The Takeover Thread - Recon Group - NOW WITH NEW POLL

[paul_e]

That's not how Lerner and co work though. We wouldn't have appointed a Sporting Director if a takeover was likely as they would want their own people.

Not necessarily. Jez Moxey survived new Wolves owners and Steve Stride was kept on when Randy arrived.

I don't think Steve Stride lasted longer than a few months but he was a long standing employee. My point was if we were in the latter stages of a takeover, why would you make a high level appointment? Why not just wait until you know one way or the other? My educated guess (educated because Sherwood's comments support it) would be that for whatever reason the deal broke down and the contingency plan kicked in.

Hopefully I'm wrong or they come back to the table.

Simple question, how long do you believe the appointment process for that role would take? If we believe that exclusivity was granted then in all likelihood we have to believe that the recruitment process for the role was well underway before it happened.

So the question is would the incoming owners want to stall everything the job is due to rectify during the summer transfer window? I have no idea either way but I can understand not wanting to risk things by putting important decisions on hold. If they want rid of people they don't like they can do it any time they like.

[pauliewalnuts]

Another way of looking at it, how much do non-playing staff, even Chief Executives, earn?

I seem to remember Faulkner being listed in the accounts under director remuneration as being on 200k or so.

Assume Fox is on 300k. That's roughly 6k a week. Thats sub-Sylla amounts of salary. And what's more, Fox can almost certainly be sacked or made redundant like a normal employee anywhere can, rather than having the sort of clauses in his contract a footballer would have.

So, Fox gets replaced, paid, what, three months salary as a goodbye, that's 72k, and Fox is the top of the tree, everyone else will cost less to get shot of.

Now look at the money that gets written off so casually against players by comparison. Sacking Fox would cost about the same as two weeks of Habib Beye not even getting on the bench cost us.

Until we get a new owner, Lerner has to continue accordingly, obviously to safeguard the value of his asset, but also with the side effect to show any potential buyers that he's not desperate to sell, or if you prefer that he's putting together a team which will make the asset more valuable.

That's why I think the whole "if we were likely to get sold any time soon we wouldn't be appointing senior management figures" argument is blown out of proportion. The figures involved are tiny.

[passport1]

Until the new owners actually own the club it continues to be run with day to day decisions including hiring etc taken by the existing owner.

What I find odd is that if Sherwoods comments are accurate that there has been no formal statement from the club.

That being being the case it is reasonable to assume negotiations are still proceeding.

[Dante Lavelli]

paul e/paulienuts

Very good observations.  Impressed.

The worry I have with your scenario is that there is still an absence of leadership; we will have lots of highly paid individuals who will have to generate their own motivation and strategy because the ultimate leader is looking elsewhere.  I don't mind him being absent but he has to delegate enough responsibility, and just enough rope to hang themselves, to make a difference. 

The uncertainty will not be good in the long run...

[tomd2103]

There were rumours a while back that even if Randy did not sell the club, a new chairman would be appointed.  Is that still the case? 

[ciggiesnbeer]

There were rumours a while back that even if Randy did not sell the club, a new chairman would be appointed.  Is that still the case?

I assume so. FYI it was more than a rumour, he directly said it in an interview.

http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11677/9866333/aston-villa-owner-randy-lerner-ready-to-relinquish-chairmanship

He told The Times: "I don't disagree with the (fans') criticism and what I should have done several years back was bring in a chairman.

"Yes, the club remains for sale. But as we've seen, 'club for sale' does not necessarily mean it will change hands so fast. I have had interest from nearly every corner of the globe.

"Germans, Italians, Americans and Chinese among others have expressed interest in and fondness for the Villa. They key of course is to try to put the club in custodial hands that can take the club forward. Resources and competence and a willingness to immerse themselves in the local fabric.

"Last year at this time I had a plan A which was to sell, and a plan B, which was to rethink the club's business management , which has led to the hiring of Tom Fox (as chief executive). This year plan A remains to find a buyer if on the cards or, plan B, find a new chairman."

[Villa in Denmark]

paul e/paulienuts

Very good observations.  Impressed.

The worry I have with your scenario is that there is still an absence of leadership; we will have lots of highly paid individuals who will have to generate their own motivation and strategy because the ultimate leader is looking elsewhere.  I don't mind him being absent but, he has to delegate enough responsibility, and just enough rope to hang themselves, to make a difference. 

The uncertainty will not be good in the long run...

If I remember rightly, under a normal business model for a small company such as AVFC, a chairman is there to provide overview and ensure that conflicting targets / goals aren't pursued, ensure all board members are heard and generally ensure that the upper echelons of an organisation function. It's also the chairman's responsibility to be ultimate guarantor for that legal / ethical requirements are upheld.  Ultimately it's him that can sack for the CEO on behalf of the shareholders

Fox as CEO should be the one pulling the strings, driving things and providing motivation (although for those levels of appointments, if you've got someone who needs motivating you've cocked the appointment up). It's his role that should decide strategy and aggressively go after what he considers the best way to deliver value for the shareholders (in our case get the team as far up the league as possible).

Randy has never been that hands on, and that's been a good chunk of the problem. It looks like he's finally appointed someone who's at least half competent as CEO.  The last thing we need is him sticking his oar in now.

If a takeover doesn't happen and we end up with Fox as CEO and A.N. Other as chairman, the Randy's only involvements should be as a de facto bank for "borrowings" and as shareholder decide whether to sack the chairman.

