stevegrant

I believe it's a maximum "free" spend of £200, anything above that amount has to be paid for. Pretty poor when you're paying around £200 per head per game in the first place.

That looks like it's in Afrikaans

So they need nearly £2m just to ensure they have a majority stake, which would involve a 90+% conversion rate of pledges. If they were to raise less than £1m, they wouldn't even have the 25% required as a blocking vote!

Don't forget that ten converted pledges are required PER DAY between now and the day Birch hands over the train set to the PDT just to cover the administrator fees in that period. This working capital is being reduced on a daily basis. If we assume a (highly optimistic) conversion rate of 50%, that's around 900 pledges. If the takeover is not completed within 3 months, that pledge money will have effectively been wasted. The fans are not contributing to the running of the club, they're contributing to PKF's Christmas bonus scheme.

Er...

There are portions of the money that are paid out in stages during the season, but as the bulk of the money is determined upon how many times you're shown on TV and where you finish in the league, most of it isn't paid until the summer. The Premier League prize money pot is split in the following ways: DOMESTIC RIGHTS DEALS (Sky, ESPN, BBC, TalkSport) 50% of the pot shared equally between the 20 member clubs. For last season and this, that's £13.8m each. 25% of the pot distributed on a weighted basis depending on the number of times a team is featured in a televised game. Last season was actually the most lop-sided in terms of the bigger clubs being shown more often than ever before. From Everton in 7th all the way down the league, every club was only shown either 10 or 11 times live, with the exception of Liverpool in 8th (23 times!) and QPR in 17th (14 times). Each match is worth £585,000. 25% of the pot distributed on a weighted basis depending on the final league position, with each position worth £755,000 more than the position below them. OVERSEAS RIGHTS DEALS (Various) The whole pot is shared equally between the 20 member clubs. For last season and this, that's £18.8m each. I would expect the overseas money and the 50% equal share from the domestic money to be distributed over the course of the season, with the remaining two 25% portions of the domestic deal being paid out at the end of the season. Next season, of course, the numbers increase significantly.

Have they given a deadline for conversion of the pledges?

SPV, I think, stands for Special Purpose Vehicle, and a company under that description is often used "to hide debt (inflating profits), hide ownership and obscure relationships between different entities which are in fact related to each other" (source: Wikipedia ). Worth bearing in mind that the numbers shown there are nearly 17 months out of date. The last filed accounts for each of the companies under the club's main holding company (DMWSL613 Ltd) show the financial position as at 30th June 2011. We will get a slightly better picture at the end of March when they file the accounts for last season (they could file them now but will almost certainly wait until the last possible moment), but even they will be 9 months out of date. They should, however, include a section called "Post Balance Sheet Events", which should detail any major events or transactions that have taken place between the end of that financial period and the date the annual report is compiled. That will include the loan from Vibrac Corporation for starters...

Swansea's supporters trust owns 20% of the football club. I suspect ultimately that means they've got a bigger share in their club than the actual supporter members of the PDT will get.

Yep

Anyone with 10% or more of the shares or anyone planning to hold a position on the board of directors has to go through the Owners and Directors Test.

Not sure if this has been posted, but an interesting read about some of Pompey's "High Net Worth Individuals"... http://lucymcarmichael.blog.com/2012/11/13/does-the-hope-of-portsmouth-fans-rest-on-a-supreme-tower-of-avoidance/

Obviously I can't quote verbatim as I wasn't there, but I recall the comment was more along the lines of "we're tied into a long-term contract that would be expensive to get out of, but if we get promoted we may look into doing so". I guess it all depends on just how expensive it would be...

Unless we get struck down with injuries, I can't see Hooiveld getting another PL game this season. His confidence is shot to pieces, two penalties conceded and two own goals scored. Anyone got him in their Fantasy League team?

My point being that Graham was available, he was simply not selected. In fact, the last game he started was a month ago, when he was hauled off at half-time with Swansea 2-0 down at home to Reading. Graham isn't crucial to the way they play, certainly not as important as Lambert is to us. The West Ham game was a strange one because we did look like we were lacking a focal point for attacks without Lambert, but we actually played a lot better before he came off the bench.

Danny Graham was on the bench.

To be honest, I'll be very surprised if we make any changes for Saturday. I guess there's an argument for chucking Boruc in instead of Gazzaniga but his mistake on Saturday wasn't a mistake born out of a lack of communication, which you often get with goalkeepers who aren't familiar with the defenders in front of him, and apart from that one moment (which I'll be amazed if he repeats it, he'll just put his foot through it next time) dare I say we actually looked reasonably solid at the back against Swansea.

3 times more likely one of them will make a mistake then

Neither Lee or Mayuka have taken their opportunities to prove their worth when given a starting place in the Capital One Cup. Of course, that needs to be in the context that they're playing alongside a load of reserves, but even so, Lee was disappointing at both Stevenage and Leeds, while Mayuka obviously only played at Elland Road but did very little. For all the plaudits he's received for cameo performances against Villa and Spurs, in his other outings he's not shown anything. He was on the pitch for 20 minutes at West Brom last week and I can't remember him touching the ball.

And the first bit? Why direct your ire at companies who are merely doing what companies do, rather than the succession of governments who allow it (arguably actively encourage it) to happen?

If the various loopholes are closed, great, but it seems somewhat odd to have a pop at companies who are doing what any good business should be doing and minimising its expenditure within the laws of the land they are operating Why would you pay more than you need to? That had nothing to do with corporation tax. That was a bunch of NIMBY types getting uppity that their town full of 1970s-esque tea rooms might have faced some proper competition.

I'm always amused by the idea that boycotting a company that doesn't pay much corporation tax might actually prove any sort of point. If such a company receives less revenue as a result of negative publicity, all that will happen is their profits will be smaller which will encourage them to cut costs (i.e. jobs), which of course then results in less PAYE/NI being paid As if the company would think "oh noes, we'd better pay more corporation tax and fewer dividends" rather than "let's keep the same dividends but trim the staff"

The football industry is quite similar to banking here, if you whistleblow or bad-mouth ex-employers publicly, you tend not to get another job within the industry. NDAs are also very common.

If you're after a list of names of people who have provided information as a basis to decide whether you think something posted on an internet forum is reliable or not then you're going to be very disappointed. Writing on a forum or in a newspaper is a completely different kettle of fish to writing an A-Level essay. Nobody with any sense is going to reveal their sources because doing so would probably ensure they never receive any information from them ever again, and depending on the source's role, could see that role jeopardised.

There is the $64m question... As SFC is now a privately-owned company, there is pretty much nothing any one of us could do even if we had any ideas about what to do.