And I'll add - I've got many years of experience in project management and know for a fact that it can take years before any given business - public or private - decides to go ahead with a construction project (which are a fraction of the cost of the 150 million or so being bounded about for the redevelopment),so to wait two years seems reasonable in my mind. I mean - it's a project worth well over 100 million pounds - if they/we fuck up on this then we'll be put back for the next ten-twenty years paying it off. Someone please tell me if I'm wrong here, after all, I've personally never spent over 100 million quid on a stadium before (though there are some .
Oh, and a quick question - people talk about FSG H&G etc etc making money out of the football club - can anyone tell me if Mr Robinson ever made any money out of LFC? Did he pump it all back into shankly's team?
But maybe that's a conversation for another day in another thread.
On the first point - exactly what anyone with any knowledge of development would know and understand. We've got one new project on site in Lndin that we first started working on in 2005. It's been put on hold twice due to changing circumstances including the 2008 recession. Just one a competition to. Work on another building - feasibility starts this month but we don't expect to start on site until 2015.
And on the second - until 1992 the Football Association prevented directors of clubs taking dividends - all profiles went back into the club. From an article by David Conn:
In 1892, the FA permitted Preston North End, football’s first great power, to convert itself from a members’ club into a limited company. Preston had, years earlier, been the first to break the rules against professionalism, paying good players from Scotland to come to the club at a time when paying players was still illicit. The club’s application to form a company was partly to raise new money, partly to limit its members’ personal liability for the increased operating expenses. The FA decreed in 1892 that a club could make itself into a company, but that dividends to shareholders must be restricted. Here was the basis for football’s future development: the clubs became businesses, which could pay players, build grounds, charge supporters for entry, and form themselves into companies. But the FA insisted they remain clubs in their culture. The supporter’s gut feeling that the club is a collective endeavour, an organisation he belongs to, not a company seeking profit for shareholders, was embedded in the regulations. Rule 34, requiring football club-companies to be run essentially as non-profit organisations, with their directors serving as ‘custodians’, was in the FA handbook until the late 1990s.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n16/david-conn/follow-the-money
