dunning1874

Murray talking about potential loan signings in his post-match interview. It is of course possible that loans can come with no cost to the club depending how the deal is structured (it's mandatory with coop agreements that there's no payment), and if so it may be the case that the club giving us players don't want it publicised, but I do think if this happens Morton need to be very open and transparent about the finances involved in those loans. It would be an awful look to be asking for donations, receiving thousands then making signings within a week. You can't be asking fans to dip into their pockets and then spending what you get on players, so if we're effectively getting loanees for free if they play X number of games that should be communicated.

If we lose next week than Ian Murray will have a worse league record than Kenny Shiels. Clearly all due to the off-field circumstances when 15 of those games were last season!

That second half was obviously a much better performance than most we've offered this season, and yet we've still ultimately come out of it with nothing due to an obvious Ian Murray failing. All the off-field issues don't excuse a repeated failure to have a team organised to defend set-pieces, and we give up so many free headers that it can only be a systemic issue rather than entirely individual errors.

So the club tweeting about shirt sponsorship achieved nothing and was the bare minimum, but Mick Kennedy replying to the tweet was a decisive factor which drummed up all the attention? You're all over the place here.

Yes, and I'm not saying "oh if only we'd sold the home shirt sponsorship to a more reliable company that money would fill the black hole left by Dalrada failing to pay." I mentioned home shirt sponsorship only because that is ostensibly what Dalrada are supposed to be paying for. I'm saying that we shouldn't have taken the Dalrada money and committed to a budget - and therefore those contracts - on the basis of it, which is the exact same point you are making.

I fail to understand why you're constructing a straw man to argue with. The only point I'm making with this is the exact same one you are, that we shouldn't have signed another sponsorship deal with Dalrada when they'd already demonstrated an inability to pay, and we'd be much better off now if we'd made a smaller budget as a result based on whatever smaller sum would come in instead from the alternative sponsors who could be trusted to pay on time.

I said home shirt sponsor because that what the sponsorship from Dalrada this season is for. Taking an alternative one would have meant not taking money from Dalrada, avoiding that exposure.

The Estrella statement explicitly said that the club was in serious danger of running out of money this month, that's what Graham Barr denied when he took the mic while they were taking turns rebutting the statement. There's no contradiction between denying that and saying the club will have serious cashflow issues later if no Dalrada money comes in. I completely agree that they should have been open about the extent of the financial challenges from the start, both in terms of having needed a loan to get through July and how quickly having no payments from Dalrada will see the club struggling to meet their outgoings, rather than this only being made clear following Estrella's statement and in response to audience questions. Asking questions about the level of transparency because they didn't do that doesn't prove any of Estrella's claims though.

I'm not overlooking that fact at all; I explicitly addressed it in the sentence between the two paragraphs you've quoted which you've removed from the quote! I don't actually think we disagree on this, as I said the GMFC board could have found a more reliable alternative shirt sponsor who'd actually pay on time even though the total sum would almost certainly be smaller, allowing whatever budget was set on the basis of that smaller sum to be maintained. We disagree about whether having not done so, that then means the club are justified in turning to asking fans to put their hands in their pockets on top of the other multitude of payments we already make, and fair enough.

I genuinely get the viewpoint that the club don't deserve fans dipping into their pockets, no football club is entitled to money from their fans and there are also concerns about the running of the club for various reasons. I would say though that the primary reason we're in the position of urgently needing to fundraise is a hole being blown in the budget by a sponsor failing to keep up with their contractual payments. It's valid to point out that with Dalrada's track record we could have gone elsewhere and found alternative sponsorship that would have been of a smaller monetary value but could actually be relied on to be paid on time and in full then we wouldn't be in this position, and there's a conversation to be had about whether the GMFC considered that alternative, if not why not and what that means for trusting them to make commercial decisions - and set budgets - in the future. However it's also not like the board have plucked an obscenely large figure for the wage budget out of thin air and hoped it would take care of itself on a wing and a prayer. They ultimately made the budget based on scheduled sponsorship income, not increasing attendances by 1000 overnight. Adding Carse to the wage bill though is a question to be answered. If Morton going down the public appeal route can raise enough money to see the club through to the end of the season and expiry of contracts, when we can then have a proper restructure of the club that brings expenditure down then good. Given the choice between being called tinpot for doing this or opening the door to some potential shysters forever, I'll take raising money the tinpot way. If we get to that point where we know we're seeing the season out, that's the time for a reckoning about what directors knew and when and so whether it's appropriate for them to still be around for part of that restructure; adding more turmoil by demanding resignations now and having a skeleton board handling things only makes it more difficult for the club to function. Caveat on that is if Estrella were to present evidence for some of the claims in their statement that would prove someone has been lying to the membership then that would be an immediate resigning matter, but I suspect that withdrawing from the process means we'll never hear from them again and so they never have to worry about providing evidence. MCT should still be providing evidence of their rebuttal regardless.

