St Marco

We'll whatever happen's all they need to do is put 10p into the club and they have put more in then Lowe and Wilde.

I love stories like these. The thing which makes me love thim is the line about Crouch spending too much money and getting the club into even more financial difficulty. His spending was out of control etc. I personally would love to see how people come to that conclusion. How they came up with it being Crouch who spent that money. Because the reality is he was Chairman for 4 months. In those 4 months he appointed a manager on LESS money then the manager was on when he took the job. Got COMPENSATION for that manager. He loaned out supposedly the TWO HIGHEST wage earners at the club. Put money from his own pocket into the club to help with certain peoples wages and the final nail in the coffin had backing from Barclays for the following season. Add to that he was not on a salary unlike two others we know. Now if he was someone who was "out of control" would a bank support him knowing at that time how bad the books were? Obviously not. My view is people need to let it go. Crouch put Dodd and Gorman in the position of Caretaker managers. Nobody was to know they would go on to feck up. Dodd was/is a Saints legend and Gorman has experience of being assistant manager at National level. That is slightly different from appointing Stuart Gray or Steve Wiggly. If it had turned out fine people would not have given a ****. But when it went wrong he rectified his decision and replaced them. With the guy now considered one of the top prospects for management in the country. But of course the bashers don't want to mention those things do they. Crouch lost £1.6m when Saints went into admin. The guy is trying to get cash together to keep the club going. He is supported by a lot of the old legends in doing this. If he can use his contacts and profile in gaining money which keeps us going if even for just 1 more week then whats the problem? Crouch has lost a lot of money in trying to help this club. This time last year you had idiots saying the same ******** they are saying now and this thread is full of them. Lowe and Wilde would save the club remember? They would be bringing in investment with them because they wouldn't return otherwise remember? And all the rest of the crap people tried to justify their view of bringing Lowe back. Roll on 12 months and here we are. The same idiots saying the same stupid stuff but this time having a go at him carrying a bucket..... People should just tell it like it is, say you dislike Crouch because you dislike Crouch nothing more nothing less. Don't make it out he made these financial errors that put us where we are because that is not true. When he and Wilde were in together Crouch was one of few to go against Wildes spending spree, Wilde lied and said he had the money coming in. But hey it's all Crouch's fault. The one thing i do know about Leon is that he won't give a **** what people think he lookslike holding a bucket. He cares more about this club then most of you do by the looks of it.

Dude on the radio says a glass bottle almost hit his 11 year old son. Guess that is acceptable for some people these days.....

A dark day made even darker by the idiots who did that. As for the Police inciting them ******** what a load of ****. Those muppets were always going to storm the pitch and go for the away fans, that was probably why they were there in the 1st place. So all of them gathering by the front row was not a sign of a potential pitch invasion?....The police tried to contain it. Normal people do not think "hey lets go beat up some away fans". If the police were not there it would of been miles worse. I saw some kid about 14-15 throw something which i think was coins into the Burnley end. A policeman grabbed him and dragged him off. The little kid was saying "what the **** did i do, my dad is going to **** you up" etc etc. These little ****s need banning for life. They been watching one to many Danny Dyer movies. With there being camera's all over the ground these people should be easy to find. The thing that ****es me off the most about it is that yesterday when i was out in town i spoke to a couple of Burnley fans in the pub and we had a really good chat. The guy said he was sorry to see our club in the state it was and was going to give some money to one of the bucket carriers if he saw one. I wonder what he thinks of us now....

