From today's Sun Biz Post.....
http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/s...789-qqqx=1.asp
Sunderland owners on track for promotion windfall
15 April 2007 By Ian Kehoe
The Niall Quinn-led consortium of Irish investors which owns Sunderland FC is in line for a windfall of almost €90 million if the club secures promotion to the Premiership in the coming weeks.
The Niall Quinn-led consortium of Irish investors which owns Sunderland FC is in line for a windfall of almost €90 million if the club secures promotion to the Premiership in the coming weeks.
The bulk of the money will come from television rights and sponsorship revenue, according to the sports consultancy department at Deloitte.
The team is currently in one of the automatic promotion spots in the Championship.
It has also emerged that the Irish shareholders have just agreed a new share rights issue and an eight-figure sum will be made available to the club’s manager, Roy Keane, to spend on strengthening his team regardless of whether it is promoted.
All the original shareholders, which include publicans Charlie Chawke and Louis Fitzgerald, subscribed to the new issue.
The consortium bought the club last July in a deal that valued Sunderland at €70 million. However, stockbroker Brewin Dolphin estimates the club would be worth between €190 million and €200 million if it secures promotion.
Speaking to The Sunday Business Post, Chawke said the consortium planned to reinvest any additional revenues back into the club, if it secured promotion.
‘‘If and when we get promoted, we don’t intend going back down again,” said Chawke.
‘‘The investors are here for the long haul. We have a four-year plan, and we are already way ahead of where we thought we would be.”
Nobody knows us, we don't care
please give me an example!
go down grafton st, shop street or any major shopping street and count the irish stores. more likely you will find very few with most being major british or multi-national stores.
turn on your tv and see how many irish shows are on during the prime times of 7 - 10 o'clock
flick through the nearest paper and see how many foreign property adverts there are
go to your supermarket and see how many irish products are the main sellers
check the brands on your clothes and how many are irish
listen to your radio and how many artists are irish
where is your tv/radio made
fact is there are few irish products available anymore - you really have to look hard for them, we have become an educated society who are no longer capable of competing with foreign manufacturing in terms of price and production levels.
the reason ireland is 'what it is' has nothing to do with us trying to invest in all things irish but more to do with our joining the EEC (EU) and embracing overseas investors and companies into our country. prior to this successive governments trien to keep all spending in the country and placed burdens on imported products. fact is if we kept up the irish only policies we would never have had the celtic tiger.
i can and i amIf you cannot see Irish football expanding into a potentially successful and maintainable league then you mustn't be with the times at all.![]()
i applaud wallace and kelleher, i wish there were more like them, these are the 'sugar daddy' types i spoke of in my earlier post.
professional football, by it's very defination, is indeed all about money. if you think it is not then you are deluded. not from the supporters but at management and board level and also at playing level. yes the supporters have an unwavering attachment to their team, usually due to geograpical reasons or sometimes other reasons. but in 99% of cases football clubs are run as businesses and have to be in order to survive. unfortunately like most things in modern society the romance and culture are being replaced by balance sheets and profit margins!
That, ladies and gentlemen, are why these guys are involved in Sunderland.
They're business people involved in a business venture. Irish football would bleed them dry of resources, so would be a rubbish business investment. And as they ahev no connection to Irish football personally, they can hardly be expexcted to squander their cash on us as a rich man's folly.
If it was English hotels or houses or holiday companies they wede invested in we wouldn't be batting an eyelid. Can I remind you all again that no-one owes Irish football a favour.
Irish football's Number 1 enemy is not Niall Quiin - a man with a job to do and who is doing it well. Irish football's number 1 enemy is the Irish people, who turn their backs on football here and therefore make it part of Niall Quinn's job to target them for his club.
We need to stop throwing a jealous hissy fit because we're unloved, deal with the reality of the situation, and work to change it. Niall Quinn owes us nothing, those Irish investors own us nothing, and they've all done nothing wrong. It's time EL supporters grew up and realised that.
That establishes that they're in it for the money, which wasn't exactly a state secret.
Let's agree that Quinny might not be Irish football's number one enemy, and not get too exercised over whether he's number 14 or 15. The fact remains that he and his partners have an active, intensively hyped campaign to draw investment, sponsorship and support out of Ireland, and therefore out of Irish football. The fact that they are doing it for money rather than pathological hatred of the game doesn't alter the fact that it is against the interests of Irish football for this to happen.
If you attack me with stupidity, I'll be forced to defend myself with sarcasm.
I actually see the Sunderland hype as a positive thing for Irish football. Our football fans are fickle and will come and support our domestic league IF we get the marketing etc right.
I was in Dublin airport on Saturday night just after 10pm picking up some family members. There were plenty of Sunderland and Reading jerseys in evidence. Now I'd be happy to bet that 95% of them have never even heard of Roker Park, Elm Park, Robin Friday or Charlie Hurley.
