Verbal

I think you're missing the point I was making. Crouch was talking nonsense - literally. For Mawhinney to use this in the way he did either demonstrates negligent ignorance or a political predator's taste for the kill. Or both. The fact that the chief adminsitrator of a football authority should revert to the low-life he was as a politician doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, at least (I speak as someone who had to deal with this guy in a former life). The bigger picture is that Mawhinney needs to find an alternative to the points-deduction penalty. It may have been endurable when the economy was such that it could sell more than one car a month. But in the worst economic crash since the Depression, a lot of other clubs are going to find it hard just to stay in business. And with Mawhinney continuing blithely down the points-deduction route, it's a bit like running a marathon where the judges run out like lunatics every so often to trip you up. Even the justification for the points deduction betrays an act of spectacular political cowardice. Ostensibly it's to stop clubs overspending and gaining advantage over their rivals. The reality - about which Mawhinney knows absolutely nothing - is that clubs in the lower leagues have for years now suffered from the trickle-down effects of the ludicrous salaries paid to premiership players. The cost of just 'staying in the game' and attracting players who can perform at Championship or League One level has always been affected by this. And badly. But you won't hear a peep out of Mawhinney about the real source of the trouble. The other aspect of political cowardice has been pretty well illustrated by the sanctions against both us and Luton. The additional penalties heaped unfairly on Luton because of the underhand irregularities of a previous regime should have resulted in bans on those involved being involved in football. But no - thump the club instead, a much easier target which can't fight back with lawsuits. Similarly, if Mawhinney were actually serious about his suggestion of financial mismanagement, ban Lowe and all the others from running football clubs. Will that happen? Of course not. I suspect Mawhinney is savvy enough about self-protection that he doesn't want to risk the lawsuit from a litigious Lowe. This isn't an argument that can be reduced to 'the rules are the rules...' There's also an unhealthy dose of cowardice, self-preservation, spite, and nauseating political opportunism. In an economic crisis where many clubs face going to wall, what we need is a football administrator with the wit and imagination to steer League Football through these dangerous times. What we've got is Mawhinney - a simpering Thatcherite acolyte with the imagination of a brick.

I don’t understand what Crouch means by the claim that the PLC was set up to avoid the points penalty. I’m sure someone knows the dates better than me, but I thought the PLC was formed in 1997, in the reverse takeover. The points-deduction system wasn’t introduced until 2004. So how can the holding company possibly have been set up to avoid the penalty. And was Crouch even there at the time? Whatever the rights or wrongs of Mawhinney’s decision to deduct points, his sleazy delight at finding that quote from Crouch suggests the craven, slimeball politician in him is alive and well. According to David Conn ('The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football'), holding companies were actually set up as a way for club owners to bypass an FA rule that was supposed to protect clubs from asset strippers. Sound familiar?)

Barclays have a long and undistinguished history of being rubbish. Lowe laying into Fry (the bank manager, not the administrator) personally was probably unfair though. I doubt he took the decision off his own bat. At the very least, it would have HAD to have been 'referred up' because of Barclays' substantial sponsorship in football, and for the invariably negative publicity that would go with a decision that, when it's played out, could yet destroy a major football club. I suspect there is much more to Barclays' decision than a local bank manager panicking, and the real reason may dribble out in time. I personally wonder whether Southampton have been set up as an 'example' - a shot across the bows to other football clubs. Southampton were an easy target (on this line of thinking) because we had a deeply unpopular, demonstrably useless chairman, a split fanbase some of whom were already half-begging for admin, an infrastructure more in line with a Prem club than League One hustlers (PLC status, the academy, Staplewood, etc), and an impending financial crunch after relegation. If any of this is true, the warning was presumably: downsize or else. Lowe was never going to axe his sacred cow of a youth academy, and would have carried on defending its costs to the detriment of the first team for years to come. Nor could the costly (£250,000 pa) running costs of PLC status ever be sustained by League One economics. So the bank, realising there was nothing really to lose, brought down the axe. Again, I emphasise, this is speculation. But the whole affair does raise some pressing questions... By the way, while watching Lowe being bowled puffballs by Jeff Randall (of all people), I just wished Randall was well enough informed to counter Lowe's accusation that all the financial trouble started after he was toppled in the 'going Wilde' revolution. Randall really should have asked rosy cheeks how on earth he therefore chose to ally himself with the architect of the club's ruinous finances.

