Over excited about Mr Musgrave taking over just yet apparently it's by far a done deal.

The club is in a worse state financially than was first thought it has been well and truly been robbed blind

Shouldn't stop somebody like him sorting it out though, remove the top tier and re group with somebody who has a scooby.

Yes but you cant just sack people who are under contract without paying a big chunk in compensation.If Harrison is on a 3 year deal and the new signings are all on 2 year deals and the club is still paying Jones and all of his crew the cost of a clearout plus running costs it could cost £1 million pounds or more. Musgrave like I keep telling people is no idiot and will only take this on if he can make money from it.
Duxbury is a bigger bullshitter than Coxall and the fans have just handed her a sackful of cash without getting any assurances the club will still be trading in a months time. She will probably pull the same stunt next month and every month till fans stop handing money over.

Rumours are that the accounts are appalling and shouldn’t be trusted in the slightest. They could take months to sense check. I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone took over after viewing them. Hopefully this fella doesn’t care about giving money away.

I fear administration is looming, the accounts must be grim if out have to sign a none disclosure agreement before looking? Posted separately re administration I suspect that's what Blackledge/ Pam are going to do ?

What you heard?

Unfortunately they are not rumours.

I don’t think anyone will be surprised about the books - the way it sounded though last week so what this bloke had seen them and was still looking to proceed? Or has that changed now?

Probably explains what that Swedish gadgie has ducked it.

We all know the books are shocking, it depends if Sage are willing to do a deal. I'm not sure why they would expect a new owner to give them most of their money back as the assets of the club are worth jack. The alternative is they get nothing in return.

The problem is, I think many got excited due to the fact he is from the Town and were thinking its a philanthropic act. He's not a Pools fan and whilst he might have good intentions even for someone with mega coin if the club is more of a financial basket case than even we thought he will think twice.

The robbing incompetent wastes of space who have owned the club in recent times want showering with shit. Instead they've been given some coin directly from fans to bail them out and sympathetic articles in the local media

Bannatyne likes football and is filthy rich but wouldn’t even consider taking on a football club. These people don’t get rich by chucking it away and not many of them are philanthropic to the other extent either.

If the club needed £200k to survive January then it follows they will need something like the same amount Feb-June till they can get some high earners off the books and draw in some season ticket money and the parachute payment. That is the best part of a million pounds to put in JUST to keep the club afloat for 6 months. Not many people would buy a business on those terms. The only thing Musgarave looks to have in his favour is the council giving home some land to recoup his losses for the rest of the season. That's a fair bit of land a lot of houses.
Blackledge, Watson and Duxbury have got us in this mess through bad financial management and sheer incompetence so I don't hold out much hope of them negotiating a good deal for Pools.

They are not ‘negotiating a good deal for Pools’ if indeed an offer for the club is made they would be negotiating a good deal for their incompetent selves. There must presumably be a trade-off between the finger in the air amount that Blackledge claims to have put into the club and the sum of sweet FA that he will receive if the club is wound up with no saleable assets other than a group of donkeys that would not look out of place on Saltburn beach.

I'm guessing that Sage put money into the club as an investment driven by the prospect of property development and high interest rates on their loans. A fair chunk of the debt will be unpaid interest compounding month by month. No club can survive for long with Wonga debt.

Coxhall had turned the club into a basket case and Sage and Pam have mismanaged the club's affairs from the moment they took over. They gambled and lost with their budgets for this season. They cannot expect to recover much of their investment if anything at all. There will be quite a lot to sort out before anyone takes over and its usual to have non disclosure agreements before any due diligence and access to the books.

Issues will include who gets any transfer installments, who pays off the Directors/Management team (who will have contracts that will have to be honored), who gets the staged parachute payments, how much is the non Sage debt and of course how much will Sage accept in p in the £. Businesses are valued on their future prospects and cash flow, not on how much money has been pumped in.

The main advantage that Musgrave seems to have is that he is used to working with the Council and a 'you scratch my back' type deal may be available to him that is not open to Sage.

Its not clear to me that administration is avoidable. No-one may be prepared to pick up the mess. Musgrave may be in the best position to make it work.

The other problem is that due to this complexity any takeover is not going to be done any time soon, by which time more games will have passed with the current squad and management team. We may end getting relegated anyway administration or not...it's certainly looking that way

Have to guess that the role of the council will be crucial. Given the existing friendly relations he might be in a position to accept a promise that he'll get permission to redevelop land around the ground that allows him to get cash he sinks into Pools/Sage back. That would let him commit to a deal for the club that others would be far more wary of.

Hopefully, the promise wouldn't include redeveloping the ground and moving the club but it could - there would be a general love in about saving the club, redeveloping the area etc so I reckon most people would back the idea.

I would like to think that the council discussions would be to allow Musgrave to buy the whole mill-house land (including the Vic, the swimming pool and bowls centre) on the condition that he redevelops it including ground improvements and a new community-use leisure centre in the plans. The rest could be housing or other facilities which generate income. But with the covenant over the ground, making sure that it stays.

The council have acknowledged that they see the value the football club brings to the town. For them to agree to selling the land and Pools moving to somewhere on the outskirts would be shortsighted and shooting themselves in the foot.

Obviously a football league club is a benefit to the town , but a ground in a town centre location makes us unique, like a pub with an open fire. It would sacrosanct to give it up. Apart from one or two exceptions I'm sure most fans of clubs who have relocated to the middle of nowhere will agree , especially if the new stadium is a cheap breeze block/bus shelter concoction, and I'm sure HUFC would go for the cheapest bidder.

I don’t want the Vic to make way for any land development, but I don’t want Pools to cease to exist either. If the ground did have to go then where do people think that it would be acceptable to build a new ground at?

Marina, in that bit of land behind Bingo hall, Customs House , bit tight but could be done I reckon, with a couple of Subbuteo type stands like those at Southend and Brentford etc

If we can't get Town Centre/Marina then the land next to B&Q is the only real feasible option, at least there's a railway station very nearby and it's still actually in the town, albeit far from away from anything else of note.

Years back I.O.R looked at the land opposite the car wash at the dock entrance at the end of powlett road.

Probably end up at Oakesway trading estate or worse still Wynyard

Right in the middle of Bishop Cuthbert to piss the 'villagers' off!

Since they're running the hospital down, why not there? Good access in and out of town too.

Out of curiosity, are the actual stands covered by the covenant on the ground or could they be sold for scrap or whatever?

To be honest, most of the locations quoted are handy if you have a car, pubs near at hand?... public transport nearby?
We'd end up with some functional breeze block/sheet metal box with the atmosphere of a chapel of rest.
Then there's the inevitable call for it to be a 'CommunityStadium' ....rugby, monster truck demonstrations and everyone will want there bit of the cake, match postponed because the Bishop Cuthbert Morris Dancers had booked a rehersal and the incessant visits by councillors strutting their stuff to get another picture in the Mail and Post, the pitch like a battlefield, oops, that was the WW1 Battlefield re-enactors.
If it moved out of town forget it, it's not my team anymore then.

The ground is part of the plans and always has been, part of this is we get a new stand with all the jazz that goes towards generating non matchday income. People are getting way, way ahead of themselves for me, loads of second guessing and assumption. Let’s just see what happens as things stand he seems to be our only real hope of surviving this mess.

Development of and around our current ground would obviously be the preferred option if it is an option which is on the table.

As long as there's another Gregg's as part of any development I'm sure the town will be happy.

Mr I said at the back end of the week that ground is safe if Mr Musgrave takes over.