[ENG] Premiership 2007/2008 (7 Viewers)

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Enron

Enron

Tickle Me
Moderator
#1,203
Oct 11, 2005
75,252
#1,203
Rafa better quit fucking around. If Pool don't quit tying relegation candidates, Rafa may have to find a new job this summer. I love the guy and don't want him to go but this shit just isn't acceptable. The new owners don't seem to be guys that will accept mediocrity in the Premiership.
 
Salvatore

Salvatore

3Seghe
#1,209
May 22, 2007
37,256
#1,209
Reds Refuse To Help Out Mad Hatters
Liverpool have stunned Luton Town by refusing to donate the League One strugglers their share of Sunday's gate receipts

League One strugglers Luton Town have suffered a major blow with the news that Liverpool have refused to donate their share of the gate money from Sunday's game.

The two sides face off in an FA Cup third round tie at Kenilworth Road this weekend, a game that's extremely important for Luton in more ways than one.

The Hatters are facing financial ruin having already been placed into administration and subsequently docked 10pts. They could even go bust if a new buyer to take on the club's debt is not found by 5pm on Monday.

Money Spinner

Bearing all this in mind, a home tie against Premiership giants Liverpool is a real money spinner, with bumper crowds expected to turn out for what is the Reds' second FA trip to the town in three years.

Although gate money is officially shared between clubs, it has long been a tradition that richer top division sides donate their half of the proceedings to smaller clubs.

But Liverpool have this week refused to grant Luton their £200,000 portion of receipts, something that has angered the Hatters as they fight for their lives. “They probably said: 'We have to pay players £100,000 a week. You must be joking! Otherwise we will be like you!" bemoaned Luton boss Kevin Blackwell.

"You just have to accept it. There are people in life who have got a Rolls Royce while some people have a Mini. We are Mini drivers. We tried to live like a Rolls Royce but that’s why we are where we are.”

Reds Also In Trouble?

Liverpool refused to comment on the story, but their refusal to cough up only heightens suggestions that the Reds themselves are facing financial troubles. Owners Tom Hicks and George Gillette have already been forced to scale down extravagant plans for a new stadium to save money, while the Americans are having difficulty refinancing £220m of debt they took out to buy the club last year.

_________________________

Liverpool are going to demolish Luton anyway so there is no point in not letting them have the money, considering Lutons financial position.
 
Salvatore

Salvatore

3Seghe
#1,210
May 22, 2007
37,256
#1,210
To continue on from that, I have a Luton Town supporters thoughts + article:
The problem was we couldn't afford the £500'

Luton's Kevin Blackwell tells Daniel Taylor why visit of Liverpool could dig the club out of a big hole

Saturday January 5, 2008
The Guardian


Kevin Blackwell is still in his slippers when he comes to his front door. He has been suffering from a heavy cough and, with respect, looks bloody awful. It is the third time, he explains, that he has had a bug in the last nine months and, as he slumps into a chair and puffs out his cheeks, it is tempting to wonder whether it might be stress-related. There is no football club in the country where the manager is not under strain, but Luton Town? This is a club that should come with a government health warning.

Article continues

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Tomorrow Blackwell will be out of his sick bed as Luton take on Liverpool in the FA Cup, a tie that will earn the League One club around £500,000, which, to put it another way, at least means the players will be paid for another month. The FA Cup is supposed to be about glamour and romance but, at Kenilworth Road, there are men in suits (administrators) who, without exaggeration, would rather the club did not pull off any giant- killing exploits if they can get a draw and a money-spinning replay at Anfield.
For Blackwell, it has been another difficult experience following his spell in charge of a financially shipwrecked Leeds United, where the boardroom buffoonery was so extreme he likens the Peter Ridsdale regime to a scene from Blackadder. "You can see Baldrick," he says, slipping into character. "We've lost £40m but, aha, I've got a cunning plan, let's buy another £40m and put it in the hole. Don't worry if there's a new hole over there because here's another cunning plan: we'll get another £40m. That's what it was like."

Luton, his home-town club, also appear to have operated by the theory of chaos, culminating in "Black November" when the Football Association announced 55 disciplinary charges concerning payments to agents, two directors resigned from the board and, most damagingly for Blackwell, the club fell into administration.

