vikingTON

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.

A fanzone or attached venue (if only there was a vendor desperate to sell on the corner...) to operate either side of match day would be a start. Ayr have invested in such a structure from scratch (as well as enhanced hospitality from their development of the ground) - we have fallen behind even the most traditionally decrepit of competitors on that score. We already have capital investment, every single year. The lion's share of it is however being used to plug the predictable shortfall in the operating budget, so that Garrity or (words fail me) 'Brian Kinnear' can put Herbalife touting or personal training gigs on the side for another year and pretend to be professional athletes of skill and dedication. For the first 5 or so years after taking over to maintain stability - and then with Dalrada demanding 'investment' in the first team budget, that use of capital investment was justifiable. It no longer is. Without an actual capital investment plan, MCT subscribers and ST holders are de facto paying a premium £415 (if not more) each year for the same if not a worse team on the park, and little else to show for it.

I'd love to see someone paint a scenario more stagnant, than our latest sojourn in the Championship. Will we repeat our performance from 24/25, in which we managed to get knocked out of every cup competition at the first serious round, all before Advent calendars were being opened? Or will it be a 13/14 campaign minus the cup shock seeing as we're already consigned to finishing bottom of the fucking group? Finishing 7th/8th every season while throwing together a bunch of crap mercenaries every summer is not exactly whetting the appetite. While relegation and lower league football is no picnic, it offers the opportunity to bite the bullet and undertake a fundamental restructure. GMFC and a large portion of the fanbase have been welching from that for at least 7 years now, all in the delusional belief that being a 'full time' or a 'Championship club' inherently matter. I suspect we won't need to argue that point much longer.

A-) To have a financially stable and sustainable football club, that punches at or above the weight of its playing budget in most campaigns. B-) To use some of its ongoing capital investment to enhance/create new sources of revenue, thereby increasing the playing budget set to judge criteria A-). The practice of chucking the vast majority of MCT funds at the playing budget has run out of road. We will not retain subscriptions if the only return is a bunch of obvious haddies being given their last full-time contract for no valid reason. Let's now take the other measure of success proposed. There is a near constant parade of clubs chucking money that they fundamentally do not have at enhancing their league status. If East Kilbride or other vanity projects spend their way into the Championship as Ross County or Hamilton might do again, then there is nothing that the GMFC can do about that. Well and effectively run or not, we do not have a divine right to play in the second tier. If enough teams spend enough money wisely, then that status is not going to be maintained - regardless of the club's ownership model. All that GMFC can do under those conditions is to set credible standards for first team performance - instead of the obvious empty rhetoric at the end of last season - and actually act on them. Which means binning a manager who should have been held accountable for his farcical efforts back in April.

There is ongoing capital investment by MCT available and relatively stable income streams. Though GMFC are falling further and further behind the competition in respect to income however by failing to do anything with Cappielow outside of 3-6PM once a fortnight). The main issue that needs to be resolved is binning this vanity nonsense about being a full-time club. We correctly binned the youth setup as a waste of resources under the SFA's current funding system - unless the Estrella Group can provide the contacts and skills to derive greater value from it, then the full time structure should be binned. It evidently confers no advantage in fitness or organisation even to fucking Lowland League teams now - so why shouldn't Longridge, Garrity etc. be told to get a real job in supplement to their Saturday work?

Murray stated in the Tele last week that Delaney couldn't be re-signed because it wasn't affordable to have two first team left backs in the squad. So either he is lying, or you and many others are being complacent about our options. I expect any left back option that is added to be of a cheap ringer/gamble of a loan variety. Though if available, it would make more budgetary sense to add an experienced centre back who can cover left back too. The die was cast for this downgrade, back when Longridge was ludicrously given a contract extension about five weeks out from the end of last season.

While some of our midfield signings have been encouraging, it's going to be a long and quite dreadful season if we persist with this utter nonsense of a system, only with weaker full back and sand dancer options than last season.

Nothing sums up the Walter Mitty world that the two Teuchter clubs perpetually live in, than Ross County magically registering an exact break-even amount. Get HMRC in to give both them and 'Uncle Roy' a comprehensive audit.

There's no need to apologise for a delay in regular communications. But I don't think it requires a full comms update for MCT to respond to a development that is being discussed on unofficial channels such as social media and here too. A stock response like 'MCT can confirm/deny that _________. The process for/further details of __________ will be communicated to all members in the next monthly update.' could be sitting there, ready to be filled in and fired out by anyone with the seniority to do so.

