How can you let someone buy a football club for a £1 and not have their finances checked?
The EFL were so worried last December that Bury were going to go bust that they let Steve Dale take Bury over without him having to do the full "fit & proper" test......and told him to complete & send in the paperwork later. He never did. 9 months later & the chickens have come home to roost. Only themselves to blame
Same shit show with Bolton. Ultimately I expect that they will fudge & cobble together some bollox to let them survive (for now)......only to see them in the same mess in a few months time.
I think the surprise is that it has taken 27 years since it happened previously. A few clubs have come close but always survived. Sadly Bury are the unlucky victims. It looks like it will happen to Bolton too. It could have been us. Whether Bolton go in two weeks or not, hopefully after this, it will be a long time before anything like this happens again.
Football in this country absolutely stinks in my opinion. The PL and Sky have ruined it really. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and neither care. There isn’t a fair distribution of money. It’s wrong. Even the system of compensation for lower league clubs changed in favour of the big boys. The EFL are not fit for purpose.
Desperately sad and totally avoidable. It wasn't as if Bury had been a basket case club for years, they somehow came 2nd in L2 last season, so there was the core of something decent there if a new owner had come in earlier in the summer before it all disintegrated.
While the structure and wages of football are nonsense, there are specific problems ownership problems here. Bolton in many ways is a far more relevant case to the wider world of football, as they're the first former PL club who could close down and a massive warning to those PL clubs who spend too much and unwisely
The roots of this are the FA's appalling decision in 1991 to buckle to a few gobby, venal club owners like Dein, Bates and Sugar and let the FAPL be formed as a separate entity and let it negotiate with Sky and keep all the money. While Sky certainly fostered its relationship with those arseholes, at the end of the day all they wanted was the right to show live first division football. If the FA had stuck to their remit and negotiated those rights, and decided how to distribute those rights down through football, Sky would not have been concerned. And where would we be now? A football country like Germany IMO, where maybe we wouldn't have quite so many foreign superstars in our League, or certainly quite so many crap players in the Second Division earning £40k per week, but also without the dreadful fate awaiting Bury and Bolton.
That's where it started, folks, and anyone who wants to argue that point with me better make sure they at least read Tom Bower's "Broken Dreams" first; where in passing you will also read an interesting couple of references to Richard Murray...
It depends what you or anyone means by "the roots of this". I recall Accrington, Bradford PA, Workington, Barrow, Aldershot etc, long before Sky & The Premier League.
Also Maidstone and indeed Dartford who were brought down as well by the former's collapse
The point being about Sky is that it’s not all about clubs trying to chase getting into the so called promised land. It’s far greater than that, because assuming that is the reason as to why they have a share of the blame is too simplistic.
Sky have provided the platform for the Premier League to be what it is now. They have put the money in and shown it worldwide to enhance the interest and revenue streams going into the clubs in the Premier League.
However, what they have done is make the rich and bigger clubs, even richer and bigger. That has a direct and indirect cause to the clubs without a chance of ever reaching anywhere near that level, one because of their geographical nature in the country, and also because potential football supporters are more inclined to go and watch a richer club funded by Sky’s original input because they’re now more attractive.
The sport is no longer fair or even close to it in the slightest. The disproportionate distribution of money has meant that clubs like Bury because of a number of factors are finding it increasingly difficult to survive. Okay they shouldn’t ever be living beyond their means, I agree entirely, but it wouldn’t be so bad without the gap being as ridiculous as it is, all starting from the input and influence Sky has on the English game.
Bolton averaged 14000 crowds last season. That should be enough to run a reasonable football team once they're rid off their top earners if they're sensible.
Not a massive fan of the Brentford model, but they are really good at identifying talent and selling it on for a profit to the PL. That's one way the money from the PL comes down to lower levels
Yes but selling players to the Premier League is not sustainable, especially not for every club in the division(s). If your policy is to do that to be able to survive and compete, that’s fine but you’re constantly relying on being able to develop the players to be good enough for them to be sold.