"I had 15 minutes to get hold of all the players before it was announced," he explains. "I told them there was nothing we could do about it, but that's not what they wanted to hear. A lot of these lads aren't on the money that people assume. I've got lads on £7,000 a week but others on £175 or £400. They weren't paid in November and, overall, in the last nine weeks they've had 2½ weeks' wages - under 30%. These lads have got mortgages and bills and it doesn't take a genius to work out they're going to be under a lot of pressure at home. One or two of their wives were crying, and understandably so. It's unnerving for everyone."

The current debt is not clear, but Luton's financial position can be accurately described as dire given the story Blackwell tells about the suppliers of their match balls ringing the club after one game. "We hadn't paid for the balls," he says, "and the firm who supplied them wanted them back."

Another story is of the club appealing against one of their three red cards from a 1-1 draw at Bristol Rovers on Boxing Day. "The problem was we couldn't afford the £500 fee," says Blackwell. "We chipped in together because we thought it was important. But the FA upheld the ban and added another game because, in their words, it was frivolous and we were wasting their time. That was another £500 gone."

Forgive Luton, then, if their priority against Liverpool is about finance rather than the sense of occasion, especially at a time when Blackwell's predecessor, Mike Newell, is suing for wrongful dismissal and could feasibly win a six-figure sum. "It could be seen as one of the bigger games in the club's history because without the half a million quid we would be in serious, serious trouble," says Blackwell.

"It gives us time to bring in a buyer. But administration has come at a bad time for us: in the middle of a season, coming up to the transfer window. We haven't got a buyer in place and we've somehow got to raise enough money to get us through to the end of the season. Which means selling players. We've already had two concrete offers and, in our position, we can't stop our players talking to the other clubs. We hope they don't go, but we can't even guarantee them their wages."

He says he would never have joined the club if he "had known what it was going to be like" and is appalled by what he perceives as a chronic lack of help from the authorities. For starters, he says the Football League has ordered Luton to cut the squad, originally to 20 players and then 16. "Pathetic" is the word Blackwell uses. His loan players have had to return to their clubs and the administrators have calculated they can save £5,000 by stopping overnight stays before away games. "We went to Port Vale last Saturday and didn't get there until half two because of a smash on the motorway."

Blackwell, it is important to note, agrees with the 10-point deduction the Football League automatically imposes when a club goes into administration, but the 49-year-old also has a dark theory. "Luton have been in administration three times in nine years," he explains. "In other words, we've caused the authorities more problems than any other club. And from that perspective we're not arguing. But you have to question whether the football authorities are actually quite happy to see football shrink.

"Natural wastage, you could say - let some clubs go to the wall and reduce the league. I'm being deadly serious here. Do these people genuinely want to keep the league intact? If you're ill, you get medicine. But are we getting any medicine? Not a bit. They don't give a damn whether or not we're in the league."

The problems are comparable with those Blackwell experienced at Leeds, where the club were £119m in debt at one stage and he can remember having "four different chairmen in one month". Elland Road was a nest of vipers and it was probably a miracle he lasted as long as he did given that the chairman Ken Bates, with his famous tact, once declared that ex-goalkeepers usually made bad managers.

Blackwell actually did a pretty good job at Leeds, taking them to the Championship play-off final while working against a constant backdrop of uncertainty. "From my first game, there were other managers sitting in the directors' box. Vultures. Batesy, to be fair to him, told me, 'I've had loads of people ringing me for your job.' People thought I would fail but we got Leeds within 90 minutes of the Premier League in a season when we were favourites to be relegated."

Blackwell is a popular member of the managerial set but, as can happen when Bates is involved, things ended on bad terms. Lawyers have been involved and Bates has seldom missed an opportunity to snipe at his former employee. "I have to be careful what I say because Bates will sue me," advises Blackwell. "But it says it all that when I went back to Leeds with Luton I got a standing ovation from 30,000 fans. And when I joined Luton I got 2,500 emails and messages of good luck from Leeds fans. I know the job I did at Leeds and I also know that, without a 10-point deduction, Luton would be in with a great shout of the play-offs. Nothing more needs to be said."
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That was yesterday, since then the players didn't get any wages for this month as the clubs run out of cash, from Monday if a buyer hasn't been found the flood gates will open and any offer willl be accepted (almost) for our players to get us down to the 16 professionals the FA wants us to be limited to, that will bring relegation almost certainly and can't see people busting a gut to find the money to save the club

Anyway we thought we might be able to buy ourselevs another week to hold on to our best players and find a buyer with the decent press coverage we have been gwtting the last few days by getting Liverpool to give us their share of tommorow's gate recipts, it works out at around £100,000, aound 5% of Liverpools normal home match game, which would have paid yesterdays player wages.

