He knows the club will lose between £3m and £7m for every season that we're in The Championship. He's not daft.

It was my dream to play for Palace and to make my debut. I've always played for the club so if I'm playing here, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

- John Bostock (Nov 2007)

Ian j
The four shareholders are sitting on a huge increase in value of their investment and perhaps it would be best if they did sell out.

It would seem that they can't afford to fund the club at a level that would be competitive with other Premiership clubs and they don't want to have to continue to pour money into a loss making Championship club either
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Conundrum for 2010 really. Clearly they want to stay in the prem on the cheap( which you can't do), stop quoting
Swansea, Stoke etc. they spent a lot, look at Reading last year, that's who we are emulating.
On other hand can't afford Championship either!! This is where I disagree with 2010. Average gates of 14000/15000 should really keep you in the black, problem was in championship they wanted us near the top half because I remember Parish saying a couple of years ago that what we pay in wages we should be top half. Well don't pay those sort of wages, bring through youth, build a team (who 2010 would have us believe natural financial habitat is bottom half championship) and stay in profit.

"Parish said: "I made assurances to our investors that we would be careful with what we spent and that is what we have done"."

£16.26m on players? 50% increase in salaries (£11.7m to £18.75)? £4.6m promotion bonuses? That sounds like my wife's version of careful spending, Steve!

I disagree, A quality striker that can put the ball in the net would make a hell of a difference for the Stoke game. Even if he came straight into the team and only met his new team mates that morning.
I keep banging on about him (or someone like him) but a loan of Demba Ba on around £80k a week would be money well spent if the player scored significant goals to keep us up. You are talking about £1.6m in wages (with say a bonus agreement we pay Chelsea £1m if we stay up) making the whole package just over £2.5m balanced against the £60m we WONT get if we go down? For me, its a no brainer. We are talking about a third of what we are reportedly said to have paid for a Championship striker that cant get a start at the moment because Jerome (who cant hit a cows backside with a banjo) is keeping him out the team (except for tomorrow of course.

To address your points:

1. Your pleased the four owners make the final decisions and not us fans.

It's sort of a redundant statement but with that said, the ideal person to make a decision is the person best equipped to make the right one. In so far as it's likely the four members of CPFC 2010 have better track record running businesses than the average fan, I agree with you. But it's also at least possible that there are fans of Palace who are even better equipped to run the club than they are, but choose not to get involved. My point is, whoever makes the final decisions should expect to be held accountable by the supporters. That is all that is happening here. The fact that your statement is basically correct doesn't mean it's wrong for us to question them.

2. QPR spent 70m on transfer fees over 2 seasons in the PL, and probably promised the same in contracts for these players.

So what? They had the wrong business model and then executed it poorly, thereby adding insult to injury. That doesn't mean it's wrong to sign a few expensive players and give them decent contracts. There is a halfway house between Loftus Road and Selhurst.

3. as much as i would love top see steven taylor marshalling our defence, im pleased weve got a wage structure to abide to.

I'm not. Wage structures (indeed, any other kind of corporate or business structures) are there to guide you. They are very rarely there to be adhered to with iron discipline no matter what because if you do that, you take risks in the same way as if you ignore the structures altogether. A good owner (of any business) stays within guidelines as a rule, and breaks them when a key employee needs to brought into the fold. I am not saying Steven Taylor is that employee, but I am saying that guidelines only have any value when you occasionally work around them. Otherwise, they simply become destructive. That is happening here and now at Palace. We are cutting our nose to spite our face.

4. at the minute we are holding onto the coat tails of the rest of the league, and fighting our corner on what is essentially a poor squad. usually in jan theres a team marooned to the bottom, and were not, on a squad that cost less than 20m to put together!

No, we're not. But that is more luck than judgment, combined with absolutely brilliant management since November. It is foolish to expect that to continue through the second half of the season and even Pulis himself has said this ("we NEED reinforcements." ) What's the point of hiring a fantastic manager and then ignoring his advice? That doesn't sound like good ownership to me.

5. to put it into context youve got WHU 1 point ahead of us and our entire squad cost the same as andy carroll....all those teams are within 3 points of us, plucky palace...so is spending money left right & center to try and survive the answer?

No, but your evidence doesn't make it the wrong answer, either. The question you're really asking here is "will expenditure guarantee success?" Of course, the answer is "no". In life, there aren't any guarantees. However, if you adjust the question to "will the combination of expenditure plus a top class manager dramatically increase the chances of success?" then I would argue yes. To the extent of buying maybe two top notch players and stretching our wage structure to accommodate them, I would say that is a risk worth taking and I would also say it would not turn us into QPR overnight.

6. personally...right now...considering what weve spend, and how underprepared we were for the league i dont think we could have asked for much more after 21 league games...and im actually over the moon at how its going so far.

So am I. And now I want to invest to cement the deal and do everything possible to ensure we stay up.

7. obviously there are things i wouldav changed, but im not the manager or owner so weve just got to pipe down and see what happens.

If the supporters are the moral guardians of the club then we have a duty to pipe up, not pipe down. It is not only "our club" when owners are doing something that all of us dislike. It's our club, and our responsibility to speak when things are going relatively well too.

Edited by sydtheeagle (17 Jan 2014 6.03pm)

Sydenham by birth. Selhurst by the Grace of God.

Sorry to wade in on this but football fans are not just customers of a business. Our loyalty sets us far apart from any other business type. If M&S don't sell the chicken Kiev you like any more you go elsewhere without a second thought. If your football club does something you are not keen on you moan, a lot sometimes but you never ever think of jumping ship to support someone else. Why? Loyalty, commitment, love even.
That's why we have a right to air our views. Some of us have given our disposable income over the turnstiles to this club for a life time. If that doesn't give you the right to speak your mind and .even criticise when you feel the need then what is the point of even having a message board to debate these issues in the first place?