We Know Why You Haven’t Invested in the Plough Lane Bond
The £1.4m gap explained.
Dons Trust Members were surveyed earlier this year. Would they be willing to invest in the Plough Lane Bond, and how much. The answers added up to £3 million. The Trust halved it to about £1.7 million to be prudent and built a budget on the safer figure.
The total today is £308,000.
Which leaves a substantial group of Members who said they would invest and have not yet got round to it.
Some circumstances will have changed. Some people will have changed their minds. Both perfectly acceptable reasons. The rest required further investigation.
We have given this a great deal of thought and we now know what happened.
It is not the decision to let Omar Bugiel leave. You are annoyed about that. You are not one and a half million pounds annoyed about it.
It is not that your other half put their foot down. Your other half is unaware this is happening and you intend to keep it that way.
It is not even that a DT Board Member once disagreed with you, and you took it as a personal slight. It can’t be that. That would be embarrassing.
The real reason is simpler.
There was no WombleWorld Bond.
So, to solve this issue, we are introducing the WombleWorld Bond.
The Trust has a problem worth £1.4 million.
We do not have £1.4 million. We have never had £1.4 million. We have a newsletter, a potential podcast idea and more beer mats with a faulty QR code than we know what to do with.
What we do have is a voice and an idea.
The WombleWorld Bond takes no money. There is nothing to send us and nowhere to send it. You invest in the real Plough Lane bond, at the real website, on the real terms.
You then tell us you have done it. Via email.
We handle the benefits.
What are the benefits? It’s a simple and elegant set of rewards for being a WombleWorld Bondholder.
A number. Issued sequentially. To create scarcity we only have 2000 bond numbers to give away. The first 1889 of which will make you a Founder WombleWorld Bondholder and come with bragging rights. Additionally your opinion will be twice as important as non-founder Bondholders.
A rank. Bondholder, Senior Bondholder or James Bondholder. Identical in every respect and allocated at random.
Recognition. Your name1 on the Roll of Honour, published on the WombleWorld website with the above details in a font size of our choice.
Priority complaining rights. Should AFC Wimbledon lose three consecutive games, Bondholders may begin overreacting up to forty-eight hours in advance.
Finally, a WombleWorld Bond Certificate. In the form of a beer mat2. From the batch with the broken QR code. Made scarce by a manufacturing (design) fault and therefore, we are assured, collectible.
Alternatively
Do the thing you already said you were going to do.
It is not a donation. It is a loan to the club you support, and own, on terms you set yourself, to an organisation that has met every interest payment and every maturity since the bond began. You choose the amount. You choose the term. You choose the rate.
As always if you cannot spare it, that is fine and always has been.
But if you said yes in that survey, and nothing has changed since, this is the moment to stop considering and start doing.
It is on our to-do list as well. We are writing this before finalising our own investment, which feels risky from a credibility perspective.
Anyway…the bond is at ploughlanebond.com. The WW benefits, such as they are, become available shortly afterwards.
WombleWorld
The WombleWorld Bond is not real. We take no money and offer no return. The Plough Lane bond is real, your capital is at risk, and we are not financial advisers. Read the offer documents before investing.
We will publish your name if you consent. If you don’t consent we publish your contribution under the name of Wesley Wombleton.
We don’t have 2000 beer mats so they will be distributed at WombleWorld’s discretion.