301, it has a nice ring to it doesn't it? But is the figure quoted for Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson's personal liabilities genuine, or has somebody just chucked a dart and come up with the bull...shit?
Is it pure coincidence that this is the number you count down from in darts or is it a wonderfully apposite metaphor for the interregnum of the Icelandic ownership? Gudmundsson came to the ocky, chucked a few darts, pissed his fortune up against the wall, then sloped off with his tail beneath his beer belly.
There has been a lively debate on this site about the honesty and competence of BG. If he really is facing personal bankruptcy then, I think, the judgment has to be unfavourable. It appears from the latest stories that the guy is a true merchant banker, in the cockney rhyming slang sense of the term.
Yet, strangely, we do seem to be immune from all this. The noises coming out of the club remain positive and, even in these days of recession, it seems that Straumur see us as an asset worth retaining. So credit to BG and Duxbury there!
Will the bankers twist or stick? Do they understand that to make the best return on the investment, they have to improve the squad? These are interesting times. The fact that Zola and Clarke signed those contracts is very reassuring; and even more reassuring is the fact that the club were in a position to offer the improved contracts in the first place. Companies going to the wall do not generally double the salaries of key workers!
I am hopeful but my fingers are crossed. I've just watched Chelsea's dreams crushed in a split second. It's a funny old game out there on the pitch; add in merchant bankers and there's no telling what might happen - as Boa shows every time he plays!
Anyway, three darts to finish - Liverpool, Everton and Boro. And irrespective of BG's troubles, I'm hoping for ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!
9 comments:
Its kind of ironic that this story comes out when we face into the biggest game in the history of the club.
Its true that a win this saturday would mean we are odds on for Europe but thats not why. Its true that Rob Green is closing in on the best season by a West Ham keeper in the the last 10years but thats not it either. In fact it really has nothing to do with us apart from how this game will go down in history.
If we beat Liverpool and manU win then their title push is over. Now when you look at this in the context of what is going on behind the scenes at Liverpool then you realise why this is more important than other game in the long ans storried history of the two clubs.
Liverpool are currently over £350M in debt. That debt was due to be refinanced in January of this year but principle bankers RBS and Wachovia refused to take on the loan for another term.
This was partly due to the fact that the clubs owners Hicks and Gillett withdrew the assets that had been used to secure the initial loan to buy the Merseysiders. I would point out that this was more likely due to more pressing concerns within their business empire.
There were some stories doing the rounds in January that Keane was sold as it was the only way the club could raise the money to pay the balance on the Torres transfer. These, like all stories that paint the top 4 in a bad light, quickly disappeared.
Some things that were not so easy to hush up are the stories from the states that Hicks recently defaulted on a £10M payment on the loan he took out to buy the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars. He has claimed that it was a negotiating tactic with his creditors but its not one I would recommend you try with your mortgage advisor. It has also recently come out that both Hicks and Gillet are both attempting to sell other assets in the US and some are saying that it is to raise some capital to help refinance the club. Hicks is selling a rodeo he owns in Mesquite Texas to a group of investors headed by Mike McCall. McCall told the Dallas News that they figure was considerably less than the $10M Hicks paid for the rodeo. This seems like a drop in the bucked when compared to LFCs debts. More likely it is being sold to help clear the arrears with his American lenders of the loan for his baseball and ice hockey teams.
When he and Gillet asked for an extension to find new investors or backers for the club they were top of the table, challenging in Europe and in the hunt for the FA cup. With all of these potentially lucrative competitions still a possibility they still couldnt find any new money.
Now with Europe gone, the premiership hanging by a thread and their owners in the middle of some serious financial issues a loss to us on Saturday could change the fate of Liverpool football club for ever.
Any prospective buyer, who refused to meet the half a billion pound asking price when things looked a lot more promising, must now be thinking they can force the owners to sell the club on the cheap. The problem with this is that even if they get the club for a knockdown price they still have to shoulder the £350M debt.
However if the june deadline to refinance passes wihtout new investment and the club is put into administration it would cost a good deal less to buy the club. Given the current squad of players at the club a 10point penalty would not spell disaster for Liverpool. There is no chance of them being relegated and even with a ten point penalty they could still make a champions league spot.
This may seem cynical but if the new buyers were my clients this is exactly what I would tell them to do.
One thing that is clear is that Liverpool can not continue to meet their operating costs and service the debt their owners have saddled them with.
Regarding the latest BG story, here is a post I did on a different site earlier that sums up my feelings on the story.
Go back to sept /oct when we were supposedly on the verge of going out of business, certain posters were wearing their fingers to the bone telling us how it was all over, we were done for, the administrators were on their way and the squad was going to feature in the next Argos catalogue. Now does anyone remember the figure being banded about in the press as to what BG liabilites were? I do, the average was £275M. Now did the sky fall on our heads? No it didnt. So today it has emerged that BG has liabilities of £300M. Now thats not really a whole lot more than was mentioned 6 months ago and the club is in a far stronger position now than it was then. We are in 7th, in pole position for Europ, we have proven that Zola and Clarke are the real deal, we have brought through some of the most talented youngsters seen in the premier league and we have settled the tevez saga for considerably less than half the reported value of the claim. So does what happened today change anything for us? Nope not in the least. BG is a shrewd old campaigner who has done right by the club. I will be posting something abuot what I think will happen in the coming days so I am not going to go into it too much. The main focus of what I am trying to find out is how a nationalised bank can take over the club. It is my opinion that it cant, I also do not think that Straumur will remain nationalised and that a new re-organised and restructured Straumur will emerge in the coming months. As for BG, my grandad had a saying that "once down is no battle". Its something I have always believed in and I think BG will come out of this in decent shape.
I do hope we win on Satruday even though I think it is a very tough ask given Liverpools impressive league form and our depleted squad and I think a draw would be a good result for us although I doubt it will do much for Liverpool
Celtic - your definitely suffering from 'toolongacommentititus'
Will someone precis Celtic's post please? I'm often interested to see/hear what he says but I'm just too weary to take in his post right now.
always amazes me the amount of time celtic devotes to other clubs while his own club is deep in the s**t
Not sure what darts you watch mate but just to correct you, they start with 501, not 301!!
Your owner lost loads of money & so have other clubs, so why you making such a biggy about it, just suck it up & see if someone else will buy you out :)
anon 8.40 one of the points I was trying to make in my post was that the top 4 have combined debts in excess of £2billion and you never hear a word about in in the press? Why is that? The media are afraid to upset the sponsors of the big clubs as they also tend to be amongst the biggest advertisers in the UK and how likely would they be to spend money advertising with a media organisation who had written a piece critising the football club who are the flasgship of their marketing campaigns?
do you not think west ham are in serious enough poo poo, and lurch from one financial crisis to another, are about to be taken over by a broke bank, while the BG will be left with his socks by the time he settles up....yet you obsess over other clubs, in fact your posts are overwhelmingly to do with non west ham issues!...very strange
anon 1138 you really need to read the peice again!
Anyway, can i just say (without arse-creaming) i think celtichammer seems like an intelligent guy, and i therefore trust and listen to his opinions and often agree with them. I often think about why West Hams debt seems to much more highlighted than say Man Utd who were forecasted to be in serious debt when the window Glazier family took over, yet they are linked with a ludicris 62 million pound Rubbéry. I don't believe it is the media covering it up, because it simply sounds unlike the media, any other possible reasons?
A game of darts is usually contested by two players, who take turns at throwing up to three darts. The players start at a set score, usually 501 or 301, and each has to reduce this score by deducting the amount of points he or she scores with each turn until they reach zero.
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