Call me picky, but as an MCT member I'd like to have some actual confirmation of any resignation of a director; as opposed to a post on a social media forum that people either shouldn't or don't engage with, from 4-5 days ago. I have checked the email junk filter multiple times (which many MCT communications tend to end up in - as did the GMFC away top launch) when this development was shared on this forum at the start of the week. I don't think I've missed the official (brief) memo that would be appropriate to recognise any such change. The wider Morton/Greater Greenock ecosystem is bad enough for encouraging 'ITK' sweetie women (100% male btw) and taxi driver level bullshit mongers to proliferate, without a neglect of straightforward communication from MCT contributing to that situation.

Too close... causing what issue exactly?

Anyone who signs up for the 'Hamilton Accies project' (or indeed the 'East Kilbride project') is displaying their mercenary disinterest for all to see. Better off not to have such wasters in the squad.

We cannot even remotely afford to have standard Championship level players as backup. What sort of relative budget do you think exists at the club right now? This should also qualify the confidence from other quarters that we will find 'an upgrade' - it's not a position where we or other clubs have great bargaining strength. It's probable that Longridge will at least start out as our left back option, while we run the usual parade of trialists and ringers. Perhaps we'll get a good option either on the open market or holding out for a loan of a young player, but the distinct likelihood is that we'll go into July and probably August too in a weaker position.

Moffat certainly had his best season at the club last time round, but if his wage expectations are beyond the wage structure at the club when Wilson, Savoury etc. are not, then it only confirms that wingers attract a foolish premium in player cost that their marginal impact on team performances and results cannot justify, when every pound in the budget has to be used wisely. Hopefully the other and inferior wingers will leave as well, and we can focus on enhancing the existing strengths of the squad instead of bringing in yet more third-rate jobbers out wide.

One further change that the club should be considering is to have short packages for tickets - such as three home games in a row, or any 3 from a defined run (first 6, middle 6, last 6 fixtures?). The walk-up price is simply too high to encourage people to attend, if they don't have the availability or opportunity to buy a ST. The overall saving on the ST compared to walk up is the right policy - but there should also be a halfway house allowing flexible attendance between the two. I don't think that £50 for a three game package is unreasonable - and from a commercial view you are locking in that income from the first game too.

There is a contradiction running through the statement between drawing a line under last season, a fresh start, setting standards etc. and then handing out new offers to far too many players who were collectively responsible for that end. I'm a broken record on this, but actions should speak louder than words - you just can't declare your standards without showing significant consequences for not meeting them. I'd have exchanged a slightly weaker squad or at least greater turnover in the squad this summer, to clear decks and set that standard.

Much happier to take a gamble on a player like Savoury. We're already retaining quite a few in that area of the park, albeit more defensive options, so can and should be taking that type of risk to freshen things up plans potentially add a game changer. It's much better than going back yet again to players who either failed the first time or didn't impress at all recently.

Hawd me back from buying a dozen for this titanic occasion.

1) The number of players that we've successfully coached to achieve the potential of rough diamonds is also very, very small. For every Nicky Cadden there have been about 50 other players who either performed at par or were duds. 2) The rough diamond category could be applied to just about any signing - especially those who came through a youth setup at the likes of the Old Firm, who are ten a penny. Despite being rolled out for pearl clutching purposes when a new player signing gets criticised every summer - though you are not using it for this purpose - it doesn't justify signing any specific player, many of which are highly likely to be dung at Championship level. 3) Given the above points in addition to your otherwise accurate summary, we need to be considering the point of being one of the smallest full-time clubs in the pyramid - in budgetary terms at least. The only remaining justification I can see for persisting with a full-time model is if the Estrella group are brought on board, and can offer a totally different pool of players who desire full-time professional training in order to join the club. The scraping the barrel exercise within Scottish football, an occasional English non league ringer and relying on key loans year in and year out is achieving nothing.

You can make an individual case for any one or two of these players (as well as the likes of Longridge etc.) re-signing. The issue is that when these cases keep being made for all of the same players of marginal value as last season - only another year older - then you are not improving the squad by a sufficient degree to expect any significant progress next season. Between contract renewals and offers on the table, we are committing too much of our resources too soon to a squad that simply didn't deliver in the campaign just finished. While next season is going to be yet another transition, the squad still merits greater renewal than this.