"The ICT Thread - From the Premiership to the Seaside"

[lyle be back]

I feel sorry for the ICT fans. A truly tough position to be in and frankly shows the precarious nature of Scottish football finances. They are hardly a Gretna under Miles Brookson. Inverness needs a Scottish League team and I hope for all the fans that a solution is found.

Queens fans will know how bad it felt during Save our South days. 

I get that ICT have a couple of bin fire starters on this board, but most teams have.

All the best in your admin negotiations.

[Sortmeout]

13 minutes ago, KirkieRR said:

'Spending beyond their means', eh? I hope the Lichtie ultras and their allies can point out the big-ticket players ICT have hurled millions at and paid over the odds.

 

 

[DA Baracus]

Someone should suggest to Duncan Ferguson that, to save money and become a source of revenue, Inverness should install an artificial pitch.

Edited Saturday at 07:34 by DA Baracus

[Broath Boy]

8 hours ago, lichtgilphead said:

I thought it stood for Ignorant C*nt Tarmo?

I thought it was only me that noticed that, now you, how many out there noticed that as well?

[CALEDONIAN108]

That’s the nearest route back to the A9 after liquidation 

[RedLichtie86]

12 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

Someone should suggest to Duncan Ferguson that, to save money and become a source of revenue, Inverness should install an artificial pitches.

[Shodwall cat]

11 hours ago, michaelspinos said:

I don’t understand the glee being exhibited by fans of other clubs. Almost every full time club in the Championship or League 1 is in danger of following ICT into administration. QP are being bankrolled by a wealthy benefactor - what happens when he dies or gets bored with them. Partick are outspending their income by some distance. Ayr are bankrolled by their Chair. Falkirk were recently mortgaging their future by selling 10 year season tickets. Dunfermline are struggling after the withdrawal of their German backers. Raith are projecting a big loss for this season. The list goes on. At some point, clubs need to realise that you cannot gamble the existence of clubs on the chance of promotion to the Premiership. 
And the biggest lesson to learn from this fiasco is that a board should never give total control to a ceo. Directors must exercise close control over spending to ensure that ICT is not the first of many clubs to go under.

I fail to see how offering a very limited number of those season tickets was gambling the future of the club away. We are doing fine and won't be joining the Scottish football list of shame anytime soon.

[Shodwall cat]

46 minutes ago, KirkieRR said:

'Spending beyond their means', eh? I hope the Lichtie ultras and their allies can point out the big-ticket players ICT have hurled millions at and paid over the odds.

In fact, the club has tend to go for frees and Bosmans in the CostCutters of football. The big question is where the money has actually gone and the directors over the last ten years - all of them - are the only ones who can answer it.

Yes, money is owed to many of them - but why? How did it happen?

Aye paying a manager over 3k a week is bargain right enough. Caley have tried to push for the premiership on mid to bottom championship crowds. Clubs need to realise that instead of spending money they don't have to get into a league that size wise they shouldn't really be in anyway they need to increase the size of their support and commercial intake. This constant attempt by some clubs to get to the promised land is ludicrous.

[Skyline Drifter]

9 hours ago, Fifespud said:

Nobody has yet answered my question about VAT and ownership of the stadium. VAT liability is treated as a preferential creditor and so, where there are fungible assets, they never do a deal. It doesn’t matter if the pie supplier will take 10, 50 or even 90p in the pound, the VAT man never agrees to a CVA. 

I doubt they have any significant debt to HMRC. SPFL rules make failure to pay any tax on time a reportable and punishable offence now and clubs have to sign up permission for HMRC to report arrears to the league. Its far more likely directors have been paying HMRC and adding to their own debt. If they owed more than a month or so to HMRC they'd have been charged and point deducted before now as Edinburgh were last year.

[Fraz]

35 minutes ago, KirkieRR said:

'Spending beyond their means', eh? I hope the Lichtie ultras and their allies can point out the big-ticket players ICT have hurled millions at and paid over the odds.

In fact, the club has tend to go for frees and Bosmans in the CostCutters of football. The big question is where the money has actually gone and the directors over the last ten years - all of them - are the only ones who can answer it.

Yes, money is owed to many of them - but why? How did it happen?

Great question. And one that most ICT fans can't seem to reconcile. If we're spending so much, where? We've made zero improvement to infrastructure or the 'match day experience' we've had no big marquee signings. All I can think of is spunking cash for gardening leave as at one point we were paying for Robbo (to do nothing), Dodds (fired 6 games after extending his contract) and Ferguson (relegation specialist on initally £3k a week.) Plus related assistants.

Fans complained repeatedly about these poor decisions and wastes of money. However the board/CEO's manta was something between shut up and know your place and to ignore any negative opinions and label outspoken fans as 'clickbait proponents'. The Supporters Trust was also sidelined by Gardiner and labelled 'not representative'. 

I'm not sure what else fans could have done as many have been concerned for quite some time. 

[Savage Henry]

5 minutes ago, Fraz said:

Great question. And one that most ICT fans can't seem to reconcile. If we're spending so much, where? We've made zero improvement to infrastructure or the 'match day experience' we've had no big marquee signings. All I can think of is spunking cash for gardening leave as at one point we were paying for Robbo (to do nothing), Dodds (fired 6 games after extending his contract) and Ferguson (relegation specialist on initally £3k a week.) Plus related assistants.

