capt_oats
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Posts posted by capt_oats
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54 minutes ago, Ron Aldo said:
Was a fee ever disclosed for Kelly? Surely we didn't pay more than the £500k, or whatever it was, we paid for John Spencer?
50 minutes ago, Busta Nut said:Aye I've never heard that patter
Aye. Until 5 posts ago I don't think anyone's ever claimed Kelly is our most expensive signing. Plenty of folk have claimed he's our highest paid player at the moment (and Aston Oxborough's our second highest
)
Either way, the season Kelly signed permanently the accounts showed we spent £542k on players and we paid fees for a few along with a development fee for Tierney. So you'd assume that whatever we paid for him was less than £542k and in all probability less than we paid for Spencer.
Anyway, I'm away to watch AVFTT now.
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1 hour ago, Handsome_Devil said:
Rumour ofc but I understand we've offered him a reduced deal. Which on one hand is fair but I'd prefer we try elsewhere.
I'm not sure there should be any great surprise in that.
For better or worse, Kelly is currently our captain and if nothing else has been entirely present over the course of his contracts with the club (loan and permanent). I don't think there was ever a chance that we wouldn't speak to him/offer him a new deal and just bin him off.
As it stands he has 149 appearances for us, which counts for something when you consider the context of him having arrived at the club in the Carson/Archer/Chapman season and the litany of injuries for Carson (which wasn't helped by Robinson rushing him back).
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45 minutes ago, YassinMoutaouakil said:
I'd totally forgotten that haha. A sacrifice I am willing to make.
On the Kelly point I noticed this from McGarry in his weekly mailer:
Quote"New investment is coming, but Kettlewell has already said that he doesn’t expect it to significantly alter his playing budget for next season. Liam Kelly will likely depart, as will key team member Spittal, who has a pre-contract agreement with Hearts."
I know that it's a general opinion piece but it's interesting to read that it's likely Kelly's away.
I mean, I think it's the right choice for him if he is as tbqh a fresh start somewhere would do him good but still...
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Just now, YassinMoutaouakil said:
Spurious but this is what Liam Kelly has driven me to. Sign him up.
Presumably it would need to involve Callum Butcher being very much launched first.
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2 minutes ago, YassinMoutaouakil said:
She must be pals with Lizzy Banks surely?
Both are Pitch Perfect alumnae (not Benji Siegrist of course).
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2 hours ago, Handsome_Devil said:
Just scrolled through the screeds of text we published with the season tickets, few thoughts.
Interesting we emphasised fan owned club again/still.
Also interesting to freeze prices having previously said we're in danger of losing touch with peers.
And either Kettlewell wrote his bit himself or the comms guy really hit the right tone of how he sounds.
Aye. This feels very on the nose.
I see it's been *liked* and re-posted by Barmack as well. He's liked Dee's post about the ST video too.
Although he's also 'liked' a Tweet by one of the many Motherwell Twitter accounts I have on mute and I've just cringed myself to death when I saw the content.
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Quote
"Strength is often defined by a number of things in life. It can be how many times someone has got up after being knocked down. It can be continuing their journey no matter the fear that falls on their shoulders and it's the despair and difficulty that we all face at some point in life."
I've just realised that the script at the start is erm...echoing Friday Night Lights. And I for one am absolutely here for it.
Quote"Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He's gonna fight and he's gonna lose. But what makes him a man, is that in the midst of that battle he does not lose himself."
Quote"Life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable. And we will all, at some point in our lives, fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts... that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us... and that when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. It is these times, this pain that allows us to look inside ourselves"
Clear eyes, full hearts...
Texas forever.
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Can I just say, last year's season ticket video got a fair amount of pushback (probably not helped by the hike in price) but I really like this season's.
Well played everyone.
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30 minutes ago, thisGRAEME said:
I suppose this is where it's important that the club makes it clear that actually; we're better for your development. That demographic has been a constant for the last decade, in that time we've seen guys like Ben Hall, Robbie Leitch (Who can forget that saga), Hastie, Rice, probably some others I forget. None of whom have come close to what Turnbull has achieved either in minutes nor triumphs.
