davidjack

Just repeating it doesn't make it any less insane, Eddie. If you told every season ticket holder who endured the 13/14 season that that team had had £10m net spent on it - when the manager in charge had constantly told them he was cutting costs, and the evidence was before their eyes - they'd think you'd lost the plot.

No I'm not...but anyone with a simple grasp of arithmetic can see those accounts don't add up.

Baptiste was the year before...and if the Juke and Dawson's 3 month loans cost us £15m then PG is an even bigger financial incompetent than the accounts already say he is.

But Carlos, we've only been bringing cheaper players in than those they've replaced over the past 3 years. The wage bill drop tells you that. Both Freedman and Lennon have made that plain. So even if that 'outflow' isn't just transfers it's still bollocks - we've been spending less on wages than we did before...so how can the net spend be £16m? It's nonsense.

I've made it quite clear what I think. I don't think the figures stack up. At all. And that little sample of the accounts should raise questions in everyone's mind.

You don't give a fuck who it was spent on? Perhaps that's where we're going wrong - that people like you are prepared to accept this bullshit. All the time he was here (which was from autumn 2012) Freedman kept telling us we didn't have a pot to piss in and he was cutting our costs. We only got Spearing by loaning high earners out. And he was the only signing that I can remember that cost anything - maybe a million? So where's the other 15 gone?!

I understand the concept of cash flow thanks Eddie, what I don't understand is how you can, with a straight face, try to convince people that almost £16m went out of the club on player transfers in financial years 2013 and 2014. Are we playing monopoly all of a sudden?

Do tell us who it was spent on...I can only think of Spearing and maybe Medo...

Net cash spend on players in 2013-14 was £13m?! Where the fuck was that figure plucked from? And the idea we had a net spend every year of £8m between 2007 and 2014 is also bollocks. If those figures are representative of our accounting generally then no wonder we're £182m in debt - whether that debt's real or imaginary.

Actually, I've a feeling the one I'm thinking of was a 1-1 draw...a lot of games under the bridge since then...having said that, I'm much better at remembering scores from games back then than anything over the past 4 seasons.

Yeah, I'd have said 88-89 season.

Leeds Road, to be pedantic. Proper old school ground that was. Always seemed a decent bunch to me, Huddersfield fans. Must have missed the house bricks, though did go to a night game in the late 80s.

Get there early would be my advice...I had a ticket last year and got there a good 15 mins before ko but nearly missed it while they insisted on body searching every fucker...year before I paid on day but ticket machine broke so was kept outside for quarter of an hour and missed the start. Though given how shit we were that day I wish they'd not let me in at all.

Point taken...tho most of this thread has been about how many may or may not be going.

Are your questions normally dishonest, Gonk?

Perfectly sober pal.

It can be true - but only if we accept that Saint Eddie may, in fact, not be quite the philanthropist some make him out to be. Which was kind of my point.

I reckon there's a missing 100 million or so on those figures. Not to mention the missing millions through sheer incompetence in the transfer sales market.

That's a miscalculation on quite a grand scale. From hazy memory wasn't the sale only supposed to bring in something like £7m?

I will - it sounds like they contradict the figures that were released to the media at the time of the sale...which is rather worrying. You're not questioning the £3m a year net spend I see.

The hotel would pay for itself and our whole commercial set-up was the envy of big clubs with old grounds like Everton - so Gareth Moores told me once. Whatever happened to him?

On Anelka, we were told he cost £8m and sold for £15m - so I was rounding up slightly. He was 28, in his prime, going to the then richest club on the planet, having already sold for more money in multiple transfers than any player in history. And this was around the time Blackburn sold that forward who had one good season whose name I can't even remember for £18m - to City. Another good bit of business by Phil.

So £3m net spend a year over 10 years...7 of those being in the Prem - as I say, hardly breaking the bank were we? And the TV money doubled in that time. And we finished way above the 17th we were told we budgeted for in all of those seasons in the Prem bar the last one (at around half a million a place). And we were spending less on wages than we were bringing in. So where do you get the £170m from? (well let's say £135m cos we always had that inexplicable debt of £35m or so for years after the move from Burnden, even tho we were told the move would be cost neutral - that was part of its appeal...it wasn't profit neutral for Gordon Hargreaves, I'll wager, but that's another story).

I stand corrected - it was over 70 in one of those and over 80 in a couple. One of those years doesn't show any commercial revenue though. But the point remains that we weren't living beyond our means - we weren't spending more on wages than we were bringing in, and as we know, we never spent on huge transfers relative to where we finished (Anelka we doubled our money on - which paid for Elmander - other than that, nothing over £5m). And how come all those other clubs on those lists with much higher wage to turnover figures managed not to get themselves into £170m worth of debt?

But gonzo, the debt was rising fast when the good times were rolling (when TV revenues were going through the roof, we were finishing way above where we'd budgeted for and when our wage to turnover ratio was never over 70 per cent). That's my main beef. Yes we pissed some money away on bad signings in the last year in the Prem and first year or so down here, but name a club who hasn't wasted money - but has run up a debt anything like ours. And who oversaw these purchases? The likes of Mears and Andrews? Since getting his one big decision right - appointing Sam - he seems to have been asleep on the job. And you couldn't turn the radio on at one time without hearing him giving his view on the state of football. And now? With BWFC in the shit? Not a fucking dickie bird.