Fans complained repeatedly about these poor decisions and wastes of money. However the board/CEO's manta was something between shut up and know your place and to ignore any negative opinions and label outspoken fans as 'clickbait proponents'. The Supporters Trust was also sidelined by Gardiner and labelled 'not representative'. 

I'm not sure what else fans could have done as many have been concerned for quite some time. 

 

Right.  It’s idiots on the board who ought to have stepped in. Unfortunately a couple of them seem barely able to spell their own name.  

[Owsley 2]

Apologies if this point has been addressed but I find it staggering that you got £501,000 for reaching last year's cup final and less than 18 months later you're in this mess.

[Sir Tarmo]

9 hours ago, lichtgilphead said:

I thought it stood for Ignorant C*nt Tarmo?

 

9 hours ago, glasgowlichtie23 said:

I thought it was Inbred C*nt Tarmo

[Savage Henry]

1 minute ago, Owsley 2 said:

Apologies if this point has been addressed but I find it staggering that you got £501,000 for reaching last year's cup final and less than 18 months later you're in this mess.

It’s a staggering mess.   I have no idea who on the board is in charge of finance, but they were negligent at best.  Duncan Ferguson’s contract is eye-bleeding, and the club seemed to be laughing about how much he got.  It was a very odd board.  

[coprolite]

9 hours ago, Fifespud said:

Nobody has yet answered my question about VAT and ownership of the stadium. VAT liability is treated as a preferential creditor and so, where there are fungible assets, they never do a deal. It doesn’t matter if the pie supplier will take 10, 50 or even 90p in the pound, the VAT man never agrees to a CVA. 

You don't know what "fungible" means

[Dunning1874]

26 minutes ago, KirkieRR said:

'Spending beyond their means', eh? I hope the Lichtie ultras and their allies can point out the big-ticket players ICT have hurled millions at and paid over the odds.

In fact, the club has tend to go for frees and Bosmans in the CostCutters of football. The big question is where the money has actually gone and the directors over the last ten years - all of them - are the only ones who can answer it.

Yes, money is owed to many of them - but why? How did it happen?

As said by Ross Morrison in the article in the Scotsman on Thursday, they've only run at a profit 5 times in their 30 years of existence.

No doubt for the majority of full-time clubs in the country the loss making seasons also far outweigh their profit-making seasons over the same time period. That figure makes it pretty clear though that while Gardiner is a blithering incompetent who made everything worse with various pieces of stupidity from appointing Duncan Ferguson and signing wildly expensive kit deals through to mad get rich quick schemes like the concert company and (in tandem with the board) the battery storage facility, the main problem always has been and continues to be spending beyond their means on wages.

I know ICT fans have acknowledged the board's own complicity in things coming to this point, but quite apart from the lack of oversight of Gardiner generally it's wild that the board didn't look at the financial position at the end of the 22/23 season (if not before) and make massive cuts there and then. They made a loss of £588K while being a Championship club who made the Scottish Cup final.

That is an absolutely insane position to be in when that cup run will have brought in £500K prize money before even considering gate receipts (which are split equally four ways for the semi too) and TV money. Quite simply, no Championship club should ever contrive to make a loss if they get to the Scottish Cup final.

Instead they did nothing, watched the losses inevitably climb to well over £1M when that cup run predictably wasn't repeated, and now here they are. Even if they were expecting the battery storage to be waved through to magically make their problems go away, it wasn't going to.

Even if their estimates of around £3.5M coming into the club if it was approved were accurate, that should be absolutely transformative money for any club outside the top flight and even some in it. However at their rate of expenditure all it would have done was plug the gaps for another three seasons and then be gone with nothing to show for it. We had the list of other clubs running at a loss up the thread, but even clubs who are making a deliberate speculative choice to run at a loss to chase promotion like Partick and Falkirk haven't come close to consecutive seven figure losses.

[Otis Blue]

29 minutes ago, Shodwall cat said:

... Caley have tried to push for the premiership on mid to bottom championship crowds. Clubs need to realise that instead of spending money they don't have to get into a league that size wise they shouldn't really be in anyway they need to increase the size of their support and commercial intake. This constant attempt by some clubs to get to the promised land is ludicrous.

I'd agree with some of this. However, I'm not sure that it's "ludicrous" for clubs to seek betterment and get "to the promised land" - isn't that the whole basis of sporting endeavour and merit? That ambition is what fans want to see.

Is the problem not that clubs want to get to the promised land, but instead that the promised land is too small, too exclusive and so the cost of getting there and attempting to stay there is unsustainable for medium sized clubs in a country the size of Scotland?

[velo army]

Obviously there's glee because Scottish football fans are very, very petty, but also because ICT are ahistorical upstarts who talk funny.

I'm utterly confused by Arbroath's place in all of this though. 

[The Great Stagsby]

16 minutes ago, coprolite said:

You don't know what "fungible" means?

Mushrooms that are safe to eat, Shirley?

[Jacky1990]

3 minutes ago, velo army said:

Obviously there's glee because Scottish football fans are very, very petty, but also because ICT are ahistorical upstarts who talk funny.

I'm utterly confused by Arbroath's place in all of this though. 

I dont think any genuine fan of scottish football takes any glee in something like this happening. If nothing else because we all know we are all a year or so of bad decisions away from the same fate. 

More just a piss take because thats what we do.

Only two clubs in scotland deserve any sort of genuine glee if they go to the wall.