https://www.hartlepoolmail.co.uk/sport/ ... -1-8936556

Lets hope this is real

It’s in The Mail so it must be true.

Fingers crossed but it will all be a long way off.

The chances of any of them still being interested after finding out how much the club loses a week is rather slim though.

Not quite sure how Pam believes the club is in a good place to be taken over - Massive debt, massive playing squad, massive coaching team, still paying off numerous ex managers (and assistant), very few saleable assets and no notable income till June/July.

They could still be interested if they could see the books to know why the club was losing so much a week and they could see how to fix it.

Great if true but if we’ve learnt anything over the last two years it should be to treat anything like this with extreme caution. Firstly and most importantly who are they? Why are they interested. If it’s people who connections to the Town and club who genuinely want to turn things around then- fantastic. If it’s another collection property developers and asset strippers then they can fuck right off. The positive thing this time as silly as it’s sounds is the debt and the loss of league status which hopefully rules out leeches like Coxall.

Everything crossed.

Don't you just love the word INVESTORS ? reeks of those up to no good , with a little in the way of a moral compass and only interested in one thing, the bottom line.

Not really, no.

Man City are ran by investors. Quite big investors!

If you are interested in the bottom line and are genuine you don’t buy Pools. The likes of JNPG weren’t investors they were asset strippers who took as much as they could for as long as they could get away with it.

This big time!

I dont want to go all newcastle n demand for one of our own but im skeptical as to why people with no affinity for the club from darn sarf would wanna chuck money away up here.

Coxall had nowt and was only here to make quick money, and pams on here because she thought she was investing in the metro centre 2.0

If i read about new people wanting to develop land or buy the ground its not a good thing.

Announce sheikh mansour now!

It's catch 22, astute businesses folk would not go near Pools. Pam claims she's good at what she does and to a large extent I'm grateful for what she has done, but she bought Pools so I'm not convinced she could ever have been the right person for us. The same goes for the next owner, only a billionaire with no sense need apply.

Hmmm, that raises an interesting point.

Let’s say that some of these alleged interested parties were already involved with a PL team and wanted Pools as a feeder club, eg that bird looking to buy Newcastle. They would come in and invest, make sure we had no financial problems and be competitive enough to get back into the league and do well. How would this sit with Pools fans? Knowing that you would always be ok but never ok enough to really thrive as any decent players would just be siphoned off to the parent club?

BIG JANUARY ANNOUNCEMENT PART DEUX

On another note, folk are bitchy about Hodcroft not looking into potential buyers or caring about the future of the club if he did. Does anyone think Pam will care where the money comes from if she's able to claw some money back?

[youtube][https://youtu.be/UqY3OpXsh-k/youtube]

Yep I still can’t add YouTube links!!

https://youtu.be/UqY3OpXsh-k

Hard to say really, it would be nice to have no financial worries, but at the same time, your kind of selling your soul and consigning yourself to a future of being a premier league B team.

I can only assume their is rules against it as it probably would have happened by now.

It’s not allowed is it by the FA? They can own other clubs abroad but not here.

I don't think it is allowed as if it was it wouldn't surprise me if the likes of Man City would buy a lower league team.

I could be wrong but i dont think its allowed.

It may not currently be allowed, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they wanted to change the rules to suit themselves.

That is what I was alluding to. Most investors , particularly those at the lower end of the scale , are hooks and sharks looking to make a quick buck. Yes there are the Man City sort of investors, with billions at their disposal, to guarantee success on the field, but just as in life there are people getting into financial trouble trying to live like those higher up the food chain, its the same with these smaill time investors, they are trying to emulate the Bransons and Trumps of this world. Its quite immoral really but the laws in this country have been tweaked to allow them speculate like this, fail , and yet do it all over again.

What a club like Hartlepool needs is someone willing to invest just to make the club successful on the field for no other reason than they feel its a good thing to do , they will die happy and go to heaven. Unfortunately that type of self made Butcher , baker, candlestick maker local lad mad good type have been consigned to the annals of history and have been replaced by the sharks and consortiums, investors types , people with an Masters Degree in Business and ripping people off, gift of the gab, blue suit and tan shoe, hipster beard type wankers.

Oh for the simpler times when someone like Vince Barker a local farmer , just wanted to takeover the club he loved and supported , even though he knew it would eat into his savings,no mention of the word investor, which in my book implies you expect something back in return.

Just incase, I've always liked man city since they were formed in 2008 and would welcome any investment form the monsour family.

I think i'll always be cautious about any future owners/investors. It states in the article that "Interested parties had to provide proof of funds to club solicitors, a sum which was set at £3million" however let's not forget TMH forged documents to show they had money when they didn't. Not trying to be negative and I hope we do get a genuine investor but we've had our fingers burnt twice now so I think we have every right to be cautious.

I actually think it has went past the stage where a club like Man City would get any value of our owning a lower league club. The way the big clubs are changing the rules to suit themselves does away with the need for it now. They just loan their 20 best up and coming players out to teams all over the UK and abroad to get game time.

Coxall managed to convince the town, the media, IOR that he was the owner of a successful recruitment firm, he even then pulled the wool over some peoples eyes to the very last minute, tickle bellies galore helped like.

I'm in the JMSE (Joe Man Sceptical Elite) with this one too.

100% this.

As I say though the good thing is this time is we are in debt on that front. The likes of Coxall were handed a debt free club for nothing. Were he set to work paying himself and his mates handsomely, what could have possibly went wrong? Plus we’re not getting £1 million+ a year handed to us by Tv deals ect so the appeal to these type of leeches has surely lessened? Anyone interested now is actually going have to physically have some cash, not just move a bit about to satisfy the Football Leagues very stringent takeover criteria (not!)

