verlaine1979

Eh, as so many people are happy to blather on about the club being a business (though I dispute this definition - it's merely a convenient simplification for owners who would prefer not to imagine they have a duty of care over an important community asset), investing to grow is always inherently risky, but businesses do it all the sodding time.

You keep banging on about business, but you miss some really obvious stuff. For a start, who says that a higher investment in players wouldn't yield an even greater return? It's not as if good quality young players go down in value once they prove themselves in the league. Anyway, as you say, it's getting repetitive. You think everything's fine, and I think we've got a dud owner and that it's unfortunate for the club and supporters that we're likely to be outspent by just about everyone in the league if we really do stick to our self-sustaining model. One of us is going to be right, and I honestly hope it's you.

Whether a business is 'self-sustaining' or not depends on the competitive context in which it finds itself. I'm not sure why you struggle so much to comprehend that incredibly simple idea. If a self-sustaining club is relegated because all the clubs around it spent more money and recruited better players, what exactly has been sustained? And as for my estimate of his net worth - I suppose it's possible he's squirrelled away a vast fortune and it was just an momentary political inconvenience that prevented him from buying the club in cash. However, I'd suggest that if Jack Ma had wanted to buy Saints, he probably wouldn't have had to cobble together a loan from Hong Kong to do so. I like your optimism, and I hope you're right and that he's loaded and that he won't have to take a penny out of the club ever, and that we'll be able to compete in the league regardless of whether the clubs around us in our mini-league continue to outspend us by tens of millions every window. I'm just pretty sure that you're wrong.

Eh, since £600m is more than the entire share value of Lander, it's an improbable figure that I mentioned only because using the Forbes list, it represents a theoretical upper limit for how much money he's got. The real figure is probably no more than £200-300m, most of which is locked up in Lander, and as such, that makes him pretty poverty-stricken for a PL club owner.

As pointed out elsewhere on the thread, he's not in the Forbes China wealth list, which bottoms out at about $850m, which puts an upper limit on estimates of his wealth at around £650m. Feel free to disagree, but unless you've got a better yardstick for estimating what he's worth than going by the market cap of the only meaningful business he's ever been involved with, then by all means, bring it to the party. As for the rest, not sure if you're just being hyperbolic, but nowhere have I suggested that removing money from the club would be a crime. It would just be sh** for us fans.

What we know of Gao is that he was a bureaucrat who struck out into the private sector during the liberalisation of the Chinese economy. As such, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that his net worth is directly linked to the value of the company he founded, which has been in a slump for several years and is now valued at only about half a billion. I don't know of many entrepreneurs whose wealth exceeds the market cap of the (listed) company they founded, so I'd guess based on that, that he's worth around £200-300m on paper, a fair amount of which will be illiquid, in which case, interest payments of around £10m a year on top of the loan principal would put a pretty substantial dent in his cash flow if it was just being funded from his personal wealth. If smarter financial minds have arguments for why he might be worth a lot more than that, or where else he might be sourcing payments of that magnitude, my mind will be put at rest - but at the moment, looking at the profile of the man, I just can't see how he won't eventually have to start dipping into the kitty, even if he hasn't started right away.

Saints are a business entity owned outright by an individual. As such, there's nothing the club could do to stop Gao if he decided that part of being 'self-sustaining' was that the club start paying off the debt he incurred to acquire us. There are several ways he could set up such an arrangement, the various tax implications of which I couldn't speculate on, but to pretend that there is a chinese wall (fnar) between the club's finances and Gao's is, I would suggest, either naive or ignorant. If we were owned by a multi-billionaire who'd taken on debt as some form of financial trickery, that would be one thing. However, the entire market cap of Lander is only about £500m, and I see no reason to believe that Gao's other resources set him up to pay what I'd guess is a high-single figures interest rate on almost £200m of borrowing. That money will have to come from somewhere over the duration of his ownership, and using Man U as an example, I don't see why it's scaremongering to hypothesise that the owner might see the club's sizeable and entirely predictable revenue as a convenient source of funding.

The existential fear is that he'll have to start using club revenue to service the loans he used to buy us. All of this debate and speculation is really about trying to figure out how likely that scenario actually is.

Blimey, getting in early doors with a shout for least-accurate-take of the season? Romeu is slow and Bednarek has a decent knack for goal-line clearances, but Vestergaard is both glacially slow and rubbish in the air. Impressively, he was pretty much the exact opposite in every respect of the player we actually needed when we signed him.

Do you have reason to believe that the loan described by Bloomberg (and widely reported elsewhere at the time) doesn't exist?

"A source close to Allen said he 'believes there is long-term investment value in UK soccer.' He added: 'Southampton is a sleeping giant, a family-supported club with traditional values, and we see the value in taking the brand global.'"

