Fair point. But the key thing is that neither AWT nor me nor anybody else knows what it brings in or anything else brings in other than “Tickets” and “other revenue”.
If, and I think it is a big if, it does cover the rent then I completely agree with you.
But of course, in the land of Walsall FC, banks don’t lend to football clubs. Even when the security on any such loan is a prime piece of real estate that will undoubtedly appreciate far beyond the value of the loan. They just don’t.
People keep saying we need another centre-back, but Facey can play there, he started out as a centre-half at Man City. If the budget is as tight as everyone thinks it is we can’t be signing bench-warmers, and the loan market can always be used. With a tight budget we’re going to have to manage risk, to me the bigger risk is having one dimensional attacking options and midfielders that can’t score.
Like everything with WFC it’s shrouded in mystery and conjecture.
Yep. My guess would be more like sign plus market equals rent. But only a guess because that’s all we can do.
I drive past a lot in my truck on the M6,and apart from the odd occasion, it’s mainly advertising events/matches at Banks’s stadium or the venue (Birmingham?whats that about Jeff?) so how they can make money out of using their own advertising screen,I just don’t know.
Sometimes when you write a long post some of the words you have in your head in advance don’t all make it via your fingers and onto the page. I didn’t mean to imply that it was just the M6 sign on it’s own that covered the rent, but it plus the other off-field (NON-FOOTBALL RELATED) commercial bits and bobs together - things that mostly never existed, and indeed never would have, until Suffolk Life put up the investment.
Rather than repeat this argument in full, here’s the same point I made a while ago https://upthesaddlers.com/t/might-end-bescot-exile/1284/15?u=andywtaylor
I can’t argue with anyone who says it’s hard to extricate exact details from the club accounts, so you have to try and piece it together from other sources where numbers are quoted. If you are one of those people that sees the world only in black and white you will either take those numbers totally at face value, or assume that since they come from the club they are always automatically false (especially if you are one of the foil helmet brigade who thinks it’s all some big conspiracy). Those of us who live in the real world and are able to see the myriad shades of grey in between make a value judgement on how much weight we give to the various claims.
Other than the fact that it is Bonser himself saying it, does anyone have any reason to disagree with the numbers given in this Guardian article from 8 years ago which talks about the original sign costing £400,000 (from Suffolk Life) but generating a net income of £183,000 in its first year? https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/football/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2011/mar/30/walsall-stadium-sale
According to the club/E&S at the time, it then cost another £2M to upgrade it to an LED display (https://www.expressandstar.com/news/2013/03/16/walsall-fc-m6-sign-to-go-digital/).
The last club accounts says that last year was the first full year of trading for the sign (https://www.saddlers.co.uk/news/2018/october/club-statement/ so we should now be getting the full benefit from it.
I make that £2.4M investment to create a revenue stream (on top of the other NON-FOOTBALL RELATED streams created by other further investment). They all add to the rent but together they cover this and even provide a surplus to go towards the football side.
As others have pointed out, if it wasn’t Suffolk Life doing the investment then the club would either have to take the money out of the football side or borrow from elsewhere (involving commercial interest and potential penalties, and assuming we could find someone prepared to lend to us - which is not a given for a football club at our level).
So we owned Fellows Park, didn’t generate much extra non-football revenue so really only had the football side to rely on. Even though we don’t own Bescot (and it is a negative on the balance sheet for the rent) the overall position is we now still have all the football side plus a bit more than we had before even after paying the rent.
OK, take Bonser and the rent argument out of the equation and we get all the football side and a bigger amount on the non-football side. Obviously true - well it is if you conveniently ignore that we wouldn’t have had much of those income streams without Suffolk Life being in the picture to start with (does everyone honestly think they would have existed otherwise?)
Does that explain it clearly enough?
I think we will play 532 which necessitates the signing of a centre half. Having said that, we could really do with a winger or two if Plan A is not working.
For what’s it’s worth, 3 in centre midfield makes sense with Sinclair and Kinsella ratting and Alfie Bates doing what we all thought Conor Ronan was brought in for.
Dobson will go and provided we get a healthy sell on, I don’t really mind.
I genuinely believe that Alfie Bates could be a big player, along with Jamie Hardy, next season.
Yes I see what you’re saying, and if that’s the case I concur we need a centre-half and a versatile forward that can play wide, so someone like Jervis would be ideal. Definitely see the sense in 3 in midfield with what we’ve got, and for what its worth and with all the negativity I don’t see many better midfield “3s” in this league than Sinclair, Kinsella, and one from Bates/Hardy. In that system Kinsella would be ideal cover on the right for Facey getting forward, with Bates/Hardy creating.
But if we had taken out loans instead of being shackled to Suffolk Life then we would have paid them off by now. Instead, we have to keep paying over 400 grand a year, ad infinitum. It’s like being in debt to a loan s hark - we’ll never be able to pay off the debt. Perhaps, it’s time to start again: AFC Walsall!
At the moment very little verging on no creativity in this team whatsoever… Which is a big worry. If you dont score goals you need to keep clean sheets every game.
I also see Facey, Norman, Cockerell-Mollett and Pring as fit young men who can bomb up and down the flanks. Elijah looks a useful target man and Flash will get at least 15 if he stays fit. A goalkeeper with good distribution is essential though…
I wasn’t just looking at 20, 30 or 40 years ago, but basing my view on 131 years since the current club came into existence (is that enough it do I need to go back further to before the Town/Swifts merger?)
