Football Supporters Are Inherently Conservative

That break that last for a couple of days towards the end of a major football tournament can do strange things to you. I considered at great length whether I should go into enormous detail about the European Championship semi-finals (which, lest we forget, are being played tomorrow night and the night after), but I thought that a break would probably be good for all of us, and that it would have the advantage of allowing me to pontificate briefly on a subject that I've been playing about with in my mind quite a lot over the last few weeks. Over the last twenty-five years or so, football has become political.

Whether it was the National Front selling their repulsive magazine "Bulldog" outside grounds in the early 1980s, the fanzine movement or the growing movement against the creeping commercialisation of the modern game, being a football supporter has become more than just turning up to the matches, singing yourself hoarse and going home again. It has become more of a 24/7 lifestyle. Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to talk about football I would have needed to go to the pub, but now we have any number of message boards that we can discuss it upon, and with this vast expansion of the role of the game into the periphery of our lives has come a new role for it. The very act of being a football supporter has become, albeit in an indirect way, a political act, and most football supporters are conservative.

It's important, at this point, to differentiate between conservative and Conservative. Very few of the people that I know will be voting for David Cameron's mob at the next general election. If one stops capitalising the "C" in it, however, the definition shifts slightly, and many more of us fit the definition. Chambers English Dictionary has the following to say:

"conservative - adj: 1. Favouring that which is established or traditional, with an opposition to change. 2. Said of an estimate or calculation: deliberately low, for the sake of caution".

How many us does that not fit? In some respects, there's nothing wrong with it. We have managed to maintain and expand our system of professional football in England for a hundred and twenty years on the basis of this, and a healthy scepticism of change was behind the massive opposition to the Premier League's insane Game 39 plan (although you haven't heard the last of that yet). One could also add that anything "deliberately low, for the sake of caution" would be most welcome in the modern climate, in which continuing spiralling wage costs, price increases and transfer fees threaten the financial stability of the game in ways that we have never seen before. The flip side to it, however, is a fear of change, even if the change itself may be to the benefit of all of us.

This conservatism manifests itself within the game in many different ways. Take, for example, one of the most-stated "facts" of football in the 1990s - "Blackburn Rovers bought the 1995 Premier League championship". Jack Walker, who funded Blackburn's rise from Division Two to the top of the Premier League, is nearest thing that there has ever been to a genuine football philanthropist, and it's true that he put a lot of money into Blackburn Rovers. However, by the standards of the football club owner, he was about as good as it gets, and his name is still the one produced in bar room debates when talk turns to how good it might be to have a sugar daddy owner. Blackburn did spend money that was over and above what their means might otherwise have paid for, but Walker also rebuilt Ewood Park into a stadium that would cope with the club's needs for the forseeable future and created an infrastructure that sees them retain their Premier League place to this day, whilst other, bigger clubs have floundered their way down into the Football League, never to return.

Blackburn Rovers winning the 1995 Premier League championship pleased a lot of people, but it angered a lot of people, too. Who were these upstarts and how dare they compete with Manchester United and Liverpool as equals? The accusation of "buying the title" isn't one that one sees being thrown at Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool very often (certainly never in the case of Liverpool - not in the last eighteen years, anyway), even when those clubs have spent very heavily indeed in the pursuit of honours, but it was thrown at Chelsea when Roman Abramovich took over. One doesn't have to be a fan of Abramovich (or, indeed, of Chelsea) to appreciate that, had he brought Liverpool or Manchester United, the same arguments would not have been put forward. Chelsea were, in a diluted form, the new Blackburn. Now perceived as being little more than a plutocrat's toy, their supporters have had "You've got no history" sung at them for the last five years or so by other Premier League clubs. Of course, their supporters don't really care that much, especially while they're still winning trophies, and the stark fact of the matter is that their place in the top four means only that the Premier League has a top four rather than a top three.

This conservatism also there in our dislike of the Premier League's arrivistes - the likes of Reading and Wigan Athletic, who have supplanted clubs like Coventry City and Southampton as the make-weights of the division. The amount of bile cast forth in the direction of the JJB Stadium over the last two or three years has been out of all proportion of anything that they have done wrong, whilst even Fulham, who were once one of the neutral's favourite clubs, have seen their popularity wane since the Al-Fayed money took them up from the Third Division to the Premier League and kept them there, even though they still have, in Craven Cottage, one of the most attractive grounds in the country at which one can watch football. The truth of the matter is that, were the story of Cinderella to be repeated today, the majority of people at the ball would be standing around whispering to each other, "Well, who the hell does she think that she is?".

Most of the time, this is all so much harmless talk. After all, who amongst us wouldn't have enjoyed Blackburn's rise to the top of the Premier League had we been supporters of theirs, especially considering that they have maintained their place at the top table for almost all of the thirteen years since? Every once in a while, though, fear of the new seeps over into real life decisions and suddenly things become much more muddy. Take, for example, the ongoing crisis at Halifax Town. Halifax have been facing extinction for quite a while, now. They avoided relegation on the last day of last season, only for the drop to come when they were expelled from the league and relegated two divisions to Division One North of the Unibond League. In the middle of all this, the club's Supporters Trust members were asked whether they would support a new club formed by consortium that has been paying the bills for the last few months or a club run by the fans themselves. They voted for the consortium.

Evidently, the challenge of running it for themselves is to much for a majority of HTST members, which does rather beg the question of why they were members of it in the first place. Never mind the stark fact that the "business" model of running a football club has failed them in the most devastating way that it possibly could or the success of ST owned clubs playing at exactly the same level that they will be playing (assuming that they will actually start next season) last season, they have decided to entrust the fate of their club to a group of people that now have to try and dig them out of the hole that they are in. With July just a week away it is still more likely than not that the club will be wound up, and there are no guarantees that any new club for Halifax will be starting next season.

Of course, no small part of the problem facing people that are opposed to Trust-run clubs is the perception of them somehow being politically left wing, and I guess that they are, in more than one sense. However, the ridiculous situation at Halifax is proof as if it were needed that our inner conservatism (with a small "c") can do us at least as much damage as it does us good. It is too late now to make the argument for a Trust-run club to Halifax supporters - they have made their bed and they will have to lie in it - but I would suggest this much to them. Have a look at the message boards for FC United, AFC Wimbledon, AFC Telford United, Scarborough Athletic and all the rest of them and take a look at how harmonious they are. Now look at the Halifax message board, and look at the arguments, mud-flinging and recriminations taking place on there. The old way might yet work for Halifax Town in the short term. A new, debt-free club will very likely be a powerhouse if it starts below the Unibond League Premier Division. It strikes me, however, that this would have been just as likely had the Trust taken over running of the club, and that this would at least have secured the long term future in the club in a way that no business consortium can. If they end up back in this mess again in five years' time, the supporters that voted "no" to a Supporters Trust owned club will only have themselves to blame.

Mad As A Hatter

Just two and a half years ago, Luton Town were playing for a place in the Premier League. Just outside the play-off places and having given Liverpool an almighty scare in the FA Cup, it looked as if a bright future might just be within their grasp. What has happened since then has been well documented elsewhere (suffice to say that this success was built upon a house of cards), but it culminated this week in the club, which has already been relegated into League Two having been docked ten points last year for going into administration, being docked another ten points for the financial irregularities that were in no small part to blame for them being in the predicament in which they ended up. If that isn't bad enough, they could yet be docked a further fifteen points if they fail to exit administration before the start of next season. Such a points deduction would be almost unprecedented in the entire history of English football (only Port Vale, who were temporarily expelled by the Football League in 1968 over financial irregularities, and Leeds City, who were permanently expelled in 1919 for the same offence, come close), and would almost certainly mean the end of league football in the county of Bedfordshire.

