Henrik Lloyd wonders just what a post-Turl future holds for Rovers

Amongst all the speculation about boardroom splits over the last week or so, one thing is certain. The way things have traditionally been done at Rovers has well and truly been challenged since the appointment of Mike Turl as the club’s Managing Director in November 2004. It is this which has led to two different viewpoints at Board level on the best way forward for the club and the seemingly inevitable parting of ways.

The root of these publicly acknowledged differences of opinion can be found in the Chairman’s Statement which presented the club’s 2004 annual accounts which were published in March 2005:

“Since the end of last season we have seen a number of developments at the Club, particularly the restructuring of our Board with the appointment of Mike Turl as Managing Director. Mike is a very successful businessman and he is making great strides in bringing a new clarity and sense of purpose to the way we manage our activities."

The first public signs of Turl’s efforts to bring “a new clarity and sense of purpose” to Rovers’ affairs came in April 2005 with the publication of one of the fundamentals of running a successful business – a strategic business plan setting out what the club wanted to achieve on and off the pitch over the next 3-5 years.

That in itself was a new concept at Rovers. Messrs Dunford and Craig would argue, and with good deal of justification, that it was difficult during our time at Twerton to do much more than survive until we managed to sort out where our long-term future lay. However, the landscape changed markedly once we returned to Bristol – and especially when we purchased the Mem. That gave Rovers the springboard to move on as a club, to really start developing. But in spite of this, critics would say that the “old guard” directors have been unable to move from the survival mentality of the Bath days to the more forward looking way of working that is undoubtedly now required. For almost as long as we spent at Twerton, the club continued to live an almost day-to-day existence, coping with regular crises as and when they arrived rather than putting into place strategic plans to address issues before they arrived and move the club forward. No clarity, no sense of purpose – and it led to regular flirtations with administration and the team playing in the basement division. It is that which Turl has sought to change, and in less than six months of taking up his role as MD he had a published a vision for the club, a set of values and a strategic business plan for delivering that vision.

Turl’s top priority was to try and bring some much needed order to Rovers’ finances, which to an outsider looked pretty much out of control prior to his arrival. The April 2005 Where’s The Money Gone? report analysed the club’s finances between July 1996 and June 2003. It found that the club generated £7.7 million of transfer income during the eight year period in question but that “the cost of running the club exceeded its revenue for all years reviewed and that net transfer fee income funded the deficit”. It then went on to say that “the day-to-day costs of running the club over the eight years to 2003 were £27.8 million. These costs peaked at £5.2 million in 2001, the year we were relegated. These spiralling costs far outpaced our non-transfer fee cash receipts which increased at a much more modest rate. In fact, running costs over the eight year period exceeded revenue by nearly £5 million. Clearly, this is where the majority of the net transfer fees of £5 million disappeared”.

In addition to that, this website has recently published an extensive article (link here) about the club’s continuing inability to control its finances in the period since 2003. In short, running costs were allowed to continue massively outstripping operating income. It is this which Turl and the other new group of directors wanted to tackle – it is specifically set out in the strategic business plan.

That plan makes specific reference to the need for the club to operate within a balanced operational budget with sound controls and monitoring in place. This of course sounds obvious, but the club’s financial results over the period prior to Turl’s arrival suggest that - in spite of plenty of rhetoric - this wasn’t in fact happening. And the fact that specific references had to be made in the plan to controls and monitoring suggests that when Turl took over such procedures were either non-existent or not fit for purpose. A Financial Advisory Group was thus formed from supporters with financial expertise to set up and implement a robust set of controls.

Furthermore, while improvements to the club’s finances were seen in the last published set of accounts covering the 2004/05 season (coinciding with Turl’s arrival), it is clear – and has been for years – that it’s going to be almost impossible to break-even until the issue of the club’s wage bill is tackled. However, both the Where’s The Money Gone report and the recent article on this site show that this has long been something that the old guard have been unwilling to address. In contrast, Turl’s business plan tackled that head on, setting out a clear strategy for delivering both a decent side on the pitch and sound finances off it - a nucleus of quality players supplemented by an enhanced youth system and scouting network that allows us to bring through home-grown players and identify non-league talent. That can now be implemented as a result of a stringent managerial recruitment policy that saw applicants scored on their ability to drive through an agreed strategy.

Compare that with the situation two years ago, when the words about breaking even were accompanied by the handing out of yet more long-term contracts to ageing players and consequently a wage bill a million pounds more than most of our competitors. The same mistakes we'd made two years earlier, namely going out and simply throwing money at it and handing out long-term contracts to too many experienced players/journeymen (delete where applicable) in a haphazard fashion (hence the unbalanced squad) which we ultimately couldn't afford. And even then the stringent budgetary control process allowed manager Ian Atkins to go over his already huge budget on the condition that he got a number of players off the books, even though there was no interest in any of those fringe players. Clarity? Sense of purpose?

The final element of Turl’s strategy is of course the redevelopment of the ground and again there has been the introduction of a clarity and sense of purpose that has been all too lacking over the last ten years. For the first time we have seen a clear plan published where funding has been calculated on something more than the back of a postage stamp and where a team has been put together with the key skills to actually deliver it. “It’s like a breath of fresh air dealing with this team compared with previous ones” was apparently the comment from one member of the Council’s planning office. But there must be a real danger that following recent events many members of that team will walk away with Mike Turl and that the stadium regeneration project will stall as we go back to the old style fractious relationship with the local Council and a lack of project expertise. Given all the evidence above, there must also be the very real prospect that all of the strategies and financial controls introduced by Mike Turl over the last year-and-a-half will also disappear along with him. That could be truly catastrophic for the future of our football club.

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