TheLip69

I did what she actually said was; "I will be able to tell you all soon enough - most likely the week of the 19th July" Hmmm, is that better or worse than "hope" or "expecting" thank God we are 2-0 up or I'd be really down.

As I have no idea who the club are supposedly dealing with I can't answer your question.

The last time Leeanne came on this board she said she expected it would be announced the week of the 19th. We all know it wasn't and we've had no explanation as to why. Given that the one thing which had improved remarkably since Leeanns arrival was communication, I can't understand the club's silence on this issue. I mean we know the site is generally monitored by the club but even 'Flow has disappeared from this particular thread, is it beyond them to come on and offer some sort of explanation. They're quick enough with the good news aren't they?

Aye I'm sure it does, but if it's a done deal why no announcement and why cant you actually tell us who it is rather than using witless clues. Done deal my arse!

Cheap as it might be, newspaper advertising is still ephemeral, it's there one day and the next it's wrapping your chips. TV advertising still requires a lot of airtime and is not as cheap as it's you might think. Advertising is all about placement and if you can get a couple of people advertising your product in the high street, where the shoppers are, you've cracked it. Nobody sitting at Old Trafford watching United a few years back was thinking of buying a video recorder, but a few weeks later strolling through the Arndale and seeing a few shirts with Sharp Viewcam on them, they might have been. That's when the advertising works. Not at the game, not in the telly, but in the street. Sharp had their best sales figures ever when they were backing Man Utd and the only reason they are still not their is because United realised their worth and kept upping the ante. I see Man Utd shirts with Sharp on them regularly, and I often wear my Motorola Motherwell shirt. You buy two years advertising on a football shirt and you will get around another two free, not everyone buys a new shirt every year, and not everyone throws away the old one when they do. There's more to shirt advertising than you think.

That's the question I keep asking, why release the strips without a sponsor? Here's another one, how many other clubs in the SPL and the SFL have failed to line up a new, or existing, sponsor for this season? I know full well, from experience, how hard it is, and how hard these guys work to get and maintain a decent sponsor. I hear noises coming from Fir Park about a lack of money, and I've even heard some people say the shirts were released without a sponsor because the club needed a cash injection from somewhere. I dont believe that to be the case, in fact I hope it isn't, but with the club allowing things to stew for so long without comment, or even attempting to allay some of our fears, I think there is a room for doubt.

It's actually the most effective according to research we got some years ago. If I was asked from a financial point of view, and I generally am, which would be best sponsoring a trophy, a league, or a club ? My answer 99 times out of 100 would be a club. While the TV and Radio announcers must call it the Clydesdale Bank Premier, when was the last time you heard any fans call it that? Did you hear anyone call it the Homecoming Scottish Cup last season other than ironically? It's the League and Cup to the fans, no matter how you dress them up. The Football Association realise that and dont give the sponsor's name to their trophy, it's normally "The FA Cup sponsored by....." Trust me it's the shirts that matter, and so successful are they that most shops, banks, etc now have instantly recognisable uniforms for their staff. I saw a woman in a Sainsbury's uniform shopping in Tesco's last week, how many of the people who saw her will pop into Sainsbury's this week to see how bad it is that their staff need to shop elsewhere? It happens.

That's utter nonsense, in Footballing Sponsorship it's the MOST effective. I've been involved in the past in organising sponsorship of football clubs, from the sponsors side, and while naming a stadum can be equally effective although for shorter period because the name becomes part of the culture and just trips off the tongue, people dont think of the airline when you mention the Emirates, they think of Arsenal, the ground is too closely associated with the club. It's the same with the SPL it's only TV and Radio announcers that call it the Clydesdale bank premier league.

