MTK

It's a good gesture and not every club would do it - I do think it's part of a PR drive though. The proof of purchase seems unnecessary in the circumstances - it wouldn't surprise me if they actually refund without it. The alternative could be a load of angry fans saying that the gesture is meaningless

I'm pretty convinced that the increase in income equals the operating cost. It may not directly state it but I don't believe that it is an unreasonable inference. This would deliver a generous 30% margin & I don't see it being higher than that.

Ok Currently we receive £3m from Kitbag but we have no expenses to get that £3m. We do not run the megastores, website or other distribution channels. So the £3m is profit however we do not see the whole income from the operation. If we did run the operation then we would have costs of £7m to get that £3m. Hence our income would be £10m consisting of £7m operating costs plus the £3m profit. Spurs & Villa run their own inhouse operation, therefore they have the cost of sale included in both their income & operating costs. We outsource so we do not have that line in our income & costs. Therefore to make a direct comparison between our operating costs & their operating costs, we need to take this into account. We can do this by adding the supposed £7m into our operating costs. This gives us a fairer comparison in how we manage our cost base. In essence, our operating costs are even worse than they initially look

As politely as possible, no. Elstone refers constantly to the fact that the outsourcing cash is pure profit & that if we ran it in-house our income would be higher because it would reflect expenditure plus profit. This is how he defends our lower income. Swiss Ramble estimates that the expenditure would be £7m and that is how much our income would increase by. However it would also increase our other operating costs by the same amount. My point was that we would need to add this back in to compare with similar clubs who run in-house operations, thereby our operating costs are even more horrific than it initially appears. This is why I believe we can save a bit of cash here

I'm presuming that £7m was an estimate but probably not so far off. If you look at Kitbag alone, we get £3m pure profit so adding £7m in costs would result in a 30% margin - about right Does that make sense?

Arsenal always bid low so unless they are the only interested team, then we can get more. Plus, their wage structure is not that great so Fellaini might think he can do better elsewhere

On a slightly brighter note, there may be another way to make a few savings. Our other operating costs at £24m are extremely high. Swiss Ramble says However he also mentions So to be directably comparable to Spurs & Villa we would need to add £7m to our expenditure to account for the costs we save by outsourcing certain functions. This makes our comparable operating costs £31m &, although we do not know what's in it, I refuse to believe that a significant portion of the savings we need could not come from here rather than the squad

It's not a direct answer but he does say that we need to knock £15m off the wage bill plus sell £10m of players every year without buying anyone

No, but they are streets ahead on commercial revenue, particularly sponsorship. Of 60m euros commercial income received by Dortmund, 40m is sponsorship although interestingly they only get 7m euros a year for their shirt sponsorship (not that much more than our current £4m). So their CEO has found 33m euros of sponsorship money every year, seemingly for things that we haven't even thought of Time for Mr Elstone to step up

GoodisonRoad - I'm not the best person to explain this but it's an accounting technicality. Money received from player sales is counted as one big payment in the year received. Money spent on players is amortised over the life of the contract (i.e. divided by the number of years of the contract and then put into the books gradually). Therefore we made a profit on players sales The spending of the Lescott money is reflected in the cashflow which shows that the money we received for Lescott immediately left the club. Err - like I said, I'm not the best person to explain

Their management have done a great job in fending off the banks but I suspect that owning the best stadium in Europe may have been a big part of this. You have to admire Klopp though

New article from Swiss Ramble. Worth reading if you want an independent view from a financial expert. Values the equity at £75m (taken from an unnamed investment bank). Depressingly he's not optimistic on finding a new owner as he estimates they would need about half a billion to turn us around. He is positive about the youth policy though http://swissramble.blogspot.com/2011/09/everton-no-blue-skies.html

Any bloke who risks his life to save his dog is sound by me

If you want to value the club by adding up the price of assets (particularly intangible assets that have no guaranteed re-sale value) then the club is worth -£29.8m according to the net liabilities in the balance sheet

Madness. It's no wonder Bill keeps talking about a billionaire who's passionate for the club. At that price, there are no potential buyers. The bank needs to tell him to get real

I think that Grantchester still has a reasonable holding & the rest are shared amongst small shareholders. The problem that you would have is that once you own 30% of the shares, you are required by law to make an offer to buy all shares. The price you have to offer is the highest price you have bought a share at during the last 12 months. So you would need to have a great deal of cash to do this & would probably end up buying at higher than market value. Or you would need to get a large number of people to sell their shares to you at a low price. In which case, Kenwright & Co can refuse to sell to you & you are stuck with 31% of a company & no control if the current directors block vote against you

Kenwright owns 8,754 out of 35,000 - 25%. Not even enough to guarantee you a seat on the board

I agree on Jack Hayward & in my kinder moments I even come close to thinking that Kenwright might just do the same, if he could. Problem being, his mates who own the other shares won't. The more I think about it, the more I believe a forced sale is the only way forward. That's why I want a campaign to force the sale now, before it's administration that does it

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The club could sell for the price of the debt but it would mean Kenwright & Co losing their cash. They will never agree to this unless forced. In the open stock market, the shares would be trading for next to nothing & the market would fix the problem for us. Unfortunately, with private ownership, the club is at the mercy of the owners and only creditors can force a sale. The problem being that normally this only happens when the club is right on the edge of insolvency & can no longer meet operational costs or debt repayments. (It's a matter for debate how close this is to happening) Football's a strange business. In any other industry if you bought a company, ran it at a loss for 10 years, sold all the tangible assets & funded your further losses by debt to the point where no lendor will touch you, you would be considered a fool who deserved to lose his money. In football you can be worshipped for doing it

I know a company that ran an event at Everton and hated it. Now to be fair this was 4 years ago but they said that the rooms were dreadful, internet facilities didn't work properly & that when they parked their cars the staff warned them that there was a good chance on being broken into. I think a fair few of these problems have been fixed & matchday hospitality does well in the industry awards (for what those are worth) but location is a big problem. People spending that type of money want a really good reason to spend it in L4

Actually there are many people very well qualified to comment on the finances of clubs. Have a read of Swiss Ramble & AndersRed amongst others. Every single one of them will tell you that the business model of the club is unsustainable & will soon lead to bankruptcy. And drop the "I'm just a simple man, what would I know" deference. That's how the Tories get voted in

Problem is, how long can we continue to sell off assets to pay off the interest we owe on the loans we took out to pay for the losses we made each year. Particularly when we still appear to be making a loss. Can we afford for Bill to be rejecting investors like Lerner simply because Randy is not as big a fan as Bill is?

I believe that Kenwright is uniquely unqualified to sell the club. He seems to think that selling Everton is purely about a passionate sales pitch demonstrating how much he loves the club. That's not how a corporate sale works & being able to tell 2 hours of anecdotes about how much you love the club is not really what is needed. The other thing is that really good sales people know when to shut the fuck up. The transcript demonstrates that Bill really doesn't know how to do this. this quote from the Mail article is interesting 'You know, I've sat with people who wanted to invest in the club and there was one guy, a very nice man, a businessman in Liverpool, and he listened for an hour and a half and finally, he said, "Bill, I don't want to be you. I want to be able to take my kids to school in the morning".' Why do I get the feeling that during the 90 minutes this guy listened to Bill, Bill spent a fair portion of it saying, "You can't imagine how stressful & dangerous it is to own a football club. I get death threats all the time. It's a nightmare.....So do you want to buy the club off me?"

I'd love to respond but I really haven't got a clue what you are trying to say