I can only assume that you haven't read your own thread. Plenty of reasons have been given for not going down the PLC route again. I'll add two more to the ones I listed above. 1. The annual cost of maintaining PLC status is, on the club's own admission, around £250,000 - the equivalent of one month's running costs in the Championship, and much longer than that in League One. 2. What really democratises a club is not PLC status - where have you been! - but relegation. The further you fall, the more you depend on schmucks like us coming through the turnstiles.

If Salz is involved, the household name (to Fry anyway) will be Rothschild.

Can I nominate this as the worst takeover thread EVER?

It says you last edited this at 5.57pm. Would that have been in 1997?

That's exactly what I'm saying - he won't be able to do that this time.

If this is true - and it's a big if - Lowe won't be able to pull shareholder strings in the way he's done in the past. And he's certainly not coming back as a big investor himself, with WH Ireland being credit crunched into substantial losses, and in such a state that it's broken the golden ' confidence' rule of stockbroking that you keep your infighting out of public view. Which means Lowe will only be able to come back if the successful consortium decides that he is more important to the club than the need to build a team capable of rediscovering how to win games, and to reunite a deeply fractured and disillusioned fanbase which, next season, through the turnstiles, will be key to the club's survival. If we're going to get a consortium that would make that decision, we're screwed anyway.

1. There's an awful lot of information that 'private' (limited liability') companies have to make publicly available. Anyone who runs their own company would be well aware of this. 2. You can 'get heard' within PLC structures in much the same way that independent voices are heard at a block-voting TUC conferences - in other words, in no meaningful way, or simpy not at all. 3. What you're proposing sounds like the very thing you say you don't want - a fragmented shareholding.

I'll probably join the 'let it go' club at some point. But just for now... I frequently met Mawhinney in Norwich in the 80s. Then he was just 'Dr' and one of a number of colourless characters in East Anglia who'd flown into their seats on Maggie's coattails. (By 1983, the whole region, which had been a Labour stronghold, had only one MP who wasn't a Tory - Clement Freud.) Mawhinney was part of the East Anglian 'mafia' that included John Major and John Gummer. What they lacked in intelligence and charm they made up for with a nasty political vindictiveness - and not always directed at people who could defend themselves. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the ten-point reduction, I personally find it hard to believe that Norwich wouldn't have been foremost in Mawhinney's mind - and given the glaring opportunity for a conflict of interest, it would be better if he made his position clear. I bet he won't, though.

I'm sure that if Crouch comes back - and it seems he is - he'll want to dispose of Wotte. But this will hardly be on a par with Lowe/Wilde's ditching of Pearson - although I expect some on here will want to to say otherwise. Wotte's record with us aside, he has absolutely no idea what it takes to succeed in League One. Hopefully we'll go with someone who knows how to build a side in much the same way that Swansea have done, and Hull before them. In any case, the takeover needs to happen NOW, because the rebuilding - which will be root-and-branch - needs to start asap. We can't afford to wait until the end of the summer to discover a team able to survive the drop into League Two.

No, bleating is good. We built a stadium to stand a cat in hell's chance, post Taylor Report and Sky largesse, of continuing to compete in the Premiership. Points deduction is too blunt an instrument. Was it really the Football League's intention, when the system was introduced, to drive clubs virtually to extinction, as they have with Luton? But the worst of it is that the problem actually originates in the Premiership. The ridiculous wages paid in that league trickle down into the lower leagues - ramping up the cost of being in the game for every lower league club. But do Premiership clubs face the threat of points deduction? No. The points deduction system is just as crude as Mawhinney's dim-witted, inept proposal for a salary cap - which was at least a vague recognition that the trickle-down effect was seriously damaging clubs in the lower leagues. Of course, the genius that Mawhinney certainly isn't, hadn't worked out what to do with the clubs that were relegated from the Prem. You can't just override legally binding player contracts in relegated clubs and impose capped salaries, so the salary cap would probably not be applied to them. Combine the salary advantage with the parachute payment system and, hey presto - Mawhinney has accidentally created a system where there is no real relegation from the Prem. The clubs at the bottom each season would, with proper management, simply bounce back the next. In other words, the clubs which Mawhinney is supposed to represent would have ever diminishing chances of breaking into the Prem. Brilliant. Give that man a peerage.