I'm afraid you're wong it's the strips sold to the supporters that is uppermost in the mind of the sponsor. That is by way of free advertising how many shirts have you seen at the game or in the park or on the street, with Motorola, or Anglian Windows still on them? We actually refer to them in that manner as well, when discussing shirts on the threads on here how many posts have you seen referring to "The Ian Skelly shirt" or "The Motorola shirt" and when was the last time any of them put money into Motherwell? I couldn't tell you how many Man Utd shirts I see on a weekly basis with "Sharp" on the front, and my daughters scouse boyfriend has a Liverpool shirt with "Candy" on the front and Dalglish on the back. One more point, someone asked who had heard of Anglian, Zoom, and Jaax before they sponsored Motherwell. That's not the point the point is we've all heard of them now. You think of any Motherwell strip of the past 20 years and I'll bet you can remember the sponsor's name that's on it.

Why release the shirts for sale free of sponsorship while negotiations, as we were led to believe, were ongoing? Now, if I'm currently negotiating to be your shirt sponsor and you decide to cut loose and release the shirts sponsor free before negotiations are complete I will walk away. The main point of shirt sponsorship is not about TV matches or press photos, it's about the fans acting as billboards for the company in question. We were told that the club would hope to have something to announce, in respect of sponsorship, in the week of the 19th July. Nothing happened and the following week they announced that the shirts would go on sale sponsor free. We did not have a three year contract with Canterbury, our contract was with Canterbury Europe Ltd, an offshoot, virtually a franchise if truth be told.

So why aren't they on the shirts being sold to the fans? They may not have a sponsor for Europe but that might only last another game or three, surely we should have announced the league sponsor and had their name on the shirts? Negotiations don't really work that way anyway, we would have went to the table with a ballpark figure for all scenarios, with a larger deal if we reached the group stages of the Europa, TV coverage for matches against some of the top teams in Europe would have been a big carrot to most sponsors. I honestly cant get my head around what is going on? Selling the shirts without a sponsors name on is a really, really, bad sign.

No that doesn't cut it, there is a lot more publicity from having your name on the shirts than there is in having a stand in your name, that's why stands are generally named after ex-players and managers, rather than commercial institutions.

What is really puzzling me is the selling of the strips sponsor free, that is a big no-no in the marketing world, if it were a straightforward choice a shirt with a sponsor or not, how many would you see sold with the sponsors name on it? Marketing people know that and what they are paying for is not just their name on a shirt on match of the day but on the high street, in Tesco's, in the pub, at the airport, it's the secondary advertising by fans away from the match that is just as big a pull as the real thing on the players jersey. More people see the advert on the fans jerseys than on the players and that's a fact. We are walking billboards and that is why shirt sponsorship is so lucrative. That's why I'm puzzled, if as we were led to believe, a sponsorship agreement was imminent why release the shirts sponsor free? Surely it would make more sense to delay the sale until we had a sponsor in place. I'm well aware that no-one other than the clubs and fans involved are interested in the qualifying rounds of the Europa League, but I would have thought that we would have had a sponsor on board before we started playing serious football. Surely that should have been a priority, get a sponsor on board, a deal signed, and money in the bank before we kick a ball in earnest. "week of the 19th" I believe our glorious and sainted chief executive was quoted as saying when asked when a sponsor would be on board. Pity she never stipulated the month eh!

I have to say that I am more than slightly concerned that we are approaching a new season without a shirt sponsor and, despite the rumours, no sign of one. Selling the jerseys without a sponsors name doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that a deal is imminent. Incredibly, we have actually offerd to print the name on feach of the jerseys feree of charge once the sponor is announced. Am I the only one who thinks that announcement was NOT aimed at the supporters who buy the jerseys but at any potential sponsor? Come on, how many really believe there will be a queue for that facility? Simply put, shirt sponsorship is amajor source of income for clubs like Motherwell and I am extremely concerned that with the new league season only a couple of weeks away our players are playing bare chested. Aye the sponsor free jerseys may be the bees knees but the reality is we need a name across our chest, and for this club, or any club for that matter, to go into a European tie minus a sponsor is unbelievable.