At this point, I do have to declare an interest. At school in neighbouring Hertfordshire in the early 1980s, we would regularly receive free tickets to matches at Kenilworth Road. Also, in an era in which much of the football shown on the television in England was shown on a regional basis, Luton fell between two different television regions. Their matches were covered for ITV by London Weekend Television and Anglia Television, meaning that they were (or seemed to be) featured on the weekly TV highlights programmes every single week. They were promoted into the First Division in 1982 with a team (managed by David Pleat) that played attacking, attractive football, and their first season in the top flight ended with an escape from relegation that was sealed with a 1-0 win at Maine Road on the last day of the season that sent Manchester City down in their place and provided, in the sight of David Pleat running across the pitch in a beige suit and brown brogues, one of the defining football images of the 1980s. Their relative popularity amongst neutrals, however, was soon undermined by the actions of their odiously reptilian chairman, David Evans. A Conservative MP and acolyte of Margaret Thatcher, Evans almost seemed driven by desire to make Luton the most hated club in England. He installed a plastic pitch at Kenilworth Road and replaced The Bobbers Stand, which ran the length of one side of the ground, with executive boxes and nothing else (these are still in place at Kenilworth Road), and then introduced a membership scheme which effectively banned away supporters from the ground. They were relegated from the First Division on the eve of the formation of the Premier League, in 1992, and few neutral tears were shed.

Twenty years on from the worst excesses of Evans' regime, the club's reputation still suffers from the worst excesses of his legacy, even though Luton have spent much of the last ten years as one of football's perennial "crisis clubs". This has been further exacerbated by the activities of a minority of their support, who have further sullied the club's reputation over the last few years. There aren't many people that have a great deal of sympathy for Luton's current plight. To take this attitude, however, seems to me to be missing the point of the FA's judgement. Evans is long gone from Kenilworth Road, and Luton Town aren't the only club to have troublemakers that have latched themselves onto their local club. More concerning still is that the FA have chosen to issue a draconian sanction against a group of people that are nothing to do with the mismanagement that took place at Kenilworth Road during the reign of former chairman Bill Tomlins. Tomlins himself (who, in addition to the charges brought by the FA, was the man that took them into administration in the first place) has been banned from football for five years and fined £15,000, and three co-defendants were also found guilty of misconduct. In addition to this, six agents were also warned about their future behaviour. None of those concerned, however, have been at the club since last year. Luton have been in administration since last November, with a new consortium (LTFC2020) being very close to completing a take-over of the club. There is no link between anyone from LTFC2020 and those that have been damned by the FA's verdict.

The decision reached by the FA could have far reaching and unwanted implications for the game as a whole. LTFC2020 have been transparent in all of their dealings since they became involved at Kenilworth Road. We would that this were always the case. Any decision to impose sanctions against, effectively, the new owners of a football club for the misdemeanours of the previous owners will surely only serve to persuade people (and in particular people with nothing to hide) to shy away from getting involved in digging clubs out of the holes that they have created for themselves in the first place. If one is wavering over whether to get involved at a football club that is in trouble, the thought that one could end up paying (in many respects, both literal and metaphorical) for something that was nothing to do with them may prove to be the tipping point in driving them away from involvement and investment. Also, the FA would never even have known about what was going on at Luton had it not been for whistle-blowing from former manager Mike Newell and former club secretary Cherry Newbery. Such a judgement will surely only have the effect of deterring the likes of Newell and Newbery from calling attention to mismanagement within football clubs. This judgement has removed part of the incentive for people within football clubs to act honestly and report suspected misconduct.

One could almost be forgiven for thinking that this is what the FA wants - that it would be more expedient for them to be able to silence people from telling the truth and revealing more of the rotten core of the game than it would be for them to actually do anything about it that might cause them (or "The Game") further bad publicity. I don't believe this to be the case, but the FA certainly make it easy for us to interpret their actions in this way. They would be better advised to channel their efforts into setting a proper definition for the "Fit & Proper" test, which is supposed to determine whether someone is capable of holding a directorial position within a football club, but actually seems to merely have the effect of allowing the shysters and hucksters to carry on doign whatever they like with impunity. As it stands, only one man - Denis Coleman of Rotherham United - doesn't pass the FA's Fit & Proper test, because he inherited a financial mess at Millmoor which meant that he had to put the club into administration twice. Meanwhile, anyone else can carry on doing exactly what they like, secure in the knowledge that the worst that will happen to them is likely to be a slap on the wrist and a fine. I'm all in favour of on the pitch sanctions for off the pitch behaviour - they are, in many ways, the only way to beat football into cleaning up its act - but there comes a point at which sparing the rod and spoiling the child becomes something that looks like nothing so much as vindictiveness and, while I cannot believe that it was the intention of the FA for this to happen, that line appears to have been crossed on this occasion.

A Home Away From Home

Sad and troubling news from South Yorkshire, where Rotherham United have conceded defeat in their attempts to stay at Millmoor, and will play for next season at least at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. The club had been in negotiations with the Booth family (who own Millmoor) for the last few weeks, but have been unable to agree terms with the owners and will, therefore, be leaving their home for the last 101 years with immediate effect. There are plans in place with the local council to build a new community stadium within the town itself, but it will take a minimum of two or three years for the new stadium to be ready for use, so relocation seems to be the only option for them for the time being.


Don Valley Stadium is five miles from Rotherham, in Sheffield. It is fortunate in some respects for the club that such a facility is relatively nearby. It is the biggest athletics stadium in England (with a capacity of 25,000), and is regularly used as a concert venue by rock bands. Whether it is suitable for League Two football is, however, a somewhat different question. Rotherham attracted crowds of in the region of 3-4,000 people for lehague matches last season, and the prospect of them rattling around Don Valley like peas in a tin can is a far from enthralling one. In addition to this, the presence of an athletics track around the pitch is likely to further affect the atmosphere at home matches. Finally, although five miles doesn't sound like very far, there is also the concern that travelling such a distance may be enough people off travelling to see them play. People in the immediate surroundings of the new stadium could reasonably be expected to already have allegiances to Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday that will not be broken because a new, less successful club from out of town have moved into the area.


The club's new owner, Tony Stewart, has had a lot on his plate over the last few weeks, having already saved the club from extinction when such an outcome appeared to be likely to the point of being inevitable. He is, unsurprisingly, putting a positive spin on the move, talking up the "opportunity" aspect of it. If Rotherham were to make a success of moving to an athletics stadium, though, it would put them in a minority of one amongst the clubs that have tried it. The highest profile club in England to use an athletics stadium are Brighton & Hove Albion, who moved to The Withdean Stadium in 1999 after two seasons of playing their home matches at Gillingham. To say that the conditions of their lease are onerous would be one of the biggest understatements that I could manage. They're not allowed to play any music over the PA until the teams come onto the pitch and then a further fifteen minutes at half-time. No parking is allowed within a mile of the stadium (which has meant that the club has had to launch a park & ride scheme from Brighton railway station), and the residents of the area have blocked any attempts from the club to make the area more football friendly. In 2005, when they renegotiated the terms of the lease with Brighton & Hove Council, a local resident spotted a loophole in agreement signed and, presumably hoping to get them evicted, made the council and club go through the whole application process again. The lease on Withdean is financially crippling for Brighton & Hove Albion, and goes ninety per cent of the way towards explaining why the move to a new stadium in Falmer was so critical to the club's survival. All of this doesn't even take into account the terrible atmosphere there on matchdays, when any attempts at creating an atmosphere seem to catch the wind and blow away over the South Downs. Ultimately, Withdean is an athletics stadium, and is ill-suited to hosting League football.

A different yet similar situation has arisen in Manchester, where FC United of Manchester have been groundsharing with League Two club Bury. The cost of renting Gigg Lane is high and the additional limitations on what the club can earn from additional revenues (food within the ground, for example, is controlled by Bury) mean that every home match is a struggle for them to break even. The fighting fund that they have set up to try and secure a ground that they can call their own, therefore, is reliant on donations and not much else. It's a catch-22 situation which suits no-one apart from, one suspects, Bury FC (and whilst I wouldn't wish ill on them given their recent financial difficulties, a smaller club is suffering because of the circumstances in which it finds itself).

