The New Raith Rovers Thread

[Dalziel8]

I see we have advertised for a General Manager for the community foundation. What’s the betting that Boyd is lined up for that job and Sim has put his foot in it by announcing he’s already at the club? 

[Michael W]

I thought he'd have slinked out after @Skyline Drifterposted, but he's gone and bunkered down.  

Jesus. 

[gav-ffc]

1 hour ago, Hank Scorpio said:

Take it back about Alegria actually, just had a look at the Falkirk thread and they’re pretty gutted. Maybe then? I dunno. 

The rumour is he’s back In Columbia and won’t be back in Scotland.

[TxRover]

41 minutes ago, Zen Archer (Raconteur) said:

I believe that's how cup draws work, or are you insinuating shenanigans?

I’d need to feel some balls to tell, but it smells…

 

[Skyline Drifter]

1 hour ago, RandomGuy. said:

My comment was more about the fact you can sign virtually any player tbh, the pool of players available abroad is now huge.

Scottish clubs need to be willing to exploit that and clubs who wont will fall behind

Your comment was ill informed nonsense. Based on something you've read, not from talking to the people actually involved.

For non EC players it might be marginally easier to get a work permit than it was before. I've no idea. In practice very few sides outside the Premiership have the slightest interest in signing players from outside Europe. That said, it still took Ayr United about 3 months to get one for David Bangala in the summer window.

For EC players it's 100% harder than it was before. End of story. EC players had the right to work in the UK automatically therefore you simply submitted their paperwork the same as if they were born in Glasgow and that was it, end of story. Now you can't. You need to become a sponsoring employer and go through Border Agency checks to get registered (and it costs a few thousand pounds too). And then you need to go through an appeals process for a work permit which is time consuming and will likely need an employment lawyer unless you are very sure of what you are doing.

The rest of us will quite happily continue to point out that it is MUCH more problematic to get a non UK or Irish player signed now than it ever was.

[Skyline Drifter]

1 hour ago, RandomGuy. said:

The only ones youve to wait weeks for would be ones you wouldnt have managed to get at all previously. 

Utter nonsense also. Bangala would have been cleared in 24 hours previously.

[RandomGuy.]

12 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

Your comment was ill informed nonsense. Based on something you've read, not from talking to the people actually involved.

Not really, but we can leave it here otherwise thisll just drag on forever. My only experience is with top flight deals so maybe theres a difference.

[RandomGuy.]

1 hour ago, bobbykdy said:

There are none you "wouldn't have managed to get at all previously" as the country they were moving from and to were both within the EU, no work permits were required and it was no more difficult than signing someone from here.

Ive never mentioned European players once. Those from outside are now plausible targets, which is why youre seeing Australia regularly plundered.

[Raith Against The Machine]

Finished the interview. I think the overwhelming takeaway is probably that nothing's really changed.

When the first story broke about the club seeking investment, accompanied with some vague notions of players being moved on, it set the cat amongst the pigeons and I think we were all left wondering what had suddenly created that situation mid-season. And it seems like the answer is... nothing. John Sim seems utterly unbothered about a lack of investment, in the same way that he has been for years. 

Ultimately, I suppose you've got two possible streams of "big" investment. Local businesspeople who are getting involved because they value the club and/or it's contribution to the community, or people from outside the local area who have some other motive. The former is, naturally, a very small and not often replenished pool, and the latter has to be assessed very, very carefully. 

It sounds like Steven MacDonald (more on him later) is constantly on the lookout for people in and around Kirkcaldy, as you'd expect, and the club is under a near-constant barrage of expressions of interest from groups abroad. Neither of those things have changed recently, and the parameters around those decisions haven't changed either. 

I think for the last couple of weeks, the worry has been that there's some catastrophe that's occurred behind the scenes which has meant that the threshold for investment had been lowered, allowing charlatans like Dellios a route into the club, but that doesn't appear to be the case. 

We can chalk the Silverbear stuff up to leaks from their end, I think that was pretty transparent as soon as it appeared on the BBC, but it doesn't explain why the first story went out about the club seeking investment. I can only assume that was a ploy to try and create some sort of leverage in those negotiations, but I can't really fathom the full thinking behind it. 

It seems, anyway, that we'll just continue to plod along. The manager's budget is what it is, and the maintenance budget is what it is. We'll hope for a Scottish Cup run and a playoff finish every few years to offset losses in the others. That's not exactly a genius strategy, but it's what we've been doing for the last 15 years and Sim doesn't seem particularly bothered. Certainly there's no indication that he's going to be pulling £150k out of next year's playing budget, or anything like that. 

