Thread About Ex Player

[AyrshireTon]

Snake McKinnon has been punted by Forfar.

Took in their game today and Spartans were comfortable 3-0 winners. 

[Pedrodelawasp]

1 hour ago, AyrshireTon said:

Snake McKinnon has been punted by Forfar.

Took in their game today and Spartans were comfortable 3-0 winners. 

Their wording was excellent too.

They “dispensed with the services of Ray McKinnon.”

No parting ways. No mutual agreements. Dispensed of his services.

Cold. Nicely done.

[Jamie_M]

16 hours ago, Pedrodelawasp said:

Their wording was excellent too.

They “dispensed with the services of Ray McKinnon.”

No parting ways. No mutual agreements. Dispensed of his services.

Cold. Nicely done.

Yeah, quite liked that.

[The Bewilderedbeast]

Jonathan Page puts Broxburn 1 up at Stranraer 

[capitanus]

Scott McLaughlin is now a UEFA Licenced Football Agent.

Theres hope for us all.

Next.

[vikingTON]

Just finished watching Arbroath 2 Queen of the South 1 on iPlayer, a clear marker of a thrilling Saturday evening. Among many former jobbers, rumours of Reece Lyon's resurgence proved unfounded as ever. Two wider points:

1) There was criticism in the Ayr thread last weekend about the limits of fam ownership: well, take a look at Queen of the South. They are precisely what we would have looked like, had we stuck with the same failing model of guilt tripping some doddery local businessmen (or farmers in their case) to run the club on our behalf. Now we may well reach those doldrums of league performance under fan ownership too - it doesn't magically protect you from mismanagement - but they find themselves down shit creek with no paddle at all to rescue the situation. 

That we have both capital investment through MCT and the Dalrada partnership are two tangible benefits of fan ownership compared to that model. 

2) Despite treatment for a minor head knock in the first half, the SFA qualified referee not only declined to play any stoppage time - he blew for half time before 45 minutes had actually been played. WTF do these clowns do to win their credentials exactly? 

[LargsTON]

21 minutes ago, vikingTON said:

Just finished watching Arbroath 2 Queen of the South 1 on iPlayer, a clear marker of a thrilling Saturday evening. Among many former jobbers, rumours of Reece Lyon's resurgence proved unfounded as ever. Two wider points:

1) There was criticism in the Ayr thread last weekend about the limits of fam ownership: well, take a look at Queen of the South. They are precisely what we would have looked like, had we stuck with the same failing model of guilt tripping some doddery local businessmen (or farmers in their case) to run the club on our behalf. Now we may well reach those doldrums of league performance under fan ownership too - it doesn't magically protect you from mismanagement - but they find themselves down shit creek with no paddle at all to rescue the situation. 

That we have both capital investment through MCT and the Dalrada partnership are two tangible benefits of fan ownership compared to that model. 

2) Despite treatment for a minor head knock in the first half, the SFA qualified referee not only declined to play any stoppage time - he blew for half time before 45 minutes had actually been played. WTF do these clowns do to win their credentials exactly? 

OR we could end up with a competent board of businessmen who want to help us progress as a club.  It doesn't have to be the Rae model or the current shitshow.  Stop pretending the club is headed anywhere but league 1, perhaps for a long time.  There's a small, vocal group on here who repeatedly champion the fan ownership model but the vast majority realise our club is slowly sliding into lower league oblivion unless something changes.   After nearly 40 years my passion for Morton has been eroded almost to a point I never thought possible.  Sad times indeed. Apathy is the biggest killer of a football club and I'm afraid our fanbase has it in spades.  

[LargsTON]

Even this messageboard nauseates me now.  You can predict who'll red dot you, who'll greenie you, who'll shout u down. It's tired pish, like Morton.  

 

[Toby]

Think that was the first red dot I’d ever given you, here’s the second.

[LargsTON]

Just now, Toby said:

Think that was the first red dot I’d ever given you, here’s the second.

Expected mate.  Thank you.

[vikingTON]

14 minutes ago, LargsTON said:

OR we could end up with a competent board of businessmen who want to help us progress as a club.  It doesn't have to be the Rae model or the current shitshow. Stop pretending the club is headed anywhere but league 1, perhaps for a long time.  There's a small, vocal group on here who repeatedly champion the fan ownership model but the vast majority realise our club is slowly sliding into lower league oblivion unless something changes.   After nearly 40 years my passion for Morton has been eroded almost to a point I never thought possible.  Sad times indeed. Apathy is the biggest killer of a football club and I'm afraid our fanbase has it in spades.  

The vast majority of the fanbase - as measured by our core support - are actually on board with fan ownership as current members. Which is itself an impressive achievement that will need a great amount of effort to be retained during lean times like the rest of this season.