The long term future of Rotherham United, therefore, depends on their being able to return back to the town of Rotherham as soon as possible. It is, therefore, critical that the council and club act quickly and decisively to secure a site for a new stadium and begin work on it as quickly as possible. Five miles may not seem like a great distance, but when that five miles takes you over the boundary and into a neighbouring (and considerably bigger) city, one fears that the identity of the club could be in danger. Lack of atmosphere and the feeling that "this isn't Rotherham any more", when twinned with the additional distance, could have a serious effect on attendances. It is true to say that Don Valley Stadium is council-owned and one would hope that the council would intend to help Rotherham United by limiting the cost of renting it and allowing them to make money from merchandising and refreshments on match days, but this is far from guaranteed. The last few weeks have seen Rotherham United fight against all the odds to secure their very existence and now, and now, not long after it looked as if they had done enough to pull through, a new and potentially graver threat to the club's existence has chosen to rear its head. I just hope that the Booths enjoy the money that they will get from the sale of the Millmoor - they're making a lot of people suffer for it.

Rising From The Ashes

During the mid to late 1990s, while the Premier League reaped the almost ridiculously ostentatious rewards of the Sky TV boom, supporters of many smaller clubs found themselves having to mobilise against a rash of asset stripping new club owners. Each protest brought its own stark images, be they the collecting tins outside Bootham Crescent as York City were run into the ground by Douglas Craig, the desperate pitch invasion at The Goldstone Ground after David Bellotti and Bill Archer sold Brighton's stadium to developers and pocketed the money, or the black card protests at Selhurst Park after Wimbledon announced their move to Milton Keynes. Perhaps the most vivid and poignant images of the era, however, came from Doncaster Rovers' Belle Vue. As the club tumbled out of the Football League in 1998, Doncaster's supporters marched a coffin from the town centre to the stadium and, as The Last Post played, they performed the last rites for a club that seemed to be at death's door itself.

The key player in the collapse of Doncaster Rovers was businessman Ken Richardson. Richardson had previous - he had been at the centre of the "Flockton Grey" betting scandal of 1982, when an average racehorse running in a nondescript race at Leicester was swapped for what was, effectively, a "ringer". Richardson and his trainer, Stephen Wiles, bet £20,000 on the fake horse, but he was charged with conspiracy to defraud after bookmakers became suspicious and was banned from ownership by The Jockey Club for twenty-five years and sentenced to a nine month suspended prison sentence. Having pitched up at Belle Vue (and it's worth pointing out that, while there was no such thing as a "Fit & Proper" test for club owners at the time, Richardson would have passed the one currently used by the FA), the club suddenly lost their main stand to fire in 1995. This time it was an insurance company that became (perhaps unsurprisingly) suspicious and involved South Yorkshire police. By the time Doncaster fell out of the Football League, fifteen points adrift at the bottom of Division Three and with a goal difference of -83, Richardson was awaiting trial for conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to commit arson. Richardson, it transpired, had paid a former SAS man £10,000 to start the fire. Worryingly for the SAS, he hadn't been difficult to track down, having left his mobile phone at the scene of the crime. Richardson was jailed for four years in 1999.

Rovers, penniless and facing almost certain closure, then finally got lucky. John Ryan, a local businessman said to be worth £20m, stepped in a bought the club for £50,000. He promised a new stadium and a return to the Football League, but first the club had to arrest its slide. Under former Rovers player Ian Snodin, they narrowly avoided relegation and stabilised to sixteenth place. The following season, they rose to mid-table, and continued their year-on-year improvement until, in 2003, they were promoted back into the League in the Conference's first play-off final, after a 3-2 win against Dagenham & Redbridge at The Britannia Stadium. In their first season back in the Football League, they won the Third Division championship, and in December 2006 they left Belle Vue, as Ryan had promised eight years earlier, for a new stadium, the 15,000 capacity Keepmoat Stadium. After four years in League One, they were promoted last weekend when a goal early in the second half from James Hayter was enough to beat Leeds United at Wembley.

For all the continuing perceived injustice coming from Elland Road over the last few months (which culminated in a fairly unbecoming display of petulance from Leeds' supporters before the play-off final last weekend), one gets the feeling that maybe they just haven't quite suffered enough. The Football League bent over backwards to help Leeds United, creating an arbitrary points deduction that prevented them having to relegate them still further because of the way that the club handled its affairs last summer. The supporters, who should have been hurling their invective at the people that had got the club in that mess in the first place, missed this point spectacularly, choosing instead to swallow Bates' frankly ludicrous story about them being forced "under duress" to sign an agreement to not take the matter to court. Leeds' supporters chose to ignore the truth and throw their lot in with Ken Bates instead. The independent arbitrators brought in by the Football League, however, saw through the smokescreen, and Leeds ended up hoisted by their own petard of hubris and self-inflicted victimhood, and their defeat at Wembley was a morally uplifting way for last season to end. Leeds United, as I have mentioned here before, benefited considerably from the way in which they exited administration, spending heavily on players (by League One standards), and will start next season as the favourites to get promotion back into the Championship. Doncaster Rovers, by contrast, have earned their season in the sun in the hardest way possible and deserve our congratulations.

Town And Out

Sunrise, sunset. The Independent this morning reported on the successful start made by AFC Liverpool, at least off the pitch - commercial activities including a sponsorship deal have, it was reported, earned them between £50,000-£100,000, while the appointment of Derek Goulding (who took Burscough to an FA Cup First Round in November 2005) as manager seems to be an indicator that they intend to be taken seriously when they kick off in the North West Counties League next season. Meanwhile, other supporter run clubs, FC United of Manchester and AFC Wimbledon both got promoted at the end of this season. Victory at Wembley for Exeter City in the BSP play-off final against Burton Albion could make it a hat-trick.

At the other end of the spectrum, it looks like the end of the road for former Football League club Halifax Town. Halifax, with debts of £2m, seem to be heading for liquidation. Docked ten points earlier in the season, they escaped relegation from the Conference on the last day of the season, but the extent of their financial woes has been unravelling in front of the public over the last week or so. The club's final hope for survival was a CVA put to creditors to repay two and a half pence in the pound against their debts, but this appears to have been quashed by Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs. It had been believed that the club owed £500,000 to HMRC, and that this left them scope to negotiate a deal, but it has become apparent today that the actual debt is £814,000. After five hours of talks this afternoon, the club's administrator, Rob Sadler, was gloomy about the prognosis. "Halifax Town will probably perish", he said today. With creditors holding out for 10p in the pound, and the Conference meeting on June 9th, agreement has to be reached by then, or the club will be expelled from the league. In their current state, it is unlikely that they will find a home in any league for next season.

Whilst I have every sympathy for the supporters of Halifax Town FC, the question begs to be asked - why should creditors accept two and a half per cent of what they're owed in order to keep what appears to be a failing football club alive? Take builder Roy Barnett, for example. He is owed £200,000 by Halifax Town for building work carried out at The Shay. Why (apart from the obvious answer of "because if they go into liquidation, he'll get nothing") should he accept £5,000? It's an insultingly small amount of money, considering what he owes. Too often, football gets wound up in its own little world and fails to take into account the lives that it affects. Yet again, the tax man is amongst the biggest creditors and, while it's easy to demonise him (Ken Bates did it enough at Leeds last summer), ultimately, that money is ours. Yours and mine. It's difficult to have much sympathy for a company that is so incompetently managed that it can't even afford to pay its tax bill.

The simple answer, so far as I can see, is that football, as ever, has its priorities in the wrong order. I would have little doubt that, throughout this period that Halifax Town were not paying their tax bill or paying the man that was helping to build their stadium (and plenty more besides, I'll bet), they spent plenty of money on players' wages. Also, whilst there is a sound logic behind the FA's insistence that football creditors have to be paid in full, this rule has stiffened the resolve of HMRC, who now vote against any CVA that doesn't pay them in full (even though government legislation doesn't allow them "preferred creditor" status any more). The success of FC United, AFC Wimbledon and Exeter City is proof of another way that works, but the reality is that the majority of football supporters probably don't want to be involved in that way. As such, the majority of football supporters are, therefore, are hostages to fortune.

