Call me unambitious, but I would be kind of terrified if we are actually offering seven figure fees for players.
Unless our owners are starting to donate money to the club - but to this point, I don't think they are, are they? Everything is still going onto our balance sheet as debt, I think?
We make an operating loss of about £5m a year now, I think? Which we then offset by player sales (sometimes partially, sometimes - like 2019/20 - so much so that we make a profit). If we start spending on transfers so that we're breaking even in that market, or losing rather than making money, then our debt's going to start to soar by £5m+ a year.
Not terminal as long as our investors are still on board. But what if Stratfield Brake falls through? Will they still want to stick around then? And who the hell would want to buy a business that loses £5m+ a season, and has almost no assets outside of its playing squad??
It all kind of feels like we're pushing all our chips into the middle......and that is making me uncomfortable, because I'm looking around at our competitors, and I'm not 100% we've got the winning hand......
I’m told we offered 750k for Hardie. The bid for Szmodics in January was in a similar ball park. We also paid circa half a million to Boro for Browne and spent another half a million simply
loaning Kane for a season. We’re already spending big money by the club’s standards. Josh Murphy’s deal across two years between wages and signing on / agent fees is also very large, and Cameron Brannagan now has the biggest contract the club has ever given a player in its history. We’ve spent all this while turning down millions in bids spread across several players since last summer. The net swing between what we’ve spent and what we’ve turned down is eye watering. This is why people should have expectations. “Oh, League One is okay, there are some big names here” needs to go as a mentality.
Now, as for your general concerns re sustainability, debt, ownership in the event of SB falling through etc, my opinion on the matter is this: Oxford United could well die if the move doesn’t happen. Again, and I want to stress this enormously, that is purely
my opinion. I have good reasons for forming said opinion, but it’s still an opinion none the less, not to be taken as fact or gospel. I cannot see a world where anybody else takes the club on if SB fails, because if this proposal doesn’t come off then I don’t know where another opportunity comes from. There is no possibility to stay at the current ground beyond 2026 unless it’s on a short-term basis, and the spiralling costs of the rent / service charges etc will bury the club regardless. I am 99.9% certain that the football club cannot actually afford to not move. It cannot survive.
However, it is worth remembering that in the here and now, things are going well and progressing broadly as hoped. There is positivity and as such, the board is investing enormously, because there are currently no reasons to believe that we won’t get to where we want to be. We have arguably the wealthiest owners outside of the Premier League - they are
that collectively rich. I still don’t think most people get it on that front. They are still smart rather than frivolous, but my God, if we get to the Championship in the next couple of years and all is going well on the stadium project, everybody had better strap themselves in for one hell of a ride. These people are serious. They’re really,
really serious.
But… we need the stadium. In that regard it really doesn’t matter whether they’re spending handsomely (but not recklessly) as they wait for a decision, or whether they tighten the belt and try to just keep us in the division. That won’t do anybody any good anyway - Bakrie is on camera saying that he believes Championship football is a very important component of getting the stadium to happen. It’s all linked. We need to be right up there banging on the door year after year, because that might just be the deal breaker, and being up there costs money.
Not spending money is probably far more dangerous for the club’s future than spending it.
To use your own metaphor, if we don’t push the chips into the middle of the table then I really don’t know where we’re planning on putting them.
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