There is a massive market out there for football in this country. Better facilities will certainly help. Better hype would also make a huge difference. However success in Europe in particular would I believe be the catalyst.
Rubbish. He's spot on there. There were about 20 english lads in with us in turners x friday and they loved it cos it wasnt sanitised.
BTW for our learned cark friend Niall Quinn is a member of our club and also helped the club out 2 years ago when we went down so your thread title is a joke. What has traitor ever done for your club?
It's business at the end of the day he's involved in nothing to do with a perceived love of some non entity english club.
KOH
Spot on. I find that us EL supporters have a rep for moaning. Now don't get me wrong, the moaning is often justified but we really should just forget about what the UK multinationals are doing and promote the unique charms of our own league. Look at us as a microbrewery. The Microbrewerys are never going to compete with the big bland multinationals like Diagio but they market to the more discerning beer drinker, the connosuir, the person who likes to actually taste the malt and the hops. Our target market should not be the Luke Skywatchers. The best we can get out of them is tuning in to Setanta for the odd big game. Lets find our own Market of football Connosuirs and target them. Lets be a little gem of a league with a small - but bigger than we have now - following of people who want to taste the ingredients that make this league great.
TO TELL THE TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY
The ONLY foot.ie user with a type of logic named after them!
All of this has happened before. All of it will happen again.
TO TELL THE TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY
The ONLY foot.ie user with a type of logic named after them!
All of this has happened before. All of it will happen again.
Ruined the game??
Fair enough, I also hate what Sky and the premiership has done to English football, particularily the instillment of the idea that football only began with the invention of the Premiership. But not all English fans are premiership fans, and by the size of the crowds even at lower league lames, not everybody agrees with you.
Sanitised yes, ruined no. Explain how it has been ruined....
Fair enough. There would have been 70,000 or so at Old Trafford yesterday who didnt seem so bothered. Must they all be less discerning or intelligent football fans?
But doesnt the analogy fall down when we realise that the premiership, despite all the hype and cr@p that surrounds it, is still a far better product, and the "more discerning beer drinker" can see that. You are suggesting that people who appreciate real football will value the eL higher than the premiership. They won't.
Don't get me wrong, I can see that supporting a eL club, with freedom to move around, the opportunity to actually get involved, the opportunity to get to know the players, the fact that is can be enjoyed on a more personal level......these are all good things, and great reasons to support eL.
But to say that English football has been destroyed is, in my opinion, false.
And to say that Quinn is our no.1 enemy, given the very existence of the cronies at the FAI and within the media, is ludicrous.
And those of us who've attended Premiership (and even Championship) games in recent years would disagree with you. As would most of my English mates who watch their Premiership teams week-in-week-out.
OT will always be filled by Irish, Japanese and Home Counties goons so that proves nothing.
One Manc mate went to OT last week for the Roma game and said it was the first decent atmosphere in over 10 years.
KOH
No One Likes Us, We Don't Care
i think osarusan is saying that while the atmosphere may not be what the people (who used to go prior to sky) are in favour of it doesn't neccesserily mean the thing is 'ruined' merely changed. t
he football is not weakened anyhow just the atmosphere. however it is not just english football but a worldwide thing where the PC brigade have watered down atmospheres and this has co-incided with the 'family theme' to football as opposed to the 18-35 y/o male only of years before.
Haven't bothered reading through this garbage heap of a thread, but all I'll say that anyone who thinks Niall Quinn is the scourge of League of Ireland is talking out their arse.
Who is Quinn trying to get over to Sunderland's side? Irish fans who support Man Ure, Liverpool and Celtic I presume, why would he go after the few thousand that go out to LoI games when he can tap into the couple of million in this country that support English football?
How is Niall Quinn going to achieve this? By pushing Roy Keane onto us. Shouldn't you people be asking why Ireland has such a hang-up on Roy Keane? Or if he is the scourge of Irish football when you consider that he dwarves every team and individual in the game over here?
Plus why shouldn't Niall Quinn tap into this market? If people are going to jump from supporting Rovers/Bohs/Cork/Kilkenny(oh wait) to Sunderland, purely because Keane manages them and they are in the Premiership than do you really want these people supporting your club?
Quinn has no moral or national obligation to resue the eircom league, I think you will find that that falls on the FAI, who obviously dont give two shiites about promoting or investing in the league.....
Sunderland are only doing what United Liverpool, Arsenal and Celtic did years ago.AND what the failed Dublin Dons initiative tried also...people in this country are obsessed with the premiership and English football...Believe me the problems are rooted much deeper than 'Sundireland'
The first thing we have to dolike any other small successful domestic league, is hang on to young players..
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