So it is the season to be Jim Cummings, we haven't heard from him in a while and once we do, has he actually got anything to say? Is this the same Jim Cummings who was going to turn AFC around when he climbed into the boardroom with promises of an immediate investment - half a million wasn't it? Very laudable for a man with only about 20,000 shares, but he only stuck around six months before undermining his own position and bailing out again.
After that, somewhere along the line, oor Jim picked up enough shares to give him a 13% stake in the Pittodrie Club, but did the P&J ask him where he got them or what he actually paid for them? Did they ask him if his buying so many shares helped AFC in any shape or form?
There are plenty of other points arising from the interview, not least over the questions that the paper claims it put to the club, like whose questions were they in the first place? But let's focus in on the BIG idea - to run Aberdeen FC on the Barcelona model.
Certainly, Barca runs by way of a system where the fans get a vote on some things, but the truth is that nobody gets on their board who isn't a millionaire because they have to put up a huge amount of money to be there. That works fine with a mega supporter base because there will always be a small proportion of wealthy people who want to swan around at the top end of football. Unfortunately although there's potential for big numbers of supporters in the northeast, Aberdeen FC has not benefited from it since the 1950's when there was little else to do on a Saturday and they could get crowds up to 40,000.
Even when Fergie was running a team that was sweeping all before it, the average gate struggled to stay at high levels. Crowds were as big as they could be for games against the Old Firm or Dundee United, but often fell short for the matches against lesser opposition - a factor that played a big part in Fergie deciding to move on.
When people got the chance to put some money into the club in the mid nineties, only a couple of thousand did so and that hardly reflects a desire by most Aberdonians to invest in AFC. One of the excuses at the time was that people weren't prepared to "give money to the Donalds". Later there was a rights issue but many of the then shareholders didn't take it up. Maybe this was prudent, maybe it wasn't, but it further illustrates that trying to get supporters to put more than their ticket money into the football club could be a tall order.
The number of shareholder grew by something like 500 when the Supporters Trust ran a membership scheme where people joining were given a single share in the club. Come time to renew their membership of the Trust? Most of these people didn't stick with it.
And so it goes, there is just no evidence to suggest that supporters would really buy into a Barcelona type scheme. And if they would, are there really enough around to make it work.
Last but by no means least, how many football clubs are debt free, as we'd like the Dons to be? Look around Europe or simply south of the border and you'll see mountains of debt approaching the levels that got Greece into trouble. In Scotland many clubs are on the brink of an abyss. Now's not the time to be hammering Aberdeen FC, now's the time to be helping it and not by high profile pontificating.
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