Over the last few years, the Conference has continued to haemorrhage money from several of its clubs - Canvey Island, Scarborough and Boston United have fell down (whether voluntarily or not), while Crawley Town, Rushden & Diamonds, Cambridge United and Weymouth have all teetered on the abyss. The mathematics are fairly simple - clubs in the Championship earn a fraction of the money that clubs in the Premier League do. Clubs in League One & Two earn a fraction of the money that clubs in the Championship do. clubs in the Conference earn a fraction that those in the Football League do. Players' wages do not, however, work in the same way. A decent Conference player costs not much less than a decent League Two player. Some clubs over-extend on the pitch. Some over-extend on ground development. The results, however, are always the same. The supporters owned clubs aren't a universal remedy to the game's financial woes (and don't even get me started on how, in an era of such wealth at the top of the game, so many clubs still contrive to end up practically insolvent), but they are leading more people to see past the game's false tragedies of relegation and losing cup finals, and focus on a change of priorities - one in which the definition of success is having a team to go and watch in the first place.

A Rare Outbreak Of Common Sense

At five o'clock this evening, Swansea City were finally crowned as the champions of League One. Swansea have spent the whole of this season doing rather well out of getting quietly on with the business of winning matches whilst playing some of the best football to be seen in England outside of the Premier League. Matters at the top of League One, however, had been rather taken out of Swansea's hands by the behaviour of Leeds United over the course of the season.

When Leeds finally collapsed at the end of last season, the administrators appointed took a somewhat idiosyncratic on the best way forward for the club. Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs were champing at the bit and looking to secure a winding up order against the club. The Football League were so concerned at the state of affairs at Elland Road that they withheld the "Golden Share", effectively threatening to expel them from the League unless they got their house in order.

What happened next has never been satisfactorily explained. With Ken Bates holding out for as low an offer as possible in the club's CVA (in the first place, he threatened to close the club unless creditors accepted an insultingly low offer of one penny in the pound against Leeds' entirely self-inflicted debts), the administrators the put the club up for sale, in a blind auction with just five days before bids had to be submitted. There were rival groups interested in buying Leeds United, but any businessman buying anything would need longer than five days to go through due diligence processes and calculate a reasonable offer for the club. Bates was, effectively, the only person that could win the auction.

The behaviour of the administrators (and of Bates himself) must have caused considerable alarm within the Football League. The League won't allow clubs to exit administration unless they're doing it unless "under exceptional circumstances", and this was what Leeds were doing. The League sanctioned them to keep their place, but with a fifteen point deduction for breaking the rule in the first place. There were rumblings of discontent, but Leeds exited administration and started the season. More details of this are available here. Then, out of the blue, Ken Bates confirmed that he was planning to take the Football League to court. Few people actually believed that he would. There are probably quite a lot of people that would like to ask him a few questions under oath.

In the end, arbitration was the result. Many believe that Leeds were simply trying to get some of the points back. When the legal challenge was raised, they were in a slump that threatened to leave them short of a play-off place. Every little helps. The matter was dragged out until this afternoon, and the timing of the decision was largely forced upon all concerned - it had to be announced before the last day of the League One season, which is on Saturday. In the middle of all of this, the innocent parties - the likes of Swansea City and Doncaster Rovers, who have played the season to the assumption that Leeds' points deduction was fair, and may have been punished had the arbitration committee made a decision that restored any number of their points to them.

In the end, they decided that the League had not acted unfairly. It would, indeed, be "fair" to say that the arrangement that Leeds have to absolve themselves of their debts (paying their creditors, including - in the form of HMRC - you and I) has allowed them to be big spenders this season by the standards of League One. They haven't done badly out of it at all, to the extent that it would still leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many supporters of League One clubs if Leeds were to scramble up through the play-offs. For now, though, the congratulations should stay with Swansea City and whichever one of Doncaster Rovers, Nottingham Forest or Carlisle United follows them up. Considering the financial travails that so many of League One's clubs have had to endure this season, it might be nice to actually concentrate on the football there for once.

Tough Love

I thought I'd better warn you first - this isn't going to make for particularly happy reading. I have, however, been doing a considerable amount of pondering about the number of clubs falling into financial difficulties this season. We continue to live in an age of comparative wealth. The Football League TV deal is dwarfed by what the Premier League gets, but it still beats what clubs used to get in the First Division in the 1980s hands down. Crowds are up, and ticket prices are, to many eyes, as extortionate as they are in the Premier League. Ticket prices of £25 in League One are not uncommon. In spite of this, the number of clubs lurching into administration continues apace and, more troubling than this, two of the three clubs that have found themselves inviting the experts in to try and sort out the mess that they have got themselves into are repeat offenders- they are clubs that have been here before.

Three or four years ago, when clubs seemed to be heading in this direction on a weekly basis, there seemed to be an obvious party to blame - ITV Digital. The television station, jointly owned Carlton and Granada TV, collapsed into liquidation and was closed by its owners after putting all of its apples in the basket of the Football League. Clubs had already gone ahead and spent a sizeable chunk of the money that ITV Digital had promised them (a jaw-dropping £315m - and that "m" at the end isn't a typo) when the company collapsed, and the Football League was heavily criticised for employing lawyers who managed to come up with a contract that wasn't in the slightest bit watertight. When the League sued them, they won £4 in damages. The problem for the clubs was that they had been cashing cheques based on promises that ITV had no obligation to fulfil. It was a miracle that none of them went to the wall. Following Leicester City's shenanigans (entering into administration and then spending heavily - more than any of their rivals could afford - immediately upon their exit from via a CVA), the League brought in the automatic ten point deduction for clubs entering into administration to prevent anyone else from doing it. But as this season's events have demonstrated, the system is still far from perfect.

The biggest single problem seems to the very financial model that football clubs work to. Clubs exist in a financial bubble, in which vast amounts of money are spent on players, both in transfer fees and wages, and the Bosman ruling removed a considerable amount of the security involved in having a player on their books. In addition to this, the changing of quotas on foreign players and relaxation of rules on foreign player registration meant that big English clubs simply stopped spending money on clubs from the lower divisions. Why bother risking £2m on an untried clogger from the Second Division whose first touch almost certainly wouldn't be up to the job when they could get a player that was three times as good for a quarter of the cost from Europe or Africa? In addition to this, clubs seem to often be on a mission to give themselves a bad press. They don't make any use of their single biggest assets - their stadium and players. The stadia of most clubs remain locked for twelve or thirteen days out of fourteen and when the players are cajoled to do their couple of days per month community service, they can barely stifle how bored they look with it all.

To this end, there is a case for saying that smaller Football League clubs are a bit like the black sheep of a family in terms of their relationships with their communities. They scarcely engage with the communities (indeed, some of them act like a proper pain in the backside), but when this lackadaisical attitude has its inevitable consequences, the collections tins are brought out, and suddenly the chairman is all over the local radio telling everyone how important the club is to its community. The same mistakes are made over and over again, and clubs end up exactly where they were before. AFC Bournemouth sold their ground in 2005 and have been leasing it back ever since, yet here we are in April 2008 and, although the latest rumours coming out of the club are more healthy than what we were hearing about last week, it is still touch and go whether they will make it beyond the end of this season. Rotherham United entered into administration in May 2006, and less than two years later they are back in the same situation that they were in before. The only main difference is that each time a club goes into administration, getting the trust of creditors and being allowed to agree a CVA becomes more difficult than it was before.

