Who has been Bolton's best signing since Allardyce left?

Sluffy wrote:

So that amounts to just short of £50 million in KNOWN transfer fees - a load more in UNDISCLOSED transfer fees - and a shed load of players signed!

Surely between the four clowns they could have signed (free or fee) at least ONE good signing - surely?

Christ just think of how much in wages the above shower of shite as cost us!!!

No wonder we are fucked as a club.

Not to mention the agents fees. Bet there's a good few million with the amount of players on that list. I didn't realise so many players had passed through the club since BSA left. Our scouting system must be proper shit. Whoever recommended most of those players need to have a look at themselves

Got to remember that before this Allardyce's squad were on megabucks salaries and it's the salaries over a much longer time frame -  not the transfer fees - that have bankrupted us.
TBH these transfer fees seem reasonable by premiership standards and we have reduced accordingly since our relegation.

wanderlust wrote:Got to remember that before this Allardyce's squad were on megabucks salaries and it's the salaries over a much longer time frame -  not the transfer fees - that have bankrupted us.

The significant growth of the debt over the last 8 years (£50 million alone in 2013) suggests that whatever we were doing in Allardyce's time (now long gone - and so to those players) had very little if any impact on the mess we know find ourselves in.

Yes players had to be replaced but for every Djorkeff and N'gotty that left we replaced them with the likes of Ngog and Knight.

Cheaper and inferior replacements may have had to be what we had to bring in - but my point is that these replacements - over the last 8 years have been on the whole spectacularly bad but given equally stupid wages AND long contracts also.

I think the fact that many of these players who left us never played much if ever again - Mears, Eagles, Knight, Ngog (to a greater extent), etc.

I don't expect any manager to get a signing right every time - or even half the time but what 1 or 2 ok signings out of something like 60 players!!!

Something is clearly wrong - even chance says that you can't be so bad if you simply picked players at random.

Statistically out of all those players we should have got at least a few good signings - but if the best we can come up with is Sam Ricketts (who let us not forget seem to have played his best football in a centre back pairing with Knight rather than in his regular full back position) then something somewhere is / was clearly wrong in the club.

It'd be interesting to learn which agents represented those players listed.

I'd put good money on the same two or three names cropping up with alarming (and suspicious) regularity............

Sluffy wrote:

wanderlust wrote:Got to remember that before this Allardyce's squad were on megabucks salaries and it's the salaries over a much longer time frame -  not the transfer fees - that have bankrupted us.

The significant growth of the debt over the last 8 years (£50 million alone in 2013) suggests that whatever we were doing in Allardyce's time (now long gone - and so to those players) had very little if any impact on the mess we know find ourselves in.

Why does it suggest that Sluffy?


The club could declare the debts at any time - usually buried when there's another news story. The £50 million in 2013 alone is a case of "get all the bad news out at once and have it done with".

It's easily done. Just put Elmander on the books and list him as an asset worth £15 million. Then let his contract run down and list him as an asset worth ZERO. There's a £15 million loss at the stroke of a pen.

When Allardyce left he had players on the books who hadn't been revalued for donkeys years. As it turns out, those players were moved on over subsequent years - always at a loss. Allardyce could easily have lost the club over £100 million - probably not far off that if you look at the ageing squad he left us with whose collective value had to be written off.

And only the club's accountants will know the truth about how much of the club's debt is down to Allardyce and the squad and wage bill he left us with - but there's no doubt that the impact of failing to do any succession planning and focussing on quality players at the end of their careers cost the club for many, many years after Allardyce left and for as long as they were listed as assets.

Are you not required by law to distinguish between "tangible" assets like buildings and stuff (independently appraised and valued at market rates) and other, less easily "quantified" (for want of a better word) stuff like players?

It seems a bit suss to me that a publicly listed business like The Wanderers should be allowed to produce accounts which contain obviously stupid player valuations like the one mentioned above.

Isn't it illegal to artificially inflate the value of your assets for audit purposes?

(Genuine question, as I'm clueless on the subject.)

Defining the value of a player is largely guesswork and based on market value - which in a mental market is never going to be accurate.

Defining "Good Will" in the context of BWFC over the last few years is another interesting and arbitrary element.

wanderlust wrote:

Sluffy wrote:

wanderlust wrote:Got to remember that before this Allardyce's squad were on megabucks salaries and it's the salaries over a much longer time frame -  not the transfer fees - that have bankrupted us.

The significant growth of the debt over the last 8 years (£50 million alone in 2013) suggests that whatever we were doing in Allardyce's time (now long gone - and so to those players) had very little if any impact on the mess we know find ourselves in.