The vast majority of money being spent on transfer fees from Premier League clubs goes abroad. It doesn’t stay in the English game so it doesn’t filter down the leagues anywhere near enough to help clubs to be able to survive.
A fair number of players sold to the PL though this summer, especially bought by the newly promoted and lower teams
Konsa, Maupay, Che Adams, McBurnie, Jack Clarke, Callum Robinson, Lloyd Kelly, Jack Stacey etc
One thing which has badly affected this money flow is the Bosman ruling which enables players to move for nothing at the end of their contracts, especially as lower league teams can't afford to give long contracts.
The only club to have scored 1,000 goals in each of the top four tiers of English football. Disgraceful that such an historic club should be allowed to get into this state. I hope that before too long they resurrect themselves under a worthy owner and reclaim their league place. EFL = not fit for purpose.
How can Sky not take a big share of the blame? They’re the one’s who have put all this money in. Why didn’t they do the same for the EFL clubs?
Ummm, maybe because they don't see a profit in broadcasting matches for clubs with 3,000-4,000 in average attendances with small, regional fan bases? Sky does not "owe" anyone anything, they are a business trying to make a profit, not a charity.
I think the surprise is that it has taken 27 years since it happened previously. A few clubs have come close but always survived. Sadly Bury are the unlucky victims. It looks like it will happen to Bolton too. It could have been us. Whether Bolton go in two weeks or not, hopefully after this, it will be a long time before anything like this happens again.
I am sure RD will be interviewing soon, saying he is a great owner by comparison and we should feel honored to have him.
£5bn for 20 clubs over three years... that averages out at £83 million per club per year.
£600m for 72 years over five years... averages out at £1.6 million per club per year, keeping in mind that the vast majority of that £600m stays in the Championship. L1 and L2 are lucky to get a game on tele if it’s not an international break.
Absolutely disgusting. For every pound an average EFL club receives in TV money, an average PL club receives over fifty pounds.
SKY and the Premier League have created the desperation for teams to reach the top flight at all costs
Look at Huddersfield for example or Norwich of late, both examples of clubs that are currently being ran properly
They leapt for the platform that is the top flight, havent been able to cling on at times but got the TV money, got the parachute money and should be set for a while
Everyone else is just as guilty of doing the same
I wasnt quite 10 when the Premier League was introduced but dont remember Football much before then
Was there such desperation to reach the First Division in the 70s / 80s from clubs?
The bury fella in charge with the beard what’s his background in all this
I keep seeing him front it out on all forms of media saying this is not his doing and that he has set out what he agreed to do and get a CVA and managing the debt
Bolton could never sustain the spending under gartside was a crazy house that has taken a while to collapse
He paid £1 and now wants £850K. Enough said.
Serious question he bought it for a quid this season or last and who funded the playing staff no way bury could sustain a promotion push without someone funding it
, I know Abdullah lezman at Oldham and he is many things but a crook after money out of the club he is not ,
Someone said on here a few months back that won’t be long before the bulk of league 1 and 2 go - and I don’t doubt it, the levels of debt some of these clubs are run at it is nothing short of ridiculous you also have a body who will let anyone buy and ruin a club - roland being a v good example has he improved Charlton since he came?
I don’t get the criticism of Sky, they are simply a broadcaster who have won competitive bidding rounds for a product, what happens to the money they pay is the issue once it hits the PL.
should the Premier League distribute more down the leagues, probably, but I don’t think the PL trusts that money would solve anything lower down while the likes of Dale and Anderson own clubs and do seemingly fatal damage to them. The focus is on the EFL, they are running scared of the Championship at the moment, who are sabre rattling about breakaways (the championship isn’t worth more then Sky pay now, one day the clubs will wake up) and the distribution of EFL TV money is badly broken. Then there is governance, Shaun Harvey didn’t care about it, the brand was all that mattered. Debbie Jeavens does, worked with her when I was at Sport England, and she does care about organisations being properly run and within a sustainable funding package, but it also needs EFL clubs to give the league the powers to do it, the clubs set the remit for the EFL and its rules, and will the turkeys vote for Christmas?