Supporters Trusts don't necessarily offer the answer here, and that isn't a criticism of the Supporters Trust movement. One wonders sometimes what it will take for the leopards that run our game to change their spots. I once heard someone say, "All football clubs are the same. Give them £10 and they will spend £11. Give them £10m and they will spend £11m", and there is a lot of truth in this. With thousands of customers that literally can't shop anywhere else, football clubs, you'd think, should at least be able to keep themselves solvent, but they seem to be incapable of even doing this. One wonders what sort of shock it would take to actually make them put their houses in order. The collapse of a Premier League club hasn't been enough, because that is what happened with Leeds United and every other football club chairman in Britain merely stood back, wiped his brow and thought, "There but for the grace of God go I". The example of Gretna in Scotland hasn't stopped those that seem obsessed with a complete pyramid system in Scottish football, even though such a system may mean the end of the amateurism that has provided clubs like Queens Park with a lifeline for the last 140 years or so. The ten point deduction for entering administration clearly doesn't work. It may have an effect on stopping clubs from entering into administration, but it often can be seen as punishing regimes that may have had nothing to do with the situation (criticise him all you like, but Leeds United's financial woes were very little to do with the stewardship of Ken Bates), as well as putting off some investors from putting money into clubs.

Maybe it is time for us all to reassess our definition of success. It is time to stop considering those cup wins and promotions as being the best that we can manage. It strikes me that, in the current environment, it is time for us to evaluate success as being the ongoing existence of our clubs. The real danger for AFC Bournemouth and Rotherham United supporters is, considering that neither of them own their own grounds, not whether they will be watching football in the Football League next season, but whether the bulldozers will already have moved in my August. It's a sobering thought.

Just to add a bit of perspective to this article, I would like to take the opportunity (and, being a curmudgeonly old grump, I don't make this sort of request very often) to ask you to pay a visit to this site and make them a tiny donation. As some of you may know, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier in the year - if you can spare a few coppers for The Playtex Moonwalk with us, we'd be terribly grateful.

An Early April Fool's Joke

Take a close look at the picture on the left. That man is John Batchelor, and you might just be hearing quite a lot about him over the next few weeks or months. The reason for this is fairly simple - John Batchelor has launched a take-over scheme for League Two club which might even replace the likes of the Thames Valley Royals, Fulham Park Rangers and Manstock County as the maddest ever dreamt up by a football club owner. John Batchelor hopes to buy League Two club Mansfield Town, and rename it "Harchester United", after the fictional club featured in the Sky TV drama show, "Dream Team". I have, on your behalf, checked, double-checked and triple-checked to ensure that this isn't all an elaborate April Fool's Day joke, but it would seem that it isn't, and it raises serious issues over who exactly is there to look after prone football clubs, who are stony broke but in possession of something that is very valuable indeed - a place relatively near the top of the tree in English senior football.

So, first of all, a brief history lesson. York City were, by the start of 2002, in a poor state. Their former chairman, the wretched Douglas Craig had been turned upon by a small minority of supporters at Bootham Crescent, and decided on a revenge that would almost bring about the club's closure. He transferred ownership of their stadium from the club to a holding company and announced that if no-one stepped in and paid him £4.5m for it, he would wind the club up at the end of the 2002/03 season. The decision to transfer the ownership of the stadium was an explicit circumvention of an FA rule designed to stop this sort of asset-stripping from happening, and Craig was very open about it. With the club seemingly being deliberately run into the ground (by 2001/02, the previously prudently run club's wage bill alone was 151% of the club's annual turn-over), it seemed certain that Craig, who had paid just £123,000 for the club, would reap his £4.5m windfall.

Enter stage left John Batchelor. Batchelor had made his money in British Touring Car Racing, and as the only person genuinely interested in buying the practically bankrupt York City, he took over, paying £1 for the pleasure in March 2002. He made numerous promises, including buying the ground for the club and having supporters involved at boardroom level, but it was little more than a pack of lies, and eight months later he was gone, with the club in a state of ruin. He'd changed the name to "York City Soccer Club" to try and make it more popular in America and disfigured the club's kit by putting a chequered flag design on one of the shirt sleeves. The club, under the ownership of the Supporters Trust, eventually managed to get Craig his blood money and now own Bootham Crescent. Although it remains likely that they will leave for a new stadium in the near future, they will at least be able to pay at least a decent chunk of the profits from it from the sale of the prime city centre land that Bootham Crescent sits upon.



After his departure, the Supporters Trust established that Batchelor had been party to a tripartite agreement with Douglas Craig and Persimmon Homes, who wanted the land on which the stadium was built. Money that should have been paid to York City went to a non-existent organisation called "York Sporting Club" - of £400,000 in sponsorship money, the club didn't see a penny. Batchelor put in approximately £100,000 in loans, but soon claimed the money back and was unrepentant about it, stating, "Look, I'm a businessman. That means I have to make a profit from what I do, and that includes football", seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had made himself over £300,000 in eight months while the company that he owned had been forced into administration. The Trust were unable to prevent York City from falling out of the League in 2004, but they remain a strong presence in the Conference, and may well return to the Football League one day.

We know, from his involvement with Douglas Craig at York, that Batchelor is unconcerned about moral issues in choosing his working partners. It should, therefore, come as little surprise to see his oily marketing talk resurface at Mansfield Town. This, after all, is the club that has "lent" its chairman, Keith Haslam, £1m - an amount of money that Haslam hasn't shown much interest in paying back. This is illegal, by the way (it's Section 330 of the Companies Act of 1985, in case you were wondering), but no-one seems terribly interested in prosecuting Keith Haslam, quite possibly because, in purely business terms, £1m isn't a lot of money - even if it is an enormous amount for a club like Mansfield Town. Batchelor is openly contemptuous of football supporters, and very open about the fact that he wants to asset-strip a club if he can't make any money out of it. He is, in fact, rather too honest about the fact that he clearly doesn't give a toss about football. Consider, if you will, these two articles, one of which is about the proposed takeover, and the other of which is a Q&A from fans. For those of you that want to keep your blood pressure, I'll pull out some of the highlights, with brief results:

- "I will budget for no fans turning up at the ground, which really every club should do.": The only response that I can give to this is that anybody reading it should be able to see that a lower division club owner trying to develop as a club and depending on sponsorship money and TV money alone is basically incompetent. Batchelor is playing a "you'll blink before I do" game, here. He's saying to potentially trouble-making supporters, that 'I neither care about or need you'. It's a thinly-veiled threat.

- "I do not buy into the club being a community resource": There are many ways that one could interpret this. I would interpret it as saying that Batchelor doesn't give a damn about Mansfield, Mansfield Town, the townspeople or the football club's supporters. He will do what he has to do in order to make as much money as he can.

- "I own nothing, because I choose to own nothing, if I make a mistake, nobody can chase me for anything, it is a standard practice in my world.": Another curious admission to make. It is a pretty common practice (and I do, in my job, enough work relating to insolvency to know about this) for shady businessmen to rent their houses, hire their cars and keep as few assets as possible in their own names so that their liabilities are limited when their companies go bust. It is - and it is only thinly veiled - an extraordinary admission about his self image.

-"Harchester is more promotable than Mansfield. That's not any form of insult to Mansfield at all because it's a club with a long tradition but it's just a fact. One club has been on the television for 10 years and the other one hasn't.": Well, this is the quote that the papers will focus on, because it is the maddest. Firstly, there is the small matter of the fact that Harchester have been on the television for ten years because they are a fictional football club in a soap opera rather than an actual football club. Secondly, there is a clear admission of Batchelor's own ignorance here - Mansfield Town have been live on "Match Of The Day" twice this season, in the Second & Third Rounds of the FA Cup, against Harrogate Railway and Middlesbrough, as well as, of course, being on ITV1's "Championship Goals" every Sunday morning since August.

- "It would be great to have an Anglo-European Cup in pre-season and Chesterfield would be my first choice as the other English team involved. There could be two semi-finals and then a final played at Mansfield. Why can't we bring Europe to Field Mill. It would fill the ground": In case you were wondering, he plans a pre-season tournament between Mansfield Town, Chesterfield, Partisan Belgrade and Red Star Belgrade. I'd estimate a television audience of at least 20m.

