chinapig

The Foreign Office initial briefing: Roman Abramovich has stakes in steel giant Evraz, Norilsk Nickel and owns Chelsea FC. He sold a 73% stake in Russian oil firm Sibneft to state-owned gas titan Gazprom for £9.87bn in 2005. His net worth is an estimated £9.4bn. He is one of the few oligarchs from the 1990s to maintain prominence under Putin. I imagine more detail will have to be put before Parliament in due course.

@Mr Popodopolous Fyi on today's Price of Football podcast Kieran Maguire says Sheffield 3 still owes £42m of the £60m price of Hillsborough yet the club is paying £2.8m per annum rent. About the same as West Ham pay for the London Stadium!

And even if he asked does anybody seriously think Simpson is going to go into specifics and name names? He might do it off the record but he is not going to allow it to be published.

Simpson was supposed to be the short term right back solution. Unfortunately he is so bad we had to fast track Tanner. Indeed he is so bad we are playing a young striker there until Tanner is fit. With our lack of funds we cannot afford to recruit that badly again. Every penny counts so we can't even afford cheap failures.

Yes, see my edit and mea culpa.

Is the £12m a reflection of the conversion of a £12m loan into shares I referred to earlier in the thread? Edit: evidently not as it is shown as a Covid add back. Must read before commenting.?

Can't be, he did a great job. Steve kept telling us so it must be true.?

Yep, I've given it a lot of thought and I can't think who he might mean. I guess we'll never know.?

So that's where part of the funding for the rest of the season is coming from then. I wonder where the rest is coming from in the absence of a buyer?

Unless a club has actually cheated I don't see it as good guys and bad guys. More a case of those who have managed their finances well and those who haven't. If we, and a handful of other clubs, demand a rule change to mitigate the impact of our actions it will be interesting to see what the response of the better managed clubs is if it ever goes to a vote.

Yes but the concept of net transfer spend is not helpful since it is only one part of the equation. There is little point in returning profits on fees if you fritter it all and more away on increasing your squad and costs way beyond what is sustainable. We built no resilience into our finances. We didn't fix the roof while the sun shone. Now we want provision to be made for our mistake.

It's still complete nonsense imo. If I were the EFL I would simply ask exactly which players we would have sold to the tune of £30m, bearing in mind that Scott and Semenyo had not really emerged until this season. The fact is we gambled on receiving big fees year after year to fund an ever increasing wage bill. This was at least risky and arguably reckless so we were likely to come a cropper sooner or later even without Covid. Yet instead of admitting we got it wrong we double down. We ought to be embarrassed, keep our heads down and sort our finances out without recourse to fantasy accounting.

In other words shortly = longly. ?

Their definition of shortly seems to be rather elastic since they have been saying the same since at least December.

So a forecast that they have funding as opposed to proof they have actual hard cash. I'm not sure what that means but if the EFL are ok with it so be it. Edit: actually I assume it is verifiable evidence of expected income and costs.

He also just happened to mention in passing that Quantuma were appointed by Mel Morris. Which implies absolutely nothing about what their priorities are of course.

No tea for you until you've done your homework then Dave.?

I thought stadium "sales" no longer counted towards FFP.

Kieran Maguire reports that Forest have issued a billion shares - at a penny each. Turns out though that this was the owner converting £12m in loans to shares so not as odd as it sounded.

Kieran Maguire slates Quantuma again in his podcast today. They are again not replying to emails and calls from the EFL and club staff are leaving because they have no idea what is going on. Apparently Quantuma say their silence is strategic, whatever that means. The alleged meeting with the EFL they refer to is apparently news to the EFL also. He also confirms that reputable insolvency firms wouldn't take the job on because Morris didn't put the stadium company into administration. Tick tock .....

Plus of course if you calculate the mean it will be distorted by extreme values. My preference is often for the median to smooth out that effect. Though I often found that users couldn't get their head around the simple difference. A depressing comment on the numeracy of British managers.?

Not quite. In the particular case of whether or not King playing makes a material difference to the number of goals we concede I am suggesting there isn't enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion. I suppose there are other confounding factors such as who did he play against, who else was in the team and so on so you may be unable to attribute the outcome to a single player anyway. Measures that are personal to him like passing accuracy for instance would still be meaningful though.

I took it that @Davefevswas simply accurately describing the data. The implication for me being that you can't draw any conclusions because it is skewed in a purely statistical sense. The sample size i.e. the number of games King has played is too small anyway imo.

Oh sure, ask an open question, though Nigel can get terribly prickly even over perfectly reasonable questions so it takes a certain amount of courage to ask! But he isn't going to say he made a bad mistake and it turned out Simpson is crap, has a bad attitude or whatever even if that was the case. Nor should he arguably so it's probably academic.

Thanks Dave, comprehensive stuff. Fwiw I read your piece at the time and agreed with it. Fans always want to sign strikers as its the glamour position but the priority was, and disappointingly still is, improving our defence. Even if Wells leaves and assuming Semenyo stays I don't expect us to sign a striker as it will give Conway a chance to step up. Of course nobody is going to ask the question about Simpson and Nigel wouldn't and couldn't answer it anyway. But in a sense he already has since his approach is very much anybody will do at right back as long as it isn't Simpson! So a bad signing but at least it was a cheap bad signing.? And for the avoidance of doubt I am not among the kind of people you quote, as I hope my posts show. Am I delighted with how Nigel has transformed us as an attacking force? Yes. Am I disappointed and surprised he has yet to improve our defending? Yes. Do I believe he will fix things given time? Definitely.