Opening Cinematic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YNqdsQoud8 Ah the nostalgia

No thanks. I think it might have been Arizona who said "Pearson got the best out of what was available, Wotte hasen't got the best out of what was available". I think he is as good as his record has shown. Played 16 lost 6, drew 6 and won 4 = 18 points. Which is 1.1 points per game. Now times that by 44 = 49 points. That would have put us 1 place above the drop zone. Where as if you work out Pearsons of 16 points from 13 games = 1.2 points per game. Times 44 = 54 points. Which would put us 15th in the league. It is those small fractions of difference that make a difference. With Davis,Saga,Surman,Skacel,Lallana,Perry,Euell,James,Gillett and BWP in the team of which were all here last season i would expect them to finish clear of the relegation zone. So even if Wotte was in charge from the start his points per game would have had us in a relegation battle anyway. As a tactitian i think he lacks knowledge of what to do and when to do it. Sort of like Jan was stuck in his ways. So my view is no. We need to have a total clean sweep as others have mentioned from top to bottom. We need someone who understands english football but now understands league 1 football. Someone who will get players playing on a cold night in some **** hole up north. The Weds game for me was the judgment game for Wotte. He got it all wrong. After the first half he should of gone in guns blazing on the players and should of gambled. Not put our best passer in defence etc. So someone totally new. My choice would be to try and nab Roberto Di Matteo from MK Dons if we get a buyer with a little bit of cash. He has done wonders with that team in only a season. They have bugger all money but now they are only 1 point away from CCC league football if they win their game in hand. He is a guy who has spent 13 years in English football so knows the game here. He has good contacts and would bring good coaching staff with him in the shape of Eddie Newton and Ade Mafe etc. I think he like Martinez at Swansea will go on to become very good managers. Especially as they use the little resources they have to create a team atmosphere. Something we don't have and havent had in a very longtime. That would be my choice if we were free to make a choice like that.

We don't have a leg to stand on. As i said ages ago as did Exit and we were shot down for it we would get the penalty as sure as day follows night. Our whole defence was to say the club and PLC were seperate and not the same, they could survive seperate. That is just pure Mickey Mouse stuff. How does a company with no income get into £30m+ debt? Because it is borrowed with the intention of going to the Club. The assets of the club are used to support the loan. Without the club as an asset there would be no loan. The club and PLC are the same, the PLC can not live without the club. The loophole only counts for two different entities. The Derby case is so different from ours. In 1minute of going into admin the admin team sold Derby and recouped some of the clubs debts for the creditors with the agreement more of it would be paid back by the new owners. They were not trying to dodge paying it back they just used admin as a way to sell the club to new owners. It was all pre-planned and agreed with the creditors (banks)before the announcement. Roll on 3 weeks since our announcement and nothing has changed. If we had done the exact same thing as Derby then we can argue our case, but we haven't. The club will appeal and the thing will drag on for years. Another cloud over our head to deal with in the future. This club has been run like **** since after the last game of last season. Error upon error from Wilde and Lowe. And this was to be their final error. We all knew the team was playing ****. We were in the relegation zone for like 5 months for christ sake. The chances of us getting out of it were always very low. We should of gone into admin before the deadline. Finish the season with a points deduction and start 100% from scratch next season, with no more anchors around our necks to pull us down further. But nope we thought we would try and be clever. So now not only are we relegated but we will start next season with minus 10 and another relegation battle to look forward to. Meaning due to the decision of going into admin after the deadline we could be looking at Div 2 football this time next year. What has happened to our club is nothing short of heart breaking. Especially for us fans who travel to nearly every game regardless of the cost or weather. We do that because we have hope, hope that maybe today is the day we hit the bottom and can start to go forwards finally. But with even all this that has happened we can't even do that now. Chances are we will have to wait at least another 12 months before we can finally go forwards. So no we should not appeal. We should of accepted our fate before the deadline. The team never looked like it would stay up. At no point this season have i felt we were anything above a bottom three side. It was all about hoping things would change on the pitch. That never happened. It was obvious we were going to be relegated. We should take the penalty and start next season with whatever team we have knowing that from the 1st game we are in a relegation battle. Then whatever happens after the final game of that season if we have survived or even if we don't then we know we have hit the bottom and we can finally start to go forwards again.