Let's finish with this little gem - "Let's be clear, I want a football club, preferably one in the league. The ONLY reason that I want it is to make money, the only reason that I want to do that is to look after my immediate family. I can only do that by making it work on the pitch and as a result making it work commercially. This would be MY club, if you like what you see come and watch, if you don't, then stay away. I am not even interested in discussing it with "fans", however, I will talk to customers any time": His candour should, at least, be refreshing. He is admitting that he doesn't give a tu'penny damn about football, and he is being explicit about his intention to strip Mansfield Town like a chicken's carcass, right down to the bones and abandon it as soon as he has had as much out of it as he can get. Given the direction that Mansfield are currently heading in, if he does take over, the end would appear to be nigh at Field Mill.

One would expect the game's regulators, the FA and the Football League to have something to say about this. All we have had so far, though, is a statement from the Football League stating that they would block any proposed name change, and in six weeks Mansfield Town might not even be a Football League club. You would think that this could be blocked more or less immediately. After all, here is a man that expressly is going to do what he has to do to profit from a club, and if that means fucking them over, then so be it. But they won't. They won't do anything. Batchelor has to pass a "fit & proper" test, which basically means that he has to have not been bankrupted or disqualified as a company director. Even the brazenness of his behaviour at York doesn't matter. Under current rules, you're only barred if you've taken two clubs into administration. So Batchelor is covered, in that respect.

There is a small chink of light at the end of the tunnel, though, and that is us. The supporters. It is simply not good enough for any single individual fan of any single individual club to not protest against this, and to do it by any means necessary. The battle has been on for the heart & soul of the game for a long time, and if Batchelor gets away with it again, the precedent will be further set for more and more slimy, shady toilet roll salesmen to come into our game, strip our clubs bare, and make off with tidy profits, leaving us to pick up the pieces. John Batchelor doesn't give a shit about us. It is our responsibility as football supporters to make his life as difficult as possible while he is sniffing around our game.

Windy Millers

As the football season wends its way towards its conclusion, it's easy to forget the harsh realities that many clubs have to operate under in order to put a team out each Saturday. That harsh reality has, however, reared its ugly head again, with Rotherham United becoming the third Football League club to be placed into administration this season after Luton Town and Bournemouth, and the danger is that, for Rotherham, the current financial crisis might just prove to be a step too far. This is, after all, a club that was placed into administration for the first time just two years ago, which no longer owns its own ground and which, according to sources, if no buyer or backer is found within the next couple of weeks or so, the club could face liquidation.

Ken Booth, the scrap metal dealer whose yard borders Millmoor, was the traditional football club owner - the local dignitary with a bit of an ego and a sense of civic pride. He kept the club ticking over until the ITV Digital collapse, when Rotherham suddenly saw their projected television income collapse from an estimated £2.5m to just over £200,000. Sinking fast under an expensively assembled squad that was falling off the bottom of the Championship, Booth offloaded the club to the Supporters Trust for £1, with ownership of the ground transferring to him in return for the writing off of a £3m loan. The Trust, however, couldn't control the losses and soon transferred ownership of the club to a consortium of local businessmen, headed by Dennis Coleman. The club entered into a CVA in 2006, which cost them a ten point deduction at the start of last season. The club rallied in spectacular fashion, overhauling the deduction in the new year, but the sale of three of their best players saw them sink without trace, relegated to League Two in bottom place.

This season, in League Two, the club has had a decent enough season, and it is this that is one of the most concerning things for Millers fans. At the time that the club entered into administration again, they were in a play-off place. This was a decision borne out of desperation rather than being a tactical one. Coleman has been desperately searching for a new backer, and the current prevailing view is that the club has between two and three weeks to secure either another new buyer or someone willing to fund them, or face closure. A significant part of their problem is that they have been in administration recently. The point of entering into a CVA is to convince creditors that the club can, under prudent management, be brought back into line with a proportion of their debts being settled as an alternative to a winding up order. However, how do you persuade creditors (of which the Booth family, who are known to not be as keen on football as their patriarch was, are believed to be the amongst the biggest) that a club that only exited administration a couple of years ago can bring itself back into line? If the Booth family wish to cash in and don't care much for their reputation within the town of Rotherham itself, there's nothing to stop them opposing all attempts to save Rotherham United, and then cashing in from the sale of the ground.

As ever, much has been made of the Football League's ten point deduction, but this situation is a prime example of the Football League imposing a well-meaning rule which merely has a detrimental effect long after the crime has been punished. Rotherham, along with a good many other clubs, wildly overspent in the race to keep themselves in the Championship a few years ago, and are still paying the price for this now. The biggest victims of the ten point deduction are the supporters and those currently trying to find a rescue package for the club. Also, the sense of resignation amongst the club's supporters is alarming. The club rallied round in 2006, but I have seen plenty of comments on Rotherham forums this week to the extent that "this time, the game is up". The club is now dependent on the goodwill of the Booth family and of the Inland Revenue, if it is unable to find yet another new backer. Whether this can be done remains to be seen, but the danger for Rotherham is that both potential new backers and creditors become more difficult to satisfy with each brush with insolvency.

You Too Could Own A Piece Of Edgeley Park!

If you're looking for a decent synopsis of how the average English football supporter can be made to suffer in a wide variety of different ways, you'd have to search pretty hard to find a better example that Stockport County. There are clubs that have been treated worse, and that have had sets of circumstances thrust upon them that have been more severe, but for sheer breadth of humiliations and crises, Stockport take some beating.

They were voted into the Football League in 1900, but out again 1904 for a season. In 1911, they were banned from playing at home for two weeks after their supporters took umbrage at a series of refereeing decisions during a match against Blackpool and started throwing stones at him. Most famously of all, they recorded a record low Football League attendance when they reported a crowd of just 13 for a match against Leicester City in 1921, although the truth of the matter wasn't quite as simple as that. Having been banned by the FA from playing matches at Edgeley Park again after crowd disturbances, they opted to use Old Trafford while banned. The Leicester match was played late on a Saturday afternoon, immediately after a match between Manchester United and Derby County. It is not generally accepted that the actual crowd for the match was about 2,000, but that most of the crowd was made up of people that chose to watch both matches, with only 13 paying to get in after the "main" event.

In recent years, things have often been just as bad as they were in the clubs early days. In 1978, buoyed by Argentina's success in the World Cup, they switched a kit that was a copy of the world champions' kit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was withdrawn in the summer of 1982, after the Falklands War. In the early 1990s, they had another protest on their hands after the club's directors voted to change their nickname from "The Hatters" to "The Cobras" - a decision which, they claimed at the time, had nothing whatsoever to do with a sponsorship deal that they had signed with a brand of lager. In 1995, having been unexpectedly promoted, their manager Danny Bergara was sacked after "getting involved in an altercation" (cunning code for "getting beaten up by", there) the club's chairman, Brendan Elwood. As recently as 2000, their owners publicly considered moving from Edgeley Park (which is, fact fans, the Football League ground which is geographically the closest to the River Mersey) to Manchester City's Maine Road and changing their name to Man-Stock County. In 2003, the club was sold to a business consortium, who in turn sold the club to their Supporters Trust in 2005. However, the state of the clubs finances were such that the ownership of Edgeley Park remained with the previous owners, leaving County in a potentially perilous position. County's Trust, however, has an option to buy the stadium back within eight years, and they have launched an ambitious plan to raise £1m, in order to put a deposit on the £4.5m required to complete the purchase. Ground For A Pound gives anyone (including you) to buy a £1 share in the purchase of Edgley Park, and since its launch last week, over £50,000 has already been pledged.

