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Mark Ashton on the Price of Football podcast
at 20:20 30 Jun 2023

Just listened to the section of the podcast where the net zero is mentioned. I noted that Mark comments that he is talking about net zero on a cash flow basis rather than a profit and loss basis. If I have understood this correctly in relation to a typical structure of a transfer then this is an important distinction. Our most significant sales have been made in the earlier part of this three year period whilst some of the more significant purchases have been in the last year (including the January transfer window). With the cash transfer payments often being spread over more than one year, including the initial cost and not the add ons, then we have probably now received the likely full value of the cash payments in relation to the initial transfer fee for the more significant sales we have made in this three year period (or even for sales made prior to this three year period but where cash in part was received during this three years period). However, for the most recent purchases we have made, I suspect that the cash payment of the initial fee are still to be made in part beyond this three year period which he mentions. Therefore, on a profit and loss basis, I suspect that we might not be net zero but on a cashflow basis I don't disbelieve what Mark says. However, we will still have cash payments to make in future years for some of the players we have recently purchased where on a profit and loss basis the transfer fees would have already been accounted for. I should mention I am not an accountant and perhaps those with more knowledge could offer a view.
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Today's highlights
at 20:03 16 Oct 2021

I think that Mick was hard towards Janoi having now seen the highlights. Once Burgess got the wrong side of the forward the two remaining defenders that side have to shuffle across and that includes Janoi covering the Cambridge player in the centre. That then leaves two possible options to cover the remaining Cambridge player on our right - our right sided player in the 3 or one of the two holding midfielders. We don't seem to have got this right at all this season as it is not the first time we have been exposed when the defenders have needed to shuffle across. Not saying that it easy for either to cover really quickly and needs player awareness of the situation to cover back very quickly. It is definitely a weakness of the system Cook plays and I feel opposition coaches will be looking at that to exploit it.
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Richard Stearman: worth a look?
at 18:56 14 Jul 2021

I would say no to Stearman owing to his age. I remember last year when we were looking for a left back that I would rather have gone for a Harry Pickering profile (young, successful in a lower league with good stats and potential) rather than a Ward who would have a short remaining part of his career left at the level we needed. With the ability to pay a fee for players now we have much more chance of signing a younger progressive type of player than we did last year and I would hope that this type of profile is on the list of possible targets for CB.
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Is it promotion or the sack for Cook this season?
at 18:41 14 Jul 2021

I don't think it will be promotion or the sack, but if we do not at least get into the play offs then I would be very surprised to see Cook as the manager next season. Not many managers would appear to have the option of replacing almost an entire squad (including those under contract) with a new squad and getting the quality of replacements that we have to date and might still be able to get. The owners have been very accommodating but think that they will be a relatively high level of achievement in return.

One point I wanted to mention is that If Cook does not want certain players then he should at least comment and act in a way which would allow us to get as much for these players as possible. Criticising them is not helping the value which we might get for them or even ease their transfer. I think that Ashton has had to comment that they are not bad players or bad attitudes etc. and this is probably to help him with getting value for them or even getting a transfer for them.
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Owen Garvan was a better player than Andre Dozzell
at 14:09 18 Apr 2021

I can see where you are coming from here. I think it is easy to forget at times that the whole point is to score more goals than you concede. This season Andre has had one assist and not scored. Defensively he is not great and therefore he is not picked on the basis of stopping goals but instead on creating. I also feel that unless he has a more physical player alongside him then we look vulnerable. At the present time we only have Downes that offers the athleticism and physicality. However, Downes, whilst recognising he has only played little more than a 1,000 minutes, has offered even less from an attacking point of view. Therefore if you play those two and then a hold up striker like Hawkins that does not score essentially you are relying very heavily on the three players that are not defenders to get the goals. Look at the lack of goals from midfielders in recent games. If we go into next season trying the same again with Andre and Downes in the middle they either need to offer a lot more in terms of goals and assists or we will end up with the same problem again. Both good players that are reasonably young and could go on to better things but not if they play like they did this season.
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5th best defence in the division, 4th worst attack
at 12:56 28 Mar 2021

I agree with Paul Cook's comment that we have a team of players waiting for someone else to make things happen and that this has been the case for several seasons. The midfield in particular has been very guilty of this for a long time.

It does seem that we have had inadequate offensive coaching and drilling of patterns of play under Mick, Hurst and Lambert. I am not sure that we had much of any proper coaching under Hurst and Lambert, whilst under Mick there was evidence of good defensive coaching, but nothing when we had the ball.