It depends what kind of owners they are. If they're stupidly rich, they can make as many mistakes as they like. If it's the kind of owner that can just about afford to buy themselves in, don't make the mistake of keeping the academy going. It costs close to or slightly more than a million a year to run. That money could buy us an entire first team. The trick at this level (assuming we're in League One, and maybe even if we're not) is not spotting the next 11-year-old would-be footballing genius. It's working out who in the lower leagues have reached the early twenties and have shown they're good enough to make the next step up. The Championship-leading teams are full of players like this. The new owner has to focus on the first team before anything else - and not repeat the absurd idea that you can rely on the academy throwing up the odd £5 million 'profit centre' player to justify the ludicrous expense of running the rest of the academy. Completely forgetting there's the small matter of creating and developing a team that can win divisions is not a mistake we can afford to repeat for a third time.

I was making a little joke - something I know you find conceptually obscure. Tell me, is there any subject, other than Lowe, on which you post? Just seems odd to me: someone with your track record wanting to be so strongly associated with a character so infused with failure and desperate hubris. Cut him loose and move on.

Anyone who let Lowe anywhere near the club.

Frost as a Southampton supporter is a bit of myth. First of all, he seems more interested cricket. (I've seen him a few times at the indoor school at Lords, working hard on his batting (!), and he's a regular in the Pavilion.) And second, it's a funny kind of Southampton supporter that does all his cheering from the Emirates stadium, and Highbury before that. Frost was even Chairman of David Seaman's testimonial committee.

My first match was Spurs v Saints at White Hart Lane, January 1970. We won 1-0 - Ron Davies (of course) scoring with a bullet header. So I thought I'd introduce my son to football the same way - Spurs v Saints in 2001. It ended 0-0. We played them off the park. You should have seen the teamsheet - Davies (Kevin), Beattie, Le Tiss, Pahars (who was on the bench I think), Richards, Kachloul, etc. Unfortunately, my son drew entirely the wrong conclusion. He went away and became an Arsenal supporter.

Exactly. either way, he's left the club with a poisoned pill. I'm sure he didn't plan it that way...

Putting the petty bickering aside for a minute, here’s an idea… In the absence of a generous (or stupid) benefactor, the consequences of administration will unravel for several seasons to come. The immediate problem, which will make our situation much worse, is the reasonably high likelihood of a ten-point penalty. Mawhinney at the Football League has pulled the classic politician’s stunt of booting the problem into the long grass, and we may not know the outcome for some weeks, no matter how ‘urgently’ the ‘forensic accounting’ is carried out. But then he’s a politician – what did we or anyone else expect? If we drop into League One and start the season on minus 10, we’d have to be as good as Leicester just to be reasonably sure of a play-off place. Anything less and we’re looking at two or more seasons struggling to ‘rebuild’ – which doesn’t describe half the pain… So the question is: Lowe’s technicality aside, how to avoid the ten points? We haven’t really got that much ammunition. In my view, the best argument is the future of the academy. Its running costs are about, or close to, £1m a year – clearly unsustainable for a club stuck for long in the League One quagmire of poor finances and mediocrity. The only realistic thing to do, if the ten points are imposed, is to shut the academy. Does Mawhinney really want this? Does he want to be forever associated with closing what has been seen as one of the country’s best football academies? (And certainly as good as they get outside the Prem). The whole penalty system is surely going to start looking utterly bankrupt (no pun…) if it destroys institutions designed – at great cost to the clubs that run them – to promote young, mostly British talent. A quiet word in Mawhinney’s ear might at least help. He is, as I say, a politician – and not an especially talented one (I talk with direct experience). Just a thought.

