Levy, ENIC and DC

[Lilbaz]

Really?

Mate was offered a tottenham v arsenal ticket for £150 in the arsenal end.

 

[riggi]

Really?

Yup.

I was regularly going to West Ham and Chelsea away whilst we had bale and were in the cl the first time.

Now you see away tickets all over twitter.

 

[riggi]

Mate was offered a tottenham v arsenal ticket for £150 in the arsenal end.

 

[gaffers]

And you whine about others patronising you.

The honours we received were a long time before ENIC took over.

That was my point. Scroll back slowly.

 

[gaffers]

Tbf though, before levy when was the last time in mid feb we still had a shot at the league and cl?

Also since poch we've been to 3 semis and a final so our domestic cups isn't soo bad compared to 95% of teams.

'Shots' aint trophies. They're fails.

 

[Lilbaz]

'Shots' aint trophies. They're fails.

Yes but being unlucky or losing on penalties cannot be used as a stick to beat levy with. This is the best squad we've had since the 60's even with a lack of trophies.

We all want trophies especially levy.

 

[dontcallme]

That was my point. Scroll back slowly.

Don’t need to scroll back. ENIC took over after an extremely poor time for us.

Our turnover was massively behind the top clubs and we were even further away in the pitch.

The gap is now significantly smaller.

The fact we won trophies between the 60s and 80s isn’t that relevant in an ENIC discussion.

 

[sxboy]

Yup.

I was regularly going to West Ham and Chelsea away whilst we had bale and were in the cl the first time.

Now you see away tickets all over twitter.

Im a new season ticket holder (2nd year) for some reason when i took on the season ticket i had to lose all of my loyalty points because i can only imagine my loyalty didnt count up to then. I used to get into all the games i wanted at the old ground, if it was waiting for the circle of boredom or through friends. i used to get tickets to semi finals and away games. Now days I still go to many away games but i have to pay a fortune or rely on friends to get those away tickets as i will NEVER again be able to get one on my season ticket points.

There has to be system in place for the truly loyal fan but there should also be a system in place to prove the person using the ticket is the person that purchased the ticket.

I had this argument on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and during the argument was offered 2 tickets for Burnley away a game that the points needed had just been announced for, same old thing "unable to go" There will be some instances when people genuinely cant go but many more where the tickets have been bought to point farm or are purchased with the view to being moved on later if they cant or dont want to go nearer the time, £30 a ticket allows you to do that.

The point of reducing the price of an away ticket is lost on clubs like ours because we sell out most of the time.

Riggi is right there are loads of tickets available on twitter for every away game and from the same people much of the time.

 

[gaffers]

Don’t need to scroll back. ENIC took over after an extremely poor time for us.

Our turnover was massively behind the top clubs and we were even further away in the pitch.

The gap is now significantly smaller.

The fact we won trophies between the 60s and 80s isn’t that relevant in an ENIC discussion.

You're actually too angry to reason with ?

 

[dontcallme]

You're actually too angry to reason with ?

Angry?

 

[Saoirse]

Im a new season ticket holder (2nd year) for some reason when i took on the season ticket i had to lose all of my loyalty points because i can only imagine my loyalty didnt count up to then. I used to get into all the games i wanted at the old ground, if it was waiting for the circle of boredom or through friends. i used to get tickets to semi finals and away games. Now days I still go to many away games but i have to pay a fortune or rely on friends to get those away tickets as i will NEVER again be able to get one on my season ticket points.

There has to be system in place for the truly loyal fan but there should also be a system in place to prove the person using the ticket is the person that purchased the ticket.

I had this argument on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and during the argument was offered 2 tickets for Burnley away a game that the points needed had just been announced for, same old thing "unable to go" There will be some instances when people genuinely cant go but many more where the tickets have been bought to point farm or are purchased with the view to being moved on later if they cant or dont want to go nearer the time, £30 a ticket allows you to do that.

The point of reducing the price of an away ticket is lost on clubs like ours because we sell out most of the time.