I recall that when we played Leeds in the Championship, the warm-ups of the two sides before the game spoke volumes. As part of their warm-up Leeds set up a session of attack against defensive at pace using their half of the field and it was really good to watch. It was high pace, excellent movement and you could see how it could benefit them in a game. I have never see us attempt to do this. Equally, it always used to amuse me that in our session, when the defenders were working in a four with their heading, passing on the ground and long passes, the attackers and midfielders would be having shooting practice. Meanwhile, Skuse when playing would be doing neither and instead did some stretches and would chat to the ground staff /spare coaching staff. No intention that it would be even worth his while practising shooting as he had no intention of having a shot during the game or was not expected to need to. Skuse was great defensively, but what would have helped him and the team is some time being spent improving the weaker areas of his game in terms of offering more when we had the ball or even shooting. He was definitely a midfielder that when we had the ball was waiting for someone else to make things happen.
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Anyone been keeping an eye on the Football Index scandal?
at 22:01 8 Mar 2021

Thanks for your overview of how this works. I was not really aware of Football Index and how it worked, but having seen the negative news in the last couple of days wanted to understand it further.

So, if I understand correctly, Football Index has two sources of income. The first is the income it receives for the initial shares it offers for each player and the second was the commission it took on share sales between traders and/or the the price differentiation between the buy and sell price of traded players. This was then expected to cover the cost of it operating and also the dividend paid on the players. So really issuing new shares for existing players was never going to be a viable option as it would dilute the dividend and thus reduce the price of the player. Therefore the sustainable income stream had to be the commission made on player trades unless some form of advertising income could also exist on their website by advertising other companies (no idea if this was part of their business model).

If this is the case then it looks like the main consideration of the traders should have been whether or not the volume of player trades was sufficiently high enough, or other income streams existed to maintain a high dividend and thus warrant an investment on football index. Then if this was the case the secondary consideration would have been which players offered the best earning potential. However, it seems that the focus of most of the traders was more on selecting the footballers which might earn the dividend rather than whether or not the business model of Football Index could sustain a dividend.

I feel sorry for those that have lost money that they cannot afford to lose when they probably expected at the time of their investment that the main consideration was their knowledge of football.
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Reality check.
at 20:54 26 Feb 2021

Personally I would be doubtful that the new owners will be expecting to plough £100M into the club over a number of years to cover operating losses and the net cash outflow in the same way that ME has. We will have been sold before then or gone into administration. In addition the pension fund will be expecting to get its cash back in the same way that Aviva (I think it was) wanted to get its cash back that it loaned to us for the stands. I too am not familiar with the funding model for the acquisition of league one clubs when they are not being purchased by a wealthy individual using his / her own money to purchase the club and fund the operations. However, it takes a brave pension fund manager to loan a large amount of money to a business that has made significant operating losses over many years and with no obvious security available to secure the loan (unless their security is future season ticket sales over many years). Interest rates will be higher but they will want the repayment of the loan. Even if we get into the Championship our profitability will not improve and in fact many clubs in that division make bigger loses than we do. We are definitely sacrificing our long term security here and given our luck in recent years it probably won't work out for us. I am definitely glass half empty tonight, but hope I am wrong.
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Phil
at 20:05 26 Feb 2021

I agree with the press release possibly being used as a negotiation tool, but also wondered if the intended audience might have been the fans too. Marcus has always said that he would be careful who he would sell the club to and also I believe in the past mentioned something along the lines of being a custodian. Therefore in making this statement he is confirming to the fans that he is not proactively looking to sell the club and does still care who the potential new owner might be. In addition, whilst the negotiations continue he intends to try to focus on getting the club promoted (although many of us feel that this might be hard to achieve this season) and if the deal breaks down or he feels is not right, then he will continue to financially support the club in future seasons too until someone else comes along that he feels is appropriate to do a deal with. Therefore I think it is to reassure us that he does not intend to walk away or seek an exit at all costs. Whilst I do not know Marcus Evans personally I do feel that this image does matter to him.

But then again I might be wrong.
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An unnamed state's fire and police pension fund...
at 15:22 26 Feb 2021

Initial thought is that this would not be a great source of funding if we are looking at long term stability. Evans made a lot of mistakes, but one thing you cannot criticise Evans for is that he set a budget every year for each manager to operate within and injected cash into the club annually to ensure it could meet its financial liabilities. A US state pension fund will not be intending to do the same and therefore if things go wrong they are more likely to walk away and leave us in real trouble financially as they will have a duty to the members of the pension fund to manage the fund sensibly. Whereas under Evans it was solely his decision to continue to fund us and to his credit he always did so - perhaps not spending the millions that other owners have done but injecting cash nonetheless.
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Kayden Jackson speaks
at 19:03 17 Feb 2021