I'm not against business owners partnering with the club at all - a 50-50 ownership model is in my view the best of both worlds - but it has to be on terms that secure the best long-term interests of the club and the fans. The most likely current local business consortium clearly don't want to offer that, and you only have to look at Queen of the South, Inverness and Dumbarton for different ways that it can go wrong. Raith, Queens' Park and Partick's buckshee models will follow them, but whether GMFC are still in a position to reap the rewards from that is open to doubt.

The proposed 'solution' of local business owners running the shop has not stopped Queen of the South slipping from relative peer status to floundering in the bottom half of League One. That's a reality that cannot be ignored in the discussion. 

Edited December 7 by vikingTON

[Hightide]

4 minutes ago, Toby said:

Think that was the first red dot I’d ever given you, here’s the second.

Do you disagree with his post or are you giving the red dot as a noise up?

The whole fan ownership is a lot of shite, let’s be honest. Under this model we will never see a competent Morton side mounting any serious challenges for promotion, or a season in the sun in the SPFL. We’ll continue to flirt with relegation to League 1 until the inevitable happens then we’ll find ourselves down there for years to come. 

The amount of fans we have who accept this nonsense together with the product on the pitch is alarming. We’re a sinking ship. 

[LargsTON]

Just now, Hightide said:

Do you disagree with his post or are you giving the red dot as a noise up?

The whole fan ownership is a lot of shite, let’s be honest. Under this model we will never see a competent Morton side mounting any serious challenges for promotion, or a season in the sun in the SPFL. We’ll continue to flirt with relegation to League 1 until the inevitable happens then we’ll find ourselves down there for years to come. 

The amount of fans we have who accept this nonsense together with the product on the pitch is alarming. We’re a sinking ship. 

This is my concern.  I'd like to think fan ownership can steady the ship for a period before hopefully moving to progress to the next level through other means.....however if this is it then God help us.

[vikingTON]

13 minutes ago, Hightide said:

Do you disagree with his post or are you giving the red dot as a noise up?

The whole fan ownership is a lot of shite, let’s be honest. Under this model we will never see a competent Morton side mounting any serious challenges for promotion, or a season in the sun in the SPFL. We’ll continue to flirt with relegation to League 1 until the inevitable happens then we’ll find ourselves down there for years to come. 

The amount of fans we have who accept this nonsense together with the product on the pitch is alarming. We’re a sinking ship. 

Aye, let's have a 'season in the sun' and go down the pan as a consequence - just like Gretna did. 

A serious challenge for promotion requires a serious prior investment in the infrastructure to earn the required money to do so, which the alternative models conspicuously failed to provide either from the last hurrah of pre-Bosman transfer fees in the 90s, or the Raes bring a friend approach in the 2000s. 

That GMFC is a full two decades or more behind the times is really not the fault of a fan ownership model. 

[Chicken_Soup]

19 minutes ago, LargsTON said:

This is my concern.  I'd like to think fan ownership can steady the ship for a period before hopefully moving to progress to the next level through other means.....however if this is it then God help us.

What are these other means? 

[LargsTON]

1 minute ago, Chicken_Soup said:

What are these other means? 

Fresh investment.  This can't be it.

[Toby]

47 minutes ago, Hightide said:

Do you disagree with his post or are you giving the red dot as a noise up?

The whole fan ownership is a lot of shite, let’s be honest. Under this model we will never see a competent Morton side mounting any serious challenges for promotion, or a season in the sun in the SPFL. We’ll continue to flirt with relegation to League 1 until the inevitable happens then we’ll find ourselves down there for years to come. 

The amount of fans we have who accept this nonsense together with the product on the pitch is alarming. We’re a sinking ship. 

I disagree with him, and find his posts and stance on the subject of fan ownership tiresome.

I like the principle of fan ownership, though I’m not convinced about how well it’s implemented at Morton.

There are positives to be taken- for all it’s easy to say that we only turned over profits off the back of cup ties at Celtic Park and Ibrox, it shouldn’t be forgotten that even without those, massive annual losses were stemmed in a relatively short period of time.

I’m pleased with how they managed to source sponsorship from Dalrada, when it was getting to the stage we looked far too reliant on the Easdales. Rightly or wrongly I’m more comfortable with Dalrada.

And we may well be flirting with relegation to League One for the foreseeable future. So what? It might have escaped many folks’ attention but save from seasons 2012-13 and 2016-17 under the Raes, League One was a distinct possibility just about every year. It’s hardly as if we’ve massively regressed from the halcyon days of a rich local businessman sweeping all before him.