Thought like others was best to wait and calm down before posting. Especially after reading what people were saying in the get a grip thread....Interesting in reading that thread that basically nobody who went to the game has commented, wonder if its because they don't feel the same? Anyway am still angry so won't bother going into too much detail as there is no point. Yesterdays game was up there with the worst displays i have seen, ever. The players we'll and truely let the fans down. Nobody deserved anything above a 2 rating. We were complete and utter garbage. The players should refund all of us who travelled 4hrs to watch that ****. They should of chosen 11 of us to play as we would of showed more effort and more fighting spirit. As for Wotte, i saw him laughing after the whistle with someone in the back staff. That for me was the final straw. His formation,tactics,subs were just plain dumb today. It was like watching the ghost of Burley return. Why did he put Surman back after taking Skacel off? We needed goals and Skacel was getting forward and getting crosses in. We never looked like scoring a goal and with his formation it was like we were settling for a 1-0 loss or something. This game probably should have been a 5-0 again. It just disgusts me and angers me so much. We are now down, anyone who thought we had a chance must now see what most of us said for months, the management has not been good enough. All those who this time last year were saying Lowe would turn it around, **** you! All those people who were saying Lowe and Wilde would do better then Crouch, **** you! All those people who said Jan would do better then Pearson, **** you! etc etc I bet you sleep easy with the blood of Southampton FC on your hands. The catalogue of failures the people who were running this club made over the past 12months is sickening. What took 100 years to build was destroyed in the space of just 5 years. The club needs to start a fresh, nobody from the old regime should remain, nobody, get the **** players out, get the **** coaching staff out, get anybody who exploits our club for their own gains out. We need people who are Southampton people in charge, people who understand the fans who go to the games, players who take pride in wearing the shirt, share the hurt the fans feel when we lose. Some ****ing respect for the history of the team they represent. And that is what ****es me off the most. Nobody on that pitch gives a **** about this club apart from Davis. All the others know they will be playing for a different club next year and will no doubt leach off those clubs too. The amount of money we have given to these players over the past year is nothing short of criminal. I would rather a team of Jermaine Wrights then a team of Euells and BWP's. Wright might not have been a very good player but at least he put some tackles in, tried to get in the game. The only person yesterday who had even a slight hint of that was Wotten. He is a **** poor player but what he lacks in technical ability he makes up in attitude. Next season we need a team of fighters, starting with the manager. We need someone who will go into that dressing room and tear a lump out of someone if they are not playing we'll.

Thought it was a pretty crap game to be honest. Neither sides keepers had much to do. Referee was a gimp. Palace were awful, guess they had nothing to play for. But hey i'll take that each and every week! Three points and we are still in the mix. A great goal by DMG to cap a good display from him. He has been so much better recently. Sure we had to hang on a bit near the end but it was a deserved three points, we were the better team. Davis had pretty much nowt to do except that save at the death. For me motm was the fans. Was a great atmosphere and reminded me of the old days. Ronnie Size,Lallana and DMG were the three who stood out. Three more wins and we will stay up.

I heard BWP might be interested?

If someone comes in with cash i think keeping either John or Rasiak would be wise. They are physical players who given chances will score goals. Look at Leicester. They have scored for fun this year and that is because they have a physical team with the right balance of young and old. Fryatt and Howard compliment each other we'll. If we can get one of them to hold the ball up they could help to create a lot of goals. But if we get someone who is **** poor then we need them off the books asap.

It goes to show also how much a difference a year can make. Hopefully if we are relegated this time next year we will be talking about how we are looking forward to the CCC again!

I 100% agree Nick. But the main difference for me is if you look at those fixtures we got 8 points from the last 6 games. Of those games we had to go to Hull who were the on fire team, they have gone on from there to do we'll in the hardest league on the planet. A win against at that point the 2nd ranked team in the league Bristol City. And then HAD to get a result away to the top of the league team West Brom. Then obviously a must win game against Sheff Utd. If we compare that to now we had the same thing. We had to play Wolves and we had to play Birmingham. The number 1 and 2 ranked teams which is the same as the previous year. Just in the previous year we came away with 4 points from those games where as this year we got zero.