The Turnbull and Miller examples (And I suppose Johnston as well now) are the best of these, where it is made abundantly clear to young players that yes; there's better money elsewhere, there's other opportunities at bigger clubs, but the chances of you playing regularly are slim. You are good enough here to be a first-team regular, and your next move is one to another club where you'll play.
McAlear and Rice took moves straight to another youth team/another team and are they better for it? Probably not. Were they good enough to contribute anyway? A question that doesn't really have an answer, but I suspect that Rice in particular would be better served standing next to Lennon Miller on a Saturday than he is sitting in the stand for 30 weeks a year.
The interesting thing with McAlear was that it was implied that he'd told us he wouldn't be signing a new deal - so we went ahead and accepted whatever it was Norwich were offering. He was 17 when we accepted the deal.
Quote“We had high hopes for Reece. He was getting closer and closer and indeed, played several first-team friendly matches during pre-season. We had positive conversations with the player, his family and his representatives about extending his stay.
“However, it was clear this was an opportunity Reece wanted to explore and probably would’ve explored, when his contract expired at the end of the season, had we not managed to agree a deal with Norwich now."
Related to Rice, I noticed this yesterday.
In other news, Season Tickets.
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10 minutes ago, Girth said:
I've already started dusting off my passport for Sligo away.
Thank you.
Sligo finished 8th (in a 10 team league) last season so unless you're just wanting to visit I'd hold off.
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1 hour ago, Ludo*1 said:
There was a tour of our training facilities for season ticket holders at the start of the season and it was said that loan deals from England are largely based on the facilities. Apparently, the top English clubs grade potential loan clubs facilities and judge who they allow to a club based on that which is why we were able to secure Beck and about to secure another player for next season.
It could well be an exaggeration by the people doing the tour but our training facilities are on par with some of the better English clubs that would be a potential loan destination ie, middling Championship/top end League 1 clubs hence how we beat a few English teams for Beck, got Jon McCracken in ahead of an English side and was the reason (alongside our partnership) that Burnley recalled Costelloe and Mellon from St Johnstone & Morecambe respectively and sent them to us.
Docherty continually points to the fact that clubs will also look at the success that most of our loans have had and take that into contention too.
Aye, from what I can tell when it comes to loaning out their good players (as opposed to the dross that fills the Academy system) the clubs take a holistic approach as to where they place them.
Which is kind of my point.
Qualifying for Europe isn't really going to level you up, it's not going to unlock 'access' to a *better* quality of player which a lot of fans assume to be the case because *Europe*. And again, that's not a dig - it's just that whether or not a club is playing a couple of European qualifiers in July/August isn't really going to factor into the thinking of that sort of club if they think that you're a good place to send their players to develop.
Broadly speaking the "access" you'll have to players will be the same if you finish 6th and don't qualify for Europe as it would be if you finish 5th and get dropped into the qualifiers.
If Liverpool like what you've done with Beck then they're going to be open to sending you similar players regardless of whether you're playing Sligo Rovers or whoever in mid-July or not.
On the point about the success of your loans, Kettlewell has been exactly the same with us pointing to James Furlong, Brodie Spencer, Georgie Gent, Jack Vale and the most obvious of the lot Mika Biereth.
It stands to reason if you have a track record of developing players (both your own and loans) rather than just parking them on the bench or freezing them out then your reputation will probably open doors for you.
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9 hours ago, peebles_Dee said:
Beck is a big loss I reckon but if we get 5th I reckon we will see him back on a short term loan. Europe qualification will give us access to high quality loans.
I think this is probably one of the biggest misconceptions fans have about "qualifying for Europe" at this level.
Which isn't a knock if you do end up qualifying but if you look at the various peer group clubs who have qualified for Europe in the time since Dundee last competed in European competition (us, St Johnstone, Killie, Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, United etc) how many of them can you honestly say had access to any "high quality" loans as a direct result of qualifying for Europe that they wouldn't have had a decent chance of getting anyway.
