Charles Bannerman

Good post Bridge Ender. Something left over? That will become apparent when the accounts appear towards the end of the year. As I recollect, of that plethora of windfalls that came 1-2 years ago, some fell into financial year 14-15 and others into 15-16 which ended on May 31st and will be detailed before the AGM. On the other hand, given that windfalls are neither regular nor foreseeable, you could see some sense in a policy of keeping something back for a rainy day - especially if, as has been correctly remarked, there is now a distinct shortage of assets to sell off. Shareholder dividends? Correct! Not a chance! A "fans' players fund"? What would that involve? I can only infer that it's a fund that fans contribute to in order to increase the player budget. If this is the case, then isn't there something of a paradox between tickets being criticised as too expensive on the one hand and fans voluntarily contributing their cash to this fund on the other. Why not just put ticket prices up? (Rhetorical question in case any of the usual suspects are tempted into yet another rant about the press not having to pay.) Also, is there not something just a bit ironic about the ordinary man in the street voluntarily contributing to a fund and hence taking a hit to their own living standards so that footballers can be paid sums which are - even at Inverness - well above what the vast majority of the population earns? Once again we return to this notion of footballers being paid well above what their ability and market forces would otherwise determine.

Thank goodness for someone who, despite limited available information, understands the fundamentals of ICT finances - that regular income streams fail to fund even basic operation and that the windfalls that HC refers to are required on a regular basis to balance the books. It's also a bit worrying that, with the social club sold to fill the last gap in windfall revenue, it's perhaps not clear how the next one is going to be covered.

Harry, I see what you are trying to say, but what I have been responding to is your reference to "the club's refusal to put money into the team". What I have been saying is that the money has simply not been there to do this. That is indisputable and you cannot "refuse" to put in money you don't have. You, meanwhile, are offering a possible reason for the lack of money relating to contract lengths which is a different issue. While what you say may or may not be the case, it doesn't describe a situation of "refusal" to put money into the team. One important concern here is that we don't know in any detail what factors the board have had to take into account in the process of establishing financial and signing strategies. Even the club accounts aren't required to reveal very much at all and don't, for instance, give a separate figure for the global player wage bill. (On mention of "global"... I see that reports today begin to lift the lid on the magnitude of Ross County's financial backing.) Returning to ICT, yes there is a need for more productive income streams and the one that I hear most frequently mentioned - amid concerns that the Kingsmills Suite is hugely under employed Saturday pre-match - is hospitality. Anyway... I digress. One fairly recurring feature of football seems to be criticism of decisions taken on the basis of very limited knowledge of the real situation and certainly much less than those who made the decisions. In the case in point, financial strategies are being criticised despite virtually no knowledge of the prevailing conditions. Similarly managers' tactics, substitutions, team selections etc come equally under fire despite the critics having no knowledge whatsoever of a whole raft of behind the scenes factors. And then there's the absolute incompetence of any referee compared with any fan in the back row of the stand 80 yards away. But to return to matters financial, I think it's unlikely that Inverness Caledonian Thistle would have done what it has since 1994 on very limited resources if it had been such a victim of financial mismanagement.

I think the Ballistic link I was thinking about was actually the 5-1 defeats that season by Morton and Airdrie. I also don't think you can exclude games because of allegedly extenuating circumstances like breakaway goals or end of season. Bad is bad and same division encounters aren't exempt either. If players consciously failed to acknowledge fans who had travelled to a central belt modweek game, and had not ben hostile towards them at full time, then I would be concerned at that.

I've just Googled that one. 1-0 Ayr August 2011. It's the last time Caley Thistle played Ayr. The time before that was in April 2010 when nothing at all was going wrong and it was 7-0 ICT.

No it's not. It's living in cloud cuckoo land. How often does it need to be explained that the money simply isn't there - and if it was, it would indeed be prudently spent on the playing squad? You can't spend money you don't have and if you try to do so, you will soon go the way of Dundee, Motherwell, Rangers, Livingston etc. For the last 16 years the directors of Caley Thistle have - mercifully - been very aware of The Micawber Principle (as stated in Dickens' David Copperfield) and have at least ALMOST been able to put it into practice. "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." But for the board's long term efforts to live by that principle, Caley Thistle would have long since gone the way it very nearly did in 1999-2000. I just don't understand how some fail to grasp the concept that you just can't go into the player market with closed eyes and open cheque book. You need to live within your means and if you don't you will soon head for the lower leagues or worse. It's a minor miracle that, with the income streams that have been available, Caley Thistle has been able to field a team which has done what it has. To have maintained an almost unbroken SPL/Premiership presence since 2004 on the kind of resources we are talking about is an incredible feat and you just have to laugh at these suggestions that they should just go and spend their way out of any problem. Look at it an alternative way - if you want to be entertained by better players than the club's finances can currently afford, how much more would you be prepared to pay for tickets in order to obtain the improved product? I've already said elsewhere that the cost of running the club under its present, prudent regime is around £44 per bum on seat. Tuesday night the worst result ever? I don't think so. Off the top of my head I could think of a League Cup defeat - at home - by Queens Park, a 5-1 defeat - at home - by Ross County, a 4-0 humiliation - at home - by Forfar at the end of D3 championship season and a complete stinker off the back of the Ballistic night, the details of which I forget. There are doubtless more. Finally... those who have swung from the "Foran is Messiah" euphoria of the Dundee United and Arbroath outcomes and performances to the "Foran is the Devil Incarnate" doom and despair of Partick Thistle and Alloa should either acquire a sense of balance and proportion or a source of lithium!