Well, if you want to guarantee that no rich person ever buys a club again and every single club needing one won't be able to find one, and more and more of them would go under.... that would do it.
The fact is that you need a lot of money to run even a League Two club. Millions per year. And they all lose money, most of them over a million per year and many several million. So you need someone with literally hundreds of millions of net worth to absorb the millions per year in losses, every year, for decades. There are not many of those in England, certainly not enough to run 72 lower-league clubs and rich Saudis/Chinese do not care about anything below The Championship in any way.
No really rich, successful businessperson is going to buy an asset where some "outside regulator" has the ability to tell them what they can do, restrict what they cant do, and then expect that owner to absorb endless losses forever while that owner has fans refusing to buy season tickets because the fans are angry he is only losing £5M per year.
If you look at Eisner's 2 hour meeting with shareholders of Portsmouth (it's on YouTube), he told them flat out that if they wanted any kind of "veto" over ANY of his decisions, or a seat on the board, or even a guarantee he would not move the club, that they would need to find another owner. Did they say "hell no!"??? No. They caved and sold. Why? Because there was no other owner interested and Portsmouth's fan-owners could no longer foot the bill. Portsmouth got someone as rich as Eisner because they average15,000 fans per match and he saw potential. How many rich owners are lining up for clubs with 3,000 attendance per match losing millions? None. Literally.... none.
Notts was sold to a Moneyball company that may or may not have the money to run it past this season. They were the only option between Notts liquidating and they were just 24 hours away. I seriously doubt they would have bought if some "outside regulator" had some power over them. So despite the dearth of very rich willing to buy lower league clubs, now people want to say "Come buy us, but we demand a seat on the board and want some outside regulator to be able to tell you what to do."
I can tell you what every potential owner will say... no thanks.
Well, if you want to guarantee that no rich person ever buys a club again and every single club needing one won't be able to find one, and more and more of them would go under.... that would do it.
The fact is that you need a lot of money to run even a League Two club. Millions per year. And they all lose money, most of them over a million per year and many several million. So you need someone with literally hundreds of millions of net worth to absorb the millions per year in losses, every year, for decades. There are not many of those in England, certainly not enough to run 72 lower-league clubs and rich Saudis/Chinese do not care about anything below The Championship in any way.
No really rich, successful businessperson is going to buy an asset where some "outside regulator" has the ability to tell them what they can do, restrict what they cant do, and then expect that owner to absorb endless losses forever while that owner has fans refusing to buy season tickets because the fans are angry he is only losing £5M per year.
If you look at Eisner's 2 hour meeting with shareholders of Portsmouth (it's on YouTube), he told them flat out that if they wanted any kind of "veto" over ANY of his decisions, or a seat on the board, or even a guarantee he would not move the club, that they would need to find another owner. Did they say "hell no!"??? No. They caved and sold. Why? Because there was no other owner interested and Portsmouth's fan-owners could no longer foot the bill. Portsmouth got someone as rich as Eisner because they average15,000 fans per match and he saw potential. How many rich owners are lining up for clubs with 3,000 attendance per match losing millions? None. Literally.... none.
Notts was sold to a Moneyball company that may or may not have the money to run it past this season. They were the only option between Notts liquidating and they were just 24 hours away. I seriously doubt they would have bought if some "outside regulator" had some power over them. So despite the dearth of very rich willing to buy lower league clubs, now people want to say "Come buy us, but we demand a seat on the board and want some outside regulator to be able to tell you what to do." I can tell you what every potential owner will say... no thanks. Good luck.
Absolute nonsense.
Lots of industries with companies owned by extraordinarily wealthy individuals have independent regulators.
If someone doesn’t want to subject themselves to some level of scrutiny over their dealings with our national sport then frankly I don’t think we want them involved in the first place.