Why does it suggest that Sluffy?


The club could declare the debts at any time - usually buried when there's another news story. The £50 million in 2013 alone is a case of "get all the bad news out at once and have it done with".

It's easily done. Just put Elmander on the books and list him as an asset worth £15 million. Then let his contract run down and list him as an asset worth ZERO. There's a £15 million loss at the stroke of a pen.

When Allardyce left he had players on the books who hadn't been revalued for donkeys years. As it turns out, those players were moved on over subsequent years - always at a loss. Allardyce could easily have lost the club over £100 million - probably not far off that if you look at the ageing squad he left us with whose collective value had to be written off.

And only the club's accountants will know the truth about how much of the club's debt is down to Allardyce and the squad and wage bill he left us with - but there's no doubt that the impact of failing to do any succession planning and focussing on quality players at the end of their careers cost the club for many, many years after Allardyce left and for as long as they were listed as assets.

Well it's simple really, by law the accounts have to be published annually and that during that year all income and expenditure have to be shown.

In your example of players, their salary has to be shown each year (in the wages and salaries bit of the accounts) and their transfer fees are 'depreciated' over the lengths of their contracts.

So in your example of Elmander (say he was bought for £10 million and given a 4 year contract) each year the 'value' of the squad (shown under assets - there is a technical term for reducing the worth of the players but I can't just bring it to mind right now - just got it 'amortised') would drop £2.5 million for him alone and proportionally for any other player purchase (divide by length of contrat).

Stuff like this is all standard accounting practice - the books remember are audited by an independant auditor - any any false accounting is liable to prosecution.

(Just look what happened at Tesco's recently!).

At the end of the day the company owning BWFC (Burden Leisure) is a multi-million pound turn over business and subject to British Law, so you simply can't act in a way as you suggest above.

QED.

Sluffy wrote:

wanderlust wrote:

Sluffy wrote:

wanderlust wrote:Got to remember that before this Allardyce's squad were on megabucks salaries and it's the salaries over a much longer time frame -  not the transfer fees - that have bankrupted us.

The significant growth of the debt over the last 8 years (£50 million alone in 2013) suggests that whatever we were doing in Allardyce's time (now long gone - and so to those players) had very little if any impact on the mess we know find ourselves in.

Why does it suggest that Sluffy?


The club could declare the debts at any time - usually buried when there's another news story. The £50 million in 2013 alone is a case of "get all the bad news out at once and have it done with".

It's easily done. Just put Elmander on the books and list him as an asset worth £15 million. Then let his contract run down and list him as an asset worth ZERO. There's a £15 million loss at the stroke of a pen.

When Allardyce left he had players on the books who hadn't been revalued for donkeys years. As it turns out, those players were moved on over subsequent years - always at a loss. Allardyce could easily have lost the club over £100 million - probably not far off that if you look at the ageing squad he left us with whose collective value had to be written off.

And only the club's accountants will know the truth about how much of the club's debt is down to Allardyce and the squad and wage bill he left us with - but there's no doubt that the impact of failing to do any succession planning and focussing on quality players at the end of their careers cost the club for many, many years after Allardyce left and for as long as they were listed as assets.

Well it's simple really, by law the accounts have to be published annually and that during that year all income and expenditure have to be shown.

In your example of players, their salary has to be shown each year (in the wages and salaries bit of the accounts) and their transfer fees are 'depreciated' over the lengths of their contracts.

So in your example of Elmander (say he was bought for £10 million and given a 4 year contract) each year the 'value' of the squad (shown under assets - there is a technical term for reducing the worth of the players but I can't just bring it to mind right now - just got it 'amortised') would drop £2.5 million for him alone and proportionally for any other player purchase (divide by length of contrat).

Stuff like this is all standard accounting practice - the books remember are audited by an independant auditor - any any false accounting is liable to prosecution.

(Just look what happened at Tesco's recently!).

At the end of the day the company owning BWFC (Burden Leisure) is a multi-million pound turn over business and subject to British Law, so you simply can't act in a way as you suggest above.

QED.

I think you are trying to describe straight line amortization Sluffy?
I don't recall that being declared as the agreed convention in the published accounts, but I may be mistaken.

But there is no requirement in English Law to adopt that approach. The legal requirement is to amortise and depreciate at a rate that best reflects the real value to the business withing any given period.
In other words whatever it suits you to write. It can be done any way you like as long as you can justify it.

