£175m Loan from the Bank of England

Gassin's finest said:

Because if Levy asks Lewis to inject money into the club, he has to give up his share majority, and then Tavistock will own us, and not ENIC.

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Gb160 said:

Thats ignoring the fact that Uncle Joe is unlikely to have £175m just sitting there in his current account.

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coys200 said:

As long as Covid is sorted by start of 2021 or worst start 21/22 we will be fine. You only have to look at stock markets to know this is viewed as a temporary “U” shaped recession and not something worse. The massive plus we have is the stadium gives us the ability to instantly bounce back as soon as things are back to normal. The non football revenue plus our huge hospitality figures are something other clubs simply don’t have. There’s a reason only us and United qualify for this loan, tbh that’s actually huge if you think about it. Will we spend huge this summer ? no, but if we are shrewd with 2 or 3 additions I think we will be fine and still top 6. No idea about us having aging squad that’s just nonsense of our 22 out field senior squad 19 are 27 or under. Only Alderweireld vertonghen Sissoko are 30+. Has this set the project back a couple of years probably yes. But as soon as things are back to normal we will bounce back instantly. Imo the £175m at 0.5% is a great deal and we’d have been crazy to overlook it. It means the club can navigate this period without having to do anything drastic like slash wages or sell star players. I’m completely relaxed about our situation now and glad we took the loan.

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Colonel Dax said:

I don’t disagree that the club can recover and nor do I have an issue with the loan. Not sure I agree with your take that we can bounce back instantly though. I doubt many companies or society in general will be bouncing back instantly after this pandemic subsides. Any recovery or return to normality (whatever that is) will take a while IMO.

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hellava_tough said:

You would have thought we could borrow the money from Uncle Joe and pay him back over a couple of years at 0% interest.

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Vinny_Sammways_left_peg said:

Why do people care so much about financials? It's not your money. It won't change anything anyway. People can keep which ever important opinion they hold on Levy etc depending on which side of the fence you stand.

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spids said:

Let's put this in perspective.... Levy has taken out an unsecured loan of £175M at 0.5% interest. These types of loans from the BoE are only available to companies with the highest grade credit rating. This is actually a brilliant move by the club as it is an incredibly cheap loan which will get us through a very volatile financial period.

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coy-spurs1882 said:

because the lack of transfer rumours makes us bored

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Vinny_Sammways_left_peg said:

Why do people care so much about financials? It's not your money. It won't change anything anyway. People can keep which ever important opinion they hold on Levy etc depending on which side of the fence you stand.

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Archibald&Crooks said:

Definitely. But are we now getting into the realms of why the squad was allowed to stagnate, decline or whatever words we want to use to describe it. Having CL doesn't seem to have done us much good on the recruitment front but even then, take all the gripes and blame out of it, United, Liverpool, Chelsea, they've all had seasons out of the CL and managed to attract players. I guess having CL might not be as important as we seem to think. At the end of the day, CL or not, if you don't pony up, you ain't signing no players.

So have we (or did we) hit our ceiling? Was that as good as it gets?

Or should expectations be adjusted accordingly, the way football is going or has been going, there's no real established 'big 4' any more who qualify for the CL year in, year out. Now, when it comes to CL qualification we're at least part of the conversation, there's no given right to qualify year on year any more, did we improve enough to help break that or did the footballing landscape change enough to bring those clubs backwards a bit? Probably bit of each?

Perhaps how it's going to be is that we'll qualify some years, other we won't, like other clubs. We just have to take our licks.

Perhaps that's how it is now and we have to be a bit more pragmatic. I dunno.

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dontcallme said:

Why do people come up with that argument?

Teams run financially poorly don’t do well. I want to see my team do well. Where the money comes from isn’t the point.

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Vinny_Sammways_left_peg said:

What have we done well with other than being run well?

Back handed praise? The Audi Cup? A memory of a cup run with a miserable ending?

Even me, after years of arguing how 'organically' we have done things has begun to wear. Teams around us are either strengthening or being linked to players who will enable them to challenge ... We're taking out a loan - all be it because of how prudent we are - to cover our backsides. While all well and good - that won't change the outlook on the pitch - the table doesn't lie going into these last batch of games. Then what? More prudence? What success will that bring us?

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dontcallme said:

We have gone from lower mid table to top four. Had numerous CL runs including a final.

I know some are only interested in trophies but we have undoubtedly improved a huge amount overall.

If you look at how clubs like West Ham are run now and go back to see how Everton, Villa and other clubs a similar size to us have done and you see we have done well.

We can disagree on the points above but the fact that it isn’t our money has absolutely nothing to do with this is the point I was disagreeing with you on.

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Vinny_Sammways_left_peg said:

It's all linked though, isn't it?

Maybe not.

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dontcallme said:

What Villa’s poor financial management leading to them getting relegated to becoming a small Premiership club? Yep, I would say those factors are related.

Sane as Everton’s lack of investment led to them stagnating while we became a top four club.

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Vinny_Sammways_left_peg said:

You have to continue to invest though, not tread water - other people won't.

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dontcallme said:

Of course, haven’t said we shouldn’t.

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