by The Green Programme »
24 Jun 2023 20:01
Elm Park Kid WestYorksRoyal Sutekh Perhaps one thing that should be insisted on is that owners MUST be residenced in the UK for at least 6 months in every year and that owner checks become annual affairs like account audits.
Is there a way football clubs can be treated like cultural assets? We'd need some sort of legislation. For example, you can't just tear down a listed property even if you own it. There should be laws that allows the authorities to create a compulsory sale order or something like that. These clubs have historic value in their communities and it's ridiculous that once a bad owner gets in there is nothing the regulators can do.
Chelsea and Abrahmovic was an extraordinary set of circumstances. Why not extend the power to do it for failing to pay wages etc. Would obviously be the nuclear option, but just knowing the threat was there would bring owners to heel.
There are plans to bring in an independent regulator for football who would have some powers to control the way that football clubs operate and increase safeguards against a bad owner.
But, at the end of the day governments are loathed to directly meddle too much in football. For one, the PL has be a fantastic success story overall, driven primarily by following commercial business practices. Two - FIFA bans governments from interfering too much in national football set ups. And three, it risk creating political time bombs if governments are see as responsible for the welfare of individual football clubs. MPs could lose their seats if they were seen to not interfere enough/in the right way.
The best thing to do in terms of safeguarding clubs would be the German approach of fan ownership. But then the German league has stagnated for decades, one club completely dominating and others being unable to raise the finances needed to compete. And they themselves are looking to move away from their existing model.
Excellent post.
I do think the EFL problem is that Championship Clubs often follow a Chelsea/Man City/Newcastle type model of incredibly wealthy owners pouring money in (sometimes allegedly disguised as lucrative ‘sponsorship’ deals as with Man City who have somehow got away with cheating the PL’sand UEFA’s FFP for years).
This model generally fails under EFL FFP rules and therefore Championship Clubs often take a massive risk.
The Derby v Villa play off final was literally do or die; whoever went up would be fine financially; whoever lost; risked oblivion due to flagrant FFP abuse.
Bournemouth are another Club who would have had to sell everyone and restructure the Club’s finances if they had not gone up last year.
Pauno made it clear when we finished 7th and blew a fantastic opportunity to go up (Joao’s penalty miss v Preston and open goal miss v Barnsley) with a very, very good squad - “we have to be promoted this season”.
We didn’t make it and that led to the other side of the coin revealing itself - it’s not quite Derby…..
Thanks to Dai’s money - but nonetheless it’s been a terrible price to pay.
The worst mistakes for me have been not cashing in on our youngsters during this period and not offloading Moore, Puscas, Baldock, Meite and others when we could have done so; for fees that would have created a much healthier financial result allowed the Club to build again with a much reduced wage bill and probably no breach of FFP.
To have let Loader and Richards and Osho (to name but three) run their contracts down or leave for next to nothing was such poor management.
It makes me very angry to see such poor decisions - especially when I stop and consider our current predicament.