The actual sequence of events went something like this. Tommac worked as a UK sales director (not, as tommac would have it, as ‘managing director’ or ‘owner’) out of an industrial estate in Fulham (he preferred to call it ‘Mayfair’), flogging timeshares and hires on executive jets for a Florida-based company called Aerollloyd. In the course of his work, he had contact with two commercial lawyers from Paul Allen’s empire (it may well have been Vulcan.) Either he or they initiated a conversation about what they do – investigate investment opportunities in sports and entertainment. Always on the look out for a good deal, etc, etc. Either during this conversation or sometime afterwards, a light bulb flashed on in tommac’s head. This is a rare event so he could hardly have failed to notice. What about a football club? I imagine he spent the next several weeks trying to master google before entering ‘football club’ and ‘desperate’. Top of the list was you know who. His brief contact with the lawyers had led him somehow to think that if he could present a ‘deal’ to them, all neatly tied up with a pretty bow on top, he could make a decent ‘broker’ fee’ from it. (The source for all of the above is tommac himself– although there is a mathematical formula you have to apply to extract the bullsh!t) So off he trotted to St Mary’s, expecting all and sundry to welcome him with open arms, and give him a deal his lawyer friends couldn’t possibly pass up. But when he got there, he walked into the football equivalent of the Battle of the Somme. Dug deep into their trenches, the various factions jostled for advantage – forgetting, at least initially, to ask some pertinent questions about just what tommac’s connection to Paul Allen really was. During the course of his futile attempts to switch back and forth among the combatants, another lightbulb went on: why not force the warring factions together by appealing over their heads to the fans. Hence tommac’s grand entrance on the Saints Forum. For all the fun and games had with him over the next few months, everything of significance in this whole affair had already happened….and the damage done. The leak of Paul Allen’s name into the press and among the City gossips sent the club’s shares into orbit. The fact that there never was a bid from Paul Allen, or even an expression of interest outside of some desultory, cabin-pressured conversations with the short-sleeved wonder, seemed to have escaped everyone’s attention. The problem was that tommac appeared just as the club really was making a determined attempt to find a buyer and unite the major shareholders behind a sale. Sadly for all of us, the false rumour priced the club out of ANY deal. Sometime shortly before or after paying tommac a ‘finder’s fee’ (rumoured to be in five figures), the board and major shareholders did start to wonder anxiously about whether Paul Allen really was behind any move to buy the club. They investigated, and Mary Corbett even found herself jetting around the place trying to confirm it all (Source: Mary Corbett herself). But after several months, it became clear that there really was no bid, or even the prospect of one – and there was no connection between tommac (or ‘representatives’ as it was delicately put) and the Paul Allen. (Source: Jim Hone) This may seem like ancient history, but it really isn’t. The dominoes are still tumbling from the disastrous intervention of that little mastermind. There’s a parallel universe in which all short-sleeved nitwits are strangled at birth, and Southampton Football Club puts together a takeover in 2007 with the share price at around 25p. Lowe would never have returned, the Dutch ‘revolution never happened, and we’d be posting about how gutted we all are to have just missed out on the play-off places to the Prem. Dream on. And tommac: thanks.

Brading & Newport are good. 0 points for us I fear...

It's not what I believe that matters. A lot of people at the club believed that this noodlehead really did represent PA. The fact is he didn't. And I strongly suspect that the first time PA ever heard of the club was when some of the more gullible/wind-uppy (delete to taste) posters on here, like St David, started pleading for him to 'come and get us' on Seattle-based radio show phone-ins. All of which forced his actual representatives to say, in effect: 'PA is not interested and never has been.' (No doubt accompanied by sentiments summed up by: WTF??!!) If you have a shred of evidence that suggests otherwise, I'd love to see it.

I'm amazed the Paul Allen rumour is still so widely believed on here. Tommac was Paul Allen's 'representative' in talks with the club. And by 'representative' I mean freaky fantasist.

I'm not so sure that this was really down to Lowe's 'cleverness'. (Something vaguely oxymoronic about that). The PLC structure, and SLH, were surely intended to be part of Lowe's empire - a leisure behemoth with a nice football club attached. At the time of the reverse takeover, I seriously doubt that he thought: 'Oh, this'll be a clever wheeze when it all goes tits up.' By the time the bank pulled the plug - and long before - there was nothing left of that ambition except the club itself...or what was left of it. It must have been blindingly obvious to put SLH into administration. Hardly rocket science, is it? And the idea that it fooled someone as pedestrian a political hack as Mawhinney shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Hi, by the way!