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Rebuild ?
Jan 31, 2016 12:33:59 GMT 1
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Post by toughatthetop on Jan 31, 2016 12:33:59 GMT 1
Who on here thinks we are actually a championship team ? Year after year we are fighting for survival and living outside our means I personally think we should start rebuilding our team the way Hearts did and getting ourselves believing in each other once more , burchills signings and hoppys seem to me like they know they are loanees and don't give a hoot others seem to be going through the motions
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Post by Auldnick on Jan 31, 2016 15:41:59 GMT 1
I think if we try to rebuild from the third tier we will be doing so in a part time capacity.
The vision of a senior club in West Lothian which led Bill Hunter here (albeit after he was unable to take it to East Lothian) was bold, especially as the MTFC incarnation had a very small (albeit very loyal) fan base & West Lothian was always going to have loads of fans of the Bigot brothers & the gruesome twosome from Edinburgh. That this venture knew virtually only success for 10 years was amazing & that it has been struggling to survive ever since is probably a more realistic assessment of the club's standing in the game.
Its a shame because I honestly think there is a young generation of support coming through but the club is failing to tap into it properly due to successive failures to build on the small successes of the last 5 years (Bouncing back from the demotion punishment, holding our own in the second tier, the great escape & cup win last season; ok winning the 4th & 3rd tiers were virtually guaranteed as a full time club & the squads we had but it was still success). Its a fine line between over extending financially & speculating sufficiently to ensure we are competitive enough to get bum's on seats & enough league "prize" money to keep the club viable (obviously other revenue streams such as sponsorship help) & it seems to me that we failed to get that balance right since returning to the second tier, as we have constantly had to "cut out cloth", thus having a poorer side to watch & diminishing crowds. Part of the failure to build on the end of last season was the embargo on signing players which was completely unfair when compared to the treatment of the Rangers.
It worked for Hearts because they already were going the way of developing youngsters (as we were until recently) & they already have a large fan base.
What we need is people in charge who want to & have the finances to re-establish a youth development program. We also need people in charge with the patience to allow a manager time to build & gel a squad & we need players who want to show their talents in order to secure a move to somewhere bigger. We also need fans to be realistic enough to recognise that when we are in the top half of the second tier we are probably punching above our weight & with sufficient patience to get behind the team rather than get on their backs when things go wrong.
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Post by jonsnow on Jan 31, 2016 16:40:49 GMT 1
I see Airdrie have announced they're going FT next season, we're about the same size fanbase wise as them so must be possible for us to be FT in the 3rd tier. We'd need a complete overhaul in the thinking of those in charge though, we're always getting owners who think we should be in the top tier and spend money we don't have trying to get us there. Right now we can barely stay in the 2nd tier and financially we're still millions in debt to previous owners with loans.
We don't even know Ford's business plan, other than have a 4G pitch and renting it out in the community from a separate company owned by investors he's trying to get interested in the plan, the council have also said they'd need more details as the ones they've been shown aren't enough to make it viable.
So as usual the fans are in the dark about what the owners plans are and are just going along with the flow, hoping we'll still have a team/club to support.
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afro
Youth Player
Posts: 68
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Post by afro on Feb 1, 2016 0:00:59 GMT 1
The current situation we've worked ourselves into of a convicted drug dealer essentially running the club, plummeting gates, and general bewilderment still over who we owe money to and who's actually in charge prevents us from even thinking about rebuilding at a decent level. Say we took the drop to League 1; there is no way realistically we could continue FT and try to rebuild for a sustainable long-term future. Part-time football is not a death knell, but either way we have a horrendous millstone round our neck in terms of the stadium. Those ITK can correct me if I'm wrong but are the overheads for Almondvale not ridiculous? How much income do we actually derive from what goes on at the stadium, as in corporate functions etc. and those who rent space in stadium house? If we have to have any discussion about rebuilding the club correctly then a massive part of that has to be the stadium situation. The council have already given us enough breaks, I don't imagine that selling up the land for the stadium for private development and giving a sizeable amount to us would make them popular with the local tax payer at all.
First and foremost, the ownership situation needs to be resolved for definite. Get dodgy characters like Martindale and Nixon out the picture for good; the former especially given how he apparently is essentially running the club and has self-appointed himself onto the coaching staff, and has a hand in certain players returning into the side. Gordon Ford seems like a decent guy, but I can't quite figure out his involvement still, or how it came about. I'm not averse to his involvement in the club - he seems to want to get youth development back on track here, but if he's going to spend 6 months of the year in Michigan then someone needs to run the day-to-day affairs.
Comparing fan engagement to the past shows how weak it currently is. I've said it numerous times - if you just moved to Livingston, you wouldn't know there was a professional team here. I can appreciate the insane costs of conventional advertising for a club as weak financially as we are now - but like every club our size in Scotland, we have to be creative. We have to be innovative to get ahead. That said, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at previous methods employed and realise that a sizeable majority of the club's support under the age of 25 are supporters because of the free school tickets scheme. It really wouldn't be that hard to implement; you genuinely could run it off an Excel spreadsheet. Fire tickets to a few different schools each week, and send two or three players and the manager along to promote it. It's not even as if it's time consuming or distracting from training, it's a couple of hours per week FFS.
Leading on from that, transparency as to what happens at the club has been lacking in the past few years. When the Livi 5 took over, and I know I'm harking back to different times when fans were probably naive to think things would change, transparency was mentioned a lot. Now, nobody really knows who's running the club, what's actually going, what the plan is? At the end of the day, if the supporters didn't turn up, there wouldn't be a club, 'cause there'd be no bloody point. Ford, Nixon, McDougall, Barney the Dinosaur, whoever runs the club - it's a two-way street. Be honest with the fans, and chances are they'll be more forgiving. The atmosphere recently has been stale and tense and just plain disgusting at times, the fans who still bother their arse to come along are probably all still wondering how the cogs are turning.
Gut feeling - it will be a very long time, if ever, before we are running on an even keel where we can be competitive. That doesn't mean we can't work towards it. The feeling I get the now is that we are simply treading water, filling the team with loan signings in the hope we'll still be a Championship club next season. Say we do stay up (which I think we will - just) - Dunfermline will probably win League 1 this year, and we'll have no safety net of a woeful team like Alloa or Cowden in recent times. AFAIA the youth system may as well be non-existent, for a club which prided itself for years in producing quality talent, there is no bridge between the U17s and the first team. The result now is promising players like Currie are shunted in favour of Premiership loanees like Telfer, or Knox, who seemingly is in the first team so he's off to the highest bidder. This treading water approach isn't going to yield any long term growth - we're continually cutting our cloth, with no money for investment in the youth system or infrastructure. On top of that, we have no assets, and a debt of nearly £2 million. I look at Clyde as an example of a team who cut back to start again - they're now debt-free, and although they're plodding along in League 2 in a stadium they're soon to be booted out of, we could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of their book and take the hit so there's something to actually build upon rather than this stalemate we're currently embroiled in.
Falkirk just sold one of their reserves to Swansea for £200k. That is where we should be, but piss poor management has left us where we are. We have a great core of supporters who've stuck by the club through so much shit, it's time to pull together and move forward.
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