We’re one of the 22 biggest clubs in the country, so in theory are the archetypal Championship club- our longevity in the division supports that belief, we’ve spent 17 of the last 18 years in this league. But rather than just fan ownership, we’re also affected by external issues. The state of Cappielow, in terms of the costs to maintain it, and the small capacity to make money outwith football from it, aren’t the current regime’s fault. And as one of the few clubs in the division making ends meet, we’re going to be susceptible to relegation when other clubs spend outwith their means. At present, clubs of a similar or smaller stature to us that are spending more than they bring in are (so far as I can make out, I could be wrong) Ross County, Hamilton, Ayr, Raith and Queen’s Park. Livingston are the beneficiaries of massive prize money that will be greatly reduced this season if they don’t go up, and Inverness have now hit the skids, having achieved more than us, having built everything on sand.

I don’t want to be one of those clubs that pisses money against a wall again, and if it means we have go down, then so be it. We’re not talking about Bordeaux playing on a public park, we’re talking about Morton playing at Stenhousemuir and Montrose.

Also, the way football is structured now doesn’t allow for clubs like Morton to succeed. Prize money is heavily weighted to the top end, making it harder for a club like us to progress without pissing money against a wall. Since the formation of the SPFL in 2013, only four clubs outwith the current Premiership have played in the top flight, with only Falkirk looking like changing that. It’s not too different to how the Champions League is the exclusive right of the few, but in a smaller scale.

Calling for fresh investment is one thing, but what happens when these investors that were waiting to wave money at us want their money back? We got lucky with the Raes. They knew the history with their predecessor, respected their old man’s wishes for Morton not to wither and die, and were prepared to cut their losses. We wouldn’t be that lucky again.

I’ve been quite critical of a few things under fan ownership- I called out the appointment of the current General Manager very early, and my opinion hasn’t changed. And I’m getting less and less patient with John Laird. I’ve not seen any evidence of anything he’s achieved in his time as Chairman, and the only time I’ve seen him appear was for a puff piece with Hugh MacDonald in the Daily Mail last month.

Those things don’t mean I’m prepared to write off fan ownership completely though. It could certainly be improved, but is an improvement on what we had under the Raes. And I suspect that the position of Raith Rovers in five years time should be more concerning to their fans than the position of Morton should be to us.

[vikingTON]

1 hour ago, LargsTON said:

Fresh investment.  This can't be it.

The current model is open to fresh investment and there was an approach to do so a couple of years ago - leaving aside Dalrada's involvement of course. That the tentative approach by said anonymous investors didn't survive contact with ridiculously minor pushback from the actual custodians of the club - the MCT members and fanbase - suggests to me that we dodged a bullet. 

As we also did incidentally by the Raes eventually showing enough good grace to favour MCT's offer to take ownership of the club and Cappielow over whatever Inverness 2024 level bitcoin chancer was poised to intervene.

Morton fans are no better or worse than any other fanbase (Dundee, Livingston etc.) in having very short memories about the genuinely dire position we were in recently - just 3 years ago in our case, never mind our actual spell in administration. 

This is just a common or garden 'crap season'. 

Edited December 8 by vikingTON

[capitanus]

6 hours ago, LargsTON said:

OR we could end up with a competent board of businessmen who want to help us progress as a club.  It doesn't have to be the Rae model or the current shitshow.  Stop pretending the club is headed anywhere but league 1, perhaps for a long time.  There's a small, vocal group on here who repeatedly champion the fan ownership model but the vast majority realise our club is slowly sliding into lower league oblivion unless something changes.   After nearly 40 years my passion for Morton has been eroded almost to a point I never thought possible.  Sad times indeed. Apathy is the biggest killer of a football club and I'm afraid our fanbase has it in spades.  

I agree with just about everything you've said there.

As far as i'm concerned, Morton sold their soul to the devil when they signed Alan Lithgow. 

There is a multitude of things that a football club can recover from including relegations, bad management appointments, bad corporate governance, crippling debts, administration - even liquidation.  But to make such a calamitous error so early on during fan ownership and make such a mess out of it by refusing to discuss the issues with the most important stakeholders - the fans who OWN the club - was effectively a canary in the coalmine.  In fairness to the Rae family, they called it right with that one several years earlier.

Worse still was the amount of Morton supporters who said 'ahm no that bothered aboot it' when they should really have been sharpening their pitchforks. That was when the Apathy was most noticable for me.

 

[TopCat]

On one hand we have a steady match-going crowd, an ever-increasing MCT membership, a positive balance sheet, 3 mid-table seasons in the Championship, no obstacles to outside investment (see - Dalrada), tempered with some short-term negatives caused by a roaster of a GM and a dud of a season on the park (following on from a reasonably exciting one).

On the other hand, we have a handful of posters on here and Facebook who have been presenting the same miserable points about terminal doom and personal apathy for literally years now (see page 1 of the MCT updates thread for reference). 

My own point of view is that the Rae family, Hugh Scott, Alan Lithgow and a successful period in the 70s/80s aren't relevant to the future of the club. Framing every discussion on ownership around them is a waste of time.