Close Season Survey - the results

Graham Clark wrote:

I have heard anecdotally that James Brent charges the Football Club rent for the use of the temporary buildings on the HHP land.

This begs the questions starting with:

1. How much does he charge?
2. How long has he been charging it?
3. Why is he charging anything at all?

Graham Clark wrote:

It makes perfect sense if you have the clear funds resources to make such a purchase. if you have to borrow to make the acquisition then that is another charge on the property and we are back to the Lombard situation.

If Brent has to borrow the money to purchase the stadium then there will obviously be on-going repayments.

Interestingly the club will be continuing to pay rent for, presumably, the office space on Brent's land directly to Brent (or one of his companies at any rate).

Meaning that Brent will be charging Argyle a rent which then goes towards paying a mortgage on the stadium that he, not the club, is the owner of meaning that he acquires an asset that Argyle has paid, a proportion of at least, for out of its income.

Absolute genius!

Obviously it lessens the funding available to the team, asset strips the club of the last vestiges of any assets it might potentially possess and impacts with massive positivity on the asset/liability spreadsheets for Brent plc but Hey Ho! eh?

Thems the breaks, I guess.

Bit unfair, he goes to every game you know!

Les Miserable wrote:

The Multis must've been very busy, over 50% in favour of the club buying the stadium.....riiight

The AFT in a chairman's update said that in a survey over 80% of Argyle supporters wanted the ground to stay with the council, with even higher levels of support for an ACV submission.

Now in JL's latest survey, 30.66% prefer that the ground remains in public ownership.

That is a staggering turnaround in such a short time!

My sense of things from social media is that very few are 'for' Brent to purchase.

I accept John's explanation regarding manipulation, so how do results like this happen?

Graham Clark wrote:

Public ownership of a City's football stadium is not necessarily an impediment to its development, expansion or improvement in facilities.

In Argyle's situation, how would you see this happening?  Or is your scenario below the best we can hope for?

Graham Clark wrote:

A new grandstand remains a distant prospect as the commercial market for any enabling development will not generate anywhere near enough funds in profit  to build even a minimum requirement. In our current circumstances I would much rather any funds be invested in a significant upgrade in the corporate and food / drink facilities at Home park and some general refurbishment of the grandstand.  

Sampling error and/or bias in one or both of the surveys is the easy answer.

The very nature of AFT is such that those strongly in favour of the Trust concept will make up its membership and it is the members that AFT will consult because it is the members that it represents first and foremost. These people are likely to be quite well informed about a range of issues affecting the club and be aware of the various topics under debate. They are also likely, but not exclusively, to be left-leaning politically. As such they will be aware of the dangers of private ownership, as evidenced by recent events, and much more likely to be sympathetic to PCC ownership because that is the model we have followed for the most of the club's history, it has never led to admin before and they are generally happy with the concept of public ownership of something.

John Lloyd's survey has evolved hugely since its conception. At the beginning it would have been essentially a Pasoti poll with knobs on because that was the only point of access to it. Since then there is also ATD, Twitter and, probably most significant of all, his FB page. FB being what it is has widened access to a huge number of respondents many of whom probably haven't thought that deeply about the issues and are probably far younger than the constituencies as represented by ATD and Pasoti. For many of them admin doesn't really matter much because everybody seems to hit admin these days and the base question was "should Argyle own its ground?"... Well why not? Seems OK doesn't it? Doesn't nearly everybody own their ground?

So the two samples are actually very different in their demographic because each is shaped (i.e. biased) by the label purporting to describe it (even though there is no label as such to the most recent survey).

If the question had been "should PCC sell to a private landlord who will then rent Home Park to Argyle?", which is essentially the same thing as time will no doubt tell when it actually happens, I suspect the responses would have been very different (and much closer to those AFT got).

So we have different questions asked to different respondents and we've had different results...

Polling/surveys/questionnaires are fiendishly difficult to get right, very easy to manipulate to get a desired response and fiendishly difficult to avoid inherent bias either in their choices of questions or the methodology employed to collect responses. Even the order in which questions are asked can be significant.

Hence the differing results.

This illustrates the difficulties very nicely using the topic of National Service.

SFD,

Your theory has far too many assumptions (as usual) to provide any logical reason for such a discrepancy.

Any answer you get from anybody will be based on assumptions.

Simply: If you ask different questions to different people don't be surprised if you get different answers.

No assumptions there. Just plain common sense.

It's not common sense at all.   It's the world according to you. Which is full of assumptions.

The assumption that AFT members lean to the left politically, or that JL's facebook page has a different 'demographic' when you you know very little about either's members, is typical of you massaging things to suit your  argument. And your assumption that people "haven't thought too deeply" manages to be condescending to boot, as per your usual style - and probably is not true.

...  and, your thesis on the history of the questionaire and how it may effect things is not really relevant to this argument as the question itself is a very recent one.

I could go on...


This isn't a few percentage points.  A 50% change in opinion is massive in such a short time.

John_Lloyd wrote:

I can put that to rest straight away, Les.

The survey was set to allow one response per IP address.

There are some multiple entries, as multiple devices accessed one IP address.

There were 22 doubles.

Four of those opted for "Purchase", 15 were split between the two options or didn't express an opinion, while three opted for "Remain".

Four sets of three respondents from one IP address were evenly split between Purchase, Remain or split.

One set of four respondents from one IP address opted for Purchase.

There was no gerrymandering here.

John I can change IP address when in UK in 20 seconds flat be resetting the Router thats via Sky. I'm no techie but think its dynamic addresses or something similar named.

Below is the link to the AFT survey results on stadium ownership. The lmove for the ACV was based on the question relating to whether the option to buy the freehold was removed

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Rickler wrote:

It's not common sense at all.   It's the world according to you. Which is full of assumptions.

The assumption that AFT members lean to the left politically, or that JL's facebook page has a different 'demographic' when you you know very little about either's members, is typical of you massaging things to suit your  argument. And your assumption that people "haven't thought too deeply" manages to be condescending to boot, as per your usual style - and probably is not true.

...  and, your thesis on the history of the questionaire and how it may effect things is not really relevant to this argument as the question itself is a very recent one.

I could go on...


This isn't a few percentage points.  A 50% change in opinion is massive in such a short time.

If you abandon all critical evaluation and take each result at face value and as being 100% reliable then 50% is, indeed, a huge shift.

If you consider each survey critically, evaluate the methodology used for each and compare the different questions asked you might very reasonably conclude that such a huge shift is likely to be an unreliable conclusion to draw and that either one or both of the surveys isn't entirely accurate or representative.

Rickler wrote:

Graham Clark wrote:

Public ownership of a City's football stadium is not necessarily an impediment to its development, expansion or improvement in facilities.

In Argyle's situation, how would you see this happening?  Or is your scenario below the best we can hope for?

Graham Clark wrote:

A new grandstand remains a distant prospect as the commercial market for any enabling development will not generate anywhere near enough funds in profit  to build even a minimum requirement. In our current circumstances I would much rather any funds be invested in a significant upgrade in the corporate and food / drink facilities at Home park and some general refurbishment of the grandstand.  

That is the best we can hope for.