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US Based Bidder Revealed


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The brutally obvious point is that you have to ask the question Stu.

We haven't been told. There have been comments that it will be over 6 years, further comments that it will be over 10 years. Critical information like that is skimmed over amongst the odd bullet point in sales pitch presentations. Fans aren't meant to worry about detail like that and have effectively been banned from discussing the process. We have just to keep the faith, donate our cash and let 10000 hrs worry about the details.

I buy into the SEN to help develop the club and its place in the community. What is now being proposed is that the clubs survival becomes dependent on social funding that 10000 hrs may or may not be able to secure. They haven't been overly successful so far. Do we end up in a situation where the CIC ends up taking out more loans at the fans expense and ultimately delaying any eventual direct benefit to the club. Meantime any downturn in revenues for SMFC and the already in debt, overstretched and skint CIC is supposed to bail the club out with initiatives we know nothing about that are going to fund the shortfall in debt repayments.

Currently we are told that the club makes heehaw cash out of its current community undertakings. Suddently we are going to be able to raise over £600K in profits from social enterprise - not revenue Stu...£600K + profit that will then be used to fund the shortfall in debt repayments.

Why are we not being presented with the numbers? Everyone appears to have concerns about the CIC and how it will be funded, as well as its ability to service the debt and what the implications are in terms of the CIC becoming insolvent. No information is in the public domain and no one without a vested interest has been prepared to come forward and validate the business plan. The fans should have been allowed an independent and capable third party to review the business plan on their behalf. All we have to go on is the long line of social funders that have rejected the business plan.

Sid, I would say my business capabilities are limited. I've had a go at running my own business and did alright from it. The lessons learned were probably more valuable than the profits made but despite that I would be extremely confident that if I was given control of a site like Greenhill Road and Ralston with the facilities at both locations and potential footfall that they get I would be able to generate an extra £2,000 worth of clear profit per week over and above what the club currently takes in right now and I would be able to sustain that for a period of six years. I would imagine most people on this website can think of areas where the club clearly aren't taking full advantage of the facilities to generate clear profit and that they too would be confident if they were given the run of the place they too could do much the same. So why would you think that £600,000 over 6 years would be causing any great concern to anyone at all?

Anyone taking a wee glance at the debt reduction that Clyde have managed in the last three years or a wee look at Spartans and their expansion programme over the last three years will see what can be achieved. If they then do a little research into existing SEN's they will see the kind of revenue streams being taken in by the likes of Atlantis Community Sports Centre in Oban, the Ullaspool Community Pool, Go Ape, The Homeless World Cup, The Eden Project, The Big Issue, The Factory Skate Park and many, many other organisations some of which were founded by people who were initially even more amateurish than me.

I have no idea what 10000hours business plan looks like, and I guess you'll need to update me on who the "long line of social funders" were and on what grounds they "rejected the business plan".

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Guest somner9

Somner I am enjoying the irony of having you advise me to think before I post and warning me about slander! This from the chap who was worried that the consortium might have trousered the money from any sale of McGowan or McLean in the last transfer window and hung on to that for themselves and used the money to make up for any loss they made on selling the club.

Key word there MIGHT, and exiting shareholders seldom leave cash reserve's when the sell up

It would take days if not weeks to detail all the places on this board where you have personally attacked Richard Atkinson, and besides not wanting to waste days or weeks of my life making that point and reminding you of all those occasions I would also have to suffer re-reading your posts into the bargain. No thanks.

That'll be NO then, you've obviously been looking re the paragraph before this and found nowt! But still you are not man enough to apologise that you just made it up

You claim innocently to not know about Richard Atkinson's religious beliefs yet you bring up the fact that one of his directorships is with the Scottish Bible Society. You complain about Life Church's involvement in the CIC and with developing the Void potentially.

ReA is a director of SMFC.... and we know that doesn't make him a saints fan, his religion and beliefs are his business, I've no idea what they are. I complain the void has been given to third parties to generate profit that will never benefit SMFC or even the CiC..... it doesn't matter to me which organisations are plundering the few money making opportunities the club has, whoever they are whaever they do it's wrong for SMFC

The post which I quoted did suggest that Richard Atkinson was the one leaking stories to the press. I see you are backing out of providing any evidence for this.

