money.  And the chance to play in the Premiership.  Leeds lost Delph, Milner, Smith, Danny Rose, Byram, Cook, Taylor, Howson, all our youth with potential over the course of our disaster. Probably a full team of premiership quality players.  I’m sure they all loved to play at Elland Road.  But as professional footballers with short careers and no certainty of ever seeing premiership stadiums or wages if they stuck with us, they all went.  Perhaps with tears in their eyes but definitely with wallets fat with signing on fees.

Just now, TheAuthority said:

Do you do children's parties?

OK, I'll stop now

But there were times when our forum was pretty much just filled with this sort of stuff, week after week after week.  The football became almost irrelevant, in the face of the appalling stuff happening behind the scenes...

15 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

See if you can guess who has been running our catering since February 2017 on a five year deal.

One of the first things our first sane owner in fifteen years did was buy his way out of our catering mortgages contracts.  Its been a long, indescribably awful fifteen years  

15 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

That money we had off Burnley was to help pay last months wages so I've just read. An unarmed player, says there is fear among the players they won't get paid at the end of this month. We just seem to be leaking huge amounts of money everywhere. Not sure how quickly we are going to be able to tie a knot in it. We owe absolutely millions, and our general outgoings are millions per month. 

The thing about loss making football businesses is that some of the black holes go on for miles.  Start checking for “interesting” companies emerging with familiar names as directors as some of those with an interest in such things try to shuttle money out of the club to themselves before the music stops.  At one point LUFC cancelled Radio Leeds’ commentary rights and was paying another part of the web of companies associated with our then owner to broadcast our games.   Actually foregoing real cash in for broadcasting rights in order to create a conduit for yet more funds to be funnelled out of the club.  Some of the pricing on building projects was “interesting” as well... the stories that could be told...  of course at the time our CEO was the bloke who now runs the EFL, Shaun Harvey....FFS

1 hour ago, sharkyvilla said:

Southampton went on a similar journey to league 1 and administration and rebuilt the club.  They were lucky that Liebherr picked them up from administration rather than some of the crooks Leeds had.

More advice, turn off your swear filter and change the rules about allowing foul language.  With what you might be about to suffer you’ll need all the opportunity to vent that you can.

6 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

Thanks for the offer of sympathy, your message doesn't inspire much hope, so condolences right back at you for what's evidently been tough times.

There are lots of lessons, none of them hopeful.

One bit of advice - looking on here, you see lads taking sides, suggesting more time should be given to the owners; cheering on or jeering the bloke who was your CEO.

Our experience is that if you think the worst of all of those ****s you will always be closer to the truth.  The sorts of evil, incompetent or exploitative ****ers who are doing to your club what they did to ours think nothing of splitting and dividing the fan base to their own ends.  All of them are different sorts of evil and in it for themselves.  Particularly when you are right up against it.  Don’t believe anything they tell you and when stuff is leaked focus less on why it is true and more on why it has been leaked.

Also (and this is tough) recognise that the strength of the fan base is what makes you vulnerable to these people.  If you (or Leeds) didn’t have a fan base who would stick with the club thick and thin there would be no cash flow to leech off as you die a slow death.  And find value in engineering solutions that enable them to profit from your corpse.  If we’d had less fans we’d have been wiped out and reemerged as a phoenix club and probably made it back to the premiership faster and in better shape than through the endless attempts by crooks and incompetents and crooked incompetents to “save” Leeds United.

Hopefully your nightmare will be shorter than ours.  We lost our ground, all our decent players, our training ground, our dignity, everything.  We’re only now starting to rebuild.  It’s been shit for us one way or another since 2004 give or take. Kids have grown up in Leeds - their entire childhood without a successful local team to support.  Damage and a lost potential fan base that will never be mended.  If you haven’t been there you can’t understand.  But maybe you soon will...