For instance, “One thing the club has suffered from is that it has always had more critics than supporters” - a remark from the then chairman in 1892!!! My, how times have changed. 
If you are going to cherrypick individual years/attendances to draw comparisons between us and other clubs, I recommend this site Football stats
You will notice that there are gaps in our own record - these are the years spent in the non-league wilderness after we failed to be re-elected by the other clubs in our division (a decision usually taken because a club’s finances, facilities, or share of gate receipts you’d get from playing them, were below expectations). These are covered here on Wikipedia.
You quote our record attendance of over 25,000 against Newcastle in 1961/2. This was not a typical gate back then as our overall average that season was less than half this - and that average itself was actually down on our best ever season for attendance just after WW2. Is that the season and attendance level we should be aspiring to? That was the boom time for football in general and the recent surge in popularity in the game that you allude to still comes nowhere near this - as many of the stats in this article demonstrate https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/talksport.com/football/116838/top-20-english-clubs-ranked-highest-ever-average-attendance-across-league-season/amp/
The reason Albion, Villa and Wolves numbers look to have gone up is because you’ve taken figures from years when they weren’t doing too well (if you want a good laugh, look at how low Wolves had sunk in 1985/6) and then comparing to now when they are doing better (relatively). The increase wasn’t new fans flocking to them but pre-exisisting fans who had stopped going when they were crap returning when it looked like they might achieve something. Same argument why Sunderland got a Boxing Day crowd over 40,000 in this division when it looked like they were going to be promoted - a bigger turnout than they were getting when struggling in the Premiership and Championship. Ditto Tranmere on the back of 2 successive promotions (will they maintain this level if the momentum stalls?)
None of this means I’m disagreeing with you about the club needing to a) increase our overall fanbase, b) mobilise as high a percentage of that fanbase to actually attend home games (as we don’t get a share of away league gates) AND purchase all the add-ons of merchandise, programmes, food and drink, etc that helps to beef up the coffers and give us a bigger playing budget.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the non-football income streams more than covers the rent, and absolutely Bonser (or anyone else on the radar) is not going to put his hand in his own pocket and make the budget bigger, so it is only gate receipts and allied incidentals that are going to do that. And that’s why I find it mystifying that at least 1 of 3 supporters groups (none of whom seem to get on with each other) who you would think would be encouraging people to get behind the team are actively reducing the match take by getting people to spend their money elsewhere and are giving any surplus funds they generate not to our club but to another one. Can someone explain the logic of that because it stumps me??!!
Perhaps that old chairman was even more right than he thought! 
Probably what we need more than a dedicated CB, winger, etc is a couple of utility players that can plug the gaps and allow us to switch from one formation to another without needing to make mass substitutions? Oh for another Chris Marsh, Darren Wrack (after his injury meant he was no longer a flying winger), or a Charlie Ntamark!
But why should the non-football income have to cover the rent? That is what I find difficult to understand. You seem to accept that there is rent to pay and that it is no problem. It is all of the problem! Then you say in your previous post that we should be thankful for Suffolk Life as we wouldn’t have those income streams without them.
You can talk attendances, promotions and relegations all you like, but the fact of the matter is that there has only been 1 winner in the 30 years of Bonser owning the club. Bonser doesn’t appear to care about any of the things fans do, as long as that rent money keeps going into the pension fund DC could send out out Pleck Boys under 11’s and Bonser wouldn’t give a ■■■■.
He’s supposed to be our number one fan and I haven’t read anything from him about the relegation - that to me just tells everyone what he thinks about Walsall FC and the fans.
So am I right to infer that you are happy with the way the club is being run and think Bonser is doing a good job?
Do I infer that you haven’t actually read my posts fully?
Whatever anyone thinks of him, getting rid of Bonser is not in itself a solution - who or what are you going to replace him with? It’s all very well having a moan, but if you don’t have an answer to that question tgen what are you doing to achieve?
I’ve pointed out that he doesn’t even need the club to exist for him to get the money everyone is moaning about him taking in rent - in fact he’d probably have more from the no -football bits as he would have all of the surplus that the club currently get. I’ve also highlighted the inconvenience truth that some of those income streams wouldn’t even exist if the he/SF/the pension fund hadn’t funded them (he caused a problem - he provided a solution to that problem).
If there is another Barry Blower out there who can bring in a white knight to take over the club then I’ll be there again to welcome the helicopter (BTW why have I never seen anything from Barry Blower or Rog Whalley saying how terrible Bonser has been for the club?). Until then I will get behind the team as it is because there is no viable alternative.
Must admit,Barry Blower’s been a bit quiet since his funeral.
Well, we will have to agree to disagree.
I don’t agree! 
Seriously though, if people aren’t happy with the chairman, the rest of the board and club administration, most of the playing staff, ticket office and shop staff, stewards, ticket prices, the match experience, the food kiosks, toilets, beer prices, parking, the fact that we’re a “smaller” club than our nearest neighbours, the design of the latest strip, being relegated, and god knows what else (the current manager being exempt as still in the honeymoon period), exactly what is it that still draws you to say Walsall are “my club”?
Well you could ask that to 99% of fans in this country, most clubs go through bad periods.
Blues and Villa just to name 2 that have been really disgruntled over the past few years… one set of fans stuck together and now they find themselves back in the premiership under new ownership.
We are no different we all know that Jeff will sell at some point and things will change for the better. By making our feelings know to the club there is that slight chance that it may accelerate the process.