A conclusion you are presumably able to arrive at as a result of being less naïve than the manager?

Do you not think they are already doing that, and have been for years, with every penny they can safely get?

I knew it! I should never have referred even indirectly to the scenario which preceded Inverness football attendances rising sixfold, despite the "But there's loads of boys at my work......" kind of line from the Flat Earthers!

I think this is simply Dougal's latest pathetic attempt to suggest that Inverness people don't support Caley Thistle because they are grossly offended in their tens of thousands at what no more than 250 ever voted against - quarter of a century ago. On the other hand his pronouncements are so ridiculous that you have to think that he's just a long term wind up!

Fans who complain that ticket prices are too high are absolutely right. In terms of how much of their earnings people have to pay for an hour and a half's entertainment, they indeed are. The problem is that the football market is so contrived and artificial that wage costs substantially outstrip what any sensible market should dictate. Look at this back of an envelope calculation for ICT. Operating costs - around £4 million. Attendances - well, without rigorously researching numbers, let's say 19 home games at ballpark average 3700, that's 70,000. Add in home and away cup revenue share equivalent to, say a quite generous 20,000 (very variable) and you get a total of 90,000 paying customers in a season. Your £4 million costs - the biggest component of which is players' wages - divided by your 90,000 bums on seats then comes out at a cost of about £44 per spectator view. That's beginning to make £30 look quite cheap, but of course these costs are subsidised (I thought I would just use that word to see if I can annoy Dougal) by the likes of TV revenues, sponsorship and the commercial activities in which clubs engage to ensure that, against that £44, the likes of £30 is an exceptional maximum and the going rate is a good deal lower.

The concern there, as reflected in 12th Man's observation half a dozen posts ago, is that some club brandings are ultimately subject to that fancy dress pantomime which is the Lord Lyon King Of Arms. I don't know how ICT would fare here but Ayr United and Airdrie have certainly suffered and Ross County's shield looks alarmingly heraldic as well. It's a complete nonsense that public money and legal authority should be afforded to this 400 year old farce which goes back to "In days of old when knights were bold...." I mean to say, in this modern day and age what you can and can't have on your football club badge is still subject to a bunch of old buffers straight out of a comic opera chuntering away with stuff like "per Fess Azure and Or over all a Bar Gules in the Chief a demi-Eagle Sable displayed addextré of the Sun-in-splendour and senestré of a Crescent Argent in the Base seven Towers three and four Gules." This bunch of comedians even have their own Procurator Fiscal to enforce this nonsense! Give me strength!

Season ticket sales is a figure which tends not to be very readily available!

No point. It's been sold out for years.

OK, I'll amend that very slightly. From what OCG says, it seems that a half time tea and pie - presumably served by other women - was OK.... or possibly part of an obligation to entertain all committee members of visiting clubs. But women, since they were banned from being members of Inverness Thistle FC, were also banned from attending meetings there in which Inverness Thistle FC were involved. I learned that from a conversation I had with INE's CEO Fiona Larg when I was writing Against All Odds. Fiona was INE's lead merger negotiator but told me she had to hand over to her Chairman Norman Cordiner when it came to meetings at Kingsmills because she wasn't allowed to attend. These meetings included one particularly fraught night of shuttle diplomacy on which the whole thing could easily have foundered. Before completing the final draft of the book, I checked this with Thistle sources who confirmed the story which was also not contradicted by any of the Thistle representatives on the ICT Board who all read the entire manuscript before publication. The tale is to be found on P40. Indeed the only thing in the book that anyone did query was when I referred to Ian Fraser, who had recently bought £300K+ of shares which are now owned by the Hospice, as "Coffin John". Someone told me "You can't call him that because down here we call him 'sir'!" It didn't take long for things to change there.