I posted the below on the other thread - EFL hang your head in shame -, I have replicated it here -:
Woken up to the sad news this morning that the self-centered TWATS at the EFL have pulled the plug on Bury, also read that Sanchez is moving on loan from Utd to Inter with both clubs sharing his reported £500k A WEEK between them. Listening to last night news at 10, Bury needed £3m to survive and hopefully stabilise, or put another way, just 6 weeks of Sanchez's salary......there is something fundamentally wrong with the way football money is distributed between the Prem and the rest of the clubs. This needs an urgent review, especially when it was also shown on the news last night that 12 clubs in the PL last season MADE £304 million in profit between them, with Sky contributing £5 billion for PL TV rights for next 3 years; the other 72 clubs made a joint LOSS of£340 million; Sky contributes just £500 million for all EFL clubs TV rights across 6 years, in other words just over £1 million (if it was shared equally, which it is not) per EFL club per season and......and £83 million each for the 20 PL clubs per season (again if it was shared equally). Sadly, unless there is a shift in finance distribution, more clubs will go bust, while the big clubs in this country just get richer. One final point - Sky's countdown clock yesterday was just disgusting and ill-thought and shows how much they really don't care - unless its the PL!
Well, if you want to guarantee that no rich person ever buys a club again and every single club needing one won't be able to find one, and more and more of them would go under.... that would do it.
The fact is that you need a lot of money to run even a League Two club. Millions per year. And they all lose money, most of them over a million per year and many several million. So you need someone with literally hundreds of millions of net worth to absorb the millions per year in losses, every year, for decades. There are not many of those in England, certainly not enough to run 72 lower-league clubs and rich Saudis/Chinese do not care about anything below The Championship in any way.
No really rich, successful businessperson is going to buy an asset where some "outside regulator" has the ability to tell them what they can do, restrict what they cant do, and then expect that owner to absorb endless losses forever while that owner has fans refusing to buy season tickets because the fans are angry he is only losing £5M per year.
If you look at Eisner's 2 hour meeting with shareholders of Portsmouth (it's on YouTube), he told them flat out that if they wanted any kind of "veto" over ANY of his decisions, or a seat on the board, or even a guarantee he would not move the club, that they would need to find another owner. Did they say "hell no!"??? No. They caved and sold. Why? Because there was no other owner interested and Portsmouth's fan-owners could no longer foot the bill. Portsmouth got someone as rich as Eisner because they average15,000 fans per match and he saw potential. How many rich owners are lining up for clubs with 3,000 attendance per match losing millions? None. Literally.... none.
Notts was sold to a Moneyball company that may or may not have the money to run it past this season. They were the only option between Notts liquidating and they were just 24 hours away. I seriously doubt they would have bought if some "outside regulator" had some power over them. So despite the dearth of very rich willing to buy lower league clubs, now people want to say "Come buy us, but we demand a seat on the board and want some outside regulator to be able to tell you what to do." I can tell you what every potential owner will say... no thanks. Good luck.
Absolute nonsense.
Lots of industries with companies owned by extraordinarily wealthy individuals have independent regulators.
If someone doesn’t want to subject themselves to some level of scrutiny over their dealings with our national sport then frankly I don’t think we want them involved in the first place.
All your leagues DO have scrutiny. It's called... their League. And all of them already must report financials every year via accountants using accepted accounting principles. What exactly are you looking for? I read the petition and it is ridiculously vague. What do people want? No debt? if so, then why would any owner build or renovate a stadium or training ground? No losses? That won't work. Imagine how few people would be coming to Charlton matches if Roland cut the wage bill LAST YEAR in League One by 80% so he could break even? Most debt clubs have come from the buildup of yearly losses by the owner or capital expenditures. What exactly do you think some outside person is going to do? Just force owners to eat the losses and write off debt forever? Good luck. Be specific please as to what magic wand this regulator would use, because that petition has nothing specific at all as to WHAT would actually be done to mitigate losses and debt, which are the real problem.
