JackWorrall wrote:
To quote Disraeli or Twain (take your pick), "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
There are a couple of things to be drawn from this squalid little piece from Smith. Firstly, I can pluck any number required to suit my argument, which is exactly what Smith has done. Given his history of many words but little fact, I don't give a lot of credence to what he's written in this offering, and even if the data he's selectively used is correct, we don't know what has been left out.
Secondly, my initial thought after reading the item (after the sense that I'd been violated), was that it was a pointless exercise. At the end, I felt like I wasn't any more informed than before I started. We all knew our revenue was down, so that's hardly earth-shattering, Greg Swann will have a knowledge of our last annual report, and I'd suggest that painted a fairly accurate picture, so our new CEO is hardly going to be 'stunned'.
This Smith article is, as usual, a complete waste of space, paper, ink and time.
Yup, Swann would have asked about the state of the club before accepting the position and made himself informed, both through asking questions and through publicly available materials.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that he probably thinks of our current situation as a whole heap of opportunities that are ripe for the picking. We are underweight in every aspect of our clubs finances. It'll be much easier to get our revenue to $40 million than Collingwoods to $50 million. He knows how to do it, he knows the current market worth of a leading clubs revenue streams and what we should be receiving and he'll have contacts to make it happen.
Throw in the commitment of the new board and the resources that Pratt will make available and I think we'll be earning $30 million within 2-3 years and $35-40 million within 5 years. The leading clubs may have increased by then, but in percentage terms we'll be a hell of a lot closer to the leading (Victorian) clubs revenue.
Smith is just pissed off that nothing new has come out about Carlton in a negative sense (omitting the player behaviour stuff) since the election.