vikingTON

None of the above has got anything to do with MCT. Try looking at the CV-padding clown in the dugout instead.

I'm still waiting for some facts as to how an ownership model that has allowed three different external backers to pursue the purchasing of shares - or alternative backing of GMFC - since 2021 is somehow preventing your mystical white knight from coming forward to save the day. Two of those ventures have been approved by the MCT membership - the other chose not to progress to the most basic step of scrutiny and approval. Your time for obfuscating and 'provoking debate' is up now. None of the above has got anything to do with MCT. Try looking at the CV-padding clown in the dugout instead.

GMFC receives around £100k (if not more) capital investment each and every year, provided by the hard earnings and generosity of its current owners. Its capital investors - quite wrongly - choose to place almost all of this into the hands of jobbers and crap managers. It is currently in advanced talks to secure significant investment from an external party, in exchange for shares and access to support that will (hopefully) improve the club's infrastructure for the long term. Rather than 'investment', what you are in reality calling for here is some magic backer to chuck unlimited money at a first team squad because ambishun. Let's be clear - we're talking £300-500k per year, just to tread water in the second tier. That demented approach was Dalrada's pitch, once they dropped the pretence of offering energy efficiency (where, exactly?) solutions. How's that worked out? You and others focus on a 'way back', but I'll say again - GMFC does not have any divine right to play in the second tier. We could be an extremely well run club under any model of ownership and there would still be an upper ceiling to our actual revenue. And there would still be the usual handful of Walter Mitty outfits chucking stupid money at mercenaries who can supplant us downwards. League status alone cannot be used as a benchmark for success. Joining the latter group of Walter Mitty outfits is not a convincing alternative. We've had one admin already and only through GC's acceptance of failure did we narrowly avoid a richly deserved second one, just 6 (?) years ago. So much for the crocodile tears being shed back then, when some of the same fans - like Dundee and Livingston before them - clamour for a return of blatant financial doping. The mechanism for investors to get involved with GMFC is crystal clear and has brought on board two different outside groups since 2020, with one falling by the wayside when basic transparency was requested. That doesn't look like a closed door setup to me, but perhaps you have some facts rather than conjecture to show otherwise.

And these are the fundamental questions that should be addressed: 1) At what point last season did Dalrada first fail to provide payment by the expected due date? 2) After the above event, did GMFC's board discuss contingency plans in the event of a potential future defaults? If not, why not? 3) If so, when did these discussions take place and what concrete provisions were made? How did these aim to insure the club (as much as possible) against unreliable or defaulting payment going forward? To be clear, I fully support the GMFC board right now, in July 2026, striving its best to achieve a break-even budget and not counting any further chickens. If that means Murray doesn't get his 11th midfielder, tough (though he does need to go, as he is toxic to the sustained support that the club will need this season). But I simply do not buy the narrative that this issue somehow only emerged between the bluster-filled end of season club statement on Unacceptable Performance Levels that Will Not Happen Again at the start of May, and the risible team and showings produced from the middle of July. I think they have sleep walked into this, by shirking the difficult but necessary actions (more staff leaving - hybrid or part time football) to start addressing this back in May and just hoped that things would magically turn out okay. What GMFC is lacking is not external backing but rather any form of competent executive leadership to avoid such drift. That's been the case for years.

I don't because it isn't supported by evidence or reason.

It's more than ironic that you think that nobody capable would possibly wish to replace Saint Ian Murray, yet at the same time peddle for debate the notion that GMFC can be sold off to a 'proper' owner with ambishun, without any hitch whatsoever. There's only one category of opening in Scottish football that demonstrably attracts dozens of expressions of interest, about 20 times each year - and it's the one currently squatted in by a Gus McPherson level time-server.

What do you mean by this, exactly? GMFC quite clearly generates more income from the fanbase each year now, than it did under the long dog days of the Raes. To replace this - because there won't be ongoing capital investment from the fanbase, were the shares sold - you want some mysterious backer to prop up a shortfall of £300k, £500k per year - indefinitely into the future. Who on earth is going to do this? How are Dalrada's promises of risk-free money from May 2025 turning out right now? For MCT to retain roughly 1000 subscribers at this stage is in no way a failure. But the current membership model of chipping in a premium to pay jobber players and a crap manager to pretend to be full-time professionals is indeed unsustainable. The solution to that is simply not the frankly delusional one that you and others cling on to.

There's little in that list to disagree with - but your solution does not make sense. There is no magical 'backer' out there who is champing at the bit to run a Scottish football club: we would be choosing from another set of Dalrada-esque Walter Mitty figures. The club's shares are open to and are in the process of securing external investment right now too. I'd personally be quite happy with a 50-50 split of ownership, but those partners need to be willing to reveal their aims and answer basic questions. The ground needs investment but it is hived off to secure the long-term future of the club. That's not a trivial achievement. Our support however is not dwindling in any historical sense. The fanbase has been hung up too long on delusions of being a sleeping giant, when basic statistical facts show that the community almost never comes out in sustainably large numbers for GMFC. The issue in fact is that we continue to rely on that fanbase as the revenue stream other than prize money, when the Raes (another fantasy backer) conspicuously failed to do anything to develop other income streams nearly 25 years ago now. Those chickens are inevitably coming home to roost - but we can still make better use of our resources rather than this utter farce of a 'full time' and 'professional' setup.