[Dante Lavelli]

I agree with what you've written there Denmark, which is why I think the new set up can work.  My worry is that if Randy's position is unclear it will be hard for Fox and the other new recruits to properly plan.  For example their strategies would be different if they were being measured in one season's time rather than five. 

[old man villa fan]

Some good points raised in the posts above.

If the club is up for sale, it must be sold as a going concern and, thus, it should be business as usual.  Otherwise, it would be something that looked like a fire sale.

The point about strengthening the management structure of the club is not conclusive either way.  It may be Lerner setting up a more professional club for himself or it could be through suggestions from a buyer i.e. "You set the club structure on a more professional basis, we see how it runs for 6 months and then we finally decide whether we are going to buy".  It is all guess work.

I work for a very large family business that used to be run by the family but as it was passed down to the last generation of the family they decided that they needed a professional board of directors and a CEO.  However, one of the family stayed on as Chairman.  The business has continued to be run this way for 20 years or more and more of the current generation of the family have become involved but not in the overall direction of the main part of the business.  Regarding Villa, there is so much more than just running the business side of the club.  A Chairman should be taking on the role of the 'public face' of the club, dealing with all of the CSR matters etc. i.e. the things that Lerner was interested in but either did not have the time for or did not have the character for.

[brian green]

A number of excellent posts on this thread and I buy into every one of them.   The elephant in the room however is the threat that a new incoming owner may be much worse for Villa than Randy Lernere has been, for all his well documented shortcomings. How does the nursery rhyme go? "Cling on to nurse for fear of something worse" Or words to that effect.

[AV82EC]

I'm expecting another announcement from Lerner and the Shumanite soon as I think he will tell us if he's still pursuing Option A or staying in and appointing Option B. As others have said for all his mistakes I reckon he's still a better bet then probably 95% of other owners.

[Mister E]

It would be naive to assume that - because we're in some sort of pre-takeover exclusivity period - the ongoing machinations of the business do not continue. Since Fox arrived there has been a concerted effort to professionalise the club and Lerner has stated his intention to step even further back in to the shadows. The only sign of a takeover would, IMO, be the reduction in transfer spend (although that cannot be cut to ribbons because doing that would diminish the value in the club, particularly with two key players leaving).

[pauliewalnuts]

paul e/paulienuts

Very good observations.  Impressed.

The worry I have with your scenario is that there is still an absence of leadership; we will have lots of highly paid individuals who will have to generate their own motivation and strategy because the ultimate leader is looking elsewhere.  I don't mind him being absent but he has to delegate enough responsibility, and just enough rope to hang themselves, to make a difference. 

The uncertainty will not be good in the long run...

Why, though?

They're in highly paid jobs and, one assumes, are given direction by the chairman / owner as to which way he wants the business to go.

The biggest mistake Randy could make now would be to assume that a takeover would happen in short measure and hold off on appointments - and I wonder if that was the thinking last year behind not appointing a new back room team and leaving Lambert in situ for too long, but that's just conjecture.

He might sell it tomorrow, he might sell it in two years time, but until whichever point he does sell us, he has got to ensure the business is run correctly. There's no reason whatsoever for the people he appoints to lack motivation because the ownership might change at any time.

Theoretically, Randy could appoint a chairman tomorrow, and then sell the club in a few weeks time, and the new owners could leave everything intact and change nothing - chairman down. Or they could come in and sack everyone. Or they could do something somewhere between those two extremes. We just don't know, and that's why it has to be business as usual until it happens.

Lerner has made plenty of mistakes over the years in the way he runs us, some of them big ones, and rightly gets criticised for it, but the alternative to doing what he is doing now is to have a situation whereby he appoints nobody, whereby we skimp by with a skeleton staff (like an off-pitch version of a shabby Lambert sat next to Roy Keane for a few months, prior to losing even him).

If he were to do that, he'd be getting absolutely crucified, and rightly so.

If you take out the possibility of the takeover, it strikes me that he's finally doing what he should have done 9 years ago when he arrived here - appointing a structured, capable, all-encompassing management team to run the club properly.

I just wish he'd done that in 2006 prior to investing all that money. Maybe then we'd have avoided pissing it all away like we did.

[brian green]

Paulie, your penultimate paragraph says it all for me.  In a profound sentence, the most profound word is "structured".   Well said.

[mattjpa]

I'm expecting another announcement from Lerner and the Shumanite soon as I think he will tell us if he's still pursuing Option A or staying in and appointing Option B. As others have said for all his mistakes I reckon he's still a better bet then probably 95% of other owners.

I understand it's what you think but I would take Issue with your Oppion of 95% etc.
 As far as I can see, he has moved quite blindly into a business he had no experience in and a combination of misguided faith, changing markets, reactionary management and poor decisions have resulted in years of austerity, fire fighting and flirtation with a failing which could result in financial disaster. I fail to see how 95% of the worlds potentially interested businessmen could do much of a worse job.
 It is luck that we are still in the premiership, make no bones about it. A misplaced header or the width of a post could have seen us relegated in any of the last 3 seasons (I'm including loss of momentum and destroying morale at pivotal times before I'm taken literally).
As things stand, we are in the black for net spend this summer so it's not even like we have proof of a loosening of the purse strings.
From what little I see or hear of him I like him but I don't buy into this 'better the devil you know' train of thought.