So you'll be able to highlight exactly where i said REA was leaking stories to the press? thing is you won't and again you know this because you've looked and your groundless claim remains just that or you would have quoted it.

The post you just made also suggested that he or the 10000Hours team tried to keep Rangers in the SPL or at the very worst in SFL1. Have you any evidence for this at all? I spoke with Richard Atkinson personally after the last public meeting as the CIC's view on how Rangers' situation was a big concern for me and was potentially a deal breaker. Nothing which he said in our conversation gave me the impression he was in favour of doing any special deals to keep Rangers in the SPL and he was all in favour of giving St Mirren fans the facts and figures on how much money we made from TV deals, sponsorships, gate receipts etc from being involved with the SPL and letting the fans vote after they had time to make sense of the figures.

Eh dude what i said was SG (selling consortium) backed by 10000 hours were very clear in putting forward the case to only drop scumco to Div 1, they had avote about that at the meeting you say you were at, was you in the bogs for that bit?

Fixed it for you in boldclap.gif

Mods are you going to continue to tolerate out and out cowards like Dibbles here making sladerous allegations of Bigotry, which are both groundless and pathetic?

You can see in this post he's trying to cover over the stupidty of what he said, but continues to post a load of rubbish rather than be a man and publicly apologise where he made the stupid allegations in the first place.

Mods GTPS!

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Sid, I would say my business capabilities are limited. I've had a go at running my own business and did alright from it. The lessons learned were probably more valuable than the profits made but despite that I would be extremely confident that if I was given control of a site like Greenhill Road and Ralston with the facilities at both locations and potential footfall that they get I would be able to generate an extra £2,000 worth of clear profit per week over and above what the club currently takes in right now and I would be able to sustain that for a period of six years. I would imagine most people on this website can think of areas where the club clearly aren't taking full advantage of the facilities to generate clear profit and that they too would be confident if they were given the run of the place they too could do much the same. So why would you think that £600,000 over 6 years would be causing any great concern to anyone at all?

Anyone taking a wee glance at the debt reduction that Clyde have managed in the last three years or a wee look at Spartans and their expansion programme over the last three years will see what can be achieved. If they then do a little research into existing SEN's they will see the kind of revenue streams being taken in by the likes of Atlantis Community Sports Centre in Oban, the Ullaspool Community Pool, Go Ape, The Homeless World Cup, The Eden Project, The Big Issue, The Factory Skate Park and many, many other organisations some of which were founded by people who were initially even more amateurish than me.

I have no idea what 10000hours business plan looks like, and I guess you'll need to update me on who the "long line of social funders" were and on what grounds they "rejected the business plan".

Where have you and Sid got this £600k figure from? Is it grabbed out of thin air or does it have any substance to it? If that was the total indebtedness of 10k hours then it could easily be serviced by the current pledges which are around £11k plus per month I understand.I thought the total debt would be closer to £1m.But there are too many unknowns. If the selling consortium really want 10K hours to buy them out then would someone bang their heads together, get serious with the fans and let us know exactly how the figures stack up. I really want to get involved but I'm too long in the tooth to suckered into helping buy a pig in a poke purely because I love my team. I think it could be done and I feel that if all the facts and figures were made public more guys like me that want more convincing would start to contribute. There is of course the possibility that we are not being given figures because they don't stack up and the reluctance to produce them makes me wonder.

Stu, you reckon £2k per week profit is a dawdle. But how long realistically from a standing start could that be achieved? Do you believe 10k hours have realistic plans provisionally in place which could generate that kind of return? I would be pleasantly surprised if they do.

I at this point don't think the figures do stack up but nor do I think that it is out of the question that fan ownership can be achieved. But they will have to really engage the fans and spell out the figures.

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Where have you and Sid got this £600k figure from? Is it grabbed out of thin air or does it have any substance to it? If that was the total indebtedness of 10k hours then it could easily be serviced by the current pledges which are around £11k plus per month I understand.I thought the total debt would be closer to £1m.But there are too many unknowns. If the selling consortium really want 10K hours to buy them out then would someone bang their heads together, get serious with the fans and let us know exactly how the figures stack up. I really want to get involved but I'm too long in the tooth to suckered into helping buy a pig in a poke purely because I love my team. I think it could be done and I feel that if all the facts and figures were made public more guys like me that want more convincing would start to contribute. There is of course the possibility that we are not being given figures because they don't stack up and the reluctance to produce them makes me wonder.

