Red Kite - I'd like to think that some of the ideas I put forward were useful. Certainly many of them have been taken up and implemented by the Club - but of course the cynics on here might say that they would have been implemented in any case and had nothing to do with me. Either way I'm happy that over the last year or so the club appears to have adopted a bit more commercial sense.

The Fault in Our Stars has sold over 23 million copies, so there’s definitely quite a big target audience…

Unless OI is in fact an angst-ridden sexually confused teenage girl who likes to think they have ADHD.

OI - as Trigger says. You are not his target audience. As for Ayn Rand - well, voting yes on our proposed investors perhaps aligns us with her view. An interesting philosophical discussion to be had there.

Yep. Don’t.

Galt - I’m genuinely confused by your posts. You say that you’d have been prepared to put a couple of million quid into the club (I’m not entirely sure why you couldn’t still do that if you wanted to help out…?), but you also have somewhat (in my view) contradictory ideas - how do “Id (sic) much rather have the club driven forwards on out and out self-interested capitalist motivations than any pretence of philanthropy” and “it would have been much better to enfranchise through equity ownership dozens, hundreds or thousands of fans” fit together? Do you mean that you’d like the club to be owned by hundreds/thousands of selfish people who only invest in the club for personal gain?

Sorry (well not really) Airsy. I might actually be tempted to read one of John Green's books. Does anyone have comments or suggestions?

6MD - absolutely!

Along with Google AI's comment "Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is generally considered a difficult and demanding read, not because the vocabulary or prose style is unusually dense, but due to its extreme length and heavy ideological weight"

OI - There was I thinking of giving Atlas Shrugged a go. You've put me off now.

With regard to Ayn Rand / John Galt I give you John Green's response in his Guardian article about books, in this case ones he would never read again: "I don’t feel an urgent need to return to the works of Ayn Rand, whose flimsy plots only serve to reinforce flawed ideas about how humans organise themselves and cooperate."

Aside from the money aspects and us forever being reliant on outsider ownership (it's no longer merely investment), my short term concern is what damage Bertrand could do to the playing side of things. He has no track record and whilst he may put the noses of Messrs Jackson and Cope out of joint, he may also commit us to player contracts that are unsuitable or bring in players that do not fit the style or culture, assuming he doesn't try to change that too. I suspect most will be moaning about that long before financial armageddon because it is the most immediate and visible consequence of selling our club.

Galty, did you get any feedback from the Club regarding your income generating ideas ?

WIJG - yes I think your ideas are interesting and would probably work in theory but I have no belief they would work in practice. We are unlikely to ever know which of us is right. I agree thatgiven our current situation the SSC offer makes a lot of sense and brings a a lot of professional expertise into the club and is thus what I will support.

OI - whatever you think about the workability or uptake of some of my ideas - I have been pretty consistent in expressing a commitment to have taken up a small minority stake if the Club had determined to adopt Real Fan Ownership. I would have been willing to have bought shares as part of a overall fan ownership offering of up to £2m; I would have been happy to pay more for my seat or purchase some right to my seat. I think you believe me. My gut feel is that the offer on the table from SSC is a better form of ownership than the ghastly collective that currently exists - but it would have been much better to enfranchise through equity ownership dozens, hundreds or thousands of fans.

Depreciation is a real incurred cost. Its just a means of averaging capital expenditure over the likely lifetime of the item. It can't be ignored.

Agreed 6mdm. Would love some more detail on why the stadium is costing more to run and what other increases are being made in our overheads.

* depreciation .... should not be ignored, not should be ignored. Freudian slip?

The problem is none of us know what is driving the overheads. We can reasonably accurately guess what is driving cost of sales but you can chunk all sorts of things into admin expenses. What we also don't know is whether we would incur most of these costs regardless of owning versus leasing a stadium. I agreed moving to Plough Lane has accelerated the decision we are being forced to make now because we built a stadium we couldn't afford but player salaries would have killed us too eventually by remaining at Kingsmeadow with lower revenues.

Yes SA but higher stadium running costs and increased general operating expenses are core factors as well.

Isn't most of our annual loss the depreciation cost of the stadium? Wooden dollars really as we maintain the stadium as a cost as well.

I enjoyed the KM days in non-league it was a crap stadium but it was ours it was home especially before a return to Plough Lane started feeling like a realistic possibility rather than a dream. But for all the things I dislike about our new stadium and how much it cost and continues to cost there’s no part of me that wishes we’d stayed at KM.

Most (?) Clubs have already fully depreciated their stadiums with some exceptions of course. The annual non-cash cost of providing depreciation is about one million

At KM, income would be about 2/3rds of what it is now, so we would already be under pressure with what we could spend on players (the 50% rule)

I thought we showed that our revenue was pretty good compared to other L1 clubs but our player wage bill is quite low? If so, what else is causing our annual loss?