You may well ask what is in it for you, as a neutral, and it's a fair question. The ownership of football grounds in Britain is probably the biggest issue in so far as the long term security of a club's future is concerned. As long as the club (or a sympathetic council) owns the ground, there will always be a club there for people to watch. However, most old-style town centre grounds are prime real estate, and property developers circle smaller clubs like vultures. It is critical, for the ongoing existence of Stockport County, that the ground returns to their ownership as soon as possible. If you need any more convincing, there will be a draw when the £1m has been raised, and the winner will get one of the stands named after them. I couldn't think of a better incentive to sign up. As football supporters, we should support initiatives such as this, and £5 of your money isn't too much to ask, is it?

Franchising In Scotland

In Scotland, the harsh realities of the wrong people getting involved in football clubs has been even more pronounced that it has been in England in recent years. Meadowbank Thistle were unceremoniously moved to Livingston, and several clubs have been left homeless or playing in two-sided grounds because of aborted development projects, but the most convoluted story of all has a particular relevance today, as it involves the financial collapse of two clubs, which led to Gretna FC being voted into the Scottish League in circumstances that are best described as "murky". Their seemingly imminent collapse provides an apt coda to a story that should bring shame upon the administrators of Scottish football.

Clydebank Juniors FC had been stalwarts of the Scottish junior football scene since the end of the nineteenth century, and found their way into the senior game there when they were controversially merged with East Stirlingshire to form ES Clydebank by owners that wanted to cash in on what they perceived as bigger crowds on the outskirts of Glasgow. The club lasted for just one season, 1964/65, before being separated through after a lengthy and messy court case. Clydebank FC were admitted to the Scottish League in their own right in 1967, following the collapse of Third Lanark. They had a fairly unremarkable stay in the Scottish League, but their troubles started in 1996, when their owners decided that what the club really needed was a new stadium. Their stadium, Kilbowie Park, was demolished and the club moved eight miles up the road to groundshare at Dumbarton. With crowds halved thanks to playing away from home every week and rent to pay, they moved on again, this time to share with Greenock Morton, twenty miles from Clydebank, and by the summer of 2002 were in a pretty terrible financial state. No-one, however, could have prepared them for what was to follow.

Airdrieonians FC were one of Scottish football's better known names. They were a reasonably regular face in the top division of Scottish football, and made the Scottish Cup final in 1992 and 1995 (losing in turn to Rangers and Celtic), as well as representing Scotland in the European Cup Winners Cup in 1993, where they were beaten over two matches by Sparta Prague. Their problems started in 1994, when they vacated their Broomfield Stadium to groundshare with another club, Clyde, with the intention of building a new stadium. To say that it was financially ruinous would be something of an understatement. Delays in planning permission meant that they were unable to move into their new home, the Shyberry Excelsior Stadium, until 1998, by which time crowds had plummeted and the club was in a desperate financial state. Their fate was sealed with the unexpected death of their sole director, Joe Rowan, in 1999. Rowan had kept the club running more or less single-handedly over the previous decade, and without him they were suddenly rudderless. Former Spurs striker Steve Archibald attempted to take control of the club in 2000. Having been given "preferred bidder" status by the club's administrators, KPMG, he brought in a number of Spanish players at considerable cost, but they failed in the pitch and Archibald was removed after failing to maintain promised payments to them. The club folded in May 2002, leaving a free space in the Scottish Football League, and it was at this point that the fortunes of Airdrieonians and Clydebank met.

With Gretna having been hastily voted into the league in the place of Airdrieonians (there have been persistent rumours of money having changed hands regarding Bill Barr, the owner of Ayr United, who was owed a sizeable amount of money for the construction of Airdrie's new stadium and stood to benefit if Airdrie failed to pull through in any form), the newly-formed Airdrie United went looking for a back door route into Scottish football. They found the answer at Clydebank, where a homeless club was playing twenty miles from home in front of tiny crowds. Their founder, a businessman called John Hall, bought Clydebank FC, changed its name to Airdrie United and moved the club to Airdrie. Clydebank's supporters had put in a rival bid for the spare place in the Scottish league, but were rejected in favour of Gretna. Clydebank continue to play to this day, in the Scottish junior leagues (one of the two equivalents of non-league football in Scotland, the other being the Highland League) in front of crowds that would put many clubs in the Scottish Second & Third Divisions to shame. Airdrie United currently sit in place in the Scottish League Second Division.

Meanwhile, the other main beneficiaries of this farce, Gretna, were bank-rolled by Brook Mileson into the SPL, until his ill health (and, reportedly, the reluctance of his son - who holds his power of attorney - to throw more money into the club) undid the self-proclaimed "fairytale" of the village team that got the Premier League. With only ten players currently available for their trip to Aberdeen tomorrow, it seems unlikely at the time of writing that Gretna will even survive until the end of the season, although they will probably be able to re-group at a more realistic level in the future. The likelihood of football supporters no longer putting all their faith in the whims of the very wealthy, however, seems to be considerably less likely.

Send My Regards To Queen Street

It was only three months ago that Horsham FC briefly made national news headlines after holding League One Swansea City to a 1-1 draw in the Second Round of the FA Cup. They lost the replay 6-2, but made a substantial amount of money from their run. Back in the present day, however, the club is engulfed in a crisis that threatens its very future, and the overwhelming impression that one gets, having looked at what is going on in some detail, is that the people running the club have some very difficult questions to have to answer.

The Hornets' problems started a couple of years, when they sold the site of their existing home, Queen Street, to Persimmon Homes for development. The club identified the site of the Holbrook Sports & Social club as being ideal for a new ground. The site houses a social club and several sports pitches already, after all. However, it is in the middle of a residential area, and the local community there has fought tooth and nail to prevent the club from gaining planning permission to build there. As it stands, final planning permission has yet to be granted, and there is no chance of them moving in there before 2010.

At a glance, this looks like an easily resolvable problem - Horsham sits on the Surrey/Sussex border, and there is no shortage of local clubs - and they initially chose to overlook their near neighbours Horsham YMCA (whose Goring Field stadium is in their town, but would require considerable renovation to bring it up to the standard required for the Ryman League Premier Division, let alone the Conference South, where Horsham hope to be in the next couple of years) and approached Crawley Town, of the Conference, to share their Broadfield Stadium. Crawley is just five or six miles from Horsham, so this would have appeared to be the ideal solution for them in the short term, but when negotiations began, it became apparent that Crawley were including onerous terms into the agreement that would not be agreed by the Ryman League. Crawley were insisting, for example, on their groundsman deciding whether matches would be played on it rather than league referees, and that they wouldn't allow matches to be played on the pitch on successive days. The Ryman League has rejected the terms of the groundshare, and suddenly Horsham are left looking at (potentially) a very bleak future indeed.

The story took has taken a turn for the worrying over the last few days, however. Horsham's back-up plan was that they believed that they had agreed a deal with Persimmon Homes to continue to use Queen Street for another season if all else fails, but have recently had to concede that Persimmon have back-tracked on this agreement, and are insisting that the club leaves on the 8th of May. On Monday night, the Horsham chairman, Frank King, and the Ryman League chairman, Alan Turvey, were interviewed by BBC London's Non-League Football Show. King played down fears over the club's future, saying that, "We are in very delicate negotiations and are confident we will sort out a groundshare for next season in the next two weeks". Turvey, however, undermined King's position, stating that the first that the League had heard of the club definitely having to leave Queen Street by the end of this season came on the 11th of February, and reiterating that the proposals for the ground-share at Crawley were completely unacceptable to the league. Furthermore, he stated that, ordinarily, clubs would have to confirm where they are to play next season by the 31st of March, although he did accept that they do allow extensions in exceptional circumstances.

What must have been most concerning for Horsham supporters was the tone of Turvey's voice. He gave the impression of being very unhappy at having been kept out of the loop in terms of the developments over their arrangements, and if what he says about the clubs having to have their ground arrangements in place by the 31st of March is correct, they may well find themselves depending on the goodwill of the Ryman League if they are to continue playing into next season. There has been talk of them playing further afield than the Gatwick area, and Worthing, some twenty miles from Horsham, has been mooted as a possible alternative venue for them. As a last-ditch replacement, it is a venue of a sufficient standard to host at least Ryman League football, but the distance will surely put many people off travelling, and with the host club taking the majority of the bar takings and rent sure to be high, it may prove to be a financially disastrous move, eating into money that should be earmarked for their new ground. The worst case scenario could see them failing to get final planning permission for Holbrook, and stuck miles away from home, with no chance of a return to Horsham.