Riggi is right there are loads of tickets available on twitter for every away game and from the same people much of the time.

The concept is that you don't keep the points because being an ST Holder is always better than a member anyway - a ST with no points gets a ticket over a member with twenty quadrillion. The problem is that they didn't do anything to take into account that they were getting 20,000 new ST holders at once which is unprecedented, and they had very different numbers of points - so if you were top of that 20k you went back to level pegging. What probably should have happened was WHL ST Holders given as a one-off ~60 points for each of the last four years in which they'd had the ST (hence 240 for the vast majority of them) to reflect having brought for every league game, and the new ST Holders then allowed to keep their previous points. That way they would not be ahead of existing ST holders unless they were in the tiny minority who'd been to effectively all the league games and then a load of cups/aways that STs didn't do - in which case, fair enough - but the hierarchy among members would've been retained.

Sadly, the ticketing that summer was a complete cock-up even without that addition to it and the difficulty of explaining it to people - while not that complicated it was probably beyond the ticket office's capabilities at the time.

 

[gaffers]

Angry?

 

[dontcallme]

I think you would feel more at home on Twitter.

 

[vegassd]

Are you making a case for NOT improving the squad? Surely buying footballers is a fundamental operating principle for any professional football team; particularly an elite one? As is paying those footballers "market rate".

There's a key point in here imo that gets to the root of some of our transfer problems, and that's the difference between improving the squad (which is easy to do with money) and improving our results (which is harder). For example, we could have replaced GKN with Grealish and it would have improved the squad, but would Grealish have made a difference in any of our defeats this season? Hard to tell but something that I don't think it as simple as it might appear.

I think Poch has done so well that he's shifted that bracket of genuine improvement to be on the very edge of our financial power at the moment. And it appears that he doesn't want small improvements to the squad like Grealish, he wants big ones like a De Jong for example - somebody who can have a considerable impact on our results and not just a moderate improvement of the squad.

So I don't think anybody wants us to not buy players but I think the idea of improving results is more relevant than the idea of improving the squad at the level we want to play at. I don't believe that a club should have an operating principle to buy players - the principle should be to play well and to win matches. Our current standing and the current state of the financially-driven game mean that buying and hoping isn't going to cut it.

We have reached a point (ahead of schedule thanks to Poch) where we need to be looking at excellent players which will almost always be expensive. In order to afford those expensive players we need all the commercial/infrastructure bits which are running behind schedule. I think it's that separation of schedules that is largely to blame for the no spending this season, and whilst we all would love to see a 70m player arrive, if we can't afford it yet we can't afford it.

PS. I've used Grealish and De Jong purely as examples... don't want to start a debate about players!

(Thankfully, the Club has perhaps heeded that "media frenzy" advice, and is now - at least in some cases - paying our elite players the type of wages their talent commands).

So when the owners do something "bad" it's because they aren't interested but if they do something "good" it's because they are listening to media advice? I think that's very unfair and ties in to some of what @coopsieyid was saying about success "despite" ENIC. I'm hoping that wasn't what you meant.

 

[[email protected]]

There's a key point in here imo that gets to the root of some of our transfer problems, and that's the difference between improving the squad (which is easy to do with money) and improving our results (which is harder). For example, we could have replaced GKN with Grealish and it would have improved the squad, but would Grealish have made a difference in any of our defeats this season? Hard to tell but something that I don't think it as simple as it might appear.

I think Poch has done so well that he's shifted that bracket of genuine improvement to be on the very edge of our financial power at the moment. And it appears that he doesn't want small improvements to the squad like Grealish, he wants big ones like a De Jong for example - somebody who can have a considerable impact on our results and not just a moderate improvement of the squad.

So I don't think anybody wants us to not buy players but I think the idea of improving results is more relevant than the idea of improving the squad at the level we want to play at. I don't believe that a club should have an operating principle to buy players - the principle should be to play well and to win matches. Our current standing and the current state of the financially-driven game mean that buying and hoping isn't going to cut it.