You've got your tie in with Burnley and you got Beck through the door when you were a newly promoted side. The prospect of playing a few qualifying rounds in the Conference league isn't really going to make much difference in a club like say, Liverpool, deciding on whether Dundee is a good destination for their player to develop.
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12 minutes ago, Neil86 said:
I think there are wee quirks like that even in OOC deals these days. You can negotiate the compensation down, for add ons.....I THINK.
Was there not something similar in Campbell's deal for Luton.
I could be miles off it.
Nah, you're right.
https://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/2021/06/15/allan-campbell-signs-for-luton-town/
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42 minutes ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:
Perhaps. You almost think he couldn't not rate him, but the example I always use in this case is that the last man to get Scotland to a World Cup rated East Fife's Jonathan Page higher than Millwall's Shaun Hutchinson.
I mean, I don't know one way or another and it's pretty pointless re-litigating Hammell-ball, everyone is scarred enough by the experience the first time round, but I have a degree of sympathy to the extent that we're kind having to reappraise what a development 'pathway' actually looks like now.
For years we were probably looking at integrating Academy players into the first team when they hit 18-ish whereas given how the landscape has changed with PL academies hoovering up talent we're having to find a way to get 16-17 year olds in and around the first team in a meaningful way. To all intents and purposes it was while he was in that bracket that we were bouncing Johnston around on loan (and of course there was Covid hitting).
I mentioned it at the time but rather than find a way to involve Johnston in the first team alongside SOD and McGinn (as Kettlewell did successfully) he opted to just loan him out (again). Which, don't get me wrong, is his prerogative - but it also felt quite instructive.
He was older by a margin but it was notable that Dean Cornelius' minutes dropped under Hammell compared to both Alexander and Kettlewell (he averaged 76.6 mins per game under Grezza, 64.1 mins pg under Ketts but dropped to only 41.8 mins pg under Hammell)
It's entirely hypothetical but if Hammell was thinking that Johnston still needed regular football to develop and was risk averse to it being with us then that's kind of a luxury that unfortunately we don't seem to have now. I guess a parallel of sorts is Turnbull, who although he didn't go out on loan, Robinson purposely held back making him a first team regular because he felt he needed to learn the 'free stuff', same with Campbell who made his debut at 18 under McGhee.
I can't remember who mentioned this whether it was McGhee, Robinson or Craigan but we apparently made a conscious decision to hold Campbell back after his first start where he ran the show against Accies rather than put pressure on him in a relegation scrap.
Given how Robinson handled Turnbull, hypothetically, would we expect that we'd have seen Lennon Miller playing as much as he has if he were still the manager? I don't know but I kind of suspect not.
Either way with Johnston you could say we fumbled things by not having a development pathway in place for him or you could also say that our being risk-averse cost us. In fact, both are probably true.
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45 minutes ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:
To be honest, I think Hammell was just a broken man by then and answered the question in the manner that he thought would get him least grief.
I think I've always had the suspicion that he didn't actually rate Johnston all that highly and just (wrongly) assumed that first team football with us would be the best offer he'd have on the table.
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4 minutes ago, well fan for life said:
Doubt it. He was out of contract so we were due whatever compensation amounts to these days.
We've fumbled a lot of things in the last few years but that's got to be the worst of them.
There's an element of "well, of course they'd say that" but at the last AGM (clearly not the one where Hammell told everyone he was confident Johnston would sign a new contract despite having bounced him out to Cove Rangers on loan because we ended up with SOD and McGinn on the books by mistake) they pretty much said that they made offers to keep him but it was made clear to them that Johnston wanted to try his luck abroad. Basically, the implication was "well, what can you do - if he doesn't want to sign the contract".
I mean, everything up to the point where we actually started playing him with 6 months left on his deal and realising he was actually really good? Massive fumble.
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4 minutes ago, wellfan919191 said:
Is there any truth in these Dylan Easton rumours? I know some guy in twitter has been posting about it but doesn't seem very trustworthy with transfers and not heard anything from elsewhere.
