New ownership


RandomGuy
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Geoff Brown admits he wants to move the club on, just days after Steve Brown says he wont be handing the club to his children. Geoff also says he doesnt believe fan ownership would be successful for us.

Steve Brown said he didnt want to spend 25 years in charge, and is already up to 8.

Its feeling like the Browns spell in charge is about over.

Anyone any idea how the next step will go?

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When I read that, I just think that Ali McCann's days in a Saints shirt are numbered. Broons will be desperate to cash in  rather than holding out for the best price or even <whisper it> holding on to our best players in an attempt to get more silverware. I understand that they have the sustainability of the club at heart and that Saints has to be run as a business but as a fan thats not what gets me excited (even though I am proud that the club is run much more ethically than many others).

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These comments also destroy our edge in any negotiations. 

We’re going to constantly get low balled from your QPR’s, Birmingham’s etc with this position as it makes us sound desperate. 

While Motherwell are pulling in a couple of Mil from players that aren’t even playing every week. 
 

If wage inflation down south carry a knock on effect up here, we just need to price our players at the same level as they do. 

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40 minutes ago, RandomGuy said:

Geoff Brown admits he wants to move the club on, just days after Steve Brown says he wont be handing the club to his children. Geoff also says he doesnt believe fan ownership would be successful for us.

Steve Brown said he didnt want to spend 25 years in charge, and is already up to 8.

Its feeling like the Browns spell in charge is about over.

Anyone any idea how the next step will go?

More pointless conjecture! How about spending your energy on some thing positive about our forethcoming game instead of continual negativity surrounding something none of us can control. When the time comes for change we'll know soon enough.

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Isn't it time that we started to talk about a possible takeover from the community in the form of fan ownership? Plenty of people on here are vocal enough about all the wrongs at the club and how we should be keeping our best players/pushing the boat out/keeping 2 stands against the OF/improving fan relations/showing more ambition etc. but how many would be willing to invest the time to properly understand the runnings of the club and help to create a sustainable future? It's a model that's growing in popularity and I don't see why it shouldn't work for Saints. 

I understand that this is a bit of a biased article but still points to some of the advantages of fan ownership: http://www.scottishsupporters.net/fan-representation/fan-ownership-in-scotland/

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I have always been a big admirer of the way The Brown's have run our club since Geoff stepped in back in the 80's. Saints fans have enjoyed some fantastic moments over the past 30 or so years and whilst Managers and Players have obviously contributed greatly to this period I feel the most significant factor in this hugely successful spell in the clubs history is conduct of the owners. It is starting to sound like the Brown Ownership is coming to an end and they will be a very hard act to follow. I must say I am a bit disappointed and slightly perplexed by some of recent stuff in the media coming from S Brown and I feel he is perfectly entitled to his feelings but it would have been better to keep those thoughts private and I do not really know what he is achieving by making these thoughts public at the present time. Some interesting times may lie ahead !! .

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Just an observation , Steve Brown has been heavily criticed in the past for not letting fans in on what's happening within the Club and the minute he lets folk know the position , once again he is heavily criticised.

Just saying.

Edited by HOODLUM65
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1 hour ago, SaintJet said:

More pointless conjecture! How about spending your energy on some thing positive about our forethcoming game instead of continual negativity surrounding something none of us can control. When the time comes for change we'll know soon enough.

Is that directed at the Brown's or Randomguy? The Brown's make cagey seem like a bolt of positive energy, never mind random. 

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21 minutes ago, HOODLUM65 said:

Just an observation , Steve Brown has been heavily criticed in the past for not letting fans in on what's happening within the Club and the minute he lets folk know the position , once again he is heavily criticised.

Just saying.

This is not the way to do it though.

They have a database of email and address details, they have match day programs, they have fans forums - anything other than bleating to the press would do. I would much prefer he just shut up though.

The pair of them wonder why there is such negativity around the club at times? They only need to read one of their interviews from 2017 on wards. Cup wins don't make Steve happy and getting into Europe drives him even deeper into despair. It seems to be an awful ending to what should be a massively positive story. 

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It’s the nature of the beast, I wouldn’t read too much in to it at this stage. To business men it will always be a business, we as fans can afford to be more whimsical about the club.

Just think we should live more in the moment, how many times do ‘star’ players move on, only to be replaced by another ‘star’ player.. enjoy what’s on the park rather than what’s going on behind the scenes... we can hardly criticise the chairman being negative when we are just as bad ourselves... 

