Leaderboard

I think that is the vital area of concern. Firstly, we must accept that there will be "football" costs other than first team wages, but wages are bound to have grabbed the lion's share of that £2.7M. You therefore do indeed have to wonder about "stupid wages". Furthermore, this third largest football budget ever has been spent in a season when performances were so poor that there would presumably have been very little paid by way of bonuses. This large sum will hence have been overwhelmingly for basic wages so you do have to wonder how excessive these were? I woyld also guess that the two bigger football expenditures will have been in seasons where there were big performance bonuses - and hence a quid pro quo to the club of team performance earnings. I wonder how last season compared with others for total basic wages? And for doing what? My impression since returning to the SPL in 2010 under Butcher is that he was pretty good at squeezing extra cash out of the board for players - but justified that by making some superb signings and achieving generally good results with accompanying windfalls. Then enter Hughes who initially looks like a hero, largely on the strength of Terry's signings. I am guessing that he squeezed even more cash out of them, but when he started to have to rely on his own signings - very expensive ones, I suspect - the whole thing begins to unravel. The next step along the road - then appointing Foran - is a further rung down the managerial ladder and he is entirely unable to do anything at all with a team increasingly peppered with over priced duds, to whom Foran also added. The result - a hugely expensive dysfunctional team which can no longer perform well enough to bring in the windfalls, nor even to remain in the Premiership, so the end product is relegation and a £422K loss. That is merely my impression of what may have happened based on fairly regular observation.

I think you have created an interface between the hammer and the blunt bit that doesn't go into the wood! The statement implies that the proposal is to gift the buildings etc to the club while Tullochs retain the lease. This would presumably mean that the stadium fabric will be owned by the club but built on land which Tullochs will continue to have an option of leasing until 2093 and they will also retain the lease of the rest of the 12.88 acre site, which clearly includes the car parks. Whilst not presuming to anticipate any action or attitude on Tulloch's part, this does create a theoretical situation where they could potentially divert use of the car parks for development of their own. This in turn would leave the club without car parking, which would have been a major condition of the original 1994 planning agreement. There is a stark bottom line here going back almost two decades. By 2000, the club had built up a £2.3M debt and would very possibly... indeed probably.... have gone out of business but for the intervention of Tullochs who were the only game in town. Five years later they were playing SPL football, debt free, in an SPL compliant stadium in Inverness. Tullochs' various interventions played the overwhelming part in that massive transition so the reality is that people can complain as much as they like, but the FACT (which I state objectively) is that Inverness Caledonian Thistle benefited massively over several years from interventions by Tullochs and would probably not have survived, never mind enjoyed over a decade in the SPL, without them.

Maybe so but they have asked for a fresh start and, in my view, deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have a club shop fit for purpose after more than a decade with a portacabin, we have better and more regular communication and we now seem to be getting our act together on the pitch for the first time in a long time. A lot of work still to be done and still huge room for improvement but so far so good.

To celebrate the club's 7 Consecutive Clean Sheets Record, the club are giving £7 off ALL Replica Shirts (Home & Away) http://ictfc.com/shop/category/23-replica-kit

My tuppence worth... Turnover was about £3.7m - they haven't given a figure but we know what the drop from last year is, and what the drop from the previous year was. That was our lowest turnover since 2013-14. Budgeting for seventh isn't as crazy as it sounds. Firstly, there is a big leap between sixth and seventh in terms of prize money, income from post-split games etc (assuming one at home against Rangers or Celtic) compared to between seventh and tenth. Moreover, the nightmare scenario is relegation. Budgeting for seventh should get you a squad which at worse finishes tenth - in which case you run at a loss for the season, but its not a disaster by any means (Of course, we gave said budget to Richie Foran, which resulted in said nightmare scenario). Our footballing budget was £2.7m, the third highest in club history (but I assume a little bit lower than in Yogi's last season). Whilst I daresay that includes coaches, we don't have too many of them. Given that 20 players on £1k a week would give you an annual bill of just over £1m, it begs the question - what sort of stupid wages were we paying our players - particularly some of the complete duds?! That said, an oft-recommended ratio of playing staff wages/turnover is about 60% so we should have been close to that mark. The main worry is the prospect of being outwith the top flight beyond this year. Whilst the board seem to have got us sorted till the summer, obviously significant cuts will be required if we are still in the Championship next season (as is likely). That in turn will weaken the playing squad, and we are at risk of being stuck in a cycle where the longer we are out of the Premiership the harder it will be to get back.

We're giving FREE UK SHIPPING until midnight on Sunday (26th November) at ictfc.com/shop You can also still take advantage of the £7 Replica Shirt Discount ?

18th December isn't the greatest date for an AGM. Lots of folk are involved in lots of events in the week before Christmas and I, for one have already shelled out for a Christmas "do" on that evening. As with the CJT AGM, there is so little notice of the date that attendance will inevitably be affected. The distribution of formal papers is required to be done within defined timetables but those organising these meetings obviously know the date a good bit before they actually issue the formal paperwork, so why not just communicate the date earlier so that people who may wish to attend can put it into their diaries?

The interesting thing in the statement from my perspective was the bit about last year's playing budget being the 3rd highest in the club's history. I had understood from what Kenny had previously said that Foran had been given the same funding as Hughes had, minus the extra Hughes received on the back of the injury crisis. If true, Graham's statement means that either Foran did not receive the same initial budget as Hughes did in his last year, or that Hughes' budget in his final year was cut from the year before. Either way, this means that S_C's point above is even more pertinent because Foran was expected to match Hughes' league position with a reduced budget.

Impressed with the offer of free delivery but, unless they are going to the Hebrides, do we have to adopt the American terminology of 'shipping' or cite the dreadful US import of 'Black Friday' ?

Hopefully we will be in the Bught Park Stadium by 2020.