AFAIK the rumours came from here and it wasn't even a rumour. The bold @Handsome_Devil mentioned they'd heard we'd signed a player from the Rovers on a PCA last week and there was a subsequent bout of speculation around which players of theirs are OOC.
Since then it seems to have been taken as being fact with mentions on Twitter and Steelmen.
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13 hours ago, Busta Nut said:
We need more sensible people thinking about this rather than the Facebook/Twitter crowd who think it's gonna be like cheating in Football Manager.
This is something I was thinking about yesterday in so much as c***s are getting excited about what they *think* they're getting rather than the reality (which isn't a dig at Barmack - I don't know the guy and I don't know what the offer is but everything points to it being pretty low stakes, low risk).
It's almost a worst of both worlds situation where the folk giving themselves a stroke about 50+1 will be raging because the WS shareholding will have been diluted and the Facebook/Twitter crowd will lose their mind when they realise that Barmack isn't a 'mogul', didn't own Netflix - he's just a relatively wealthy guy who quite possibly doesn't even want to own a Scottish Fitba' club and a low stakes, low risk offer like this won't actually move the dial in the way they want so we'll still be having to sell Theo Bair and Lennon Miller because it's literally our business model and we still wouldn't have chucked £6k p/w at KVV back in January because it would have been mental.
IMO, if what's rumoured is actually the case, the offer on the table is...pretty much what should have been expected when you think of the limitations:
- We're not looking to sell the club
- We don't want to cede any meaningful control
- But we want "investment"
- "Taylor Swift, gies some dosh"
Without wanting to kick the can of that video around again but to repeat one of my main issues with the messaging put out by McMahon what exactly would any "investor" be getting out of this?
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Tbh, I think that the whole thing has been handled woefully and there's more than an eyebrow to be raised about how McMahon's gone about this (shock!).
On the point of the offer though assuming it is the £1.5m over 5 years then to Devils Advocate; how much does the WS bring in annually? The last WS AGM update from 7th August 2023 had the following:
QuoteAccounts
Members also accepted the accounts, which showed that we brought in £155,000 over the year. The Society currently holds a fund of £560,000 at the bank. This reserve:
- acts as reassurance for auditors
- continues to grow
- is a substantial safety net, which would be available to the club at a moment's notice if required
At the moment the amount owed by the club to the WS sits at £868k for an interest free loan used for general working capital and repayable on demand.
So based on that the WS have put £868k into the club with a cash reserve of £560k. So that's a total of £1,428,000 since what? 2016 or 17? (happy to be corrected on these points). If it's roughly accurate though it's pretty, pretty close to what has been rumoured to have been tabled by Barmack.
Is £1.5m for majority ownership a good offer to "sell" given the assets at the Football Club and the fact that this whole shitshow wasn't even put into motion by the WS? Absolutely not.
Should it be accepted? Probably not but equally if someone turns up at the table and says "I'll put in double annually what the majority owner is bringing in" then I'm not surprised there may be a question raised over what the split of shares looks like.
Again, I'm not advocating for the offer and I think the whole thing has been incredibly unhelpful given the state of flux we were in at the time.
I mean, my preference would be to put a pin in the whole thing, get McMahon tae f**k and allow Caldwell and the new Society board to find their feet and revisit the "investment" idea further down the line on the WS terms rather than whatever this is where we've been railroaded into a discussion by the chairman having gone rogue.
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1 hour ago, fat_tony said:
I think we bought and then sold Sol didn't we?
I got the impression that the OP was meaning more in the spirit of the 'player trading' model that Les introduced where we invest a modest amount in signing the player and sell for profit. With the best will in the world I'd guess any income we got from the likes of Efford etc would be minimal while shifting Sol on probably meant the deal washed its face with maybe a bit extra (the accounts have it as having been the only 'significant fee' last season and our gains on player registration were posted as £194,246 vs £974,168 the previous year).
Having said that, does it actually matter as long as we're getting some sort of value out of the player? Like, Carson is probably one of the best £10k fees we'll ever spend does it really matter that we didn't flip him for cash given we sold Kipré for £750k from the same intake of players?