COYS :razz:

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8 minutes ago, Wendy Saints said:

It’s the nature of the beast, I wouldn’t read too much in to it at this stage. To business men it will always be a business, we as fans can afford to be more whimsical about the club.

Just think we should live more in the moment, how many times do ‘star’ players move on, only to be replaced by another ‘star’ player.. enjoy what’s on the park rather than what’s going on behind the scenes... we can hardly criticise the chairman being negative when we are just as bad ourselves... 

COYS :razz:

Perfectly summed up.

Why would we want to make a big issue of this when forthe first time this season we have something positive to focus on - our team playing well!

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59 minutes ago, Wendy Saints said:

It’s the nature of the beast, I wouldn’t read too much in to it at this stage. To business men it will always be a business, we as fans can afford to be more whimsical about the club.

Just think we should live more in the moment, how many times do ‘star’ players move on, only to be replaced by another ‘star’ player.. enjoy what’s on the park rather than what’s going on behind the scenes... we can hardly criticise the chairman being negative when we are just as bad ourselves... 

COYS :razz:

It would have been great if it had been kept behind the scenes frankly. 

  

36 minutes ago, SaintJet said:

Perfectly summed up.

Why would we want to make a big issue of this when forthe first time this season we have something positive to focus on - our team playing well!

We aren't the ones making the big deal of this - the owner and chairman are.

Edited by garydavidson
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To be honest, Geoff Brown comes out with something along these lines every three or four years, so it's not as if this is something new. Of course though he won't be around forever, so at some point something has to change. Personally I've always been a bit sceptical of fan ownership - I'd much rather have someone at the top who is a shrewd businessman with football at heart, than a committee of fans. Under fan ownership we probably would have sacked Tommy Wright a couple of months ago. Frankly, the long term future of Saints without the Browns at the helm worries me.

What annoys me though is this line that both Browns keep bringing out about the fanbase not going up after the Scottish Cup win. I know this has been covered lots of times on here, but the club's failure to capitalise on the feel-good factor around that day was an absolute travesty. They have no idea who bought tickets for that match, so can't reach out to any of them. I've never received a single letter or email from Saints to try to promote anything to me. They dragged their heels on getting season ticket forms out during that summer, and by the time they did, the moment had passed. And instead of doing everything they could to get fans excited for the coming season, they went silent on their online channels for weeks and Steve Brown used his platform - as usual - to moan about money and publicly argue with the manager (remember the whole saga around getting David Goodwillie in as a trialist and then claiming he was never a target?). And now Steve Brown is doing the same thing again: waiting for a moment when things are looking really positive and he should be talking the club up, but instead moping about finances and bringing everyone's mood down. It's truly infuriating at times.

 

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2 hours ago, HOODLUM65 said:

Just an observation , Steve Brown has been heavily criticed in the past for not letting fans in on what's happening within the Club and the minute he lets folk know the position , once again he is heavily criticised.

Just saying.

Why does he focus on all the negatives and not on the positives?

He says we've got a top 8, then top 6 budget, he doesn't even know himself. We all know why we have over spent this season, there are several top earners who won't leave. There's no need for him to come out with it.

We have several young stars in the making, why not promote that rather than the doom and gloom shite?

He again puts the boot into the fans, nice one Steve, good way to entice them back.

He goes on about budgeting for a cup run and top 6. We are in the last 8 of the cup Steve you moron, also with an outside chance of reaching top 6. Doom and gloom is really going to entice the fans to come out and the players to go for it against Celtic. 

In summary, Steve you're a fanny, shut your mouth until you can say something positive, you're helping nobody.

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25 minutes ago, Havana Saint said:

His comments regarding fan numbers in spite of huge success are absolutely spot on.

It also ignores that the club got the details of 15,000 supporters, and had about half that turn up to a club hosted event the next day, and didnt store any contact details, didnt hand out any season ticket pamphlets, and didnt even have the prices out for season tickets at that point.

They, still, don't contact people who havent renewed their season tickets. I buy online tickets for most games, and previously had a season ticket, and I'm still not on a database, I sign up for "offers/promotions" through email when I buy tickets, and not once, even when half season tickets were being advertised, have I recieved a single email from the club.

The fans havent turned up as much as they should, too many clearly cant be bothered and make the weakest excuses up, but the club are wide of the mark if they think they're blameless.

Edited by RandomGuy
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10 hours ago, HOODLUM65 said:

Just an observation , Steve Brown has been heavily criticed in the past for not letting fans in on what's happening within the Club and the minute he lets folk know the position , once again he is heavily criticised.

Just saying.

Mr hoodlum with his finger on the pulse  !

