More About Administration
29 points separate leaders Bradford City and second-bottom Bournemouth going into this one; though no one, least of all those who chose to boo the team off at half time last week, should be fooled by the deceptive nature of League Two.
The Cherries are one of three teams who began the season on minus points due to financial difficulties, with the early indications already suggesting this year’s relegation battle will have ultimately been decided before a ball was kicked. A good start was clearly vital and, while one of the three, Rotherham (deducted 17 points), would now be occupying a play off spot had they started on zero, for Bournemouth (17) and Luton (30) the prospects are already looking grim.
The away fans dedicated enough to make the 540-mile round trip will arrive at Valley Parade having yet to celebrate a league victory this season and could be forgiven for feeling a touch bitter. Were it not for a ten point deduction last season they’d have finished mid-table in League One, now they’re facing up to non-league. It’s difficult to argue with the logic clubs who spend beyond their means should be punished, but the loss in revenue Bournemouth can expect should they go down is hardly going to help matters. Are Boston and Halifax uncomfortably closer than they’d like to imagine?
Such financial problems are thankfully a thing of the past for the Bantams, though the resultant lessons should not be forgotten. This week Mark Lawn has talked about promoting the Bradford City brand in America but behind those headlines were some interesting, if unsurprising comments. The Rhodes family and Lawn pushed the boat out during the summer and this will result in the club losing “a fair amount of money” this season, which they will cover. More investment is welcomed and Lawn has made it clear that this summer’s considerable transfer activity is unlikely to be repeated.
All of which means the club has taken a gamble of sorts on gaining promotion this season and, while the risk of it causing financial headaches later is faint, the plight of clubs like Bournemouth should remind us supporters that relative high levels of spending should not be demanded if things don’t go to plan.
The early indications are that the summer transfer activity has left manager Stuart McCall with a squad capable of matching the club’s ambition. He’s likely to name an unchanged team for the sixth consecutive league game and the benefits of building familiarity are evident. Rhys Evans keeps goal behind a back four which failed to convince last week but has earned three clean sheets from six. Paul Arnison still has something to prove but the form of Graeme Lee, Matt Clarke and Paul Heckingbottom has been pleasing, so far.
In midfield Lee Bullock and Paul McLaren are developing a decent understanding, with the latter playing a deeper role to enable the former to get forward more. Omar Daley and Joe Colbeck took most of the plaudits last week and will consider the muted response to their efforts from those supporters who’ve spent the last couple of seasons yelling abuse at them a victory of sorts.
Up front Peter Thorne continues to suffer from minor injuries but continues to find the back of the net, while Michael Boulding’s brace last week will help him to settle. There have been minor questions raised by some over the former Mansfield man’s start with City, but he’s looking sharper with each game under his belt.
Boulding will do well to match Stuart’s opposite number’s enviable goal record. Former Bantams striker Jimmy Quinn has sat in the away dug out at Valley Parade before – a 3-0 defeat for Swindon during our promotion campaign 10 years ago – and will have similar limited ambition for his current team this season. No Cherries player has managed more than one goal so far this campaign but, in Lee Bradbury and Darren Anderton, they have players of some pedigree. Striker Brett Pitman is also one to watch.
A home win is expected of course but, as Exeter threatened to prove last week, assumptions can be dangerous. City have pushed the boat out this season and the early signs are promising, but many battles lie ahead. As Stuart has stated, it’s how you finish which counts and it should be remembered how challenging it will be to realise our ambitions next May.
Only four teams will be promoted from League Two this season, even if only 21 began it standing any chance.
Football League Chairman Lord Mawhinney is warning football clubs to be careful with money and the patronising sod is saying…
People’s disposable income, what they’ve got to spend on other things once they deal with these fundamentals, is likely to decrease this year.
Once you have recovered from being told you have to pay your mortgage before you go to the football think about this. This weekend Rochdale are paying £20 to get ito Valley Parade and in a couple of weeks we will be paying £15 to get into Elland Road for what could well be a reserve game.
Lord Above-Us-All continues…
I have been a member of parliament for 26 years, and I understand the pressures on the budgets of ordinary people up and down the country.
Ordinary being the scum like us who follow teams up and down the country watching football. He understands the pressures on our budgets and knows that clubs might have to be careful cause fewer of us will be able to go pay the thick end of £20 plus travel, beers, programs and so on.
The Lord of Football tells us
My advice to our own clubs is that you should review your budgets, make sure they are as tight as possible and make sure you administer them as tightly as possible.
Yes. The man who runs the league that City are in is telling clubs to be careful with budgets cause they will not be able to rip people off as much which is what travelling to football is. A rip off. You pay more money to sit in worse seats to watch the same game as the people opposite you. That is an obvious rip off but we have no choice just like we had no choice about paying to get into our home ground before City changed things.
So why doesn’t Mawhinney do something impressive like recommend that if clubs are suffering they start trying to get more fans in rather than warning them that they can’t rip the other ones off as much? Why doesn’t he tell them all to follow City’s example?
And for that matter why don’t City do something about charging £20 to away fans which is stupidly high. We have the space for them. Why don’t we try charge them £10 and see if more come and hope they make more noise that could get City fans making more noise back?
