by Svlad Cjelli »
09 Dec 2010 12:39
brendywendy I may well be wrong, but I genuinely do believe JM has no intention of promotion while either a) he's still here or b) until the general economic situation (and his business empire) shows signs of massive improvement
if gates continue to drop, and the quality of the team diminishes, hell never make his money back. i just dont get what you think he gains by stopping us going up. its the only way he'll ever make any money out of us.
But he will - his investment is actually a lot smaller than many people think and his publicity machine likes to make out.
It's the risk factor - if he was guaranteed that pouring money in would take us up a league he probably would, as long as he could also be relatively sure of selling as soon as we were up, because to compete in the PL also means pouring lots of money in too, at an order of magnitude greater.
But there are no such guarantees - he could pour money in and have 3 other clubs pour more money in and go up instead, with all that money then wasted and making it less likely he'd never recoup it. Similarly he could pour money in and have the team lose a play-off final, be cheated by a poor refereeing decision, or have the expensive star players he's bought break a leg at a crucial time. There are no guarantees that investment equals success - investment only makes success more likely, nothing more.
The only way to make money is to go up relatively cheaply and then sell up, and he knows that that takes time but it can be done because he's done it before.
But that's all largely irrelevant at the moment - although many won't believe it, he simply has no spare liquidity sloshing around to throw at the club. Just about everything he has is tied up in other schemes, like Station Hill, and the recession has hit this and his other businesses hard. There simply isn't spare cash around.