Babylon

Where is the evidence he's been lied to? Perhaps, just perhaps he's taken on the job with a long term view and has been told that barring a disaster it's his for a few seaons. He's working with the staff we have, I mean if that's not a sign we're working on a tight budget, I don't know what is. I'm pretty sure staff would have been discussed right at the start. He spoke to Maresca who gave us a glowing review, which hardly paints the picture of him being unhappy like some would like to suggest.

Our stratergy started long ago, we shifted out accounting period long before all these issues cropped up. We had a plan (for once), I mentioned the exact thing at the time. In terms of the cases I'm talking about, there have been numerous cases. Some smaller and some larger, some were more clear cut than others. But the EFL absolutely acted outside of their own rules. The independent panel said there was no ambiguity, they had no right to try and force a business plan on us back in November 2023. Then you have the legal proceedings we started against the League and EFL about them conspiring. Which ended with the league saying "Having taken legal advice, the EFL has confirmed to all parties that whilst it would want to respect any decision of a Premier League Disciplinary commission (and vice versa) to deduct points in the EFL, it does not have the power under the Regulations". They backed down and we didn't even need a ruling in the end, they admitted they were going to act within the rules. Then you have the other cases against the prem about us not technically being a premier league team. Actually we weren't in the prem when they voted in the rules and we voted against them in the champ I believe. So we weren't that involved in the decision making.

At the time we had a team rammed with huge assets, who looked like they could all fetch massive amounts of money to easily cover that expense. Unfortunately, massive injuries to a number of players, a couple of players seeing out contracts really put us in a pickle. We had an awful run with injuries with big assets like Barnes, Maddison, Justin (at the time), Ndidi, Ricardo all struggling with injuries. We basically went from a team of bankable assets, to losing about 7 of them over the course of a season or so. That's the risk you take with that game plan though.

No that's wrong, there were other cases we won. Not just the one you are talking about.

They would take points off I imagine, and we'd fight to get them put back on.

From all the stuff that was said at the time about Top reading the riot act. I would summise that it's aimed at the players failing the manager a bit, we don't know what goes on behind closed doors, but it's not impossible that the players were whining and downing tools for him. So Top's annoyance stems from that a bit, seeing as he had a pop at them. Obviously, don't appoint a shit manager in the first place... but players still need to be professional. Who knows.

But that would be one of the points, we ran a high wage to turnover plan. With a player being sold to cover that, it worked ok for us for a while. The new rules that came in for Europe and then knowing the league would follow, meant we had to start slashing costs. That lead to the barron summer of no signings, that you could say then impacted us masively in terms of relegation. It all had a knock on effect. The problem was buying shit players, not particularly our wage structure. If we'd bought good players, then no issue. The rule changes and poor signings made the wage structure an issue.

You must have read a totally different article to me. He's repeated that we are confident we will pass, not for the first time.

No, we'd made enough of our own poor decisions. But all the rules changes have made it impossible for us to perform in the way that had served us well in the past. The changes negatively impacted our way of working more than it did others. Not forgetting we've actually won cases against the different leagues for trying to punish us with sanctions etc, when it was outside of their remits to do so. So, from that persepctive we are correct.

He never says the word expected when talking about PSR. He says Swis Ramble predicted, but he's just guessing, he's basing it off data we hasn't got a clue about. So no, he doesn't infer it's expected. "Will it all be enough? Respected football finance account Swiss Ramble has predicted an overshoot of £12 million, but only Leicester and the Premier League’s financial and legal departments will know the precise details. The argument about whether Leicester are entitled to lose £105 million or £83 million could be crucial, perhaps dependent on how legislation is worded in the Premier League’s rules."

Not sure it's that clear, the rules as they are written clearly aren't up to much, they've admitted that themselves and keep relying on the "spirit" of how they were meant, rather than how they are written. Be assured, if the rules aren't absolutely watertight in terms of who can do what and when, they might not have a case. It's become clear, despite us being a bit shambolic, that we're actually planning well in advance to work ourselves into positions to exploit their own rules. We''ll have been pouring over the rules long ago and will quite likely already know our next moves.

It doesn't say that, he clearly says only we and the league know. ................... "There is a suspicion among other top-flight clubs that the Premier League is ready to adopt a hardline stance with Leicester." I really don't get this, the rules are the rules. How exactly can you take a hardline stance? That suggests punishment outside of the rules, but as we already know, our team have had them on strings so far. If they try and punish us outside of how it's written, we're just going to go after them again and make sure it's all done as layed out.

“Constant denial”… and there we have it. You literally don’t have a single clue what you are talking about. You just spout a load of old nonsense and expect people not to react. Take a read, use the search button and find the posts where I’ve repeated the same things over and over again.

Ha.. rather important context. Basically everything is guess work still and as you say, it could be pretty much anything good or bad.

And as I said, if that was the case I don't think you'd see the language we are seeing... "Estimates", "Maybe", "Potentially", "Could".

But we got relegated, which means a huge chunk of the data is basically null and void. Wages (by far our biggest issue), costs, sponsorships etc he can't possibly know. If he's estimated a 25% drop in wages and our actual drop is 35%, the numbers change drastically, as one example.

He's using data from previous years to estimate a year that's nothing like the previous years due to relegation. There are way too many variables that can change, from wage reductions, to sponsorship etc. If they had a mole feeding them information, I think all these people would be a bit more bullish about it... as it is, it's all "estimates", "could", "maybe", "potentially" etc etc.

But most of the information isn't publicly available and won't be until we publish our accounts.

We haven't even released our 23/24 accounts, have we, so where exactly does the information come from?

8 games... what a disaster They are currently top 10 in the premier league. I'll say it again, easy to talk about it when things are going well. When every man and their dog has the knives out and will twist every word that comes out of your mouth, not so easy.

When we were doing well, the likes of Walsh, and McKenzie loved talking about how and why we do things the way we do... let's see how open and transparent those clubs are when things go wrong, and they are getting slaughtered for everything left right and centre.

I'm not sure anyone is saying they are wrong, because the simple fact is none of us know. But the fact is they don't know either; it's guesswork, and they purposely use certain non-committal language.

Well we could have spent absolutely nothing, stayed in the Championship and been potentially in an even worse situation without premier league money. We could have come up and spent absoultely nothing and banked all the cash. The reality is, getting relegated was never even considered when budgeting. So the gaps between compliance and what we could achieve were vast. It's like turning round an oil tanker because players are on contracts that you can't just stop paying. It's a balance between having a total fire sale and giving up being competitive, or trying to cut back whilst also remaining competitive. It's not an easy one to strike, I would have preferred us to come up, bank the money and plan for next season by buying the cream of talent at that level. We've neither really given it a go at staying up, or planned for next season, which is my issue. But financially, as I said it's always going to take time to correct. You are measured over a number of years, you might have done all you can possibly do and still fail because of numbers you posted 3 years ago, for instance.

Well it's not really is it. We got relegated when making massive losses, compounding what was already a problem. It was always going to take years to correct the issues we had.

The costs also get spread over the length of the contract, so they don't even make THAT much difference, even if they counted.