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Have you ever seen that TV show with Michael Portillo on the trains. He goes to all sorts of interesting places and meets a variety of interesting people along the way, but never a half-jaked guy on route to Drumfrochar who has accidentally got on the wrong train. He doesn't have a titanium knee to my knowledge, but he has many sports blazers in different bright colours. Watch out for it, you might enjoy it.

fair play to all involved. I was always sceptical that Morton (under MCT) should have a substantial asset that would be very tempting to run up debt on or be the subject of unscrupulous takeover bids. I also couldn't really see if GC could write off £2M+ of debt to a solvent company without HMRC potentially assessing those funds as 'income' they had taken out of GC and spent running their football club. My belief is that the original deal was to protect Cappielow from falling into the wrong hands or a sale being forced due to financial hardship. As well as a way of keeping the GC balance sheet in check. I know people seem to think of Rae as some kind of enemy of the club, and you are entitled to your view, but I certainly don't see it this way and there's dozens of things he could have done if he just wanted some cash out of all of this. I didn't see how Rae was benefitting from the previous deal and I don't think he will or is trying to benefit from this deal. Other than the fact he won't be underwriting the running costs of a football club any more. With this new deal, they are perhaps operating at the margins of what HMRC would be happy with... but as we've long argued on these pages Cappielow & the car park could be worth anything from £1 to £millions, depending on what you plan to do with the land. On the wider point of MCT... I think we / they certainly have a job on their hands, but I do believe they can run the club much more effectively and make better use of our resources than the previous owners have done over the past decade or so. Here's hoping they at least start with owning a Championship club.

Not to be rude, but you are clearly not capable of grasping this (for starters, the deal on the table is not 'secret option C' if we're sticking with that - that was Morton taking ownership of the stadium, and with no debt). You are so utterly blinkered by your view of me and my (entirely non-existent) relationship with GC that it is a complete waste of time for you, me and anyone reading. I'm sure you'll lash out with a "liar" or by plucking another fantasy from the air (I liked the one about me muddying the waters, or however you described it, on the feasibility study, this tax thing is a red herring too but is probably lash out if I’d made this much of a tit of myself too) but it gets us precisely nowhere.

I presume their real life lawyers were advising them on those options before they were made public and put to a vote, no?

Incredible legal insight as always! Certainly without your pointing this out - after your argument got hilariously fucking demolished, with both sides' lawyers thinking it a non-starter for serious negotiation - none of us could have figured this out ages ago. Go back a few pages, you'll see several people asking the same question. (Any onlookers wishing to conduct the same experiment may wish to count the number of times cmdc mentioned the tax, rather than rent implications of such an arrangement. This offer is especially open to readers with no fingers, and/or people practiced in the shifting of goalposts.) There was never, ever a compelling reason for GC to be the entity that held the deeds to Cappielow, except the Raes wanting "their" money back. Your ham-fisted attempts to conflate advantageous tax arrangements with "the Raes get to keep everything forever otherwise Morton are in big trouble guys!" were transparently shan then and are even worse two months on. The time to endorse a "propco" was months ago. Your plain preference for Morton's risk - ha ha ha - was Option A, losing the stadium to GC with a peppercorn rent. Now neither GC nor MCT want anything to do with it? What's changed? And on the final point, I remind you of my earlier reversal: As they say: Act in haste, repent at leisure. Not the first time I've had to learn such a lesson, but then again I'm a huge advocate of lifelong learning.

The car park or whatever happened in the past doesn't really matter. A fans group has the club, a stadium, around 300k and hopefully a place in the championship. As a club we're not getting a better opportunity to move forward.

Golden Casket leaving with anything after the decades of damage they've done rankles, but a debt free club with ownership of the stadium is considerably better than we had before. I still think it might be too late to avert catastrophe and if we go down this season we won't be back at this level for years, if ever. Turning into Clyde is more likely than turning into Airdrie and it's easy to see turmoil on and off the park feeding off each other and sinking MCT's credibility before they properly get going. If they're planning to overhaul every aspect of the club with the ultimate aim of purging the social club mentality and becoming a properly professional outfit then it's going to take years to achieve and longer to rehabilitate the club's reputation, which has been a laughing stock for the entirety of Golden Casket's reign and has plumbed new depths this season. We could do with five minutes of stability on the park to facilitate that - if they're trying to carry out a restructure of the club against drastically reduced income from being in League One while showing no sign of a promotion challenge and possibly going part-time, they're obviously more limited in what can be done. Relegation from the Championship is always going to be a risk for a club floating around the bottom end of full time budgets, but there's really no worse summer it could happen. While we have more reasons to be pessimistic than optimistic about the future, the previous deal was nothing short of a death sentence regardless of what division we were in. There's at least a route to survival from here.

Can we all unite and agree on the following sentiments: FUCK CRAWFORD RAE! As you were

My initial impression is this is as good a deal as we're going to get. Golden Casket keep the car park but we get the rest. It is what it is. This seemed to be the most obvious solution from the start.

500k was written off at the initial stage when MCT got involved and for every 100k contributed GC would write off a further 500k. MCT hit that 100k in December 2020, so there’s another 500k off the debt (remember the debt that would never be called in, and isn’t something to worry fans) So we are paying off a debt that doesn’t need paid off if we go on Crawfords word. Clearly it’s to be paid off as that’s what we are doing and we have knocked 1m off it since MCT came in but we’re still sitting at 2million? It’s a fucking joke, and I’m shocked that 2m is even being discussed when we’ve paid off 1m of it already. He is effectively putting hee haw in, has had the grant of 500k from the government paid aswell so I fully expect a hard line from MCT. Get him told. He would be getting an absolute hounding if fans were allowed into games.

Fair point. Extremely frustrating would have been a more accurate assessment of my thoughts on the carpark topic. Good news though, WhowouldbeaMortonfan and TRVMP have had a meeting of the minds, which has to bode well for all MCT and the fan community. If we can put our views out there, respond and acknowledge without offending each other surely then we can all do the same. Still available for Friday if needed.