Ten4 - I really love the Highland League and am very disappointed to see it go the way it is. Indeed much of the feedback I am getting on this is from Highland League people - former players, managers etc - who are completely dismayed not only at what players are now getting for doing very little but also at the frequent lack of commitment to the clubs that pay them this silly money. A good friend of mine played for Caley in the late 60s for £3 17s 6d a week with negligible signing on fees at a time when HL standards were very probably a lot higher. Index linked to now, that comes to under £50 a week. As I said above, nowadays it's often thousands to sign and hundreds a week to play in front of much smaller crowds. Too many Highland League clubs have become the personal vanity projects of local businessmen who fail to realise that they are big(gish) fish in a pretty small pond. I think the demise of Nairn's Narden arrangement - which was also, usually in private, widely criticised when it was in operation - has opened a whole can of worms with respect to the lack of value for money that a lot of Highland League players are showing. It's also perhaps worth observing that if, even at the low prices quoted, attendances are as low as they are, then the quality of the product can't be all that high.

Sounds about right, though, for a club which, to the very end, banned women from entering its boardroom Seriously, though, the points made there are bang on. If it's costing £4M to run a club, then it has to get that money from somewhere and gate receipts are an important part of this. It's quite clear that ticket prices have to be set at the point on the elasticity of demand curve which maximises income. The difficulty is that players' wage expectations are such that it's difficult for most clubs to make ends meet. Take ICT. The ballpark attendance is maybe 3000 odd, depending on opponents, and prices probably maximises income. Drop the ticket price and attendance won't rise in proportion. Increase the price and gates will fall more than in proportion. Meanwhile the ballpark, possibly quite variable, player wage is believed to be around £1000 a week. This begs questions. Are players who can only attract 3000-odd fans worth £1000 a week? Is that wage level artificially inflated by the football environment in which it exists, thus creating a false market? I suggest that the answers there are No... and Yes. Football is operating the economics of the madhouse where TV reveneues and billionaires with more money than sense are distorting the market at the very top and this is working right down through the system, helped on its way by benefactors such as at Dundee United, Ross County, Rangers etc who - for their own reasons - choose to donate money so that expenditure can well exceed real revenue. To be fair ICT,although quite far down that list, has also had episodes of this over the years - eg Ian Fraser, Tullochs and the more recent Muirfield Mills investment. Between one thing and another, the game has created an artificial situation where players are paid hugely above their realistic market value. For instance, that £1000 a week is well, well above the average working wage and you do have to question whether it can be justified for a 25 hour week which includes playing in front of 3000 people in the top tier of a very poor national set up. But since everybody else is offering similarly inflated sums, clubs have to stretch every financial sinew they have - which includes raising ticket prices to the very limit of the income they can generate. One of the biggest absurdities is the Highland League where Nairn's recent, highly publicised abandonment by their sponsors has really got people talking about - and frequently criticising - HL wage levels. Let's be realistic. The HL is the fifth tier of, as I've said, a poor national set up. Skill levels are pretty low, fitness levels even lower. With all due respect to them, they are by and large not very good, and hugely inferior to many other local performers in other sports. They train - often reluctantly - just twice a week and play in front of crowds in the lower end of the three figure bracket. But there are not a few HL clubs paying signing on fees well into the thousands in addition to hundreds of pounds a week in wages. These remuneration levels are totally nonsensical - even before you consider that there are world class performers in Rio who are actually out of pocket getting where they have.

Precisely - but whoever came up with that story would like us to think that in this case it does.

You mean they will be some of the time!

The photo caption says - "Homes near Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s stadium have almost doubled in value over 10 years". OK, so the price of caravans has gone up because these are the only "homes" remotely close to the Caledonian Stadium. (DD posted his reply as I was typing mine.) Quite frankly, I think that story is a lot of hot air and probably placed as a press release by vested interests in the housing market in order to generate publicity. There is absolutely no evidence of any cause and effect relationship and indeed the Inverness scenario is quite good evidence for the lack of one. They are claiming that the biggest effect is around the Caledonian Satdium but on the other hand it has conspicuously few houses near it compared with other Scottish grounds. There is therefore more evidence there of the reverse correlation. Also, if there was a cause and effect relationship present, then it would presumably be at least in part a result of fans wanting to live near the ground for access purposes. However ICT has almost the smallest fan base in the Premiership, but yet the "effect" is said to be the greatest, so again an apparently negative correlation. This assertion is also counter-intuitive since immediate proximity to a place where you get thousands of sometimes noisy and unruly people passing your front window on a fortnightly basis would more sensibly be a factor which would depress rather than inflate house prices. Equally counter-intuitive are the contrasting figures presented for Ibrox and Celtic Park in the darkest East End. Commonwealth Games housing development is far more likely to be a factor in the latter case. It would also appear that this is simply a postcode lottery since it's postcode on which the assertion seems to be based. So between one thing and another, I think this is a complete red herring based at best on coincidence which has in treality nothing at all to do with the presence of as football ground.

Ditto.

A certain irony factor sometimes operates when you read people's pre-match posts post-match.

..... on ICT's budget????

Midfield or up front? When did Swift sign?

I agree. His best chance of winding up Rangers supporters is not to rate them as title contenders and instead back the other side which is, literally, like a red rag to a bull to them - Aberdeen.