yep we got rejected meaning as full time whistle blows on Sunday unless we pull off an upset and manage a draw to go back to Anfield tofound the club for the next month or two the clubs almost finished
 
Salvatore

Salvatore

3Seghe
#1,214
May 22, 2007
37,256
#1,214
Bozi said:
sounds a lot like the problems Notts County were facing until recently, i hope that Luton pull through it
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Yeah does to be honest. Luton have until 5pm, Monday to do something. New owner/miracle against Liverpool. Take it to Anfield and it will be enough for maybe 2 more weeks wages and some publicity for someone with cash to take control. Basically, this all forms from the failed attempts to get a new stadium. Kenilworth Road is squeezed into a tiny space, and all plans for a new stadium have been rejected by the council. If they got a bigger stadium there would have been much more support for them, would have got them promoted as well. As you go up stairs to get to the top of a stand you can see into peoples bedrooms and living rooms! The previous owners of Luton were right twats I heard, got them into the mess in the first place.

Plus, I think this is the second time that Liverpool have sort of stuck it to Luton. In the late 80's, Luton won the Littlewoods cup (called the League Cup now), and would have gone to Europe had it not been because of the Liverpool fans in the Heysel disaster.
 
Salvatore

Salvatore

3Seghe
#1,215
May 22, 2007
37,256
#1,215
Can Luton, the club that football forgot, find salvation in the FA Cup?

Fabio Capello will today take a crash course in the other side of English football. And what better place could there be to learn about the haves and the have-nots of the game in his adopted country than the spartan stands of Kenilworth Road, where lowly Luton Town, of League One, take on lofty Liverpool, of the Premier League, in the FA Cup third round?

As Capello's Football Association limousine negotiates the narrow, terraced streets around the run-down stadium before the Italian who is England's new coach finds that he needs to peer round pillars to watch the action, he will surely question whether this is the same English game he has been watching on television these past few years and with which he has apparently been so in love. He might also ask a few questions about what happened to cash-strapped, strife-torn Luton, whom he will remember as something of a force in the English game 20 years ago when they won the League Cup and reached FA Cup semi-finals. Before, that is, the game here took off and left them behind. Before they became the club that football forgot.

"This club has rested on its laurels too much, allowed too many people to pass them by," laments manager Kevin Blackwell. "It's just been stuck in a time-warp."

Blackwell was born in the town and raised on the Kenilworth Road terraces.

He remembers being passed down to the front when he was a small boy in the Malcolm Macdonald era of the late Sixties and early Seventies, when Britain's best-loved comedian, Eric Morecambe, a resident of nearby Harpenden and a director of the club, gave Luton Town a higher profile.

After enjoyable days under David Pleat and the club's Cup exploits of the Eighties, Luton's misfortune was to be relegated the season before the start of the Premier League, with its TV-supplied millions.

It seemed Mike Newell might be leading them back to the top flight a few seasons ago.

As a Championship club, they even led Liverpool 3-1 in an astonishing FA Cup-tie two years ago before Rafael Benitez's side won 5-3 and went on to win the trophy.

But it was another false dawn and they quickly became another of the game's Icarus clubs, flying too close to the sun.

Liverpool may have their problems with American owners worrying about funding a new stadium and at odds with Benitez over the money available for buying players,but Luton would gladly exchange circumstances.

"That would be nice to see, a job swap for 12 months," muses Blackwell.

Having racked up considerable debt chasing a place in the Premier League, their best players, men such as Curtis Davies, Steve Howard and Carlos Edwards, had to be sold when the dream failed to materialise.

Newell grew discontented, amid it all speaking out about bungs in the game as well as the state of the club.

He was sacked last March, to be replaced with Blackwell, previously manager of Leeds United, also during dark financial days. But Blackwell arrived too late to prevent relegation to League One.

A new chairman arrived in David Pinkney,a local businessman and parttime racing driver.

He promised investment and a five-year plan to move the club to a desperately-needed new stadium but enthusiasm waned when he found money was haemorrhaging and he was unable to stop the bleeding.

On top, Luton were hit by more than 50 FA charges relating to previous transfer dealings, with chairman Bill Tomlins and three other directors, all now departed, cited along with a clutch of agents.

By mid-November, with the club facing a potential £3.8million lawsuit from Newell for wrongful dismissal, Pinkney decided he had had enough and took the club into administration, meaning a 10-point deduction that plunged Luton into the relegation zone.