Just re-found this thread looking back. The ironic thing is nothing has actually changed since then. We're still in the relegation zone, we're still playing ****. We still have a cheap manager etc etc How fitting that those who are so vocal about being right have been proven so wrong. Seriously what were some of you thinking?!

The other thing is Pearson actually really cares about Saints. He said he was really upset by what has happened here as thinks its a great club with great fans. He was on the Football League show and said he wanted to stay etc. For a guy who is at a club top of their league with a chairman who is not exactly pro-Southampton to make comments like that i think shows his class. Where as Wotte has said a lot of trash about the fans. The fans have stuck by him and supported the team regardless but in terms of decency and respect Pearson is miles above Wotte.

We'll if i remember right Lowe gave him a new 3 year deal soon as he took over. Some people said it was an 8k a week deal or something because supposedly other teams were trying to sign him? Wasen't he out of contract at that point? If thats true then he will be gone if we get a buyer with no money. But i think even regardless of that Dyer is a CCC player. He has done very we'll at Swansea. So i would expect him to leave. Maybe has a relegation release clause or something.

**** forest

We'll that is just a gamble really. The Norwich approach means a guranteed lump sum of minimum of £7m a season. If you rely on the walk ins to pay xyz then your not guranteed anything and various things can influence your income. I think this season is a fine example of that. If we have say 5k who walk in each game and pay £25 to see the game means you make £125k a game. So if you times that by 23 games = £2.8m made from the walk ins. If you add that to the £3.5m from season tickets means £6.3m. That is for everything. That is the maximum you could make. As i mentioned before if you sold 20k season tickets at £350 you make £7m and then still have 12k more seats to sell. So then say you sell 5k walk ins at £25 a game would mean an additional £2.8m on top of the £7m giving a total of £9.3m a year in ticket sales alone. Obviously if we had that type of income we would be doing a lot better then we are! But as i said it is a gamble to rely on the walk ins. Without the various deals we have had this season on tickets (especially near to the end of the season) then our average would of been miles lower then what it is. The worrying thing is that even at £15 a ticket we still only sold 26k tickets.

The Norwich game is massive. If they win they will basically be 6 points clear of us due to our GD. Barnsley have 2 games in hand and pretty much a 5 point gap due to GD, we won't be catching them. So in all fairness i think Norwich win and thats it. So today we are all Swansea fans, come on Dyer do us a favour!

We'll its simple maths really. Norwich have over 20k season tickets. So say we take that number and times by the £350 means they get £7m a season minimum from just season ticket sales. Then we have supposedly 7000 season tickets sold at say £500 (i know they are more but lets just say that) means they get £3.5m a season minimum from season tickets. Now you don't need to be too clever to work out something is not quite right there. If we addopted Norwich's approach and say sold them for £350 in this league and maintained our season tickets sold of 14k from last season would of meant we would of made £5m minimum from season ticket sales this year. Of course if tickets were that price we probably would of sold more then the 14k we had last year and more then the 7k we had this season. Say we matched Norwich and sold 20k season tickets (would still leave at least 12k seats for away and people buying on the day, 37% of the stadium) would of meant at least £7m a season to our club. If we had that i doubt we would be in the situation we are right now. If we could of made £7m a year from just selling out 63% of the stadium we could of made more with the other 37%. So as i said before. If we go into league 1 expecting to keep the same ticket prices or anywhere near it then i fully expect that 7000 season ticket holders to drop to somewhere like 4k. Meaning i would expect our average in league 1 to be under 10k a game. That would put us about 3rd or 4th for the highest average attendence in league one. So say they do sell 4k season tickets at £500 means they would make about £2m from season ticket sales. Makes far more business sense to make the tickets cheaper and have more people buy season tickets. More full stadium = more money. This is why we are in administration. People thought fans would pay whatever they asked to watch the team play regardless. To repeat the same mistake again in league 1 would be sheer stupidity. But with new people coming in i doubt very much they will be of the same business mind as Lowe and Wilde.