You have to have some sympathy for Kayden this season and to some extent Norwood. Their goals and assists combined were very important last season and yet at the start of the season Kayden was told that we were changing formation and he was not in Lambert's plans as either a lone striker or the two wider attacking players. Not exactly going to fill you with much enthusiasm having contributed so much the season before and when you are at a key age in your career. Leaving aside that Norwood has been injured for big parts of the season, I suspect that rather being a lone striker he would rather know that they were going into the season playing another striker up front and to benefit from the assists that Kayden provided last season and could provide this season. I had fears that we would be relying very heavily on the midfield or wider two players to replace the goals and assists that a second striker could provide and whilst the midfield started well it has become its largely ineffective self again. On the rare occasions we have played two up front this season we have looked more likely to score and therefore as a striker it must be incredibly frustrating just going on to the pitch when you know that the set up is not going to get the best out of you but as the sole striker there is pressure on you to get the goals.
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I thought Dozzell looked back to near his best yesterday
at 17:14 31 Jan 2021

Agree that Kenlock was the best player yesterday and pleased for him. I think that the heavy, wet, slightly cut up pitches this time of year don't help Dozzell. He is the type of player that will play better at the start and end of each season when the pitch quality is at its best.
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Radio Stoke
at 19:10 30 Jan 2021

Agree with that. I turned on the commentary to see what it was like and listened to it throughout. Commentator had done his homework on us, thought he called the game well and the analysis was good too.
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Jackson
at 12:39 27 Jan 2021

When a player leaves us some do better and some do worse. With Jackson a different manager will get more out of him playing to his strengths and therefore when he does leave I would expect him to do well with another League 1 team and would also not be surprised if he was recruited by a Championship team. It is very easy to forget the goals and assists he got last season often when he was not always playing as part of a front two. The quality of strikers in League 1 are generally quite poor.
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Stephen Ward
at 21:18 26 Jan 2021

The problem with this signing was that he had to play well this season. It was signing that would only work if we were to get promoted this season. Otherwise at the end of this season we are back to square one at left back. I would have preferred a young left back, like Pickering of Crewe that would be a solution for that position for more than one season and could potentially develop and be good enough if we were to get promotion. The next recruitment for left back has to have a younger profile even if not signed for a fee but signed as a free agent.
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Love him or hate him MM is
at 13:59 23 Jan 2021

It is a good appointment for him so soon after his brief stint in Cyprus. I will be interested to see how he gets on. In the last season or so of his management spell with us, his style was setting us up not to lose rather than setting us up to win. I don't think that will meet the expectations of Cardiff's owners. Therefore, can he set up a team to be more attacking with the emphasis on winning rather than losing? I'm undecided but interested to see. He also has a team that is not in immediate relegation trouble but looking to get up in the top half of the table. Therefore he cannot use that as an excuse to set up defensively.

When Mick left I wanted to see what another manager would do with essentially the same squad. We never go that opportunity to find out as not only did we get a new manager but we also started the following season with a vastly different squad. Therefore that question remains unanswered and always will do.
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I note that Ward is as deluded as Lambert and Evans
at 19:20 14 Dec 2020

Some interesting comments in this thread. The right statistics in combination with others are very telling and some are having very good success as a result of diligent interpretation and application of them to outperform other teams relatively speaking. For example I think that it is no coincidence that Brighton under Tony Bloom and Brentford under Matthew Benham have both performed above expectations in recent seasons. They really know what they are doing with statistical analysis. Sure, not every decision they make is correct, but they get more right than wrong and hence the generally good upward trend of each club in recent seasons. In contrast focussing too heavily on one area - whether it is possession which seems to be the case under Lambert or distance run as was the case with Hurst is the wrong use of statistics.
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Bishop injuries and contract
at 23:03 4 Dec 2020

Does this triggering of an extension to the contract mean that the average salary no longer applies to the contract? I thought I read previously that it did but I might be wrong.
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Bishop injuries and contract
at 21:51 4 Dec 2020

Without the salary cap I agree, However, with the salary cap this becomes a very tricky decision. Of the £2.5M salary cap we have, how much would you offer a year to Bishop bearing in mind that you might be allocating an above average salary to a player that might only play a handful of games a year?
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Just thought, Dozzell suspended, Downes & Skuse out.
at 19:52 16 Nov 2020

I don't think it will be as straightforward as some assume when it comes to deciding which players we offer terms to whose contracts expire at the end of this season, particularly for those where their salary is above the average salary that applied this year. Every player whose contract expires this summer will be planning for next season from 1 January when they can enter in talks with new clubs. They will be concerned to get something sorted early rather than wait until the end of the season. I am sure some will get offers and then the club will have to make a decision on whether to match it and if so what implications that will have regarding the salary cap. For example some clubs in League 1 might target one of our players to be one of their higher earners. A championship club might make an offer for one of our better players. What do we do then? It will be very unlikely that all the players that we want to keep will still be available at the end of the season for the wage that we can pay under the salary cap.
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