[LTLF] Don’t underestimate a club on the brink

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LTLF

First Team Squad
Steve Cotterill has the unenviable task of leading Portsmouth in their first season outside the Premiership. Football is always said to be a funny game, but there is nothing odd about the likelihood of a club fighting for their lives to show a similar tenacity on the pitch [...]

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Well that's a frightening read!
 
Portsmouth are an example of everything wrong with football, especially Prem football. Rack up a huge debt, get put into administration, pay back, say, 30% to your creditors and you could possibly keep £60,000 per week footballers in your side. Until there is a law/football rule which forces clubs' debts to remain payable when the club has the money, these atrocities will remain. All you do is to overstretch yourself, wait until you're sure to be relegated, go into admin, lose the 10 points and have your debt effectively written off. It stinks. The FA/League have got to allow greedy clubs to go out of business. So it should have been goodbye Pompey, Leicester, Cardiff etc, shouldn't it?
 
RRRREDUN said:
So it should have been goodbye Pompey, Leicester, Cardiff etc, shouldn't it?
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Would hardly be fair on the fans, would it, if the Football League was putting their clubs out of existence left, right and centre? If you do that, the businessmen who made the mistakes in the first place are still getting away with it and fans who have had no say in events get punished. What good would that do for the sport?

Don't forget Forest have run up some pretty huge debts themselves in the last 10 years and it's only the patience of the chairman that has stopped them being called in.
 
Yep they should have been made to pay the ultimate penalty for there mistakes and gambling with the clubs future but thats life i suppose; break the rules and you may just get away with it.
 
Tricky Tree said:
Yep they should have been made to pay the ultimate penalty for there mistakes and gambling with the clubs future
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But how does that punish the people who made the gamble? As soon as a club gets into financial difficulty, the money men generally scarper. Kicking the club out of the league doesn't affect them if they've withdrawn their investment, so it's not a deterent to taking risks.
 
They shouldn't be allowed to continue to loan in players and retain an unfairly assembled squad of over-paid players.
 
Winnits said:
They shouldn't be allowed to continue to loan in players and retain an unfairly assembled squad of over-paid players.
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I agree with that, that's not the 'ultimate penalty' some were talking about though. Given that it's almost impossible to run a competitive side without running up debt in this division (or any) I think it would be unwise to start swinging axes at clubs that get into trouble. Really the Football League should look into the roots of the problems and introduce some wage caps.
 
So we'll make it so that the club can be run in a totally cynical way because 'it would be the fans who would suffer'? The same fans who are quite happy to gain pleasure from watching their over-extended club and over-expensive team perform on the pitch?

The only way to make the whole game 'fair' would be to....
Share round Sky money more fairly (with no parachute payments).
Allow clubs to only pay out 50% of income as wages.
Make sure that clubs going into administration must pay all debts.
Let clubs go bankrupt. No other business could survive the way Football clubs try to.
 
RRRREDUN said:
So we'll make it so that the club can be run in a totally cynical way because 'it would be the fans who would suffer'? The same fans who are quite happy to gain pleasure from watching their over-extended club and over-expensive team perform on the pitch?

The only way to make the whole game 'fair' would be to....
Share round Sky money more fairly (with no parachute payments).
Allow clubs to only pay out 50% of income as wages.
Make sure that clubs going into administration must pay all debts.
Let clubs go bankrupt. No other business could survive the way Football clubs try to.
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Agree.
 
RRRREDUN said:
So we'll make it so that the club can be run in a totally cynical way because 'it would be the fans who would suffer'? The same fans who are quite happy to gain pleasure from watching their over-extended club and over-expensive team perform on the pitch?

The only way to make the whole game 'fair' would be to....
Share round Sky money more fairly (with no parachute payments).
Allow clubs to only pay out 50% of income as wages.
Make sure that clubs going into administration must pay all debts.
Let clubs go bankrupt. No other business could survive the way Football clubs try to.
Click to expand...

I agree too. I don't think it's in anyone's interests to let clubs go out of business but it's not in anyone's interests to let them fall into debt-administration cycles either. You make four points above and I think they would be steps in the right direction, but steps 1 and 2 must come first. If the structure of the sport makes it unfeasable for clubs to run themselves economically then it would be unfair to issue severe punishments. At the moment a club doesn't have to be involved in dodgy business practices to get into financial trouble. The game's financing needs to be changed so that 'honest' clubs can compete within their means and going into administration would be a genuine sign of mismanagement rather than bad luck.
 
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