When a player like Anelka finally leaves the club, obviously they are no longer an asset and have to be replaced on the books by the transfer money received i/e/ the asset has become cash at bank. But until that point, you could say Anelka was worth £20 million and base the justification on whatever the media speculate Anelka might be worth. As soon as he is sold for £15 million there's a £5 million book loss.

Cahill was valued far higher than the £7.5 million we got for him - there was even a buy out clause of £17.5 million in his contract so I can't imagine he would have been valued any less than that.

Losing money in the accounts like this is a cornerstone of tax avoidance so God knows how many years it took to write off debts accrued during the Allardyce regime. We'll never know I guess.

If you don't believe me then perhaps you will believe UEFA'a FFP Rules

(note what the video says around the 1 minute mark about the clubs financial accounts!)

Somehow we managed to stay in the Prem with a lot of those crappy players.  So in hindsight they weren't that bad......compared to today's bunch that is.
Or to put it another way...would the team we have right now survive in the Prem?

Why would a team struggling in the championship survive in the Prem Terrence?

bwfc1874 wrote:Why would a team struggling in the championship survive in the Prem Terrence?

The article is suggesting that we bought a lot of crap over the last few years. All I'm saying is that crap was better than what we have now..... 
Today's team is not close to the teams we had just a few years ago ..... barre Lennon working some magic.

WL you seem to have a bit of an obsession with condemning BSA's transfer policies yet the evidence doesn't really support you. Where is the evidence that it was "debts accrued during the Allardyce regime" that have caused our current problems as opposed to the wretched transfer policies of his successors?

The video above shows that straight line amortization would have been used so it is clear the accounts would have shown this and there is no question of these amounts being hidden and "cost[ing] the club for many, many years after Allardyce left".

The players that BSA's successors brought in were most likely given equally generous contracts - just look at how expensive some of the dross signed by Coyle was.

Compare the massive difference in the quality of most of BSA's signings to most of those on Sluffy's list. Just look at how many of them continued to perform at Premier level at West Ham under BSA whereas virtually all the post-BSA rejects are unemployable.

Finally I don't think BSA is perfect but he gave Bolton more success than we have had since the 1950s and for that I shall always be grateful.

Sluffy wrote:If you don't believe me then perhaps you will believe UEFA'a FFP Rules

(note what the video says around the 1 minute mark about the clubs financial accounts!)

It's not a matter of believing you or not Sluffy although this video proves nothing given that Ed Thompson's video isn't official and FFP didn't even exist at the time we are talking about i.e. between 8 and 4 years ago.

Ironically the video (accidentally) highlights one of the biggest causes of financial problems. In using contract duration as the straight line variable, the club in the example will invariably have to write off part of their asset - after all, how many players actually stay at a club for the full duration of their contract? As far as I can tell, that only happens when they have been overvalued and can't find another club daft enough to meet their demands.

But 8 years ago we had a healthy turnover of players who will not have had their book value fully amortised.

So although each player has their value written off over a number of years - and this is my point i.e. accounting for Allardyce's tenure continued for several years after he departed - when a player is sold the book value may be - in fact is likely to be - way off the market value. The income from any such sale will appear in the accounts of that particular year and will only appear once.

I'm not having a go at Allardyce - just saying that all those top players did not come cheap. Worse still they set a precedent for the dross that followed and our inevitable financial decline.

Beware false profits.

How does this work with players signed on a free transfer?

If you've acquired the rights to their contract for nowt, how do you amortise an asset whose initial valuation was nil?

Are they never listed as assets in the first place?

I'm confused......

xmiles wrote:WL you seem to have a bit of an obsession with condemning BSA's transfer policies yet the evidence doesn't really support you. Where is the evidence that it was "debts accrued during the Allardyce regime" that have caused our current problems as opposed to the wretched transfer policies of his successors?

The video above shows that straight line amortization would have been used so it is clear the accounts would have shown this and there is no question of these amounts being hidden and "cost[ing] the club for many, many years after Allardyce left".

The players that BSA's successors brought in were most likely given equally generous contracts - just look at how expensive some of the dross signed by Coyle was.

Compare the massive difference in the quality of most of BSA's signings to most of those on Sluffy's list. Just look at how many of them continued to perform at Premier level at West Ham under BSA whereas virtually all the post-BSA rejects are unemployable.

Finally I don't think BSA is perfect but he gave Bolton more success than we have had since the 1950s and for that I shall always be grateful.

Whatever happened to BSA?  Oh yes, 4th place in the EPL, with a team equal to us just a few years ago.  Success begets success and it takes £ and lots of them to succeed in the top division.  It also takes leadership and BSA obviously has that.