Ed Chorlton

Exeter City chairman and Devon County Councillor,made some very interesting comments in today's WMN,to the effect that because ECFC is completely trust owned,if any offers [no matter how large] came in to take the club over,they would be rebutted and the current model retained.He did state that benefactors would be welcome should they expect nil return in terms of shareholding.I wonder if any leading light in the Argyle trust who posts on this site would care to outline what the attitude of the said organisation would be to such a scenario at Argyle? I realise that the set up is likely to be different at Argyle,ie the trust would own only 20% of the club at best,but it strikes me that in the long term such an exclusive stance could be damaging to the clubs hopes of ever reaching the highest level of English football.In essence,would the trust be prepared to sell it's share out lock stock and barrel if they considered that a suitable offer [after having received positive due diligence] had been received?

That article confirms my fears of trust owned / run football clubs it smacks of small time.
Security for the future maybe but you can kiss goodbye to any real ambition other then lower league mediocrity.

After recent events would you be comfortable with "Superfans" controlling the operation at HP.

Chorlton is a Man Utd supporting tosser who speaks for the Suits but not for the Club, WTF does he need to speak of such things to a national media outlet when he has never addressed one word directly to the supporter base.

No the Club is not for sale, Chorlton and the rest of the festering Suits, aided and abetted by the poodles and turncoats on the Trust Board, are looking forward to stealing it once they have fooked it up enough to get the price down to the same kind of money that Brent paid for PAFC, Sweet FA.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Chorlton is a Man Utd supporting tosser who speaks for the Suits but not for the Club, WTF does he need to speak of such things to a national media outlet when he has never addressed one word directly to the supporter base.

No the Club is not for sale, Chorlton and the rest of the festering Suits, aided and abetted by the poodles and turncoats on the Trust Board, are looking forward to stealing it once they have fooked it up enough to get the price down to the same kind of money that Brent paid for PAFC, Sweet FA.

What he said.

The Club should never be for sale and if that makes it small time Arch then that is OK with me. Rather we survived without ripping off creditors or the HMRC. We did that once and the fans took control. Never again. Better for a Club to still be around in 20 years time than offer fans false promises of Premiership football then go bust. You came so close and will come close again. 20% trust stake is pointless. Less than 50% means they have no real say. Granted, at present our Trust is stagnant, yet we are a League 1 Club about to be relegated to probably the worst League 2 in many years. We will survive and move on again, this time without the need for bucket collections or fake auctions.

The Club will not be turned into a hotel or a car park, there will be no Olympic bid, no need for a crooked President, no need for autions of fake goods (did I mention fake goods again), no need for the staff to go unpaid

Until the FA sort out the dodgy dealing and corruption perpetrated by football clubs at this present time we need Trusts.

The Red Star wrote:

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Chorlton is a Man Utd supporting tosser who speaks for the Suits but not for the Club, WTF does he need to speak of such things to a national media outlet when he has never addressed one word directly to the supporter base.

No the Club is not for sale, Chorlton and the rest of the festering Suits, aided and abetted by the poodles and turncoats on the Trust Board, are looking forward to stealing it once they have fooked it up enough to get the price down to the same kind of money that Brent paid for PAFC, Sweet FA.

What he said.

The Club should never be for sale and if that makes it small time Arch then that is OK with me. Rather we survived without ripping off creditors or the HMRC. We did that once and the fans took control. Never again. Better for a Club to still be around in 20 years time than offer fans false promises of Premiership football then go bust. You came so close and will come close again. 20% trust stake is pointless. Less than 50% means they have no real say. Granted, at present our Trust is stagnant, yet we are a League 1 Club about to be relegated to probably the worst League 2 in many years. We will survive and move on again, this time without the need for bucket collections or fake auctions.

The Club will not be turned into a hotel or a car park, there will be no Olympic bid, no need for a crooked President, no need for autions of fake goods (did I mention fake goods again), no need for the staff to go unpaid

Flippen 'eck. What those two Exeter City supporters said.

"Man Utd supporting tosser" there's more than one!!!

Call me an old curmudgeon but I don't think, in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, we should refer to "fake" auctions on here. I can believe that certain items might have had the auctions "managed" but don't think that qualifies them as "fake".

Charlie Wood wrote:

Call me an old curmudgeon but I don't think, in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, we should refer to "fake" auctions on here. I can believe that certain items might have had the auctions "managed" but don't think that qualifies them as "fake".

Managed auctions. I like that.

Charlie Wood wrote:

Call me an old curmudgeon but I don't think, in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, we should refer to "fake" auctions on here. I can believe that certain items might have had the auctions "managed" but don't think that qualifies them as "fake".

Fair point Charlie and apologies.

The present day reality is that most clubs rely on outside funding such as a benevolent owner or backer to finance success. A long as each league has a couple of clubs with backers willing to bankroll success it means that all clubs must do the same to stay competitive. All Ed is saying is that on income alone, ECFC cannot be competitive in League 2.

Any Club whose Board say they must be "sustainable" will only rise to a level that can be supported by their income. If that income is also paying off debts previously incurred, the club will not even achieve the level of success that their gates warrant.

The Red Star wrote:

20% trust stake is pointless. Less than 50% means they have no real say. Granted, at present our Trust is stagnant, yet we are a League 1 Club about to be relegated to probably the worst League 2 in many years.

Can I re-iterate that. Anything but a majority shareholding is pointless....................and something else any trust witha majority shareholding has to beware of is allowing additional funding from a "benefactor" in return for shares as that is what happened to Wycombe Wanderers when they could not repay the investment of Steve Hayes; and Brentford where Matthew Benham has pumped millions into the club in return for a shareholding that they cannot hope to repay so that he becomes majority shareholder by default.

Both these gentlemen have underwritten impossibly unrealistic spending on things such as staff appointments that the size of those clubs warrant and pie in the sky projects that aren't going to come to fruition.

I don't know why you label next year's League 2 "the worst in many years" ~ not a bad league for the small Devon clubs to be in (and YES Argyle I include YOU in that category) you might even have little ole Torquay in there too yet to join you with Bristol Rovers and Cheltenham!

Although not owned or run by it's trust, Torquay United ARE owned and run by a compnay consisting 100% of lifelong supporters of the club (and that traditionally is how ALL small Football League clubs were historically run.

A dozen of them budgeted around £5 million between them over 5 YEAR PERIOD to purchase, rebuild the infrastructure and invest in the future (new training ground, youth development set up, grandstand etc) and now have a First team squad that cost precisely nothing in the transfer market and to the best of my knowledge costings are under control to the extent that the club is no longer running up any significant losses or in need of further share capital investment.

Again, like Exeter City; no desire to bankrupt the club by chasing impossible rainbows, grandoise schemes but merely to put in place and run a sustainable and professional operation of which any small community can be proud.