As ever, of course, it is the fans that will suffer, and it strikes me that, no matter how much bad luck Horsham have had in their plans, the responsibility for ensuring that the club has somewhere to play next season ultimately lies with the people that run the club. They may well have tried to get an arrangement with Crawley and failed, and they may have thought that they had an agreement to stay at Queen Street for an extra season, but these good intentions will count for nothing if the club is expelled from the Ryman League at the end of the season. Time, suddenly, is not in their side, and that FA Cup run must be starting to seem like a very long time ago indeed.

Too Much, Too Young?

Some of you will have already seen the piece that I wrote for "Pitch Invasion" on the boom & bust football culture in Essex over the last fifteen years or so. The dangers of being dependent on a single benefactor are being thrown into even sharper perspective north of the border, where Gretna FC's existence is now under threat as the result of a serious illness contracted by their long-time owner and benefactor. With few assets and money draining out of the club in an alarming fashion, the big concern is that they will not be able to survive a spell in administration. It is, I have to say, yet another cautionary tale for supporters hoping that a multi-millionaire will walk into their club and make everything alright.

Gretna spent their first few decades scrabbling around in the lower reaches of the English non-league game, before transferring into the Scottish League in 2002. With Mileson providing considerable financial backing, they soon showed that anyone with a bit of financial muscle could overpower the semi-professionals of the Scottish lower divisions, and they became the first club in the history of Scottish football to be promoted from the Third Division to the SPL in successive seasons. As they won the Scottish Second Division title in 2006, they also made it to the Scottish Cup final. They lost on penalties at Hampden Park against Hearts after a 1-1 draw but, with Hearts having already booked a Champions League place after finishing second to Celtic in the SPL, Gretna had already booked themselves a place in the UEFA Cup, although this ended in defeat against Derry City.

Their problems started last summer, with promotion to the SPL. Their stadium, Raydale Park, had not been significantly developed in tandem with the team and fell well short of the standard reqiured for regular visits from the likes of Celtic and Rangers. The club were faced with an almost impossible dilemma. Should they redevelop their ground in Gretna? What point was there in building a 6,000 seater stadium in a village with a population of less than 3,000 people? They elected to play their home matches for the 2007/08 season 75 miles away at Motherwell's Fir Park whilst planning permission was being approved to redevelop Raydale. Their first season has been a more or less unmitigated disaster. Unsurprisingly, crowds at Fir Park have been poor (the 501 hardy souls that turned up for their recent match against Dundee United is a record low for the SPL), and the club's inspirational manager, Rowan Alexander was sacked in November. More troubling, however, was the health of Mileson, who was admitted to hospital last month and found to be suffering from a brain infection which has left him unable to run the club.

Matters came to a head in the new year, when it became apparent that the players and staff hadn't been paid for some weeks. Gretna's contract at Fir Park is costing them £600,000, and to put this into perspective, they have had Raydale Park valued at just £800,000. Fourteen players left during the transfer window, and the club have been rooted at the bottom of the SPL for the entire duration of the season, with just four wins to their name. Mileson's son, Brook Junior, is running the club in his father's absence, but he is not authorised to sign cheques on his father's or the club's behalf, and there have been widespread rumours that he is not quite as committed to the Gretna cause as his father was. Alexander's replacement, Dave Irons, has left to go to First Division club Morton, and the club are now considering going into administration, although the danger with doing that is that the trustee appointed to manage the club's finances might just decide that it is simply not feasible to even continue until the end of the season.

Most worrying of all for Gretna is what seems to be a somewhat defeatist attitude within the club itself. Consider this interview with the club's chief executive, Graeme Muir. Comments such as some of those made are probably at best unhelpful in securing the club's long-term future. Ultimately, though, it may all prove to be academic. With the level of debts and the sort of wage bill that Gretna are labouring under at present, it seems unlikely that the club can survive in its current form. The fact of the matter is that the club have allowed themselves to become over-reliant on Brook Mileson and his money (in spite of the setting up of youth academies and free travel initiatives, both of which hinted towards a club aiming for self-sufficiency), and the harsh reality is that the club allowed itself to become run on a hopelessly unsustainable business model that was entirely dependent upon the goodwill of one man.

There is little doubt that Brook Mileson is a man of honourable intentions, and we obviously wish him a safe and speedy recovery. It has to be said, however, that a tempering of ambitions may be in order at Gretna Football Club. It's all very well to talk about "fairy tales", but a club expanding too quickly with no sensible business plan is always likely to end in the death of the club concerned in the long term, which doesn't sit particularly comfortably with the belief that all fairy tales should have happy endings. With Raydale Park having been allowed to run to rack and ruin since the club switched to Motherwell, it's difficult to see how this will end well for them - one would hope that a sustainably run club, owned by its supporters will be the eventual outcome, but it will probably take the death of this Gretna Football Club for that to happen.

He's At it Again

It looks like Leeds United's Ken Bates started legal action against his team's fifteen point deduction for not following Football League rules on administration just in time because, on the pitch, his team is falling to pieces. They haven't won a single match in their last seven games, and have collapsed from being being contenders for automatic promotion from League One to being in ninth place in the table and five points off so much as a play-off place. Yesterday, they were reliant on a late Tresor Kandol goal to salvage a 1-1 draw at home to struggling Crewe Alexandra.

Bates' campaign reeks of his own trademark brand of self preservation, and it runs the risk of dragging the name of Leeds United even further into the mud. The circumstances surrounding Leeds entering into administration and their subsequent sale back to Bates last summer was highly suspect, and the League's decision to dock them fifteen points would seem to indicate that they felt the same. Bates, you may remember, had initially offered the insulting amount of one penny in the pound to his club's creditors, and the final offer agreed by the administrators still only offered their creditors a small percentage of what they were owed back. As soon as Leeds were released from what they seemed to think of as being some sort of unfairly applied straitjacket, they started spending again, and pretty heavily by League One standards.

The story took a turn for the strange last week, when the Football League's Brian Mawhinney announced that Barnsley had decided to publicly to back Leeds in their fight. This was news to the Barnsley chairman Gordon Shepherd, who had been away from his post for a few weeks with health problems. "I have nothing against Leeds United but this is their fight, not ours", said Shepherd, which leads one to wonder where where this particular piece of information came from. Whatever the situation with Barnsley, other clubs in the Football League have been most conspicuous in not supporting Leeds in their legal action.

What sticks in the craw is that Bates is back-tracking on an arrangement that his club signed in the summer when, desperate to get their "golden share" back in time for the start of the new season (and without this, they wouldn't have been able to start the season and would almost certainly have closed), they signed an agreement promising that they wouldn't enter into any legal action against the Football League over this matter. Bates, with his trademark habit of being utterly self-centred in his pursuit of anything whatsoever, is arguing that this should now be voided and rendered unenforceable. They're trying to spin it that they are somehow the victims of a miscarriage of justice here, to the extent of starting a petition about it, which, with wearying predictability, 8,000 Leeds supporters (all of whom are presumably so desperate for promotion that they are happy to concede any moral misgivings about this) have signed.

Should they lose the legal case (and, without wishing to put a hex on it, I can't see them losing it), the Football League should seriously consider playing hard-ball with Leeds. They should consider removing the "golden share" from them, and if that means dire consequences, then so be it. Everybody knows the circumstances of what happened at Leeds United last summer, and a fifteen point deduction was, considering what Bates got away with, an exceptionally light punishment in many ways. Football clubs may need to learn the hard way that there should be no easy ways out of financial mismanagement.