Stu, you reckon £2k per week profit is a dawdle. But how long realistically from a standing start could that be achieved? Do you believe 10k hours have realistic plans provisionally in place which could generate that kind of return? I would be pleasantly surprised if they do.

I at this point don't think the figures do stack up but nor do I think that it is out of the question that fan ownership can be achieved. But they will have to really engage the fans and spell out the figures.

I think the first time I heard about the £600K was at the poorly attended public meeting where SMiSA raised it. 10000 hrs haven't been shouting about how they are funding the £1.25M bid. There is £1.25M required. I reckon the 87 club and 1877 club may just about scrape together over £125K. That will be the only capital investment. There will be £500K coming from Bii in the form of debt with an annual 8% interest rate. So that leaves over £600K investment that is still to be found. The blah, blah at the public meeting was that the 87 club and 1877 club capital would be higher.

So far the only explanation of the shortfall in capital being met is from Div who reckon they can trade off some of the direct debits into capital. Not sure what mechanism they are using however that generally requires factoring, which also attracts interest rates - generally higher than traditional loans....similar bollox to using future season ticket sales to raise capital...was KMG not pilloried for that in attempting to broker a similar deal with Ticketus. If we are turning direct debits into capital that reduces the number of direct debits available to serice the increasing number of debts. Let's not forget that the selling consortium are deferring payment already as 10000 hrs original (3rd plan) offer couldn't deliver the required payment up front.

This was a poorly funded plan even on the basis of the 87 clubs and 1877 clubs had hit their targets.

It would be useful if 10000 hrs could provide a detailed breakdown of how this is all being financed and what the charges on the CIC and ultimately control of the club actually are. So far we have a bullet point on a presentation slide talking about Bii's conditions being saving scumgers, and then some etc's....there's clearly more conditions that aren't being shared with the people investing and ultimately gambling with the future of our club from a position of almost complete ignorance.

And that's before we get started on there being zero information on the process that we're also not meant to talk about as it is nothing for us fans to worry about.

I was bemused at some of the responses to SMiSA at that public meeting when they asked questions about the funding and the business plan. The response was along the lines of there being no business plan beyond raising enough cash for a bid to be accepted. That started the alarm bells ringing for me. We managed to tease out a little more information at the next meeting and in FAQs....however that seemed to be written on the fly, and the meeting was all about who else might buy the club if 10000 hrs didn't take control.

The problem with that is.....10000 hrs appear to be stringing together a desperate bid that Angelo Massone or Craig Whyte would be ashamed to put his name to. The smoke and mirrors being that it is all about the fans getting control of the club - only the fans don't. The debtors will be in control of the club, just as Lloyds were in control of the sell off of scumgers. Just as Venture Capitalists have a heavy steering hand in the running of a business they invest in.

Shite funding and no business plan is a disaster waiting to happen irrespective of the people in control of it. Step away from the fan ownership and think of this scheme as if Angelo Massone was fronting it and you would run 10000 miles in the opposite direction.

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....and if Angelo Massone had been put in charge of merchandising, and carried out this roll of honour, how forgiving would some people on this forum be ?

Let's get some good old-fashioned facts out in the open boys & girls. let's say that "Angelo" as Commercial Director of SMFC had......

*Allowed the previous service provider to sell-off the entire stock needlessly leaving the club to make a large investment to re-stock the shop.....then moaned about this situation 2 (TWO) years later

*Had no proper online store for 2 years

*Claimed "the club shop had cost the club money" - a lie: the deal guaranteed SMFC a fixed sum each year

*Claimed "all-time record sales" for shirts - a lie: a) he didn't know the previous figures ; and b ) more shirts were sold in Div 1 than the figures he quoted, let alone SPL.

Now if the bold Angelo had that as his CV as Commercial Director of SMFC, his proposal/offer for buying SMFC would have been slaughtered on here, and rightly so.

Why some people continue to defend the indefensible is beyond me.

My DD has been cancelled, and I would advise any sane person out there to do likewise.

