Duxbury Out

They make money on loans. What's a myth about that? You've even backed up that point yourself. Not sure where you're going with this.

I didn't say they make a lot of money on loans, my point was they make money on them, thus it's not a loss leader for the owners. They buy a lot of players, loan them out so they are not a burden, then if they are any good they sell or might even promote to the first team, as in Cucho this season. But in the meantime they make money on it, so it's a financially beneficial thing to do.

 

But it’s largely irrelevant in the wider scheme of things, our peak PL revenue was £147m, £1m in loan fees is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things, it won’t help us be any more established as a PL side. Especially when you spend £18m on Andre Gray, or £9m on Louza.

I get what you’re saying in that it helps Gino avoid taking a bath on the many duds he buys, but equally it’s a myth he’s coining it in from loaning players out, because he isn’t, he’s barely washing his face in terms of overall revenue.

It stands to reason if you loan a PL player on PL wages to a club in Bulgaria they aren’t going to be paying more than you do for the player, because they’d be mad to, and they simply don’t have anywhere near the means to pay it, if anything you’ll be lucky to get the player of your books without it still costing you anything yourself.

 

I don't think it is irrelevant at all. The purpose of the exercise is to have a self-funding system so Watford can sign multiple players in order to hopefully make money on them. The law of averages suggest you will find a few gems, as we have done, and sell for a decent sum of money. We made around £38m on selling just three players in Lukebakio, Suarez and Estupinan. So it does work.

It's a very clever way of doing things. The fact they make around £1m on a self-funding system is a bonus.

 

No.

 

It’s not necessarily a self funding system though, as you’re not allowing for the fees paid for the likes of Sinclair, Oulare, Louza at present, Success who cost £12m, but neither us nor Udinese will ever see that back.

 

But they are a different category of player. None of those were signed to be loaned out. They were all signed for our first team. I'm talking about the young players we sign, from Columbia and the like. The ones we rarely see.

Look back to my original post, I did say it was a mixed bag in terms of players we sign for the first team.

Oulare and Sinclair were flops, but they were signed for our first team, a bit like Pedro and Richarlison were. They never made the grade, so were loaned out in the end, but they were never signed initially as players to be developed through the loan market.

 

The problem is it isn’t self funding. At least not for Watford anyway. But then it’s the same for everyone else.

Edit: I see you are just asking about the cheap non first team trading in which case yeah probably fair enough.

 

Are we really turning a profit on these types of players? I dare say to get young ‘prospects’ out of their clubs (wherever they may be), we are paying a transfer fee/compensation or some sort of other payment to help them grow their club. Then when you couple in the fact that the clubs we loan them to may not be picking up their wages in full or paying much at all by way of a loan fee - certainly negligible amounts for most of them.

Of course you get ones like Estupinan and Suarez who turn a great profit but we would have clearly liked them for the first team. The likes of Jaime Alvarado etc have probably cost us as much as we have made from them. Either way, it’s small amounts either side and not really a case for the defence or prosecution in the ‘Duxbury Out’ thread IMO.

 

It's clear we make lots of money on a few signings and lose a little on most. We have a decent team now which may not turn out to be quite good enough for the prem, but has a chance, and Sarr excluded, didn't cost a lot. There will always be players we lose money on but over 10 or so years I don't think there have been too many disaster signings unlike Muff who can afford to take bigger gambles due to the wealth of their backers.
Loans fulfill 2 purposes, 1/ to develop young players and hopefully turn a profit on cheap punts who will never play for us and 2/ minimise the financial loss on players signed for the first XI but aren't good enough or whose contracts are over-long. On the latter I'm sure we will usually lose money on a monthly basis but it's probably the most sensible approach in the circumstances.

 

You've completely changed your angle. You originally summed up the few player fee profits we've made, but then went to focus on loans as if it was a significant part of the revenue stream. Now you're saying it's not a significant part of the revenue stream, but that it does support the player fee profits, which you already showed aren't that great when balanced against the losses.

 

No changing of tune. You just didn’t understand the post in the first place I guess.

 

Looks very much like a change of tune to me.

 

The loan system was always mainly about getting EU passports over anything else, now that is no longer really relevant. All the loan system really now enables Gino to do is give stay of execution to most of the duds he buys, keep rolling the dice and you never know, one of them might have a half decent season and we might be able to break even or make a small profit. It doesn’t actually make us any meaningful money.

 

Never mind.

 

I expect nothing less from you, but you wrote a whole paragraph on loan fees to counter a point about our player trading not being all that good.

Why write your whole paragraph on it (and I suggest you read it and tell me how it could mean anything else) unless you were somehow implying that our loan income was more than that bagatelle it is.

You even doubled down on the near 1m it peaked at recently, as if that's not a couple of months' wages to one of the poor signings that we make which instantly offset 50 years of loan fee income.

 

No, but it diverts attention and resources away from the priority of strengthening our first team.

Take Estupinan. A left back we could have benefitted from for 2 or 3 years, but we didn't. We never had the pleasure, even though we owned him. But we got some loan fees and Gino got a golden Gavel so it's all good.

Meanwhile our first team hadn't a decent left back for 3 seasons.

 

In Estupinan’s case, did he not need an EU passport, hence the initial loans? From memory they needed at least two years in Europe to be able to apply for a passport so they could then automatically play for us.

I may be wrong on that so stand to be corrected, but I do believe if we hadn’t had been relegated he would’ve been transferred over to us, so I don’t blame Gino too much for that as long as his intention for these players was to eventually play for us.

I guess we’ll never know if he would’ve still been sold anyway, but needs must.

I don’t really have a problem with the loans to earn a passport if the end game is they played for us, but my point was that was why the majority of the loans happened in the first place, not as some huge cash cow for the loan fees.

