I see that WIJG has been giving his successful businessman schpiel again. Us lower paid workers deserve the living wage. We give customer service, some bad, some good and my managers rate me as excellent. I currently get the London living wage but as of March I'll be 26p off it. No Biggie, I'll still be able to afford my season ticket and I'll be at every home league match - holiday allowance permitting.

WJ - possibly so?

Tranmere, Harrogate and Crawley all have academies and often run in conjunction with the local sixth form.

I’m sure that academymanager has been thoroughly enforced by now and will not post on here ever again. It’s not how this club is run.

I can see the benefits of the academy for the youngsters who go through it and get a career in football, and for the Premier League clubs who get to poach talent relatively cheaply. For us as a club?Not so clear, though I think that you’d need proper financial data to really understand and maybe the various grants that we can get push the cost down enough to make it work. I agree that a relying on developing and selling academy players is really a bit like a business strategy based on buying lots of lottery tickets (ie it’s probably not going to work).

The median would be a more interesting number than the mean.

It is hard to make a serious windfall profit out of an academy. Very few academy players make it to the first team of our club anymore. Why? If they are any good they get poached by a bigger club and we receive a formula driven fee. If they are no good they get released. Only a few slip through the big club vulture net and make it to the first team. That is why we don't see many anymore. I said as much when Hamilton came on here the other day to say how wonderful the academy was (fair enough - so he should, even if he isn't totally objective or unbiased) and to lecture us on positivity (which wasn't fair enough and another attempt at a club employee to shut down debate on here by some spurious justification a parent of a potential player may read something they don't like).

VAR taking a lifetime in the Barca game too

Nah I can only take one fan owned club at a time 😁

Any Barcelona fans in the house

An average is an average, it doesn't mean every club is exactly on the average. Clubs around the bottom are probably losing less, a few at the top, more.

Got 4 cans of double diamond today Tesco are the only ones selling it at the moment £5 for 4 big cans brought back some memories brewed in Leeds now

RP: FYI Peterborough's revenue is broadly in line with ours but their loss (for the most recent year they have filed accounts) is 15% less than our most recent loss. The idea that every owner of a L1 or L2 club is subsidising to the tune of £6m each year is one for the clouds.

Athletico Madrid v Barca on ITV4

Academy players don't make it that often as the quick fix of PL football is better served by bringing in foreign "established" players

JG - as I said it's a secondary consideration, not a justification for the academy, but it is a consideration. The lottery analogy is good because it's almost literal. The previous arguments made for sales and first team break throughs resulting in cost savings as a justification for spend on academy are primary.

KPI 1 may be how many academy players make the first team squad but is there a KPI 2 which is a measure of how many become first team regulars (e.g. Isaac ... a definite success story) and a target of a KPI 3 based on players we sell on and make money from?

I'd be interested to know how much Darragh McAnthony & his co-owners put into Peterborough each season. They're at the sort of level I think we could aim for - fairly safe in L1 with occasional seasons in the Championship.

Yeah I don’t know how well the economics of an academy work out these days with the dice loaded against lower league clubs if they happen to find or develop a talented youngster. Exeter with the main payout in recent years and it hasn’t transformed them as a club.

KT2 & trigger - I get the lottery analogy - but surely an entity in debt can't afford to gamble on the slim chance of winning a transformative payback in years to come - unless the odds are truly stacked in our favour. But that's all part of the commercial assessment.

Not a glib response at all kt2 but the best example of that must be Exeter and Ollie Watkins.

Besides the P&L focused commercial rationale for an academy there is also the element of fortune, if that academy is successfully selling decent volumes of players. Provided decent sell on clauses are used there is always the chance a player goes for mega bucks down the line and pays off the debt in one fell swoop. The more players that are sold into the market, the more tickets in the draw you hold. Ollie Watkins etc.

Laurence, I thought maybe cigar smoking rosette man was recovering from being accosted by Paul Bowgett during a reserve match, but that would have been several years later.

As discussed on here the other day, the term 'working capital' is stretched in many different directions. I think the pretty clear implication of what was said was that it wasn't just lending us money to cover operating losses (hence distinguishing it from the loan that has been offered to us by one of the directors). We were given no clue what the quid pro quo was, however.

By the way, I went to see Hamnet the other day. Who knew Joe Lewis was a dead-ringer for William Shakespeare!