Professor

On the minus side, we don't have a squad that is remotely ready for CC1, with a lot of gaps to fill, and maybe more gaps to come. On the plus side, if the new owner is able to fund a rebuild, the 10 points deduction is not that important. The top four teams in League 1 last season would still have made the playoffs even with a 10 point deduction, so if we are competing at that level, promotion is a realistic prospect - BUT - it does depend on the funds to bring in some genuine quality.

The new board will not make announcements on management or players until they have control but its reasonable to think they are making their plans. An approach to WGS - even if he turned it down - would be great as it would demonstrate the level of ambition, but the first action must be an interview with Wotte to tell him their intentions.

New ownership, break with the past, sorry for Wotte as he's done the right things to try to get through this period. I'd like to see a well-known name who will attract players to come here and demonstrate we have ambition. How about WGS? No compensation to get him here, and a chance for him to prove again that he can do it.

SFC RIP 1898 - 2009 .... premature?

Has anyone heard a quote from MLT recently?

Any purchaser is better than none. Of course we'd all like a White Knight but it isn't going to happen. Saints fans have spent far too much energy slagging off the boardroom, so whoever it is, lets get behind them so that fan unrest is not a distraction as it has been for far too long.

And in the meantime, Brighton have found a fan (board member) who is putting £80m of his own money into the club because the banks won't fund their new stadium.

Not sure that people 'invest' in professional football in order to make money. It may not be love of this club for for everyone involved in these bids, but I think there is genuine interested in being involved in the game. Anyone just looking for an investment opportunity will try almost anything except football! The point Um makes about any group having money to take the club forward is a real worry though. If the bidders are struggling to convince the Administrator that they can pay him, how can they find anything to spend on the team except what the club earns through the gate and the usual commercial activities - which leaves us worse off than we were before with less gate income.

The obsession with Lowe goes on and on, but through the red mist people seem to overlook the role of Michael Wilde, who climbed on the anti-Lowe bandwagon - changed the board at entirely the wrong time with his threatened EGM, appointed a bunch of nobodies to run the club incompetantly and allowed £7m to be wasted, then stood back while Leon Crouch oversaw the running down of the club's finances. As for Lowe, his biggest personal mistake was in coming back last year to try to save the club, but if he hadn't, does anyone seriously believe that things would have been any different if a different chairman and manager had simply meant that the club's insolvency had become apparant earlier in the season.

What a shock - the odds suggest most bets on Leeds, Norwich and Charlton. Hard to understand why anyone would bet on Saints as its a complete unknown as to which first chioice players will still be here next year. Relegation may be more likely than promotion for all we know at the moment.

Yes, lets change the manager again - after all, this one's had over 3 months and I'm sure we can get someone worse.

Its a nice thought, but a consortium may not be one leader, although hopefully they will have one vision, but will a new manager and new players be any better than what they replace? Mike Ashley has spent £250m of his own money at Newcastle and they are closer to the drop this afternoon than they were this morning. There are no guarantees in this game, except one - the fans will ultimately blame the chairman.

Might depend on what second hand shirts are on the market.........

You have to look on this as an auction - the winning bidder must expect to pay more than the others, but the bids will be complex, not just straight cash and the Liquidator needs be sure that the funds are real. It could be that Pinnacle is not strictly the 'leading contender' but just the most high profile and most popular with fans, partly due to the MLT link, which could be why they are being pressed to put up or shut up. If they can put up, so much the better, but if not to them, it does at least look likely that a sale will happen. The concern continues to be whether the winning bidders, whoever they are, will have any funds left over for team building. If the creditors don't get all their money back they won't expect to see the buyers then able to go in for big spending. As others have pointed out, the liquidator must favour the creditors, which may not suit the fans beyond just seeing the club survive.

Pleased to see Skacel out of the door, despite him being a consistent player - consistently lazy - and that some other exits were inevitable. A squad that wasn't good enough to stay in the CCFC is not likely to be good enough for promotion from L1, so changes are needed. But there must be some advantage in most of the team having played together for 12 months, so hopefully the core of the first choice first team can be retained.