There remains, however, most of the same questions about the bigger picture. John Sim continues to run a very fine line in disassociation. Everything seems to be down to the manager, the Chairman, or the board. He refers to things being under the chairman's remit during times when he was the chairman, without any recognition of that fact. It's maybe just his manner of speaking and I'm perhaps being a bit harsh, but I sat back a bit when he said "We need to do some succession planning". We? You hold all the cards, John. The framework for the ownership of Raith Rovers in one year, ten years, fifty years time is entirely within your gift. (Not to mention the fact that the Trust have been badgering Sim about succession planning for years now.) 

I've prattled on about this before, but I'm once again going to ask that someone sets out the clear roles and responsibilities within the senior hierarchy at the club. To take this Silverbear debacle as an example; Steven MacDonald is in the papers shrugging his shoulders giving it "these fellas seem like good eggs!" on a Tuesday and "Good job we're well shot of those bad guys!" on the Friday, all the while claiming he's barely spoken to them and it's all down to John Sim. Sim then does his interview the following Monday and claims the negotiations have been handled by MacDonald. We've got an owner who apparently funds everything but never gets involved in budgets, and no finance director despite apparently being desperate for one. We did have a Chief Executive who almost certainly is no longer employed, but we've got absolutely no word on what happened, when, or whether she'll be replaced. So who's picking up her responsibilities in the mean time? 

I understand the reticence when it comes to this side of things. You don't want to put up a statement that says "Steve's in charge of setting the budgets" because Steve's then going to get it in the neck when we lose £150,000 at the end of the year. But ultimately that accountability needs to be there. Your fanbase are your customers, and more pertinently on today's topic, your potential investors. They need to have faith that the club is in good hands, and is being well run. 

If Sim isn't involved day-to-day? Fine. If he is? Fine. But the lack of transparency doesn't help anyone. And I think that applies to the financial side too. To be fair, Sim was relatively open about costs in his interview, but I think he could've gone further. David himself says he's been picking through the publicly available accounts to try and glean what he can to inform his questions. The club (and it's web of constituent companies) can be more open and forthcoming about the realities of its budgets. It'd be helpful to get an executive summary once or twice a year, not just for those at the AGM(s) to say; here's where we are, high level, in terms of income versus our expectations, and in terms of expenditure. This is what came up unexpectedly and had to be dealt with, this is what we're anticipating soon. Sim himself mentioned the "excellent" statement that Morton put out at the start of the season explaining their current situation to their support. 

Particularly at this time of year, there's always a (somewhat tongue in cheek) lead in to questions like "Onto the thing the fans care about, what's the transfer window going to be like?" and while it's undoubtedly true that all fans care about the short-term transfer business and results on the park, there's also a significant number of supporters who care about the medium-to-long term future of the club, and want to be communicated to like adults. 

[Enigma]

4 hours ago, RandomGuy. said:

Its easier to sign foreign players in Scottish football than its ever been.

 

7 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Ive never mentioned European players once. Those from outside are now plausible targets, which is why youre seeing Australia regularly plundered.

Your original comment was “foreign players”. Don’t try to shift the goalposts. You’ve been utterly schooled here.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Enigma

[Skyline Drifter]

8 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Ive never mentioned European players once. Those from outside are now plausible targets, which is why youre seeing Australia regularly plundered.

So we can agree then that your original comment that it has never been easier to sign foreign nationals was nonsense and you were in fact referring to a very narrow area which few clubs outside the elite dozen or so have scope to exploit?

 

12 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Not really, but we can leave it here otherwise thisll just drag on forever. My only experience is with top flight deals so maybe theres a difference.

You know you're posting on a Championship forum right?

It's also still plainly not true that it is easier to employ foreigners even in the Premiership. There used to be no process at all for the majority of foreigners. Now there is. Inherently it's nonsense to claim some process is easier than no process.

[CountryBumpkin]

Pre match video for Cove is up, sound quality seems awful, but from the sounds of it, might have some players back others out injured and I think we also recalled Arnott, maybe misheard.

[RandomGuy.]

8 minutes ago, Enigma said:

Your original comment was “foreign players”. Don’t try to shift the goalposts. You’ve been utterly schooled here.

What?

Foreign players are foreign players, the market is now far larger for them and ones you couldnt sign before you can now.

