Darran said:
:roll:
https://www.swanseacity.com/news/swansea-city-update-jake-silverstein
There is much that is simply factually incorrect about that statement.
Don’t know whether Silverstein is financially illiterate or whether he believes supporters are.
His statement firstly says they aim ‘ to build a culture that embodies the core values of our club—integrity, community, connectedness, and love for the game. ’
Surely if integrity is the first mentioned ‘core value’ of the club, a good place to start would be this statement?
Firstly, he is not ‘ownership’. He does not ‘own’ any part of the club. He is a lender to the club.
That may or may not change depending on whether he decides to convert his debt to equity.
Secondly, he states that he ‘came on board as an investor’ in 2020. This is not true. He became a lender of money to the club in 2020. Irrespective of whether he converts of not, the statement will remain factually incorrect.
On a wider note, there is a narrative building from both Trust and club that suggests a broken relationship that has been magically improved by ‘Jake’ and ‘Dave’. I for one, am becoming increasingly annoyed at the mischaracterisation of what happened, both since ‘Jake’ became involved and before he did. The efforts and achievements of Stu in developing deep relationships at the club (not ownership levels, the people who actually ran the club and occasionally showed their faces in Swansea) which led to the sharing of detailed financial information, budgets, forecasts, involvement in weekly meetings over financial and commercial activities fell away hugely when Stu left. All requests for open communication and transparency (those things so close to ‘Jake’s’ heart) were ignored. Comments such as ‘above my pay grade’ have been made public when questions deeply relevant to sustainability were asked.
It’s all lovely that the relationship is back on track now that the Trust can’t actually do anything to protect any of the aims that the Trust was started to achieve (by the way, work in the community and playing exciting football was never mentioned to my knowledge), and we have been told that the Trust is now asking the difficult questions (obviously we won’t know what the answers are since they refuse to communicate any longer), but this statement doesn’t show much signs of permanent protection of the club. A ‘player trading model’ isn’t what makes a club sustainable. All clubs have a bloody ‘player trading model’ unless they’re Man City, Real Madrid or PSG. And certainly ‘supplemental support from ownership’ (again, Jake, you’re not an owner), is not sustainable, it’s the opposite of sustainable. It’s debt. Debt that includes the debt currently owed to Jake, (which continues to rack up interest at 5% per annum according to Companies House filings by the way). Oh, and has quite wide reaching fixed and floating charges against it (again, charge documents are all online at Companies House) just in case Jake starts to feel less fuzzy about Christmas in Swansea.
Just a bit of ‘accounting 101’. The club will become sustainable when its regular income is sufficient to pay for its regular expenditure (including those interest payments everyone). Until it does, maybe fewer of the ‘loans’ for the sake of it (lovely though it has been to see the huge contribution of Finlay Burns for the past few months and it can’t be denied that Wolf has probably seen us finish at least one or two places higher in mid table than would otherwise have happened).
Let’s also perhaps try to stop losing back room staff every ten minutes (with the associated pay outs).
Convert your loans. Actually become an owner. Stop the club having to pay out interest it can’t afford. Let the football people run the club. Wave to the fans from the stands every so often when you happen to visit Swansea, and that will be great.