Edited by Big Fras
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Guest TPAFKATS

Shite funding and no business plan is a disaster waiting to happen irrespective of the people in control of it. Step away from the fan ownership and think of this scheme as if Angelo Massone was fronting it and you would run 10000 miles in the opposite direction.

This brief summary of the post is all that is needed for me smile.png

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....and if Angelo Massone had been put in charge of merchandising, and carried out this roll of honour, how forgiving would some people on this forum be ?

Let's get some good old-fashioned facts out in the open boys & girls. let's say that "Angelo" as Commercial Director of SMFC had......

*Allowed the previous service provider to sell-off the entire stock needlessly leaving the club to make a large investment to re-stock the shop.....then moaned about this situation 2 (TWO) years later

*Had no proper online store for 2 years

*Claimed "the club shop had cost the club money" - a lie: the deal guaranteed SMFC a fixed sum each year

*Claimed "all-time record sales" for shirts - a lie: a) he didn't know the previous figures ; and b ) more shirts were sold in Div 1 than the figures he quoted, let alone SPL.

Now if the bold Angelo had that as his CV as Commercial Director of SMFC, his proposal/offer for buying SMFC would have been slaughtered on here, and rightly so.

Why some people continue to defend the indefensible is beyond me.

My DD has been cancelled, and I would advise any sane person out there to do likewise.

And they shall still defend this dismal record of our commercial director.

It wasn't too long ago that the site owner referred to 'us' when talking about 10000 hours. It was worrying that the unofficial website became the official online mouthpiece of 10k hours.

The selling consortium have screwed up giving this group boardroom access and positions of influence within the club.

I am not fooled by stripes on the back of strips or pretty pictures in the vomitaries.

I'm out, and have been for some time.

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Fixed it for you in boldclap.gif

Mods are you going to continue to tolerate out and out cowards like Dibbles here making sladerous allegations of Bigotry, which are both groundless and pathetic?

You can see in this post he's trying to cover over the stupidty of what he said, but continues to post a load of rubbish rather than be a man and publicly apologise where he made the stupid allegations in the first place.

Mods GTPS!

I will happily to retract the stuff about Ayrshire and offer an apology on that if you want one - it was Sid who was beating the drum on that front.

When someone accuses someone else of being a bigot, depending on the context the accusation might suggest someone was being racist or sectarian but this doesn't have to be the case. A bigot can be someone who is intolerant of any different opinion from their own or someone who is so convinced that they are right that they show no interest in compromise or giving people with a different opinion a fair hearing.

Your last two posts have asked the moderators to intervene and censor or remove my posts. Point proven?

According to you my masculinity depends on agreeing to re-read all your old posts and begin requoting them on the board to substantiate my claim that you have attacked Richard Atkinson personally. Several other people have pointed this out to you on this thread already but you don't seem to accept you have done this.

You were the one who brought up RA's involvement with the Scottish Bible Society and said he had told bare faced lies and surely this went against what the Bible said about being honest with your followers... or words to that effect. First you bring up his involvement with a religious group, then you accuse him of lying and being a hypocrite, then later when i challenged you on this you say you don't know what he believes and any religious beliefs he has are not important to you or your view of him and you've been careful not to suggest he has lied or leaked stories to the press.

If Richard Atkinson's religious views are not important to you and if you don't know anything about those why did you introduce his directorship at Scottish Bible Society into the debate here and accuse him of going against the Bible by telling bare faced lies?

My recollection of the last public meeting was that when Tony Fitzpatrick began dropping hints that Massone may be one of the rival / other bidders that Richard Atkinson interrupted him and said to the meeting that some of the names mentioned in the press had not bid for the club and there were interested parties whose names hadn't been mentioned in the press or guessed at from the floor on the night of the meeting. His position on Rangers at the time of that meeting was he thought the tide had turned and no one would vote for them to re-enter the SPL as a newco and taking the SFA to court had blown away any support they previously had in any SPL clubs and that it was unknown territory as to what would happen with TV deals and sponsorship money with Rangers' involvement... he seemed to think the most likely scenario was that some value would be lost from TV and sponsorship but if there wasn't a massive change then St Mirren would cope... he could also see a doomsday scenario if Sky pulled out completely but didn't know how likely that was and also thought that more optimistically there was a small chance St Mirren might benefit financially... if standing up at the vote meant more St Mirren fans attended games in support of the stance and if some disgruntled bears came along to our games as neutrals or we got a bigger slice of a smaller TV deal. I can't remember seeing many quotes from Richard Atkinson saying he was in favour of keeping Rangers in the SPL or SFL1 so that St Mirren would avoid a financial Armageddon... if anyone made those type of statements it was our chairman rather than our commercial director.