They weren’t some huge cash cow as HB1 was alluding to, as the accounts prove.

That loophole has gone anyway, all we now need to do is name them on Udineses bench to achieve the same thing.

 

Maybe it's my mistake to use Pervis as an example. There are always circumstances which justify some of the ridiculous deals we do, but on the whole the net result is a **** first 11, a wafer thin squad, very few valuable assets a budget of near zero for transfers and a huge burden of external debt.

So overall, something isn't working on the whole, however we explain individual deals as being sensible.

 

As I said, you've misunderstood what I wrote and I can't be bothered to justify or explain it. It's not really all that important.

 

Fair enough. Let's leave it and move on.

 

I don’t know how much longer I can keep faith with owners that consistently under value defenders. It just undermines everything else.

Josh King on a free is great business as is Sissoko for £5 million but that’s all totally ruined WHEN YOU DO NOT BUY ANY DECENT DEFENDERS.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

So if you want new defenders then you just don't understand according to Duxbury. The line about not doing something just because it feels right on a particular day or week is seriously worrying. We've needed defenders for at least four years and he clearly thinks the fans are just reacting to the performances this season. ******* clueless.

 

Scott and Gino never make bad bold decisions.

 

"The silent majority" should be the nickname for our home crowd.

 

Lol, that is laughable. So basically the only people that agree with them conveniently happen to be mute, what are the chances!

This club is a PR shambles, can’t help but insult fans at every opportunity.

 

That quote is a bit weird though. I assume it's from an Athletic article but it seems more like the stock answer given to outside journos when Duxbury's talking about the regular turnover of head coaches, rather than getting into the weeds of whether the defence is good enough.

 

I read that this morning. It does have a condescending tone to it. It was obvious to absolutely everyone, even the silent majority, we needed to upgrade the defence. The only ones that didn't think that were the silent hierarchy.

 

When did the doughnut say this??

 

Reading the full article on the Athletic thread it just looks like standard programme notes. AL has woven his spin into about it addressing defensive reinforcements but I very much doubt that was the point Duxbury was making.

 

The stark reality about Duxbury is he can have 20 decisions to make on any one day. He will get 1 right, delegate another 9 and get 10 wrong.

And then act like other people are to blame for the delegating going sideways and that the 1 right choice he made absolves the blame of getting 10 wrong. Why Gino feels so much loyalty to him is beyond me. Yes the NHS stuff was brilliant last year - but we aren’t a community project that happens to have a football club. We are a football club that does community work - I think Duxbury has it the wrong way around. Too often the focus is not on the product on the pitch. And when that’s pointed out to him, he’s prickly and tells fans they don’t understand….

And now he’s saying they will continue to make ‘bold’ decisions that people don’t understand - despite the relation statement admitting that a lot of their bold decisions were wrong and they would learn.

I just don’t think there’s a project under this ownership. They are treading water game-by-game, season-by-season. Fans would like to know where they are the club realistically in 3-5 years time - and how they will achieve that. But it all just comes across that they don’t really know where we will be in 3-5 months. Or weeks even.

This is stuff I have heard time and time again from people with first hand knowledge of the guy.

 

It's nice to have this article out in the public domain, just to assuage a small amount of the mania building up in my (and I presume many others') minds, but as ever, some of its framing and what it omits to fuel a certain narrative is maddening.



Nkoulou was not 'added' - the club desperately brought him in a couple of weeks ago in the midst of a devastating (and yet, entirely predictable, and indeed by many predicted) injury crisis. We could have brought him in as an experienced free agent in the summer, with no change in cost, and we wouldn't have had the same injury crisis, and we wouldn't have had to field Cathcart and WTE as a calamitous first choice central pairing in multiple matches against rivals that we should have been looking to take valuable points off, but we didn't. Because the club and its recruitment is done blindfolded and scattergun, with no sense of forward planning or direction whatsoever.



Similarly (and this is no slight on Ranieri, at all) this argument completely ignores the fact that EVERYONE KNEW THEY WEREN'T GOOD ENOUGH IN THE SUMMER. Some people were hopeful/incredibly optimistic, and suggested that WTE would for some reason magically improve with the step up to a higher division, but either way pretty much no Watford fan was happy with the standard of our first choice defence, and even less so with leaving the numbers so low we couldn't even fill out a Premier League squad list. We all saw what they were and were not as individual players, and how that could be exposed, last season, and the majority (not all, but I would say a majority) were fearful of the potential result of that. A result that has well and truly come to pass.



To add to that - whilst this is good news - WE ALWAYS KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN - WHY DIDN'T THEY CONFRONT THIS IN THE SUMMER, WHEN A WELL-RUN CLUB IS SUPPOSED TO BUILD A SQUAD AND DO THE MAJORITY OF THEIR BUSINESS TO PREPARE FOR THE UPCOMING SEASON. This is full-on piss in your pocket and tell you its raining stuff. And whether Masina is going to the AFCON or not, it shouldn't be the main driver of assessing whether we need cover/a replacement for him, because he's not good enough - he never has been, and we don't even have a silly excuse for him like some did for WTE - we've seen him in the Prem plenty - as I marvelled at the realisation of the other day on here - this is his FOURTH season with us, his THIRD Prem season.

Pretty much the only unequivocally good piece of information in that article is this:



But even then - a fat lot of good it's doing us a present.

Gino and Scott do business properly.

 

I laughed at the bit about a Nkolou being added as well.

 

It is genuinely weird how he just cannot help himself at any turn just slightly dropping a little twisting of the truth in an attempt to reframe the overall situation. As I've bleated on about multiple times before, there's something slighly Soviet about it.

 

Wait, Troost-Ekong is an international and as a result will be out of the team for a month plus? Finally, something to be optimistic about this season! Thank God for that, I can't wait for January now - first clean sheet incoming.