All overnight stays for away games were stopped,Blackwell's scouting staff were sacked and mobile phone use was halted.

Two loan players were even refused an evening meal and then turfed out of their hotel, turning up for training with their suitcases until someone from the club was dispatched to pay the bill.

Brendan Guilfoyle,who had been the administrator at Leeds, was called in to do the same job at Luton.

Blackwell, still at Leeds when Guilfoyle's insolvency company arrived to investigate where it had all gone wrong in the Peter Ridsdale era, was not exactly delighted to see him again.

"There's a lot of swearing in football, isn't there?" says Guilfoyle. "When Kevin saw me at Luton, he said, 'Not you.I hope you're not going to stuff me again.' Or words to that effect."

Guilfoyle was surprised by what he found. "Not by the level of debt, which is around £4m, with £2.5m of that due to the Inland Revenue, and very low when you compare clubs like Coventry and Leeds. But I was surprised by the losses of £3m to £4m every year. And the wage bill of £3.6m."

November's wages went unpaid but an unexpected victory over Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup second round,coupled with the Liverpool draw and live TV money, means some of the projected revenue of around £350,000 could go into paying the players 55 per cent of their wages in December.

And this month? Pinkney's promise to fund the trading loss runs out. Cup windfalls are unlikely to continue.

The club may have to sell promising assets such as goalkeeper Dean Brill, mdefender Chris Coyne and midfield players David Bell, David Edwards and Matt Spring.

Though he has held off thus far, the administrator will have to accept bids, no matter how derisory. Unless...

Tomorrow at 5pm is the deadline for potential new owners to declare bids.

"Four parties have been conducting due diligence but realistically there are two shaping up and who have shown proof of funds," says Guilfoyle.

One — either a consortium of local businessmen or another embracing American money — will be chosen as preferred bidders and he hopes to persuade them to fund the club while they negotiate an agreement to pay off creditors a percentage of the debts.

Nick Owen, president of the Luton Town Supporters' Association, could even be part of a new consortium.

Yes, that Nick Owen,once of breakfast television and now a presenter with the BBC in Birmingham.

"If the group gets in that I would like to get in, it will be extremely exciting for the club," he says. The most exciting thing that could happen to Luton — and the most necessary — is a new stadium.

The facilities at Kenilworth Road are so basic they deter supporters and yield little income.

"This will be my 50th year supporting the club," says Owen, "and I can remember back then as a boy reading headline in the Evening Standard saying: 'Luton Town To Build Country's Best Stadium.' It was a 50,000-capacity on green belt land but it was turned down.

"We have a good location and catchment area, with many smaller towns around us, just off the M1 30 miles from London,with an airport and rail links. So many people tell me they would come to watch Luton if they could park, see properly and be comfortable. We have to do something."

Blackwell, on borrowed time and hoping new owners want to retain him, agrees.

"This town, this club, could be anything they want to be. But we have not been as aggressive as we should have been."

That much can be seen by the composition of Luton crowds. Though the club exist in a predominantly Asian area, few faces from that community are inside the ground on match days.

With gates around 6,000,neither have they sold their young,spirited side — bolstered by experienced campaigners such as Chris Perry, once of Wimbledon and Tottenham,and Don Hutchison — to the rest of the community.

"We are not going to go out there and not perform just because we're not getting paid. We're professionals," says Hutchison, once of Liverpool, now 36 and likely to be on Luton's bench today.

"This club is struggling but if you perform to your best someone else might think you have enough talent to play for them. Then if someone buys you, that might help this club survive. When you go on the football field you forget everything anyway.

"I'm lucky to have done well out of the game but some of the young lads have got mortgages to pay. They might not be on great money and it's tough for them. But 99 per cent play for the love of the game anyway and they will get paid eventually."

A draw or even an unlikely win today before a capacity crowd of over 10,000 would lift spirits. Steven Gerrard's absence makes that a little less fanciful but Hutchison says: "I've told the boys my ideal scenario would be a draw.

"Financially it would be good for the club. I think we can do it.We proved in our performance against Everton in the Carling Cup that if we put in the same attitude and desire and Liverpool have an off day we'll be in with a shout."

A good result could even make Luton a more attractive purchase.

Who knows, perhaps Fabio Capello will be so impressed by this slice of Olde Englishe Football, he will make a late offer.

His reputed salary of around £6m a year would be more than enough to bail them out.
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Do it Fabio :smoke:
 
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