I am delighted with that result, not the manner of their equaliser obviously, but on the whole we didn't lose and came away with an away goal. It's as good, if not better, than we could have hoped.

Take my advice mate, steer well clear, an absolute cow of a woman.

Of course it's not true, it might be true for you, you may want to bury your head in the sand and hope everything works out alright, I dont. I, and many others, want to know and in fact I believe we need to know you just cant sit back and say we dont want to hear it as some sort of excuse not to tell us. I work in finance, I read balance sheets and financial accounts the way some of you read the Wishaw press, minus the finger under every word and the moving lips of course. So, forgive me if I get a wee bit uppity when people say I dont want to hear it. The fact is we cant get more fans into the game until we reduce prices, and we cant reduce prices until we get more fans into the game. To quote Yossarian "That's some catch that Catch 22" I'll tell you what I'd do, I'd add £2 to the price of every adult ticket, and let the kids in for free. Fathers would be able to afford to bring all of their kids, I know one guy with three boys who takes them to alternate home games. As he says it's not the two at home jealous of the one at the game it's the other way about, he's miffed because his brothers are out with their mates or playing on the X-box while he's at the match with his Dad. he did say though that the one time he made the effort to take all three, the Nancy game, they all sang all night and battered those bloody ballons all through the match and all the way home loving every minute of it. Get the 3 of them together every week and you've got them for life. How much would the club lose if they let kids in for sod all? There would probably be more kids buying more snacks and how many more paying fans would that generate when these guys leave school and start earning a few bob? Kids are the lifeblood of the game, that's why most clubs turned a blind eye when we got lifted over the turnstile years ago. I remember my dad lifting me over the trunstile at Fir Park and a policeman helping me down at the other end. We need to make it easier for kids to watch football.

I am. No she wasn't.

I find Leann's remark about football fans not understanding footballs finances more than a trifle condescending. Most of us have lived through a peroid when a whole host of clubs have been stricken with financial difficulties, Motherwell, Dundee, and Dunfermline just for starters and we've also lost seen clubs like Airdrie and Gretna go to the wall throw in the continuing saga of Hearts and Rangers money worries and I think we have a more than fair idea of whats going on. You go onto virtually any supporters forum and look at the rumours threads within three posts of someone mentioning a possible signing, someone else will post whether "we can afford him". When was the last time anyone on these boards had a football discussion where finance didn't come into it? It's almost the first topic of conversation and it has been for some time now. Fans have been shouting long and loud about ticket prices for years, the fact is we are pricing a lot of fans out of the game. It's no mystery where they've gone, they just can't afford it, some will pick and choose their games and others will stay away altogether. Of course in this financial crisis the struggle to put food on the table, and clothes on the kids backs, may cause some to lose sight of footballs financial crisis. It was condescending and patronising, two of the main traits of every chief executive I've ever met.

So, who is it?

I like both and will buy both as soon as they come out, I'd rather see a couple of pumas on the sleeves than the flock of kiwis we previously had. The one thing I don't like and have never liked is claret shorts, I'll get the white ones though.

I dont think we really had an away strip for years, If I remember correctly one of teh principal reasons for switching to claret and amber was to avoid the numerous strip changes caused by the blue strip. Away strips only really came into fashion with the onset of TV, anyone at a Hearts v Rangers match could tell the difference between maroon and blue but not on a black and white telly. I also wonder when they began to get called "away strips" as a kid I always remember them being called "change" strips. I dont remember Motherwell changing strips too often but they did, on occasion, change shorts from white to claret or amber.

We had a white Xara training top similar to that a few years back when Butcher was manager, I've still got it.

Maybe in Rugby, but definitely not in Football and wasn't it a franchise we were signed up with anyway, Canterbury Europe or some such? No matter who we eventually end up with lets hope someone performs the necessary checks, some due diligence wouldn't go amiss this time.

If it's to be Puma I'd take any form of these, they are, respectively, Cameroon, Ghana, Tunisia, and Angola away shirts.