Somner feel free to suggest where my posts pointing out your own narrow-minded bigoted posts were indictaing you were anti-Catholic or anti-protestant (if that is what you think i meant by bigoted).

Edited by Dibbles old paperboy
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I will happily to retract the stuff about Ayrshire and offer an apology on that if you want one - it was Sid who was beating the drum on that front.

Beating what drum DOP? I've been posting my concerns about the finances. There's people from Paisley who are St Mirren fans involved in this. It doesn't make the finances any better. I actually quite like REA...don't know much about Chris other than he has got great secretary legs. Brian Caldwell appears to be getting the blame from SMFC for the ripping off of our disabled fans...if that is the case then I wouldn't rate him much as a human being at this point in time.

£750K was a big gap to fill and I haven't seen any evidence that has happened. My view is that they should have packed up and shipped out after that. Instead we have wasted a lot of time and effort on a lot of madness, not least of all the 10000 hrs / SMFC meltdown over the newco situation. Hopefully the quiet man from the US will save us all in true Hollywood / Brynner style and we can all have a laugh about it in the Champions League Finals. thumbup2.gif

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Basturt. My life is over.

Mate, its not the actual design, its a belterd,all the strips this season are great. Im referring to the nonsense at the time how it was a major coup for our commercial director to get the SPL/sfa to allow stripes on the back or was it red numbers, I can't recall. Big deal I.thought at the time, where's the effin rubber ducks?

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Mate, its not the actual design, its a belterd,all the strips this season are great. Im referring to the nonsense at the time how it was a major coup for our commercial director to get the SPL/sfa to allow stripes on the back or was it red numbers, I can't recall. Big deal I.thought at the time, where's the effin rubber ducks?

No worries mate, I was just kidding on. The shop situation frustrates me greatly, believe me.

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Stu, you reckon £2k per week profit is a dawdle. But how long realistically from a standing start could that be achieved? Do you believe 10k hours have realistic plans provisionally in place which could generate that kind of return? I would be pleasantly surprised if they do.

I don't know what plans 10000hours have - Sid's point is that no-one does - but without doing too close an analysis and just from focusing on areas within the club that I have experienced or know well I would be very confident of being able to cover most of that £2k within days of a standing start and I'm thinking of two very simple narrow area's of improvement that where there is clearly a demand and where there is a clear need to be addressed.

I've obviously got history with guys on the selling consortium so I'm not going to detail my thoughts on here as I have no desire at all to help them at all but if you want one really silly example of wasted resources that others have mentioned too look at all those empty parking spaces in the car park on match day.

I don't think it's difficult and I think most people could come up with ideas. Look at the footfall at the club. How many supporters are coming in? How many players, parents and coaches are involved in the pro youth set up at Ralston? How many kids come into Greenhill Road on a week night? And then ask yourself could you think of anything you could do that would get those people to part with £1 extra of clear profit off 50% of those people. If you can do it then you've probably smashed the target yourself and all of that is before you even start to consider the increases in footfall that would happen when you start to involve the local community in the kind of activities that an SEN would be involved in.

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I don't know what plans 10000hours have - Sid's point is that no-one does - but without doing too close an analysis and just from focusing on areas within the club that I have experienced or know well I would be very confident of being able to cover most of that £2k within days of a standing start and I'm thinking of two very simple narrow area's of improvement that where there is clearly a demand and where there is a clear need to be addressed.

I've obviously got history with guys on the selling consortium so I'm not going to detail my thoughts on here as I have no desire at all to help them at all but if you want one really silly example of wasted resources that others have mentioned too look at all those empty parking spaces in the car park on match day.

