| Just finished watching the Fans Forum 20:39 - Mar 29 with 4417 views | Lord_Lucan |
I disliked the criticism of Evans because although things were pretty much all doom and gloom, he did bankroll us, kept out of the dressing room and supported his managers (of whom pretty much all were applauded as the right man)
Gotta say though you can't fail to see the night and day between Marcus and Gamechanger, and with Ashton and his merry men at the helm it really does seen exciting at this present time.
I think we have a really positive team here, I know the management etc hate doing these forums, and who can blame them, but they do seem to have something they really want to push through and they are hinting at some exciting announcements. For me, the land acquisition was the real statement of intent and they seem to want to work with the council to regenerate the map.
This time next year Rodney! |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:25 - Mar 29 with 1485 views | Lord_Lucan |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:23 - Mar 29 by J2BLUE |
I'm a play them both together man. |
And on that point, I will attempt to retire for the evening. | |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:29 - Mar 29 with 1459 views | Stewart27 |
I don’t dislike the criticism of Evans.
He robbed me 10 years of my football club. |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:44 - Mar 29 with 1423 views | RegencyBlue |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
Frankly, if you don’t understand why Evans got abuse, not as much as he deserved in my opinion, you really weren’t paying attention over the 14 years of his inept ownership! |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:18 - Mar 29 with 1375 views | Guthrum |
Nice to have people who are not only willing to sit in front of the fans and answer questions, but are also actually good at it. Detailed replies and rousing speeches. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:23 - Mar 29 with 1338 views | waveneyblue |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
And in English ? |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:28 - Mar 29 with 1309 views | LeoMuff |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 20:49 - Mar 29 by Skip_Intro |
I don't think he did a very good job at all but he did stop us going under when we were in serious danger of going bust and wrote off c£100m of his own money without which we wouldn't have Gamechanger... |
Firstly I doubt it was anywhere near 100m the larger the debt the greater the tax breaks, he charged us interest on this debt.
He neglected the club to a shocking degree, wouldn’t even re invest the cash from player sales for replacements ffs.
If he hadn’t got lucky with appointing Mick his whole reign would have been utterly catastrophic.
As others have said barely a good word to say on him, apart from he left and hopefully found decent owners to replace himself, utterly incompetent at owning a football club. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:32 - Mar 29 with 1295 views | ghostofescobar |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
Are you bonkers? Just on the evidence of tonight alone, it is crystal clear how much Evans destroyed the club. Ashton was basically saying, this club had been left to fall apart and it is going to take a hell of a long time to fix it. Evans didn’t spend money, other than the first few years. And I don’t take any crap about him being some kind of saint because he walked away from the debt. Every single decision that led to said debt was made by him, no one else. He bought us to make a quick buck, not because of his love for us. It went wrong, he drove the club into the dirt. Wake up. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:35 - Mar 29 with 1271 views | waveneyblue |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:32 - Mar 29 by ghostofescobar |
Are you bonkers? Just on the evidence of tonight alone, it is crystal clear how much Evans destroyed the club. Ashton was basically saying, this club had been left to fall apart and it is going to take a hell of a long time to fix it. Evans didn’t spend money, other than the first few years. And I don’t take any crap about him being some kind of saint because he walked away from the debt. Every single decision that led to said debt was made by him, no one else. He bought us to make a quick buck, not because of his love for us. It went wrong, he drove the club into the dirt. Wake up. |
Let me answer for you. He's bonkers | | | |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 23:06 - Mar 29 with 1201 views | Churchman |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 20:49 - Mar 29 by Skip_Intro |
I don't think he did a very good job at all but he did stop us going under when we were in serious danger of going bust and wrote off c£100m of his own money without which we wouldn't have Gamechanger... |
Is anyone seriously telling me this club was ever truly in danger of going bust without saviour Marcus? If so, please list the half way decent sized clubs that have gone to the wall in the last 50 years. Bury Town? Maidstone? Wow. Even Derby with their dubious dealings will survive and thrive. The club might have gone into administration and might have got relegated to League 1. Nobody would want that …..oh.
The sale of the club benefitted Sheepshanks as it enabled him to slide into his comfy FA job and Evans who had a chance of a quick flip jackpot if he could get the club in the PL in a season. After that, the club was allowed to rot in every way imaginable. If our saviour got burned to the extent reported, it’ll be strange if he goes near another club as is rumoured. But then I doubt ME Group lost in real money terms anywhere near the amount reported.
Evans was accountable for years of football misery. The man was a stain on this club and the sooner his 5% is bought out the better. It was a sigh of relief for me when his name was ripped off the stands. |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 23:09 - Mar 29 with 1195 views | MattinLondon |
Evans was the man who saved the club from a short term death only to try and kill it in the long term.