Could you secure a loan against the stadium without violating the terms of Macquarie's charge against our TV central funds?

The issue with that is the likelihood that we will fall behind and eventually be relegated if most other clubs are not operating under such a constraint. By the sound of it, you'd prefer to see Saints relegated as long as it improved Gao's chance of a positive ROI.

You seem to be confused. I'm not saying that Gao is obliged to put money into the club. I'm simply pointing out that in a world where, over time, budget correlates with performance, if we spend significantly less than our peers, we will eventually fall behind them. And in football, there's a specific word for falling behind, and it begins with R. My starting point is that I want us to be competitive and work back from there. If the prevailing economic reality in the league is that the owner has to support the club for it to compete, then yes, I'll be dissatisfied if we're one of the small number of clubs in that position where the owner is either unwilling or unable to do so. I'm not really sure why you're finding this so difficult to grasp? Or are you just content for the club to be eventually relegated as long as it means we remain pure and self-sustaining?

Right, which is why nobody is comparing our spending with that of clubs like Liverpool and United. The apt comparison is the likes of Bournemouth, Leicester etc. - the clubs we imagine we should be competing with in mid-table. Those clubs have largely similar wage bills to ours, largely similar TV, commercial and matchday revenue, but they have had significantly higher net outlay on players over the past five years. If you have a moral objection to the idea of wealthy owners injecting cash into their clubs to boost league performance, that's fine. But over the medium-long term, performance in team sports tends to correlate quite strongly with budget, so the corollary of that position is being happy to see us fall behind those clubs and permanently into the lower quartile of the league that traditionally dices with relegation until eventually there's no more dicing to be done. The only alternative strategy is to hope that you can make up the difference with better-than-average recruitment, boosting revenue through player sales. However, contrary to received wisdom, we haven't really adopted this strategy with any determination: a) we don't cast a wide enough net bringing in young players with potential - recruitment has always tended to be one in, one out; b) our stance over VVD's departure suggests we don't want to be seen as a selling/stepping-stone club; c) over the past few seasons the average age of signings seems to have risen dramatically towards the 26/27 age range, in which players are already known quantities.

My expectation is continued dicing with relegation if we are consistently outspent by the clubs we imagine ourselves to be competing with (as opposed to the newly promoted).

Nothing, if it's the norm. However, if 3/4 of the rest of the league either have dramatically higher commercial revenue or an owner prepared to inject equity at the maximum rate allowed by FFP, then it becomes a problem.

Debt-laden isn't an option. You're either a club where the owner supplements income with injections of cash that convert into equity (max £105m over three seasons), or you're a club that finances itself purely from tv, sponsorship and player sales. Either way, FFP means clubs can only really be in debt to their owners, and even then not for very long without the debt being converted. Leaving aside the top six, whose commercial incomes are so much bigger than ours they don't warrant comparison, you'd have to say that the spending patterns of the likes of Bournemouth, Leicester and Everton suggest their owners are providing additional funds, while Gao is saying categorically that he wont.

The squad has been absolutely crying out for genuine pace in transition and on the counter ever since Mane left. Looks like he brings that, and can finish with either foot, which is a bonus.

Eh, Lingard got 4 goals and 3 assists in just under 1700 minutes of league football last season. Redmond got 6 goals and 4 assists in just under 3300 minutes. Taking into account the fact that Lingard has already performed well for England, there's no injustice in him keeping Redmond out of the squad when fit.

So, essentially, what you're saying is that Southgate has picked a experienced backups in case the likes of Rice, Sancho and Rashford aren't working out. Put like that, it makes copious amounts of sense to the alternative of picking similarly average players with no tournament experience.

That depends. If the club really does want to be entirely self-sustaining, then profit from player trading will have to be substantial, as wages alone eat up the vast majority of TV money. Part of the club's calculation for incoming signings this summer will have to be based which ones are the most likely to increase in value over two/three seasons. Maehle might make even more sense on those terms, with Valery stepping up to remove any anxiety over succession. I think that was probably a big part of the calculation in signing Gunn last summer when a new GK wasn't exactly a priority, and similar thinking will be in evidence with signings this year.

Moreover, Valery's delivery is still quite unreliable, and he often fails to get his cross past the opposing fullback. He exceeded expectations last year, but I'd be happy with Valery being an understudy/going on loan while Maehle hopefully has his two good years here before being sold for a profit.

No, you're just oblivious to the fact that we've got no money and he's one of few players we could sell.

Gunn made a few mistakes towards the end of the season, but he's clearly better suited to the style RH wants to play where the keeper has to be comfortable sweeping and starting moves from the back.