I don't think it's difficult and I think most people could come up with ideas. Look at the footfall at the club. How many supporters are coming in? How many players, parents and coaches are involved in the pro youth set up at Ralston? How many kids come into Greenhill Road on a week night? And then ask yourself could you think of anything you could do that would get those people to part with £1 extra of clear profit off 50% of those people. If you can do it then you've probably smashed the target yourself and all of that is before you even start to consider the increases in footfall that would happen when you start to involve the local community in the kind of activities that an SEN would be involved in.

That doesn't make any sense at all Stu. The people coming into the club are SMFC customers not CIC customers. SMFC needs to grow, not the CIC. You appear to be saying that we rob SMFC to pay off the debt of the CIC. The commercial and community profitability of SMFC should be made more profitable for the club, not to service an unecessary debt.

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That doesn't make any sense at all Stu. The people coming into the club are SMFC customers not CIC customers. SMFC needs to grow, not the CIC. You appear to be saying that we rob SMFC to pay off the debt of the CIC. The commercial and community profitability of SMFC should be made more profitable for the club, not to service an unecessary debt.

Sid I'm just highlighting a couple of simple areas where revenue could be generated that isn't currently to show how simple it would be to make an extra £2k per week profit. I've already published plenty of ways in which the club could share or use resources with the community groups to generate greater profit too. Some of them would actually cross over as certainly not all of the footfall is from St Mirren customers.

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Sid I'm just highlighting a couple of simple areas where revenue could be generated that isn't currently to show how simple it would be to make an extra £2k per week profit. I've already published plenty of ways in which the club could share or use resources with the community groups to generate greater profit too. Some of them would actually cross over as certainly not all of the footfall is from St Mirren customers.

I don't think you have though Stu and you ignore the crucial point. Increasing the commercial and community profitability of SMFC is what St Mirren fans want. What is on offer is innovation to pay off a debt that 10000 hrs can't afford based on the cash it has raised to date. All the effort of the "new blood" will be on trying to service the debt, not on growing SMFC. The BoDs will effectively be trying to run two businesses. One currently surviving from month to month with specualtion that next season is going to be tougher than this with the fallout from newco and potential reconstruction. The other business appearing to be significantly underfunded to service a £1Million+ debt. That's a pretty tough platespinning exercise. Running SMFC under normal conditions looks challenging enough at the moment.

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I don't think you have though Stu and you ignore the crucial point. Increasing the commercial and community profitability of SMFC is what St Mirren fans want. What is on offer is innovation to pay off a debt that 10000 hrs can't afford based on the cash it has raised to date. All the effort of the "new blood" will be on trying to service the debt, not on growing SMFC. The BoDs will effectively be trying to run two businesses. One currently surviving from month to month with specualtion that next season is going to be tougher than this with the fallout from newco and potential reconstruction. The other business appearing to be significantly underfunded to service a £1Million+ debt. That's a pretty tough platespinning exercise. Running SMFC under normal conditions looks challenging enough at the moment.

Sid if I've got the structure right there are two separate BOD's - one running the football club and one running 10000hours. I've shown and you've agreed that there is plenty of evidence of self funding revenue generation at other SEN's like Spartans, Go Ape, Ullaspool, The Homeless World Cup, etc, etc. None of those organisations are reliant on grants or government funding, or increased debt levels. At one point Wishaw Juniors and Wishaw Wycombe were talking about taking on debt in the region of £1m to fund a football complex project in Wishaw FFS and the sums added up quite easily just from looking at the current level of payments Wishaw Wycombe are making to the local authority for pitch and school hall lets. So I can't at all grasp why you would be worried about what you call an unfunded debt level that equates to £2k per week for the next 6 years from activities around two complexes that has a regular footfall well in excess of 3,000.

I totally agree with you that 10000hours have handled the PR badly. I totally agree with you that everyone would have far more confidence if REA could come straight out and showed some examples of actual revenue raising activities that 10000hours would be involved in on the community side. It may also have been nice had they managed to get some publishable information from one of the SEN's that presented at the conference I was at, or provided links to the information and slides which were readily available on the SENSCOT website some time back. We could agree all day long that it would be much better if there were no debt levels and the consortium handed over their shares for their real value which is f**k all. Their poorly worded online survey cost them my direct debit and that of WWW and to this day I still haven't rejoined despite my strong support for football clubs moving to member ownership under an SEN model. Maybe if the journalists that are supposed to be close to the project had done their job properly I'd still be a member, the fans of the club would be comfortable with the whole bid, and you and Somner would have been completely starved of oxygen for your daft scaremongering.