We have reached a point (ahead of schedule thanks to Poch) where we need to be looking at excellent players which will almost always be expensive. In order to afford those expensive players we need all the commercial/infrastructure bits which are running behind schedule. I think it's that separation of schedules that is largely to blame for the no spending this season, and whilst we all would love to see a 70m player arrive, if we can't afford it yet we can't afford it.

PS. I've used Grealish and De Jong purely as examples... don't want to start a debate about players!


So when the owners do something "bad" it's because they aren't interested but if they do something "good" it's because they are listening to media advice? I think that's very unfair and ties in to some of what @coopsieyid was saying about success "despite" ENIC. I'm hoping that wasn't what you meant.

No, Vegas, that wasn't what I meant at all; I agree wholeheartedly with the tenet of Coops argument and stated so in my response to his post, mate. Frankly I don't really care about the motives behind the Club now paying some of our elite players "market rate", I'm just glad they are, and hope it continues!
"Our current standing and the current state of the financially-driven game mean that buying and hoping isn't going to cut it." I get what you're saying here, Vegas, but surely, NOT buying and hoping isn't going to cut it either mate, is it?

 

[buckley]

All I can say is that almost everytime my son and I apply for away tickets they are sold out.
What I think is happening is that some are in a position to get away tickets and are selling them way above the real price.
These people are probably the first to moan about ticket touts.

 

[vegassd]

"Our current standing and the current state of the financially-driven game mean that buying and hoping isn't going to cut it." I get what you're saying here, Vegas, but surely, NOT buying and hoping isn't going to cut it either mate, is it?

Yeah totally - I wouldn't ever advocate that we stop buying players completely and try to just squeak the current squad into a trophy winning group. But I think that old ENIC model of buying a whole bunch of average-ish players and hoping a few become stars isn't applicable to us any more, which in the context of the stadium delays seems like a very plausible explanation to me for not buying at all this season.

It's understandable that people will have a problem with us not buying, but what can be frustrating is when the last summer window is used as a conversation shut down (by some). I think it's far too simplistic to think that the reason we didn't buy any players is because the owners don't want to spend money. It's misses the basic balancing that we all face ourselves with household budgeting etc.

Maybe you want to take your family on a dream holiday but can't afford it so you go to Tenerife instead. It's lovely and all that but not the dream. You face the same problem the following year and on and on. But if you decided to not go on holiday one year and save your money, maybe the following year you can afford that St. Lucia trip. I'm not saying that's how simple our transfer policy is... I'm just saying it's the basic, basic stuff we all deal with in our own lives so why is that same reasoning so seldom applied to the purchasing decisions of the club?

A second full year of no spending would be very surprising in my opinion - particularly if we lose Eriksen and Alderweireld in the summer - but that hasn't happened yet so I don't think it's accurate to say that the owners don't invest in the squad. To do that would be to take a fully negative slant on the last 12 months plus a fully negative slant on the coming 8 months which isn't how life works.

 

[midoNdefoe]

No, Vegas, that wasn't what I meant at all; I agree wholeheartedly with the tenet of Coops argument and stated so in my response to his post, mate. Frankly I don't really care about the motives behind the Club now paying some of our elite players "market rate", I'm just glad they are, and hope it continues!
"Our current standing and the current state of the financially-driven game mean that buying and hoping isn't going to cut it." I get what you're saying here, Vegas, but surely, NOT buying and hoping isn't going to cut it either mate, is it?

It currently is though, isn't it? We are doing really rather well.

 

[gaffers]

It currently is though, isn't it? We are doing really rather well.

If you ignore trophies - we're on fire

 

[[email protected]]

It currently is though, isn't it? We are doing really rather well.

Ah there we are then, let's never buy another footballer again!! Is that what you're advocating mate? Trusting to luck? Hoping for the best? Hardly the most robust of footballing or business strategies for a multi-million pound organisation, is it? Wouldn't you want a more considered and stringent approach than "not buying footballers and hoping it all works out"?!