No attendence in terms of % of the stadium that is used. Our average attendence is 52.9% which puts us 2nd to bottom http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D1/attend.html If you want to say attendence in terms of people at each game then we would be 12th. But that is not a good indicator due to the fact teams such as Blackpool are last on the list even though they sell out 82% of their stadium for every game. It is not a case of who has the biggest stadium wins, it is a case of how much % of your stadium you can fill with people. And you can't say "It is because we are in a relegation battle blah blah" because Norwich have an average of 24k every game and they have a 26k capacity stadium. How do Norwich get a 94% full stadium for every game? Because they have cheaper tickets. £350 for a season ticket for adults and £150 if your under 21. Thus proving cheaper tickets = more people in the stadium. But of course more people in the stadium does not = success.

The ticket pricing will need to be at least 50% cheaper next year. We have a huge stadium (one of the top 100 in europe) and it will not be even half full next season if prices stay the same. We are in the depths of possibly the worst recession in living memory. Companies going under, people losing their jobs and so on. Southampton FC is not a charity, the money does not go to help starving kids etc. It makes people very very rich. Judging the players,managers and pretty much everyone connected to the club over this season makes me angry to see people getting paid the vast fortunes they are for practically nothing. Next season we will be most likely in league 1. Probably with a massive points deduction. If the club comes out saying you must pay £22-£30 to watch Yeovil,Carlisle,Hereford,Orient etc etc then we can expect a near empty Stadium. Season tickets for league 1 teams are varied but you got Northampton with £250, Hartlepool with £276, Leicester with £289 etc etc. The average attendence in league one is around 5000. Whoever takes over our club needs to not make the same mistakes the previous board made with pricing this season. In the attendence table this season we sit 2nd to bottom even though we have the 3rd biggest stadium in the CCC. If they repeat the same prices for next season with a worse squad and a points deduction it will not make for good reading. I will buy a season ticket no matter what, im fortunate enough to be on a sound financial footing. But it would be nice to see my friends return with me for next season. Something i know they will not do if asked to pay anywhere near the same amount.

Indeed. Can't really compare a guy who has been here for 12 months almost working with the players and staff to a guy who came in from the cold and had an injury hit team with the star players out on loan. But for those who do want to compare the stats are Pearson Games = 13/14 (depending on if you credit him with the Plymouth game) = 16 points. Wotte Games = 14 = 15 points and Jan's first 14 games = 13 points. At the end of the day it makes no difference what we think about Wotte or any of the managers in years gone by. What matters is right now and what happens in the last remaining games. Time for judgement will be then. But of course there are those who don't quite see the point of judgement and blame, chosing to rather blank out or forget the causes of our demise.

Hate to bump old threads but thought maybe this one should be to see if people still think the same as they did? Johnny made it quite clear he didn't rate Pearson but rated Wotte. Now that Wotte failed to reach the same amount of points as Pearson did in his time here over the same period of games does he now think Wotte is **** too?

We'll just back home. Not really sure what to add that hasen't already. Hopefully it didn't look as bad on tv as it did at the game! The first 15mins or so was just a joke. Trying to look for positives and the only thing i can come up with is at least we don't have to play Wolves again! We really were there for the taking today and probably should of been more then 3-0. We had no shots at all. Reading those shot attempts stats now makes me positive the guy doing them must be having a laugh. The only time i remember their keeper doing anything was from a back pass that almost went in. Other then that was nothing. What worries me is the last 7 games now we have not looked like winning anything and in most of them we didn't even deserve a draw. I'm also becoming more sure Wotte probably was the wrong decision for us. I will support the guy untill the last kick of the season but the team just looks awful. If you look at it on paper it is not far from being a good team, deffinatly not a relegation team. I would even say it is maybe even better then the team at this stage last year. But they just looklike they can't be arsed. I hope they buck up and sort themselves out for monday because we have to pretty much win all our remaining games now. One more draw or loss and i think that will be it.