Decent update - SSC are talking to potential investors including people they spoke to before and during the process, we are no longer exclusive so we can also talk to people, unsecured loan of up to £3 million gets us through this season and into next, they are still going ahead with moving TWIOF as a subsidiary of another holding company or whatever but this might not be completed before we get another investment vote (which makes me hope that we will be months rather than years away from another investment vote), etc

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Has anyone on either board really admitted to making mistakes? Doing so might make them more believable.

Maximise the return on shares? That'll be the day. Ha!

Russ: it’s poor leadership imvho - it’s a scatter gun approach. Need to define the areas that need expertise and ‘working groups’ and move on.

Russ, i think it was said that the stadium actually makes a profit and its those football budget costs you highlight that are beyond our reach now.

...or to minimise the destruction of value, in our current situation!

$6m - I think you'll find that the Directors of AFCW have only one duty - that is to shareholders of AFCW. The duty is to maximise the return on AFCW shares - by the payment of dividends or the increase in the net asset value of the company. Everything else follows from this.

As an aside I 'love' that whilst Rome burns the DT have decided to establish more working groups (aka talking shops) to discuss AI and 'Social Impact' whilst the current working groups give no update to members on what sort of work they're doing. Who decided we should be using Dons Trust resources for these items? Why focus on these items rather than, say, exploring protections for club assets, or scrutinising club performance, etc?

I agree that, as a league club, we are better off at PL- the issue for me is that, if we are forced to radically cut our budget and go back to non league, we wouldn’t have the income to cover the fixed costs of the stadium (maybe we could do so if we were in National League but not if we were NL South or Ryman level). We had really good crowds when we were chasing up through non-league to get our place back, but I don’t think that we would get the same if we were just dropping back down the levels.

The reason we are in the shit is almost undoubtedly due to the wage bill continuing to rise. Average in 2019/20 was £6.5m in League One, in 2024 it was £9.5m, now its likely even higher, and our loss is £3m per year (including depreciation of the stadium assets).. we could not have sustained £6.5m if we stayed at Kingsmeadow. We wouldnt have the depreciation charges (which arent a cash flow issue anyway) but we are almost undoubtedly in a better position at PL than we would have been without it.

I suspect running costs for a dilapidated stadium in North Wales with very few facilities and our new West Stand are very different but I believe it would be possible. However, we would need to make changes such as mothballing certain parts of the ground to cut down on FM and other costs and certain parts of the West Stand. We don't need all those TV screens in the concourse for example. I don't want it to come to this as, like Nick, I don't want to go through all that again but since we got into the EFL as AFCW, aside from a few fleeting periods, it has been mostly struggle, fighting relegation and dross to watch.

Wrexham pre-Hollywood managed to survive 14 seasons in the National League with sub 5k attendances without the need to move to a smaller ground.

$6m man- I don’t disagree with any of that in terms of causes, other than my view (based on no analysis, just gut feel) is that we would struggle to fund the budget even to stay in the National League and that crowds at NL South level wouldn’t allow us to cover the costs of running the ground, so in effect we would need to find a new smaller ground and go back to being a permanent non league side. At that point I don’t care what happens- I have done that once and it wouldn’t be for me again. I am too old to start a third time.

Building a stadium we couldn't afford based on flawed assumptions on revenue (how the ancillary income would generate cash for the playing budget), costs (no real idea of how much the stadium would cost to run) and funding (initially it was thought the funding gap would be filled by a community share offer, which was a ridiculous assumption from Erik) have accelerated the position we are in. Our ambition has killed us but it is not just the stadium. Going full time and getting into the EFL, with the excessive player salaries, would have killed us anyway had we stayed at Kingsmeadow. Quite simply, whatever Kris Stewart says that whenever we needed money we (royal we as he didn't put much in) can raise it ourselves, might work for modest sums in non-league when we still had supporter goodwill but that's worn off now.

$6m man- if the directors were dong their fiduciary duty properly they wouldn’t have left it until it was almost too late to start seeking investment. I suspect that there isn’t much we can do to cut costs for the rest of the season, given contracts in place, but if there is no investor signed up by the end of the season we will see a massive massive cutback in terms of the budget for next season- which then ties back to the “4-6 months viability” quoted to us in the investor meeting.

The directors have a fiduciary duty to all stakeholders in AFCW PLC, so if they are just banking on agreeing a deal with investors and having a £3m facility as a temporary back up to buy time, they're not. They need to cut costs NOW. That's how you buy time. If we get investment, great, and we can build back up again. If we don't then at least the club is surviving.

$6m man- I agree that signing off on us being a going concern is a “bold” approach by the auditors, even with the unsecured facility in place. I can only imagine that this was a combination of (1) them feeling that they had covered themselves with the “emphasis of matter” on this point in the audit report and (2) our plan B, if we can’t get another investor, of slashing the playing budget to almost nothing and accepting relegation out of the league - the latter would probably still fall over as I doubt we would be viable in non league unless we get a new smaller ground, but that is probably far enough way not to factor into the analysis now.

Not sure of any enshriners on the DTB currently but then it's hard because they're all so anonymous these days they never say anything about anything.

Nug- but the vote to sell down to 50.01 was massively in favour and I imagine the vote for SSC would have been as well? 50.01 failed the first time but I think that was down to an unrealistic prospectus from the DTB. I think hardcore enshriners are very small in number and have made almost no difference.

I'd probably just wake up on a Saturday morning and think "Rochdale!" and then get on the train to Rochdale, have a pint or two in a couple pubs and then head home :-)

I think i'd just watch international football and not bother with club football anymore. May pop to Corinthian Casuals occasionally if I am bored on a Saturday afternoon as they are down the road from me

"At least we had a club"

What a brilliant game 🤪 [Link]

This is all so predictable and you could see coming as soon a NPL was built. The way the club voting is set up the vocal minority were always going to win and we were always only ever going to tailspin into administration and have no control over who the club was sold to because that was the only way any decision was going to be made. The decision was going to have to be taken out of the enshriners hands because they have crippled the decision making process. The naivety will eventually kill the club because "we are never selling out" but "I don't have a way forward" just doesn't cut it