Yoss

I like the way every link on the front page of the Livi website takes you to the same article. (Which incidentally contains several pictures of Leigh Griffiths.)

In the middle of an Andy Murray match? Are you kidding?

Yeah, sorry, that comment wasn't meant as personally as it looks, now that I read it back. I look forward to that beer.

I don't like the use of Franchise to talk about Livi as if to imply direct analogy with the Milton Keynes thing. That doesn't really work, principally for the reasons noted above that Scotland doesn't have the same set-up or the same process to allow for natural declines / rises or changes in population. The Inverness merger or the importing of Gretna from a different league are both things that wouldn't have happened down south either, things just work differently up here. That's not to justify (or comment one way or the other) on the legitimacy of the move to Livingston, or indeed Clyde's to Cumbernauld or Clydebank's transformation to Airdrie, it's just to note that the situations aren't the same and for AFC WImbledon fans to be throwing around accusations of franchise football in Scotland is misplaced. The MK Dons thing I do of course agree was a scandal, and I'm still at a loss to understand how the rules were such that it was allowed to go ahead even though both the Football Association and the Football League had turned it down. "Never forget, never forgive", I can go with, it's when it comes to "never stop wanking on about it" that I part company with KtfS. As for AFC Wimbledon - I'm a fan, in the first instance that's largely by accident of their founding chairman being a good mate of mine, but independently of that it's one of the most heartening stories to emerge fromt he world of football in my lifetime. It just shows what fan groups can do when need be, that you don't have to put up forever with unscrupulous owners - they need us more than we need them, and fans can take charge of their own destiny and make a success of it. That's been a big lesson for supporters all across the country, and should be so again for Livingston fans just now. However, that is not to say that Trusts are always the best or only legitimate means of running a football club. Where it happens that's great, I'm always happy to see it and wish any club well in those circumstances, but the smug superiority with which some Trust devotees preach to others about it gets to be a bit annoying sometimes.

Spot on. I strongly suspect our first loanee will be Johnny Russell, incidentally, but that's a pure guess on my part.

Sorry Charlie, no envy or bitterness involved, but you really can't have it both ways. You can't ask for sympathy for your string of bent chairmen while basking in the glow of the success that that bentness brought you. It's just the way it is. (And by the by, the irony of someone named Charles Darwin talking of a "right to exist" was observed to me this morning by someone else reading the thread.)

Same question again - what guarantees, specifically? I'm not disagreeing here as much as it may appear, but I really don't see that it's that easy.

I realise that, yeah, and I'm trying not to shoulder shrug. I agree more should have been done, but as I've already said probably a few times in various bits of conversation on this thread, it's much easier to slag off the SFL and say something should ahve been done than it is to come up with concrete proposals as to what, exactly. It's a difficult question to which this episode should make the SFL give a good deal of thought.

And the same goes for your second paragraph, it would be very difficult to think what rules you could have set that would have disallowed Massone as a chairman that wouldn't disallow virtually anyone else. Clearer set of deadlines - yes I agree, but unless you;ve got good ideas for what deadlines and for what, specifically, that's just hot air.

Both of those things have just happened today, and in any case it's not unusual either for a ground to be without a safety certificate for all kinds of reasons during a close season, nor is it *that* unusual for winding-up orders to be issued, quite a number of clubs have had them, usually from the Inaldn Revenue, and survived. Any watertight criteria you try to put in place on those lines will be too hardline and will catch other clubs, needlessly, now or in the future.

It comes back to the same question, how are Livingston supposed to be able to prove they can start the season? Massone has assured everyone all along that they can and will - what other criteria would you have used to make that judgement?

The last two summers we've been saying the same thing at this stage, that the squad is too small. But one thing McGlynn has never done is panic buy. If the right players are there then fine, if they're not he's not going to fill the squad for the sake of it. Last season the board backed him with cash during the season to bring in players as and when they becamse available - Wales, Simmons, Williamson, Andrews. If the gates do indeed look good I'm sure they'll do so again but let's keep clam here. As we've already noted time and again, we'd take relegation over administration, but in any case given that the automatic relegation spot looks like being taken off the radar by a club that failed to live within its means, it's an odd time to want to push the boat out.

Okay then, what's our income and expditure over a year, how much of a wage budget have we got, how much of it are we spending and how much more do you think we should have stuffed under a mattress somewhere?

They will try and keep senior football there if possible, yeah, but I think they may have reached the point of recognising that can't happen under Massone. We'll find out fairly shortly I think. Any chance you could stop harping on about the franchising thing every time you make a comment? Y0our sense of righteousness about trust-run football clubs and all that jazz has a tendency to set the cause back by getting peoples' backs up.

Don't panic. No point in signing players for the sake of it at this stage if they're not good enough. I hadn't realised the Williamson signing was confirmed.

Yes indeed. Almost any business, especially a newish business, is likely to have some debt, that's how the whole system works. It depends what level of debt you've got and how much you're pushing the boat out, which as you say is a judgement call and a fine line. Arsenal took on a colossal debt to build their new stadium but one that was within their means to manage.

Historical comparisons with the likes of Arsenal are fatuous. Insofar as there was a time when there were no football clubs, and the leagues in both Scotland and England were assembled by various sets of historical accidents and rules that were made up according to circumstance as things evolved, then yes evey club could be said to be a franchise ar some stage - but that would just be a bit silly and says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of allowing such geographical shifts under the current system. That said, Scotland unlike England still doesn't have a pyramid structure or quite such well-established or any procedure for allowing clubs to come in and out the league to reflect demographic changes (except by the somewhat unsatisfactory method of waiting for some to go bust) so I don't really accept comparisons between Livingston and the Milton Keynes thing, which was far worse.

Sometimes soft loans really are just that. Abramovich gave all his cash to Chelsea as loans (and Mileson to Gretna) not because he expected to see any of it back but because it's apparently beneficial for tax reasons to do it that way. What Melville's thinking is I have no idea.

I know you've got a decent youth team, yes, but there's a world of difference between being able to introduce players from it as and when they develop to thrusting them in at the deep end when the senior squad leaves en masse. If it does come to that, you'll finish bottom.

I know you've got a decent youth team, yes, but there's a world of difference between being able to introduce players from it as and when they develop to thrusting them in at the deep end when the senior squad leaves en masse. If it does come to that, you'll finish bottom.

Nowhere near what he said he has, agreed, but there doesn't seem to be any doubt that the club has been running at a substantial loss this past year - more than the recent player sales can cover - and he's been paying the bills himself. He'll have been doing so on the form of loans to the club, and as far as you can gether it seems to have been those loands he wanted repaid as the first condition before he'd consider selling to McDougall. For as long as he insists on that, it'll be hard to see any way of making progress.

I think it's the money rather than the face. Before Livi can move on, AM is going to have to accept that the money that he or his financiers have put into the club (which they have, in fairness) is down the drain and he's never going to see it again.

Agree with that, the website is excellent.

That's true. If he'd left of his own accord presumably there'd be no prolem tearing up his contract and he'd be a free agent. I thought that's what must have happened, tbh, but perhaps not. I'd forgotten he was ever given a two year deal at all until I stumbled across this by chance the other day. http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/raithrov...rees.4131246.jp

Probably, but it depends on what terms he left. If he walked out then I doubt we'd be paying his wages.