I also think back to that Talksport interview a couple of weeks ago when the Bury player Dawson basically called Dale out, said he had no money, hadn't paid players, he was a liar etc. Dale disputed everything Dawson said, said he would prove it and that he would get everything sorted out. We probably all knew it at the time, but now we know for certain that Dawson was spot on.
Comments
Same shit show with Bolton. Ultimately I expect that they will fudge & cobble together some bollox to let them survive (for now)......only to see them in the same mess in a few months time.
While the structure and wages of football are nonsense, there are specific problems ownership problems here. Bolton in many ways is a far more relevant case to the wider world of football, as they're the first former PL club who could close down and a massive warning to those PL clubs who spend too much and unwisely
Konsa, Maupay, Che Adams, McBurnie, Jack Clarke, Callum Robinson, Lloyd Kelly, Jack Stacey etc
One thing which has badly affected this money flow is the Bosman ruling which enables players to move for nothing at the end of their contracts, especially as lower league teams can't afford to give long contracts.
13th January 2018. Our final game against Bury, a one nil win at Gigg Lane
£600m for 72 years over five years... averages out at £1.6 million per club per year, keeping in mind that the vast majority of that £600m stays in the Championship. L1 and L2 are lucky to get a game on tele if it’s not an international break.
Absolutely disgusting. For every pound an average EFL club receives in TV money, an average PL club receives over fifty pounds.
In those days there was patience.
https://www.castrust.org/2019/08/petition-for-an-independent-regulator-for-football/
https://www.castrust.org/2019/08/petition-for-an-independent-regulator-for-football/
should the Premier League distribute more down the leagues, probably, but I don’t think the PL trusts that money would solve anything lower down while the likes of Dale and Anderson own clubs and do seemingly fatal damage to them. The focus is on the EFL, they are running scared of the Championship at the moment, who are sabre rattling about breakaways (the championship isn’t worth more then Sky pay now, one day the clubs will wake up) and the distribution of EFL TV money is badly broken. Then there is governance, Shaun Harvey didn’t care about it, the brand was all that mattered. Debbie Jeavens does, worked with her when I was at Sport England, and she does care about organisations being properly run and within a sustainable funding package, but it also needs EFL clubs to give the league the powers to do it, the clubs set the remit for the EFL and its rules, and will the turkeys vote for Christmas?
So despite the dearth of very rich willing to buy lower league clubs, now people want to say "Come buy us, but we demand a seat on the board and want some outside regulator to be able to tell you what to do."
Lots of industries with companies owned by extraordinarily wealthy individuals have independent regulators.
If someone doesn’t want to subject themselves to some level of scrutiny over their dealings with our national sport then frankly I don’t think we want them involved in the first place.
https://twitter.com/garytaphouse/status/1166477125081321472?s=21
Woken up to the sad news this morning that the self-centered TWATS at the EFL have pulled the plug on Bury, also read that Sanchez is moving on loan from Utd to Inter with both clubs sharing his reported £500k A WEEK between them. Listening to last night news at 10, Bury needed £3m to survive and hopefully stabilise, or put another way, just 6 weeks of Sanchez's salary......there is something fundamentally wrong with the way football money is distributed between the Prem and the rest of the clubs.
This needs an urgent review, especially when it was also shown on the news last night that 12 clubs in the PL last season MADE £304 million in profit between them, with Sky contributing £5 billion for PL TV rights for next 3 years; the other 72 clubs made a joint LOSS of£340 million; Sky contributes just £500 million for all EFL clubs TV rights across 6 years, in other words just over £1 million (if it was shared equally, which it is not) per EFL club per season and......and £83 million each for the 20 PL clubs per season (again if it was shared equally).
Sadly, unless there is a shift in finance distribution, more clubs will go bust, while the big clubs in this country just get richer.
One final point - Sky's countdown clock yesterday was just disgusting and ill-thought and shows how much they really don't care - unless its the PL!
Like Northern Rock going in 2007 and proving a catalyst for other banks to fail.
Bury is just the start imo unless there is a real shift in rules, funding share, strategy, governance, attitude and fan expectations