No problem with cash neutral stance as "investing" in a football club looks like a sure way to lose your money. My gripe with Sisu is their lack of honesty (new ground for example) and their lack of transparency and communication of what is really going on. The whole Northampton debacle which ripped the heart from the club and from which we are still suffering. Add to this the lack of any real substantial plan forward either on or off the pitch you have a state of stagnation. We have no stadium with no long term plan in place, we have an academy whose deal runs out next year, nothing in place. All of the talk is about the need to own a stadium to generate money. Very little seems to be done to look at ways of generating money in our current situation, lots of ideas for that from people on here for raising money now without a stadium.
At least we have a shop now but very small and along with programmes, outsourced which I presume means less risk of loss but reduced profits also. Everything has a feel of "small time" about it. The really crap way of selling tickets for the past two seasons for example. The match day experience can feel really flat compared to other clubs (Sheffield Utd for example). Some of this can't be helped, with yellow and black increasingly prominent in the stadium, with the feeling we are very much the tenants in what should be our own ground. The atmosphere was much improved last year. However, the cynic in me feels that Waggot's motivation wasn't to improve atmosphere but to save money on the rent by closing the stand behind the goal. I think a far better idea to improve the atmosphere and the look and the feel of the stadium would be to open up both end stands to home fans (could still have half a block segregation Tesco end) and to have the top half of the stadium closed until we can fill it. (Go down the steps when you enter the stadium bowl rather than go up). The whole feel I get with Sisu is if we're not losing (much) money, the club can stagnate until the final court case finishes.
I hate the fact that a franchise has blown in and I hope they go bust and clear off sooner rather than later. But why have they been so proactive in trying to get bums on seats and we haven't? Why have they got their flags all over the traffic island outside the Ricoh and we haven't? Surely the club could challenge the council on that?
i think there is more hope on the pitch thanks to TM who seems, at least from the outside, to have put things on a more professional basis. I would also hope that Chris Anderson does have the best interests of the club at heart and will make decisions in the future that reflect our needs, not Sisu's, as far as he is allowed. A real test for him is showing that money from player sales is given back to TM. If the club is meant to be self sustaining then extra cash gained in this way should not be needed to simply keep the club afloat. I would have thought that some of the JM money did go to finance the Jodie Jones deal.
shame about ticket prices as I think following the lead of Huddersfield, Wigan and Bradford it would have been a boost and given a real feel good factor to the close season as well as helping the team on the pitch if ST were discounted in the way they were at those clubs. The money back thresholds are so high given our lack of success to be almost meaningless. However, if we have a good season, I think price increases will be quickly forgotten.
If Sisu want to be taken seriously they do need to show they care, not through shed loads of money for players but by truly buying into the infrastructure of the club, working with what we have and where we are now. An ideas man or woman in the mold of JH would be great, to keep us in the limelight media wise and also to generate that much needed cash, most of which would come through getting people to believe again and to enjoy coming to the games and returning regularly.