(Off Albion Topic) Bristol City

[Lenny Rider]

Older NSC'ers will recall the 'Ashton Gate 8' who were the 8 top highest paid players at city who effectively ripped their contracts up in late 1982 and walked away from the club and stopped it going to the wall.

28 years on, it appears City are back in the shit, but surely when they got Steve Coppell as manager earlier in the year and signed David James and others they must have known they were looking at this huge loss?

 

[Billy in Bristol]

I should be following this story, being local and all that, buy have I missed something?

YES I DID , a small matter of a £11.8miilion loss!

I have vaguely looked on, and my understanding was...

They have a stadium of an acceptable standard but want to move out of the city and sell up to Sainsbury's who have a big store 250 yaerds down the road...alas the area is up and coming, i.e. lots of middle class families with enough connections and nous to mount an effective blocking campaign!

Oh and the site of the new stadium, next to a park and ride, has of course got green fields which bring forth a whole lot of new people, equally adept at blocking measures.

The chairman is a City Banker used to getting his way and has got a bit stroppy over the fact that he cannot get his way vis a vis the stadium, also chances are that if you find yourself talking to a cock in a posh bar in Bristol he works at Hargreaves Lansdown.

So, with on the field they are keeping tabs with Palarse, in a city of sporting underachievement, Rovers struggling, the Rugby team going down the tubes and the cricket club losing all their beast players at the end of this season; the City story is the lead chapter in a sporting pretty shitty city.

As regards the loss, said rich banker told the local Evening Post

He told the Evening Post: “The reason the debt has built up is that I thought we would have had things in place by now with regard to the stadium and we would have had the funding in place and been drawing on the facilities we had for the stadium financing.

“We’re probably a year behind in our original timetable and that catches up with you. I’ve been content to put that money in to push the football club and stadium forward until the stadium issue is resolved.

“I don’t want to give the impression that the club is in trouble. I think people realise that most of the funding comes from myself, but the balance sheet looks a bit of a mess at the moment because of the push we have made to make the football club more successful.”