3 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

So we can agree then that your original comment that it has never been easier to sign foreign nationals was nonsense and you were in fact referring to a very narrow area which few clubs outside the elite dozen or so have scope to exploit?

 

You know you're posting on a Championship forum right?

It's also still plainly not true that it is easier to employ foreigners even in the Premiership. There used to be no process at all for the majority of foreigners. Now there is. Inherently it's nonsense to claim some process is easier than no process.

My experience is that the range of players available to sign is far larger than it was, so its easier to sign foreign players as the "scope" of quality you can bring in is larger. Clubs can look at lower standard players now as plausible options rather than having to look for ones to fit the narrow permit criteria. Online scouting + virtually no chance of permit refusal means clubs can now sign players from virtually anywhere on the planet, and with restrictions in England being harsher, theres also less competition.

Im well aware of how long the process takes considering Saints had a player last year take about a month to get approved. That wasnt the point i was making at all.

[Raith Against The Machine]

Can't believe I wrote an 8,000 word essay and I'm still not the most boring b*****d on the page. 

[Skyline Drifter]

12 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

What?

Foreign players are foreign players, the market is now far larger for them and ones you couldnt sign before you can now.

My experience is that the range of players available to sign is far larger than it was, so its easier to sign foreign players as the "scope" of quality you can bring in is larger. Clubs can look at lower standard players now as plausible options rather than having to look for ones to fit the narrow permit criteria. Online scouting + virtually no chance of permit refusal means clubs can now sign players from virtually anywhere on the planet, and with restrictions in England being harsher, theres also less competition.

Im well aware of how long the process takes considering Saints had a player last year take about a month to get approved. That wasnt the point i was making at all.

Is English not your first language?  I don't think you understand what the word "easier" means.

There may be a wider scope for signings, that's not remotely the same thing.

[Enigma]

41 minutes ago, Against The Machine said:

Finished the interview. I think the overwhelming takeaway is probably that nothing's really changed.

The one encouraging thing for me which does seem to have changed, is his attitude to and acknowledgment that there needs to be a succession plan, clearly Raith Rovers isn’t a mess he wants to leave for his wife to deal with. As Sim says, he’s only the present custodian.

The issue, as always, is who does succeed him. Clearly there are a variety of reasons putting potential willing board members and/or investors who are supporters off. Sim mentions that while he’s had discussions with the Trust, there’s no plan, nothing to rally around. That leaves the outside investor route.

Plenty of thoughts about the rest of the interview which I might posit later but I tend to take a lot of what Sim says with a pinch of salt. He’s contradicted things he’s previously said and not answers or fully answered everything out to him. I don’t think he’s dishonest, per se, but I’m a bit unsure about whether we always get the full truth from John Sim.

 

Edited January 12, 2023 by Enigma

[Been going too long]

35 minutes ago, CountryBumpkin said:

Pre match video for Cove is up, sound quality seems awful, but from the sounds of it, might have some players back others out injured and I think we also recalled Arnott, maybe misheard.

I thought that as well about arnott  when I watched the interview 

[RandomGuy.]

8 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:

Is English not your first language?  I don't think you understand what the word "easier" means.

There may be a wider scope for signings, that's not remotely the same thing.

Its easier to get foreign players at your club because there's more to pick from.

Getting an apple is easier if youre competing against 10 folk for 100 apples rather than 100 folk for 10 apples.

Instead of clubs looking solely for European players and competing against English sides, they can now get players from all over the planet that English clubs cant.

I'll walk here though, aware ill now get the pish ripped out me, as youre clearly not grasping my point and i cant be arsed with this since youve decided to throw insults about. Im not getting involved in that.

[Enigma]

18 minutes ago, Enigma said:

That leaves the outside investor route.

One thing I will add is he seemed against the possibility of handing things over to a third party to sell the club for him, which sounds like a frankly terrifying prospect.

And another thing which concerns me is that we’re clearly struggling for numbers/skills in the boardroom. Though I’m not sure if that’s anything new. We’ve been in need of fresh ideas for some time.
 

Edited January 12, 2023 by Enigma

[Enigma]

7 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Getting an apple is easier if youre competing against 10 folk for 100 apples rather than 100 folk for 10 apples.

Getting and apple is harder even with the choice of 100 apples when you have to fill out a form to apply for an apple and need a lawyer to advise you on how to fill out the form for an apple than if you have a apple tree in your garden.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Enigma