But no. Mawhinny insults us and then tells clubs to be careful cause they can’t rob us as much as they used to. It is times like this that I’m pretty proud to be a City fan with our pricing and pretty ashamed of the people who run the game.
This article is in reply to Football’s Administration Punishments Need To Change To Avoid Uncertain Futures
BfB is nothing if not democratic. In the language of all football fans, it’s a game of opinions. There are some places where there’s only one opinion that counts. Many of us have worked in places like that. But BfB is not that place. So, when Michael Wood posts his piece about how to deal with the ever increasing risk of a club going into administration and one of the other contributors wants to disagree with him, this is the result!
Let me say at the outset how very fortunate I believe my beloved team have been to go into administration at the right times. Not for us the 10 point penalty on either occasion Bradford City went into administration. We got in just in time. It would, of course, have been far preferable not to have got in at all, but there’s no point in rehearsing the reasons behind either of those two periods of financial difficulty.
These days it’s hard to keep up with who is and who isn’t in administration in the lower leagues. Even more difficult to work out is how some of these clubs are coming out of administration. Both are increasingly essential considerations as long as the present system is in place.
Take Luton Town, for instance. They went into administration last season and suffered a 10 point deduction. Those points in themselves cost them nothing. They finished 17 points below the safety mark. The administration and the associated inability to sign new players may well have cost them their League One place – but the deduction didn’t. It was a penalty that imposed no punishment.
Others have achieved the same in recent years. Leeds and Boston both went into administration when the points deduction was irrelevant. They were both already relegated. This brought about a rule change, which would allow such a deduction to be carried forward to the next season, when it might have a true meaning.
Bournemouth’s 10 point loss certainly was a punishment. They finished only two points below the safety line. Rotherham’s 10 point deduction left them 14 points away from the promotion play-offs, but again it could be argued that the fact of going into administration and the surrounding uncertainty knocked all the stuffing out of a very promising season spent, to that point, in or very near the play-offs.
But it is what comes next that matters more. As Leeds found, if you won’t or can’t get out of administration via a CVA, the Football League’s preferred option, you run a risk of a second penalty. Their 15 point penalty, thanks eventually to their Wembley defeat, was a genuine punishment. They will still be playing in League One next season. Without the deduction they would have gained automatic promotion.
All three of the League Two teams who start the new season in administration face the serious prospect of ‘doing a Leeds’. All three may come out of administration by a non-CVA route and, if so, will face the 15 point deduction for 2008-9 after their 10 point deductions for 2007-8. Additionally Luton already face another 10 point penalty for completely different breaches committed by those no longer involved with the club. Luton could start on minus 25 points and, just to avoid relegation to the Conference, they may need to win the number of points that would normally achieve a play-off place.
While all this could give Bradford City a head start on three of our League Two rivals, the bad news is that we did actually come out of administration via a CVA twice. OK, so Leeds United missed out on promotion last season. But this season they start with a clean sheet on and off the field. We all know it has taken City several years to achieve a financial break-even point and the present company still faces annual payments from the CVA that bite into the limited budget.
So the question I want to pose is not, as Michael writes, whether the penalty points system is too harsh on teams in the lower reaches of football and finance, but whether taking the 15 point hit might be seen to be preferable by some directors, providing only that their club can get over the one hurdle of the next season.
We can’t dwell on the Leicester scenario. That couldn’t happen now. Nor would I support Michael’s relegation-and-promotion proof suggestion, mainly because it would have involved two League One teams, Cheltenham and Crewe, being relegated and Luton, 17 points behind Crewe, surviving, when at the start of the season all of them believed that the four teams with the fewest points would go down. Why should Cheltenham and Crewe and their supporters suffer for the financial mishandlings of the boards at Luton and Bournemouth? And how long might it be before some directors decided that it was worth the 15 points, if they were guaranteed not being relegated?
But someone should suffer. A financial penalty is out of the question for a club that is in such debt it cannot continue to trade normally. What other penalty is available? Community service hardly fits the bill! A points deduction is less harsh than relegation, which is about the only alternative.
I believe that the Football League must do two things. The first they are already doing, although perhaps not quite well enough. They must at the start of each season make clear what their financial rules are and what the penalties for breach will be. That puts every club on notice. Go into administration and you know what to expect. Come out without a CVA and, again, you know what’s coming your way.
The second step the League must take is to make the semi-voluntary wages cap part of its own binding financial regulatory scheme. There is already in place a provision aimed at preventing clubs in the bottom two divisions from spending more than 60% of their income on players’ salaries. It was supposed to apply equally to the Championship, but there were too many big clubs there who wouldn’t play. It should be made a requirement of League membership that a club agrees to and complies with a salary cap. There should also be clear penalties for breaches. I would suggest a look at the Rugby League’s sliding scale, where the greater the excess the more points are deducted, would be a suitable guide.
Three final thoughts. I wonder what Julian Rhodes, the one in the middle of two administrations, would do if he were now given the option of the CVA which to this day takes it toll on the club or a clean financial sheet and a 15 point loss, even if that meant certain relegation. And how do the supporters of Halifax Town and Gretna feel? Wouldn’t they have preferred to have been forced to live within their means, even if a points deduction followed? And, last of all, I go back to how lucky City were with their timing and with the man whose offer allowed the CVA to be completed. Neither Bradford City nor any other league club should rely on that sort of luck ever again.