The reality check needed is to remember that for players, football is a job, and a career that lasts for 15 years if they are lucky. Players don't come to Southampton because this is the club they want to play for, they come because its the best offer available for them at the time. Players are not fans, and fans should remember that.

I usually ignore this poster, but the level of abuse provokes a response. It is interesting to speculate what people of this mindset would have said about Pearson if (1) Lowe had appointed him and (2) relegation had happened anyway. This name-calling could be dismissed as childish and part of the blame culture if it were not so deeply unpleasant. It is a matter of regret that people using this kind of language follow the team I have supported for 50 years.

A very realistic thread and a good explanation of why those who have been recommending administration almost since the start of the season simply failed to understand the risks involved. It is too easy to think that the club can do a flight of the Phoenix, free of debt, as Bates tried to do with Leeds - although even he still seems to be bogged down with legal actions. The club may come out of of this, we all hope it will, but the risk that it will not is very real.

I suppose this could be a mild insult, or just an admission of being a bit slow on the uptake. I'll take it as the former and just feel sad as to how divisive some saints fans have become. Probably one of the contributory reasons to why we are where we are. As to the point, each of the potential futures for the club has a range of possible outcomes. Optimistically, people have been saying we can get promotion - one comment was the usual "we can walk.....". On this side of the card there is the somewhat forlorn hope of a wealthy group putting millions into team building and Saints being the next QPR/Leicester/Man City. The pessimistic options run through to another relegation, caused by the points deduction, after which for any club in Div 2 the Blue Square is the next trapdoor. Is that inconceivable? This thread was a reminder that people should focus on the potentially bad outcomes as well as the good ones. If a fall comes it will be very painfull. There is a third possible outcome, which is that things stay much as they are. We may stay in Div 1 for a few seasons, might even get back to the CCC at some point, but the Prem may become a distant memory. But for fans brought up on seeing the club playing the top sides, even this 'middle way' carries its own share of pain.

We are relegated anyway - regardless of the deduction, so does that fact get in the way? What ensured our relegation was the emptying of the clubs coffers over the previous two season - when incidentally Lowe wasn't on the board - but hell, lets blame him for trying to pull it round.

Was going to rattle the cage again - it can be a lot of fun, but others are doing it very well......

Last time Saints were in the third level - the old Third Division - so were York City. Saw an advert today for an upcoming game: Lewes v York City in the Blue Square premier. And York are 17th in that league! If SFC even survives the next few weeks it could still be that the new owners are underfunded and with the points deduction there could be another relegation next year and then...... Of course it won't happen. Will it?

Why should I boycott my club because of who is in the boardroom. This anti-Lowe stuff has always been bordering on the mindless because there is certainly no logic to it. Can't see it happening myself - although if Lowe were to resurrect the club without the debt, I suppose that might even seem quite clever, but after Bates and Leeds, would the league allow it? If that happened and I was a creditor I'd not be too happy.

Not sure on what grounds Art presumes to present this comment as if it should somehow carry more weight than an individual opinion. There are nine pages on this thread at this point which shows how many saints fans want to express views on anything to do with potential buyers. Inevitably there is proper secrecy around the potential sale but that is no reason for fans not to speculate. Nothing said on here will have any effect at all on any negotiations but the issues are well worth talking about.

Fantstic hindsight in some of these posts. DMG was a prolific scorer in the reserves. If you don't give a player like that a chance to do the same in the first team then Shearer and Le Tiss would never have had their chances either. You cant say whether a player will reach that standard until he does, and it needs more than a couple of games to find out. It doesn't make sense to blame the manager when these things cannot be predicted. As for the past two seasons, last year's squad and this years, neither have been good enough to compete in the CCC - so if the managers are to blame its all four of them, not just Poortvleit. The so called 'big names' on high wages left behind by Burley were no better (except for about 1 place in the table) than the so called 'kids' who replaced them, although I'm not sure that Wooton and Perry qualify as kids....