He only invested into the club as he saw an opportunity to buy a ‘cheap’ asset, invest some money and then sell for big once promotion was achieved. Spoiler alert - this didn’t go to plan.
Evans was nothing but a disaster for the club. |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 00:37 - Mar 30 with 1132 views | trncbluearmy |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 20:49 - Mar 29 by Skip_Intro |
I don't think he did a very good job at all but he did stop us going under when we were in serious danger of going bust and wrote off c£100m of his own money without which we wouldn't have Gamechanger... |
Wasn't his money it was the companies |  | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 00:53 - Mar 30 with 1111 views | Strimmer |
There's good and bad in all people and acknowledging the bad doesn't negate the good or vice versa. The VAST majority of Evans's tenure was a disaster. But he didn't sell us to some crackpot who'd properly bankrupt us or the bored heir to a biscuit fortune who'd run us into the ground and scarper, and he wrote off a chunk of real money to do so, and for that I am ever grateful. Life aint black and white, what can you do.
Tl;dr this evans good/evans bad debate is foolish. | |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 00:59 - Mar 30 with 1101 views | Illinoisblue |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 23:09 - Mar 29 by MattinLondon |
Evans was the man who saved the club from a short term death only to try and kill it in the long term.
He only invested into the club as he saw an opportunity to buy a ‘cheap’ asset, invest some money and then sell for big once promotion was achieved. Spoiler alert - this didn’t go to plan.
Evans was nothing but a disaster for the club. |
Said that many times; he was keeping us alive and killing us at the same time. It was way past time to move on. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 01:16 - Mar 30 with 1093 views | Stenvict |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 23:09 - Mar 29 by MattinLondon |
Evans was the man who saved the club from a short term death only to try and kill it in the long term.
He only invested into the club as he saw an opportunity to buy a ‘cheap’ asset, invest some money and then sell for big once promotion was achieved. Spoiler alert - this didn’t go to plan.
Evans was nothing but a disaster for the club. |
Surely everyone wants an owner that wants instant success, like ME did at the start of his tenure? It's in everyone's best interests. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and owning a football club suddenly became too expensive for ME.
We now have new owners that, believe it or not, want instant success relative to where we are, hence spending a significant amount on players this season.
Had ME appointed someone like Mark Ashton back when he bought us, things would've been extremely different, I'm sure. Instead, he was naive, and easily swayed when making important decisions. | |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 03:08 - Mar 30 with 1049 views | The_Romford_Blue |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
You never understood why? Really?
This is a man who lets remember described Murphy (top scorer in the league the year before remember) as one of our most important players and was a massive element to the style of play under Mick, only to sell him days before the transfer window ended, promised (via his mouthpiece of course) we’d be spending the funds on a replacement which was a blatant lie and then ended up signing... Leon Best on a free. But you can’t understand why sh*t like that would anger fans?
He was killing the club slowly year on year and every day that passes under Gamechanger just highlights it more and more. In fact I’d go as far as saying ‘I told you so’ to everyone who replied to my Evans Out posts with ‘find us a buyer then’. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 04:59 - Mar 30 with 1017 views | Westcountryblue |
Marcus's parting gift of writing off over 100m in debt was a nice touch. Fair play to him for putting the needs of the club in front of his own and knowing when to sell.
The problem with the Evan's era was the constant penny pinching in things like infrastructure, staffing and recruitment. Moving across senior managers from the Marcus Evans group with no industry experience, under staffing vital areas of the club and a total failure to develop any sort of culture or overall strategy put us back light years. This was while similar sized clubs (at the time) like Southampton and Leicester all reaped the rewards of good, off the pitch, management.
Naivety also springs to mind. Evan's enjoyed the contacts that football brought him, but was misguided to think he could seamlessly shift from being a successful owner and leader in one industry to a completely different one. That's why he got his pants pulled down by the likes of Barry Fry with deals like Paul Taylor etc... [Post edited 30 Mar 2022 5:20]
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 06:04 - Mar 30 with 981 views | BlueBadger |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
'He was doing his best' is a defence that works nearly as well about the Evans era as it does Boris Johnson's management of the pandemic. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 06:12 - Mar 30 with 973 views | BlueBadger |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:07 - Mar 29 by J2BLUE |
Not bringing in a CEO who knew what they were doing, having every decision run through him and refusing to change his 'investment strategy' despite the fact it was clearly only going on way.
Selling assets and replacing them with frees, loans and trialists was always going to end badly. |
Not backing the one competent manager he appointed, keeping the bad ones in post too long and indulging them in their mad whims, lack of investment in things like ijury rehab, the academy, scouting and training facilities which would have actually saved money long-term... [Post edited 30 Mar 2022 6:13]
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 06:43 - Mar 30 with 938 views | textbackup |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:01 - Mar 29 by Seablu |
Never really understood why ME got quite so much abuse.