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I'm bored shitless with this situation now. If I'm being brutally honest, I'm already thinking of other ways to spend my monthly tenner.

I can't even be arsed reading any posts on this thread. This isn't to say that I don't think they're worthy of a read - I'm just not convinced that I care that much any longer. What a terrible shame that it has come to this.

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I'm bored shitless with this situation now. If I'm being brutally honest, I'm already thinking of other ways to spend my monthly tenner.

I can't even be arsed reading any posts on this thread. This isn't to say that I don't think they're worthy of a read - I'm just not convinced that I care that much any longer. What a terrible shame that it has come to this.

That more or less sums up how I feel about the whole thing. From the very beginning I had concerns about how the whole thing would pan out and how long it would take to do so. With most things in life there's always the danger of folk becoming restless and frustrated to the point where they think "this is taking too long, I can't be doing with it" and so they move on.

I've been wavering with my love of football for a few years now if I'm totally honest with myself. Renewing my Season Ticket year after year has become like a habit or way of life that I am used to doing, the same with watching football on the television. I felt some real excitement during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, excitement like I hadn't experienced in a long time and it made me think and feel very different about modern football, the people playing it and the people in charge of it all.

Edited for typo(s).

Edited by Obi-Wan Ben Kenobi
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That more or less sums up how I feel about the whole thing. From the very beginning I had concerns about how the whole thing would pan out and how long it would take to do so. With most things in life there's always the danger of folk becoming restless and frustrated to the point where they think "this is taking too long, I can't be doing with it" and so they move on.

I've been wavering with my love of football for a few years now if I'm totally honest for myself. Renewing my Season Ticket year after year has become like a habit or way of like that I am used to doing, the same with watching football on the television. I felt some real excitement during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, excitement like I hadn't experienced in a long time and it made me think and feel very different about modern football, the people playing it and the people in charge of it all.

I agree with the last part especially. The Olympics has been a huge eye opener in terms of what other sports have to offer at the highest level.

The thing about boardroom takeovers in football is that it very often exposes just how poisonous the politics of the sport is. This summer we've also seen the underbelly of Scottish Football as well with this whole Rangers issue and the ridiculous, grasping attempts by boardrooms to gerrymander the league structure to protect their own self interests and St Mirren fans will have witnessed their own Chairman - previously a hero - shamefully ripping into SFL Chairmen for not cowing to overwhelming pressure and voting in a way that Stewart Gilmour himself didn't have the balls to do. It's hardly a wonder fans are bored and that interested has waned.

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It wasn't too long ago that the site owner referred to 'us' when talking about 10000 hours. It was worrying that the unofficial website became the official online mouthpiece of 10k hours.

"Us" as in over 1,000 fellow St.Mirren fans who are still involved with the bid.

"Official online mouthpiece" - you mean in the same way that we have a full section of the forum purely dedicated to SMiSA then ?

This is the busiest online forum for St.Mirren supporters on the internet. 10000Hours tried to set up their own forum but all the traffic related to the sale continued to be discussed here so it was mothballed and fans were enagged directly on here.

The "Sale of St.Mirren Forum" has never had a single post or topic removed or edited despite some slanderous posts being made about the bid and members of the bid team, in fact anyone reading this section of the forum is far more likely to decide not to bother getting involved such is the volume of (mostly completely made up) crap that has been posted in here. Still it remains, as this is and always will be an independent St.Mirren supporters website.

Personally I am right behind the fans bid for control of the club, and that is my right to have an opinion the same as anyone else I'd have thought ?

10 years I have been running this site so you will forgive me for being more than a little f**ked off when I read shit like this.

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I'm bored shitless with this situation now. If I'm being brutally honest, I'm already thinking of other ways to spend my monthly tenner.

I can't even be arsed reading any posts on this thread. This isn't to say that I don't think they're worthy of a read - I'm just not convinced that I care that much any longer. What a terrible shame that it has come to this.

Feel exactly the same as this. I won't cancel yet, though.

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I will happily to retract the stuff about Ayrshire and offer an apology on that if you want one - it was Sid who was beating the drum on that front.

