Happy Face

http://www.football365.com/f365-says/9429950/F365-Focus

I'm currently more concerned with the lack of increased income from Puma than the SD hoardings like. At least the club have come clean on the latter. No idea what the deal is with Puma though.

11 clubs paid less than £1m in interest. £3.8m in total on a combined £587m of debt in 12/13 (0.65%). It's a very good thing that Newcastle have gone from a club that was paying £4.5m - £7.5m a year on interest to one paying coppers, but that's just a trend among most clubs as billionaire owners with less reliance on the banks become the norm. Like I say, none of those other clubs seem to give away millions of pounds in free advertising.

So that's when he'll hamer on the interest payments

He runs sports direct with debts too. I Think the club can still avoid tax based on previous losses, but with the profits we're making we'll soon have to start paying off loans rather than report a profit if we want to keep the tax bill down.

every other billionaire that owns a club that had any debt has not only stopped interest payments, they have converted their loans into equity, effectively wiping out the debt at their clubs. Abramovich at Chelsea (£340m), Mansour at man City (£305m), Al Fayed at Fulham (£212m), Lerner at Villa (£90m), Short at Sunderland (£69m), Leibherr at Southampton (£38m) etc. None of these advertise their other companies for free or hold their loans over the club as a stick to beat them. They write off the loans and maximise the financial performance of the club.

Its difficult to estimate. No other club of our size has renamed their existing stadium. Derby got £7m for pride park.

If advertising didn't work it wouldn't be an industry of the size it is. You like to think you aren't susceptible to it, but en masse we are. We were Europa league quarter finalists, that's a little bit sexy.

They've increased international retail 20% and unique visitors to their site 50% without increasing advertising spend at all, claiming they don't need to. Every PL game is shown overseas. Not just the glamour clubs.

To be fair most of those posts called it just about right. Plenty were over-optimistic. We dropped from a 7th place finish to 13th.

Pardew's record since he finished 5th does not compare well with other sacked managers.... Roeder 47.4% (52 Games) Allardyce 41.3% (21) Hughton 39.6% (16) Souness 39.4% (55) Pardew 39% (77)

Exactly

http://www.toontastic.net/board/topic/6846-expectations-for-next-season/?hl=expectations Comparing this to the current "expectations" thread it's interesting how little difference there seems to be between then and now, despite all the talk of lowered expectations attributed to Ashley.

Read a tweet about the bust up being a set up. Ben Arfa off the bench with the ultimate warrior music playing after embracing Pardew on the touch line would have been mint.

Hope you had a tenner on it.

Hardly Nostradamus like. The stated club policy is not to throw money at "proven" quality. We buy 24/25 year old prospects, sell 28/29 year olds where there's profit to be had.

Shit defender and brown nosing twat.

Aye. It didn't stop us trying to renegotiate his contract if anyone triggered it though.

I reckon it was all about cash.

Aye. If the transfer funds the manager gets is only what can be made from sales, then that sort of penny-pinching is understandable. The frustration is that we have a big wedge sat there doing nothing right now. My view is they'll maintain the current sell to buy approach, any profits on top of that will only be used for players in the event of a rainy day, which would be if we're relegation threatened come January.

Ba especially seemed daft to me. We sold for £7m someone we'd have to pay double that to replace BEFORE wages. Why not just give him the wages he's asking for. Of course, we never did replace him so that was why

Ta, I try to mix it up

Show Box is canny. Not available in app stores but you can download it from their site. If you have a chromecast you can stream the content to your TV using allcast as well. Excellent quality and new stuff like Planet of The Apes 2 available.

In a little over 1000 days we sold almost a full team of notable players... Milner N'zogbia Given Martins Duff Beye Bassong Carroll Nolan Enrique Some before relegation, most just after, a couple after promotion. In the same period since selling Enrique we've sold Ba, Cabaye and Debuchy. I'm cautious about criticising the club for what's been done rather than what they're doing. It might be that we just don't have the players in our squad anymore that can be sold at a large enough profit, but the major issue with our team for me right now is Pardew, not the approach to squad building.