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16 hours ago, RandomGuy said:

It also ignores that the club got the details of 15,000 supporters, and had about half that turn up to a club hosted event the next day, and didnt store any contact details, didnt hand out any season ticket pamphlets, and didnt even have the prices out for season tickets at that point.

They, still, don't contact people who havent renewed their season tickets. I buy online tickets for most games, and previously had a season ticket, and I'm still not on a database, I sign up for "offers/promotions" through email when I buy tickets, and not once, even when half season tickets were being advertised, have I recieved a single email from the club.

The fans havent turned up as much as they should, too many clearly cant be bothered and make the weakest excuses up, but the club are wide of the mark if they think they're blameless.

They did actually personally phone a large number of these 15000 to see if they would be interested in a season ticket etc. I know this as my brother was one of those that Roddy contacted.

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1 hour ago, mainstand said:

They did actually personally phone a large number of these 15000 to see if they would be interested in a season ticket etc. I know this as my brother was one of those that Roddy contacted.

I highly doubt it was 'a large number'. It took them so long to get season ticket packages together that they won't have had time to make a dent in the 15,000.

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1 hour ago, mainstand said:

They did actually personally phone a large number of these 15000 to see if they would be interested in a season ticket etc. I know this as my brother was one of those that Roddy contacted.

That's great, but phoning 15,000 people is unrealistic, time consuming, and probably has little impact (and a lot of people these days won't even answer their phone if it's a call from an unknown number). They should be reaching out to those people digitally with regular newsletters, promotions, special offers etc, just like loads of other clubs do (sometimes I feel like I get communication from practically every club I've ever bought a ticket from, except Saints). I know that there's apparently an email that gets sent out to season ticket holders, but those people are already nailed-down paying customers - what about everyone else? The fact that the Browns believe they have "tried everything" is actually pretty worrying because it really shows how closed off they have become to new ideas and to the methods clubs use to market themselves in 2020. I really hope this is something Kirsten Robertson might address - only time will tell.

Of course there is one other point which rarely gets mentioned amid all this, which is that Saints matches (and Scottish Premiership matches in general) are now just way too expensive for a lot of people to regularly go to, and really that's what's at the heart of attendances being disappointing. I know the club is stuck between a rock and a hard place with its pricing structure, but really, if the Browns can moan about spending too much money and costs escalating to a worrying level, then so can we as fans. The club tries to live within its means and only spend what it can afford, and at the end of the day so do most of us. At £24 a ticket for Saints v Hamilton, is it really a surprise that attendances aren't brilliant?

 

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25 minutes ago, blueheaven said:

That's great, but phoning 15,000 people is unrealistic, time consuming, and probably has little impact (and a lot of people these days won't even answer their phone if it's a call from an unknown number). They should be reaching out to those people digitally with regular newsletters, promotions, special offers etc, just like loads of other clubs do (sometimes I feel like I get communication from practically every club I've ever bought a ticket from, except Saints). I know that there's apparently an email that gets sent out to season ticket holders, but those people are already nailed-down paying customers - what about everyone else? The fact that the Browns believe they have "tried everything" is actually pretty worrying because it really shows how closed off they have become to new ideas and to the methods clubs use to market themselves in 2020. I really hope this is something Kirsten Robertson might address - only time will tell.

Of course there is one other point which rarely gets mentioned amid all this, which is that Saints matches (and Scottish Premiership matches in general) are now just way too expensive for a lot of people to regularly go to, and really that's what's at the heart of attendances being disappointing. I know the club is stuck between a rock and a hard place with its pricing structure, but really, if the Browns can moan about spending too much money and costs escalating to a worrying level, then so can we as fans. The club tries to live within its means and only spend what it can afford, and at the end of the day so do most of us. At £24 a ticket for Saints v Hamilton, is it really a surprise that attendances aren't brilliant?

 

Agree 100%. 
 

I was down in Watford for a weekend 2 years ago, I registered for their site to see if it was possible to get a ticket. 
 

I still get regular emails from them. 
 

They leave a lot to be desired when it comes to marketing. 
 

A huge number of locals and away fans STILL dont know we let kids in free. 

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One thing I'd like to have seen us capitalise on was the 25th anniversary (very soon to be the 30th anniversary) of The Airdrie Game.

This is something a lot of us of a certain generation would have probably enjoyed. Maybe even just ensuring the surviving players are in or about McDiarmid for the Hamilton home fixture which is near the actual date? A showing of the match day footage in a lounge with some of the players would have been good. Mark Treanor told me he had watched it a few years back.

 

 

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