When someone accuses someone else of being a bigot, depending on the context the accusation might suggest someone was being racist or sectarian but this doesn't have to be the case. A bigot can be someone who is intolerant of any different opinion from their own or someone who is so convinced that they are right that they show no interest in compromise or giving people with a different opinion a fair hearing.

Your last two posts have asked the moderators to intervene and censor or remove my posts. Point proven?

According to you my masculinity depends on agreeing to re-read all your old posts and begin requoting them on the board to substantiate my claim that you have attacked Richard Atkinson personally. Several other people have pointed this out to you on this thread already but you don't seem to accept you have done this.

You were the one who brought up RA's involvement with the Scottish Bible Society and said he had told bare faced lies and surely this went against what the Bible said about being honest with your followers... or words to that effect. First you bring up his involvement with a religious group, then you accuse him of lying and being a hypocrite, then later when i challenged you on this you say you don't know what he believes and any religious beliefs he has are not important to you or your view of him and you've been careful not to suggest he has lied or leaked stories to the press.

If Richard Atkinson's religious views are not important to you and if you don't know anything about those why did you introduce his directorship at Scottish Bible Society into the debate here and accuse him of going against the Bible by telling bare faced lies?

My recollection of the last public meeting was that when Tony Fitzpatrick began dropping hints that Massone may be one of the rival / other bidders that Richard Atkinson interrupted him and said to the meeting that some of the names mentioned in the press had not bid for the club and there were interested parties whose names hadn't been mentioned in the press or guessed at from the floor on the night of the meeting. His position on Rangers at the time of that meeting was he thought the tide had turned and no one would vote for them to re-enter the SPL as a newco and taking the SFA to court had blown away any support they previously had in any SPL clubs and that it was unknown territory as to what would happen with TV deals and sponsorship money with Rangers' involvement... he seemed to think the most likely scenario was that some value would be lost from TV and sponsorship but if there wasn't a massive change then St Mirren would cope... he could also see a doomsday scenario if Sky pulled out completely but didn't know how likely that was and also thought that more optimistically there was a small chance St Mirren might benefit financially... if standing up at the vote meant more St Mirren fans attended games in support of the stance and if some disgruntled bears came along to our games as neutrals or we got a bigger slice of a smaller TV deal. I can't remember seeing many quotes from Richard Atkinson saying he was in favour of keeping Rangers in the SPL or SFL1 so that St Mirren would avoid a financial Armageddon... if anyone made those type of statements it was our chairman rather than our commercial director.

Somner feel free to suggest where my posts pointing out your own narrow-minded bigoted posts were indictaing you were anti-Catholic or anti-protestant (if that is what you think i meant by bigoted).

Mods yet again this poster calls me a bigot, do you intend to do anything about this? Or are you happy to let the forum descend into the narrow-minded sectarian name calling seen on blue/green vermin forums?

Dibbles INSISTS and continues to INSIST that i am a bigot because i don't see why the money making opportunities at our club should be given away by 10000 hours to their friends. I don't care who their friends are, the colour of their skin, their creed, religion ,culture etc it matters not a jot. What i do care for is SMFC not being asset stripped by any third parties because they happen to be mates with ReA.

And still you either refuse to get it, or can't get it! Why is pointing out ReA's directorships of various orginisations bigotted? I pointed out he is Director of Horse Scotland...! By your logic that makes me bigotted towards all things equine!

I pointed out he is a director at SMFC..! by your logic am I indeed bigotted towarsd my club of 40 odd years????

Did i say he lied, yes I did and backed it up with reference to two statements he made HERE. Of course you'll be able to prove this wrong?... No? didn't think so

Is there anyone other than you that doesn't believe the BoD (which has several 10000 hours types on it) didn't try to slot scumgers into Div 1??? I don't think they'll be many in as much denial as you.

You can apologise for calling me without any foundation a bigot, everyone reading this will know exactly what inference you were making, and trying to weedle out of it makes it look more pathetic in each post. Or as coward you can continue to throw wild allegations of religious intolerance without any evidence showing a complete lack of maturity and responsibility for your actions.

I am happy to be judged by my peers, if you want to discuss this in person without the anonymity (Not an offer of a square go) then lets get it on! Man up and stand by your accusations or apologise! whats it to be dibbles?

Edited by somner9
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