THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

The motivations of PW are interesting to me. I should start that the following is all qualified without a shred of evidence.

I truly believe PW started this all off with the correct motivations. The process was highly unorthodox and far far from guaranteed to be successful and must have cost him a good deal of time and money to get to the point where the 3 man commission gave the green light.

After that like an excitable puppy he got a bit carried away with building a stadium we would never need and for getting to get a training ground sorted. All errors but forgivable at the time.

At some point, something changed and the dawning realisation of how hard football club ownership is hit. Personally I think it was the promotion to the championship. The shock of understanding the financial power required just to stay there coupled with a fanbase that stubbornly refused to grow at the rate expected. I think that changed everything which led to where we are today. The disengagement with the fans, from all I can see the abandonment of any real plans to build a training facility and the advancement of the entertainment sude if the business. For many years, the misguided pursuit of a Cat 1 compliant piece of land was the delay but surely that dream died many years ago and here we are , in L2, with no proper training facility closing parts of the ground we were never going to fill to save money/look good on camera/build atmosphere/ whatever else half arsed reason you choose to believe.

It’s beyond recovery for Winkelman I believe and that scares me a bit as I can’t even begin to understand whats next? A disengaged owner, starting to make losses in the funding infrastructure with no obvious route to disposal.

The fact we are almost 20 years as MK Dons and still without a Training Ground should tell you everything you need to know about Pete and what he thinks of MK Dons.

The hardest thing to read are these easy to solve for things that have a massive impact on fans. Netting over seats that have been bought, a programme that is a handful of pages of adverts, the ugly sight of seeing the club platinum/ gold crowd happily sitting in your stand in a game where you have been booted out of your seats, a club shop that sells a rack of football shirts and a couple of castore caps and nothing else.
On the field- a playing squad who don’t have a training ground and wait for a text in the morning to see what park they can kick about at is a shambles. Our defence is dreadful but maybe they would be a bit better if you just neutralised the nonsense of where to train , get them into better habits on the training pitch instead of spending the morning driving around Milton Keynes in a borrowed Suzuki looking for where they are training today.

Assuming we have 5 million ish coming in the door for selling max dean and a sell on fee for Matt o Riley , we should get the training ground done and sorted before we do anything else.

It's a good post from Dan. The only issue I have with it being that he thinks he has any friends at all. Let alone four.

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For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.

We should have seen it coming when the Castore deal was done, it's the biggest F**k You to the fans for a long time. Pete needs calling out for sorting that deal.

That is incredibly optimistic we have half the sell on fee for O'Riley (half goes to Fulham) and L2 strikers don't sell for multimillions

PW checked-out on the football side some time ago IMO. I’m convinced his strategy is ‘just enough’ on the football side to promote his music and hospitality businesses. He now has a strangle hold on the music side in MK so all that side is looking good for him. He still needs to fully monetise and exploit it.

I think he’ll do what it takes to keep a few thousand fans and any promotion pushes every few years will keep him satisfied.

He is not going to sell the stadium, so this is all we can expect for the foreseeable future.

leeds also have a high sell on clause for Dean, 40-50% i read a few months back, we’ll get fuck all from his sale

Do many other clubs sign players on two year contracts with the inevitable consequence of them having to cash in quickly if there's whiff of interest? There's plenty of things wrong at the club but for me the short term contracts cause a fundamental problem.

Yes. Losing good players is a fundamental part of being a poor, lower league club.

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The greatest fools are often times more clever than the men who laugh at them.