I guess it's similar with Slattery there's absolutely zero doubt that he was brought in on the pitch we'd give him a platform and look to cash in which doesn't look like it'll happen but then again between the money we've got in for Kev along with the more modest amount for Sol that puts us in profit for the £500k+ we 'invested' in the Alexander purchases.
I noticed a few posts over on SO and a handful of people are still bumping against the 'player sales model' (as @JayMFC put it in a reply) - in essence you're getting people struggling to get over the fact that we have been profitable under fan ownership and countering with "Yes, but only because we sold David Turnbull" despite player sales and player trading literally being part of our business plan.
Quoting Jay's post from that thread and also Steelboy's which I found myself nodding along with:
On 20/04/2024 at 08:11, Jay said:The player sales model debate is an interesting one. For me, it's not a precarious model by any means. And I'd suggest that it demonstrably works.
We're in a situation where the club doesn't urgently need outside investment - it would just be preferable. Our model ensures that it's unlikely that the hypothetical gap outlined in the Well Society's consultation earlier in the year, and the hypothetical gap that is the very reason for courting external investment in the first place, will, based on the experience of fan-ownership to date, materialise. It never has under fan-ownership and, even if it did, the Well Society has enough funding to cover that gap as a one-off. The issue would be if something that has yet to happen didn't just happen one year, but two in quick succession.
Of course, nothing is impossible in football. Over the same time period that fan-owned Motherwell has remained in the division, reached cup finals, and made Europe, clubs with bigger resources such as Hearts, Hibernian and Dundee United have all been relegated. So it's a duty of the club to at least recognise that hypothetical gap and see if there's a more productive way to eradicate it, other than relying on the Well Society to plug it if it happens once, and then to probably slash our playing budget if it happens again in quick succession (before the Society has built up the safety net again).
But in terms of our model, David Turnbull always gets picked out as a seeming "anomaly" but in reality, he's the result of an effective player sales model. Since fan-ownership came into being, we have - purely off the top of my head, so there'll probably be others I miss - sold, for cash, guys like Louis Moult, Cedric Kipre, Kevin van Keen, Sondre Solholm Johansen, James Scott & Ben Heneghan.
We could have, had we tied them down on contracts, added Chris Cadden, Allan Campbell, Jake Hastie, Dean Cornelius & Max Johnston to that list. However, the compensation for each still numbers in the hundreds of thousands meaning that, collectively, that's still well over £1m.
We will probably sell Theo Bair on for a relatively decent fee in the summer, January, or next summer, while at the same time, Lennon Miller will almost certainly go for a price that you could perhaps list alongside the Turnbull fee.
In terms of any investment meaning a change from that model and the ability to keep our best players, I would argue that is incredibly unlikely, if not impossible. The player sales model is only partly because of a financial need, it's also largely because of the club's stature in world football. As has been mentioned elsewhere, it was confirmed at the AGM by the club that no investment offer is transformational, meaning that there would be no change to the model. In fact, you could argue that, if any investor was keen on getting a return on their investment, the player sales model could become even more important in that situation.
The only way in which our model ceases to be our model that I can see is if we ended up with an incredibly unlikely Colin & Christine Weir scenario where a diehard Motherwell fan wins the Euromillions and wants to just chuck cash at the club. But even in that situation, where you don't necessarily need to sell players, players would still be sold - because the best guys will always want to move on to play at perceived bigger clubs or in better leagues, regardless of how much cash you're able to throw at them.
The player sales model at Fir Park has been in place, and worked successfully, before fan-ownership, has worked under fan-ownership, and will continue to work regardless of whether the club is owned by the fans, an external investor, or a hybrid of the two. Personally, I think it's both a successful model that we should be positive about, because we're good at it, and a model that will be integral to the club whether we like it or not anyway.
On 20/04/2024 at 16:33, steelboy said:Safety certificates meant we had to level the pitch? Further SPFL sanctions when we haven't been sanctioned for the pitch since 2010? Are you sure about that?