Too many experts telling him how to spend his money.
Yes, we were stagnating, but at least he put food on the table every week.
Just a shame it was bland microwave mush.
That said, I confidently expect some Nigella-style over indulgence in the coming year or so.
Less eating mess, more Eton mess. |
ME got a few nasty things said on a forum, he absolutely got away with the piss poor running of our club.
He’s lucky he only had Ipswich fans to deal with, the sort that worry about bottle lids ffs
When you look how Birmingham, for example, dealt with their awful owners.
The only good thing he done was write off the debt, and even that I’m not grateful for, it was all his own doing. |  |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 09:31 - Mar 30 with 834 views | tractorboy1978 |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:17 - Mar 29 by Lord_Lucan |
I kind of agree with about the CEO but the rest is just blah de blah.
ME took over at the same time football changed, having £770m was no longer rich in football terms but without him we would have capitulated.
You can spout things out of anger but he saved our arse and whatever happened we can all say things in hindsight and as human beings we all make mistakes. |
£770m is a red herring too as that was his asset wealth. Cash wealth is obviously a wildly different thing and I am far from convinced he ever had the sort of cash wealth needed to adequately fund a football club of our size. In many ways it is unfair to compare him to the new ownership group for whom it seems money is no object.
That being said, he made a catalogue of poor decisions along the way which put him further into a hole. No CEO and draining resources from every facet of the club other than the first team eventually caught up with him. Writing off the debt was his only option in order to sell the club, so I don't see it as some sort of charity. His alternative was to keep losing circa £6m per year to at best be a lower end Championship club.
Selling Webster for £3m and him being sold on a year later by Ashton for £20m really is a great summation of his stewardship here.
Would we have got another owner if Evans hadn't bought us? Probably. Would they have been better or worse? Who knows. [Post edited 30 Mar 2022 9:32]
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 09:35 - Mar 30 with 823 views | The_Flashing_Smile |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 22:28 - Mar 29 by LeoMuff |
Firstly I doubt it was anywhere near 100m the larger the debt the greater the tax breaks, he charged us interest on this debt.
He neglected the club to a shocking degree, wouldn’t even re invest the cash from player sales for replacements ffs.
If he hadn’t got lucky with appointing Mick his whole reign would have been utterly catastrophic.
As others have said barely a good word to say on him, apart from he left and hopefully found decent owners to replace himself, utterly incompetent at owning a football club. |
Ah, the old "he made money coz of tax breaks" nonsense rears its head again. Never seems to go away despite people explaining it again and again. |  |
| Trust the process. Trust Phil. |
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 09:35 - Mar 30 with 823 views | MattinLondon |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 03:08 - Mar 30 by The_Romford_Blue |
You never understood why? Really?
This is a man who lets remember described Murphy (top scorer in the league the year before remember) as one of our most important players and was a massive element to the style of play under Mick, only to sell him days before the transfer window ended, promised (via his mouthpiece of course) we’d be spending the funds on a replacement which was a blatant lie and then ended up signing... Leon Best on a free. But you can’t understand why sh*t like that would anger fans?
He was killing the club slowly year on year and every day that passes under Gamechanger just highlights it more and more. In fact I’d go as far as saying ‘I told you so’ to everyone who replied to my Evans Out posts with ‘find us a buyer then’. |
I can’t believe that anyone still defends Evans. | | | |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 09:39 - Mar 30 with 814 views | wkj |
There is a very simple analogy here -
Evans kept us on life support, GC20 are trying to perform surgery.
Whilst it could have gone much worse in the short term, there is every chance Evans' ownership got in the way of a better option coming in to the club too.
I have no warm feelings towards Evans, he might have meant well but his decision making during his stewardship was wreckless and lead to the cracks to wide to paper over. [Post edited 30 Mar 2022 9:41]
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| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 09:47 - Mar 30 with 785 views | itfcjoe |
| Just finished watching the Fans Forum on 21:17 - Mar 29 by Lord_Lucan |
I kind of agree with about the CEO but the rest is just blah de blah.
ME took over at the same time football changed, having £770m was no longer rich in football terms but without him we would have capitulated.
You can spout things out of anger but he saved our arse and whatever happened we can all say things in hindsight and as human beings we all make mistakes. |
With what he spent, if it was spent well it was enough to make us competitive in the league above - someone like Luton would only dream of the budget he gave us and they are looking good in the Championship
It was the lack of dynamism and investment he brought to the club - everything went to the first team wages, where the reality is one less player could have paid for 5 off field appointments that would have made much more difference to the club |  |
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