That's right, initial sign up was based on £10 a month and you immediately had voting rights with it, but once you'd contributed £240 your voting rights continue even if your payments stop. There was an AGM proposal in 2025 to change the rules so voting rights were contingent on continuing to make regular payments. I think we can all appreciate that we don't want to end up in the position in 2029 that you have 900 people who paid a lump sum of £240 in 2019 and haven't made another payment for a decade able to outvote 200 who are still actively contributing (numbers plucked out of thin air to illustrate the point), but that amendment to the articles was massively voted against. Coming after the whole fallout regarding the transfer embargo, Dalrada deal and mass resignation of the MCT board, there was a feeling that it was time for more carrot and less stick and the focus should be rebuilding trust in the hope that would encourage people to resume payments, rather than immediately removing voting rights from however many non-paying members there are.

These things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive though. It's possible for Estrella to be exaggerating the extent of the issues by saying the club is at serious risk of running out of money this month, while cashflow will still become an issue that serious in two months if Dalrada don't pay. They should have been that open about the extent of that risk off the bat rather than needing to be bounced into it by the Estrella statement or questions from the floor so members could make an informed choice, but it doesn't make denying the claim they were going to run out of money at the end of the month a lie.

If you're giving Estrella some credit and taking them entirely at face value, you could take them dropping out as totally fair enough. On a charitable reading, despite having huge concerns they've stuck in and still made an offer, been honest with the membership and the membership have told them they don't want to vote for it now, so they've decided not to go any further as they won't make a better offer than the current one. With a more cynical eye, it doesn't escape notice that deciding to withdraw now means they aren't going to be engaging with the MCT membership or Morton support at large any more, and so they can disappear with needing to present any evidence for the claims made in the statement last night. MCT, and GMFC where appropriate, should still be providing a rebuttal. I get that some of this will be commercially sensitive and they can't leave themselves exposed to a legal challenge from Estrella over details that should remain confidential either, but there were some extremely serious claims made which both sides claimed to have a paper trail to prove or disprove. Even if much of it has to be redacted, MCT should provide as much as they possibly can of that to prove they were telling the truth.

This is a serious brass neck. While they may have a point about professionalism throughout the process as a whole, you don't get to complain about not seeing the wording of an email in advance or professionalism and transparency when you've attempted to drop a bomb with a statement like that. That's Estrella confirmed they're withdrawing. https://estrellafootball.group/news/estrella-football-group-withdraws-from-proposed-investment-in-greenock-morton-fc

You're misrepresenting the GMFC & MCT position here. They said that Estrella first had access to information about Dalrada's arrears in April, not that they got that information in April and nothing else after. You can choose to believe GMFC over Estrella, Estrella over GMFC, bits of both or neither of both, but what GMFC/MCT claimed (I think it was David Whitton speaking at that point who's on both boards which is why I'm not making a distinction in this case) was that Estrella were fully kept up to date with Dalrada's arrears between being given access to April & May financial information in the due diligence period, then being updated again when the arrears grew in June, with the transcript of the phone call between Dalrada & GMFC being shared with Estrella. You may not believe that, but it's not true to say Morton's position was that Estrella got one update in April then didn't keep them in the loop.