I don't understand where you are coming from at all with concerning the losses. We make a profit one season. The money is in our bank account and we spend it. It shows up as loss the next season. It's totally normal. You seem to be suggesting that we should never spend more than we earn in any 12 month accounting period regardless of the cash in the bank which is a fairly mental way to budget for anything.
The 12 month period is totally arbitrary, it's not the be all and end.
On 20/04/2024 at 17:09, steelboy said:Levelling the pitch and adapting the East Stand to the new height were the expensive outlays.
We earned it. Then we spent it. The alternative would be sitting in a relegation battle with a pile of money in the bank and not touching it for no reason at all other than some people don't like seeing an annual loss.
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12 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:
Its probably because you actually have players enter *dons wankers hat* Zone 14 -
- so he has support to play with. Under Davidson we regularly had not a single player having a touch in that area, and the CMs were generally stuck out wide, alongside wing backs and the wingers/second strikers, creating "overloads" against the corner flag while the striker stood marked by entire defences.
You'll know better than me but it feels like the big difference between shite Bair and good Bair is the level of support around him?
This absolutely makes sense. If you look at the numbers Spittal has done and latterly the impact Vale has made then that's the exact area that we're getting players into.
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29 minutes ago, djchapsticks said:
The shite aspect of it is that it simply doesn't work that way.
If the opportunity to play first team games for SMFC presents itself against the opportunity to be on the books of a club the size of City or Chelsea, there will only ever be one winner. These clubs aren't looking at guys in the 19/20 age bracket up here for their academy and to progress to first team football. 16/17 is where they catch them so if there is firm interest in Ethan that becomes an offer then it's highly unlikely, even if he was to stay and shine in our first team, that those particular levels of club will still be interested in him in 2 seasons even with first team football under his belt. You'd be looking at English championship level clubs at most.
If City or Chelsea make a bid then it's quite literally a once in a lifetime opportunity and I don't think there's anything that we could offer that would tempt a player to hang about. That isn't a sleight at us either. Even Celtic stood no chance when Liverpool decided they wanted Ben Doak.
No' being wide but generally speaking how has Robinson been in terms of integrating your Academy players into the first team?
It's something that he obviously always talked up when he was with us as he had the likes of Turnbull, Campbell, Hastie, Scott etc in our first team but, kind of to the exact point you're making, he held off playing Turnbull because he felt he wasn't equipped to do the "free stuff" (as he called it).
Turnbull eventually made his debut when he was 18y 7 months whereas we've now seeing Hammell giving the likes of Lennon Miller his debut at 16y 6 days and we've had a bunch of legitimate school weans sat on our bench for almost the entire season.
It's something we were talking about on our thread the other week with Dylan Wells having recently signed an extension despite Leeds and Brighton wanting to sign him. I think that exact gap around 16-17 is where clubs are having problems working out what to do as the one thing that teams at this level have in their favour is the opportunity of first team football vs u23s football in the Academy system down south.
It requires having the baws to actually do it though.
Again, absolutely no shade but I can't imagine Robinson having been prepared to chuck a 16 or 17 year old in and give him meaningful minutes when he was with us but it feels like it's increasingly a necessity if you want to keep hold of them but I'd I imagine it's a difficult needle to thread from Robinson's POV with Top 6 fixtures and expectations of European football.
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1 minute ago, Vietnam91 said:
Thought he was cross border jiggery pokery like Humphrey?
Nope.
Signed for an undisclosed fee.
https://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/2015/06/30/steelmen-sign-dragons-moult/
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2 minutes ago, Vietnam91 said:
I can't recall the last player we bought we sold for money, everyone arrived for free or were promoted from the Academy. Maybe Marvin Johnson?
Louis Moult for one.
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Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons
in Scottish Premiership General Chatter
Posted
From memory Kelly, Slattery, Ojala, Johansen and Efford were all under contract when we signed them and as I say we'd have had to pay Bohs a development fee for Tierney (and maybe even Mahon).