I wouldn't thank you for getting success so soon that way. I used to work with a City fan when in the mid-late 90s, a canny lad, football wise very humble, as City were struggling in the old 2nd division and soon to hit the 3rd division. The shit he used to get from the Man U fans were I worked was unreal.He used to travel up from Swindon to watch their home games watched by gates of 22,000 ( good gate at the time and City no argument then had the loyalist fans in England).

I wonder what he makes of all this success and whether he still goes.

Joe Man

Joe Man.

I've re branded you for 2018.

Can I join the JMSE too? P

Best way to attract buyers at a boot fair is to have a crowd of buyers already gathered round your stall. If you were selling a football club you could try to get the same reaction by telling the local paper that you had lots of people with millions of pounds who were already keen.

Not saying that is what Sage are doing but it seems more likely than six serious potential buyers with at least 3 million squid each.

It will be the same when the managers job is up for grabs shortly. 100s of applicants, maybe so, but of what standard? either mad , unemployable, alcoholic or totally naïve young manager looking for first real managers job.

Did you ever get that job working for The Samaritan’s horden?

No m8. Decided to pursue a career as a self employed Motivational Life Coach instead.

I’m gonna treat every potential buyer as an asset stripper. It’ll save time later.

Just hope whoever takes over does it as quickly as possible and gets these people out of the club and as far away from it as possible. Will always be linked with the Coxall fiasco in my opinion and have brought in two useless managers, loads of useless coaches and even more useless players. They might know something about property but the clearly know absolutely nothing about football. She has had an easy ride of the fans but I am struggling to see one positive thing Pam has done for the football club.
She keeps saying it is more professionally run but it isn't. The players are crap, they clearly aren't fit, the club shop is a joke, Poolsworld is a joke, catering at the ground has actually got worse, attendances are down, season ticket sales are down and once again we have run out of money halfway through the season and are having to offload any players we can in January.
Name one good thing she has done for Pools ?

The Aquaduct

Reading between the lines kept us away from administration or worse.

Which are hardly trivial matters.

Time will tell I’m sure it will all come out in the wash.

I'm happy to wait and see if there's anything at all behind this story. No point in assuming they're all crooks and conmen until there's at least some names and company records in the frame to do a bit of digging on.

In the very very short term, it would be nice if the prospect of a takeover put the fire sale of players on hold and at least allowed Pools to get Keith Watson on a contract.

Wouldn't it just.

That's why I don't like the word Investors , to me it smells of property speculation. What happened to the wealthy people who just wanted to buy a football club? , for just that , a challenge to make it successful or at least better and to give something back to the community they were born into and or lived in.

The only problem is Hartlepool as a town hasn't much form in terms of producing people who went on to become rich , never mind have an affinity with the local football club.

Good thing John got off his arse and sorted that ACV out.

£3m isnt going to last long is it. If the debt is around £1m as rumoured and you are losing £100k a month then thats 2/3rds of it gone within a year at the current level of spending.
Lower the amount of spending and you end up with a smaller squad and possibly a weaker team especially if injuries kick in. A bit of a vicious circle isn't it! Not something that is going to show much of a return unless they are more interested in the land and thats been a sticking point, even for IOR.

I’d imagine a lot of the debt is to Sage which would be recouped on the sale, also a lot of those monthly losses could be paying off loans/debt.

It’s all speculation nobody has seen the books, the figure of £3 million is the minimum the insolvency Geoff wants to see before he’ll talk not what anyone has said they’ll put into the club.

I imagine the Vic boardroom to be currently like the first episode of Mcmafia........."there's £5m pounds up front as a goodwill gesture"

Canny watch that. What we want is someone with money, not the modern day so called rich man who haven't really a pot to piss in, raising 100k in order to get a loan for 500k used as surety to get another loan for a million....etc...etc

Don't understand how the current owners are expecting to get all or most of their debts paid off as part of a sale.

If they don't want to put any more money in then they are probably no more than a month away from going into administration and then likely liquidation.

If debts are as high as the £1.8 million previously mentioned and Pools have assets of probably no more than £100-200K if they are lucky, then any creditor (inc current owners) would only get about 10p in the pound from a fire sale.

If they got 25% of debts paid as part of a sale then they could count themselves fortunate and that would leave new owners with more money to put into the club.

But if Sage want to be greedy and gamble then they might end up with next to F all.

Time will tell !

That flipping masterplan will be the death of this club. It's probably would attracted TMH up here, Grubby Gary and Sage.

It's not gunna happen.

Yubep is still fuming after losing his deposit for a New Year stay at the planned hotel behind the rink end for him and his lass.

He put a shed up there last week and told her it was glamping.

Part of the problem is that it's become such a more expensive business even at our current level... used to be that someone like Sir Harold Hornsey could come in and sort things out, but forget being a millionaire, you now need to be worth tens of millions... ultimately the question ends up being, "how do you make it at least sustainable" and while some clubs have, we never really got that far - HH was trying to do that, but when IOR first came in they were less interested and so some of his plans (not the Mill House Masterplan, but talk of putting in a Conference Centre from memory) never made it off the drawing board.

We're basically asking someone to come in and sink several million to pay off debts, keep us running for a while, and finance the development going forward to sustain the club - problem is who's prepared to sink that sort of money into us, for little to no reward and possibly a lot of grief? We need a Steve Gibson, we're more likely to end up with a Garry Gibson....