We seem to have had pretty good availability of wide attacking players though, and have got (surprise!) literally no goals from the lot since day 1. So unless we're unveiling Haaland on Monday morning, a fit striker by itself won't be nearly enough for us to bother 30 league goals or more. The squad assembled on paper resembles last season's obvious defect - only this one is somehow worse - in its complete lack of credible goalscoring threats. A fit and effective Savoury playing behind a couple of strikers could change that, but getting Haaland looks about as likely as that outcome right now. I also wouldn't be surprised if our 'lack' of a fit striker currently is preparation to nudge one out of the door before the window closes, for budgetary reasons. 'McKenzie Carse', save that phone number for August!

Lowland League Galacticos Linlithgow were held to a draw at home by Civil Service Strollers today, so I can see why GMFC cancelled to avoid getting beat by the pair of them.

A: It's not a display of honesty and transparency at all. It is buck passing that the manager only started to express this summer, from the exact point when he might be held accountable for his own performance. And it is also unprofessional to throw in a line about how he wouldn't sign the deal himself. Perhaps that was due to frustration, but achieves nothing other than to highlight the club's situation to wider media attention. The club is hardly going to succeed with its final ST push with this style of communication and leadership. It's hardly going to encourage agents to advise their player clients to consider a move to GMFC either. If he doesn't feel that he can do the job and is discontent with the situation (understandable), use the door now and give someone else a chance in football management instead. This Gus McPherson style holding position is untenable.

Perhaps he could give a similarly honest and transparent answer about his own management ability (Stenhousemuir, Ross County, Linlithgow), as well as his decisions to waste what available budget there is by stacking up options in a couple of areas (how many fucking central midfielders does this squad require?!), while signing blatantly obvious duds elsewhere. This was the same manager who declared that he saw nothing to be negative about from the only pre-season match that they deigned to play - in which we scored zero goals to set the stage for a truly disgraceful League Cup campaign so far. So either dishonest or delusional in his communication at that point. I don't care about the GMFC wagon-circling exercise around how 'hard' everyone is working behind the scenes. The manager is not doing a credible job with the limited resources at his disposal and so gurning about the latter to the press is risible.

The running costs and playing budget should be met using club revenue: ST sales, prize money; other gate receipts; commercial income. At the very least, if MCT funds were split 50-50 (or a different weighting) between supporting the first team budget and establishing a separate fund for capital projects, then we would gradually build over time the capacity to deal with issues and take opportunities. The reserved 50%, accumulated year in year, increases the conditional wealth* that GMFC can access. Which ironically would have been very handy in the event of cashflow issues from a major backer, as well as postponements. Spending nearly 100% of subs on the first team playing budget means that this capital investment goes down the drain, just as Dalrada and indeed Golden Casket's did. It is also not sustainable: subscribers will tire very soon of paying a premium for no discernible return, other than 'community owned club' guilt tripping. I haven't seen any evidence from either visiting Cove's nick of a ground, or their ruinous financial account summaries, to suggest that they are a model worth emulating tbh. Arbroath's establishment of themselves as an effective club with strong commercial links to the local community makes more sense as a case study worth looking at (although they absorbed a substantial loss to get out of League One as well). * A potential extra benefit of this is that it provides the MCT board and members with a greater degree of accountability over the GMFC board, if the latter requests access reserved funds. The current relationship - fairly or not - is regarded as a blank cheque in which the club board gets all the money and can do whatever they want with it. That said, recent EGMs have not always made a good case for member-led scrutiny either. An additional benefit would be for MCT to actually use the capital for its stand-alone projects - possibly with external grant support as IIRC it remains classed as a charity rather than a company.

Some issues unexplained by the litany of updates: 1) If the reliability of Dalrada payments was already questionable last season (which it was - I'm about as ITK as a member of a kibbutz, and still heard various stories of payment delays before season's end) then why did we commit to re-signing Longridge about 6 weeks before the end of the campaign? Why add extra contractual commitments when you don't need to do so? If the new deal was triggered by a clause in the player's favour based on appearances, then GMFC should have repeated the policy set for Telfer in a similar case a few years ago. No extra appearances, no contract extensions given until the club knew its position going forward. 2) The ending of the Dalrada deal was set out in advance rather than being a sudden event - so did GMFC explore restructuring the playing squad to create either a hybrid or fully part time alternative? What justification was provided for full-time training (and pay) being the best use of limited, if not wholly insufficient resources? 3) What would be happening right now had the club actually been relegated at the end of last season, regarding both of the above points (and more issues since)? Was there any contingency planning at all for how GMFC would deal with either of those impacts - if not, why not? From an outside perspective, the current stewardship are merely following an established GMFC culture of the past 20 years - under various guides of leadership - in trying to muddle through and hope that something/enough comes up. However this means that the credibility of the club's leadership is deteriorating, at the exact moment when taking decisive action and to be able to bring the fanbase with you with those decisions is needed.

Why would it automatically cost more now than an asking price that wasn't met before? That's not how a market works. GMFC (or MCT, if the direction of capital investment is changed) can make any number of follow-up offers that can be rejected. But if he wants to sell up - and he absolutely does - then there's a deal to be had. As for the quality or otherwise of hospitality, the clearest measurement is bums on seats. There were several home games last season where GMFC did not run any hospitality at all. Meanwhile every single pound spent from 95% of the spectators goes elsewhere regardless. That revenue isn't going to transform the club, but it's being left on the table right now. That is what capital investment by MCT can address (and more) - instead of squandering it all on useless jobber players.