Paywalled. The first few sentences were cracking though!
paywalled? thats strange, i can see the whole thing.
pasted it here for you mate.
Enjoy 1 complimentary article
FOOTBALL | GREGOR ROBERTSON
Historic clubs being driven into dirt – yet game does nothing
Travels around the country made clear the scale of unease as clubs struggle financially, writes Gregor Robertson
Gregor Robertson
July 27 2019, 12:01am,
The Times
Football
Notts County were among the League’s founding clubs but this season will be their first in non-League football
Notts County were among the League’s founding clubs but this season will be their first in non-League football
ALEX DAVIDSON/GETTY IMAGES
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A week before the EFL season gets under way, Bury have four registered first-team players. For a recent pre-season friendly against Nantwich Town, the Shakers submitted a team sheet with 22 players named “Trialist”. Ryan Lowe, their former manager who led a buccaneering team to automatic promotion from League Two last season, departed for Plymouth Argyle this summer. So far five players, among a host who have cancelled their contracts because they have not been paid in months, have followed Lowe south to Home Park.
Believe it or not, Bury have bigger worries. On Thursday, the EFL threatened the club with expulsion in 14 days if Steve Dale, their owner, fails to provide evidence of how he intends to pay creditors under the terms of their company voluntary arrangement.
Seven days before Notts County’s first season in non-League football gets under way, the club still do not have any strips. It appears, at the time of writing, that their interminable takeover saga is reaching a conclusion, so the famous black and white strips will hopefully now be paid for and delivered from the supplier’s warehouse. Lilian Greenwood, the local MP, had approached Juventus, whom the Magpies furnished with a kit in 1903, to ask if they would return the favour. How times change. At least a fourth visit to the High Court on Wednesday over an unpaid £250,000 tax bill, and the very real prospect of liquidation, should now be averted.
Bolton Wanderers, like Bury, will begin life in League One with a 12-point deduction, the result of becoming the first professional club to enter administration since Aldershot Town in 2013. Bolton’s fall from grace has been lengthy and well documented. They, too, have a shell of a team. Players have not been paid in more than 20 weeks. A series of pre-season friendlies have been cancelled. Meanwhile, the sale of the club to the Football Ventures consortium, their prospective new owners, has been “imminent” for too long and faith in their levels of funding, and the club’s administrator, is gradually eroding.
Faith in the game’s governing bodies has been eroding for some time now too. Catastrophic mismanagement by owners with dubious motives and business histories, unsustainable levels of debt and a regulatory framework that looks increasingly unfit for purpose does not paint a pretty picture.
To travel around the country last season left no doubt about the scale of unease. Oldham Athletic, Morecambe and Macclesfield Town’s players were all paid late last season. The same is true of players of Oxford United, Reading and Southend United. Add to that the long-running disputes between maligned owners and embattled supporters of Charlton Athletic, Port Vale, Hull City, Blackpool and Coventry City, who must watch their team play their home games in Birmingham next season, and the picture is even bleaker.
Financial distress? Dodgy owners? Nothing new there, of course. More than 40 professional football clubs have faced administration in the past 25 years, some on more than one occasion. Insolvencies spiked at the turn of the century, catalysed by the collapse of ITV Digital in 2002-03 — around which time ten clubs entered administration, but since then the number in professional football has largely been in decline. Yet players, staff and bills are being paid late more regularly than ever before, winding-up petitions are being issued with increasing regularity, in part as a result of a more aggressive approach to collecting tax from HMRC. Seventeen clubs were issued with winding-up petitions in the five seasons between 2012-13 and 2016-17, eight were issued with winding-up petitions last season alone.
In the Championship, an increasingly cosmopolitan race for the riches of the Premier League meant all but five of 24 clubs ended 2017-18 in the red (in League One six clubs were in profit and in League Two eight). According to Kieran Maguire, a football finance lecturer at the University of Liverpool, in the five seasons up to 2017-18, while Championship clubs’ income and wage spend increased by more than 50 per cent, operating losses more than doubled and net losses totalled more than £1.1 billion.
A “new breed’ of owners, Maguire says, who are “prepared to underwrite losses in the short term to reach the Premier League”, and for whom “losing £50 million a year is not an issue”, has led to “creative accountants circumnavigating FFP [financial fair play] rules” — as we have seen with Aston Villa, Derby County and Sheffield Wednesday selling their stadiums and leasing them back from the club’s owners.
The nine-point deduction for Birmingham City in March for exceeding permitted profitability and sustainability losses of £39 million over three seasons may convince some Championship clubs to rein in spending. With less than two weeks of the transfer window remaining, the division’s 24 clubs have parted with about a third of the £200 million that they spent last summer. After the success of Sheffield United and Norwich City last season, who prospered through intelligent recruitment, coaching and leadership, there are hopes that more clubs may adopt a more long-term ethos.
Luton Town’s unprecedented 30-point deduction for failing to adhere to insolvency rules led to them plummeting from the Championship to the Conference a decade ago. David Wilkinson, the Luton chairman and an original member of the 2020 consortium that bought Luton from administrators, has seen first-hand the “trickle-down” effect of inflated spending as clubs stretch themselves to compete. After securing back-to-back promotions, Luton are preparing for a return to a very different second tier, where the average wage bill now stands at £28 million.
“We can’t compete with big transfer fees and we can’t compete with big salaries — if we do, we’ll end up where we did as a club before,” Wilkinson says. “We’d rather be relegated than go back to that. The club is more important than the league we’re in. So what we’ve done, at least for now, is spend a lot more on scouting and coaching, because we think that’s the only way we can compete — to be better, sign cheaper.”
In 2017-18 player sales meant that the club turned a small profit for the first time and this summer the full backs Jack Stacey and James Justin have been sold to Bournemouth and Leicester City for a combined sum of about £14 million.
In a bid to improve regulation, supporters’ groups’ have proposed a new owners’ and directors’ test that would include assessment of a business plan, relevant skills and capabilities. A code of practice on stewardship, the adherence to which would be monitored, has also been mooted. Tightened restrictions surrounding the way in which the purchase of football clubs is funded, greater protection of their assets and a bond delivery from proposed owners, which would be forfeited in the event of any default in payment of wages or taxes, have been consulted upon too. The most ambitious proposal, championed by Andy Holt, the Accrington Stanley owner, and supporters groups, is the introduction of an independent regulator, which some believe should come under the auspices of the FA, which would almost certainly require government legislation. But it is easy to be persuaded by such an idea when, as things stand, the EFL (and Premier League and National League) — which are members’ clubs, with hugely varying priorities, ambitions and agendas — are in effect self-regulatory.
Holt, Wilkinson and others admit, in private discussions with their fellow EFL owners and directors, that there is an acknowledgment that the status quo is unsustainable.
“Turkeys won’t vote for Christmas,” Holt says. “They won’t vote for something that might restrict them from having a gamble, or getting their money back. They’re of a mindset: it’s their money, they’ll do what they want. But in doing what they want, they jack up costs for everybody, including Accrington. Players, wages, gradually pumping up the bubble.”
Clubs can never be completely safeguarded. But doesn’t the game owe it to Bury, Bolton, Notts County, and the next club, to try?
Clubs in trouble
Late wage payments
Bolton Wanderers, Reading, Bury, Oldham Athletic, Oxford United, Southend United, Macclesfield Town, Morecambe, Notts County
Winding-up petitions served
Oxford, Macclesfield, Bury, Bolton, Notts County, Southend, Ipswich Town, Morecambe
Fan protests/boycotts
(last season) Charlton Athletic, Hull City, Blackpool, Coventry City, Bolton, Port Vale