In the red
In sport, in order to enjoy winning, you have to know how to lose. But the price of defeat in football has become one that clubs in the region can no longer afford to pay.
At least three North West clubs are currently perspiring at the prospect of relegation from the Premiership and a crash in revenues from which they may never recover. The once great Liverpool are contemplating the horror of failing to qualify for the Champions League. Even Manchester United are under siege from shareholders over corporate governance, captured in excruciating detail in the notorious 99 questions asked by shareholders Cubic Expression.
In an age when the technical standard of English football is supposedly better than ever before and there are world-class stars from virtually every footballing nation plying their trade in the English leagues, how did football get into this mess?
Every balance sheet is riddled with debts, extraordinary items, changes to accounting policy. It is the economics of the madhouse, but then football has never been about running a sustainable, growing business that can be planned and budgeted for over five years. It is about chasing the dream, but in so doing football has paid a very high price.
In the pursuit of success and supposedly attracting the best players, our leading clubs have tried virtually every financial trick in the book: media partnerships, stock market flotations, selling or remortgaging the stadium, re-evaluating the property assets, taking out loans secured against future season ticket sales, even signing players in complex sale and leaseback arrangements and keeping the transaction off the balance sheet.
In Charlie Lambert's excellent biography of Jack Walker, The Club That Jack Built (Milo Books, 2001), one commentator was quoted as saying: "To achieve what Jack Walker did at Blackburn in the 1990s would require someone of the magnitude of Rupert Murdoch." What that commentator didn't appreciate (it was me, by the way) was the rise of the Russian oligarchs, so what price an entry ticket to football now? We have now been treated to the unedifying spectacle of club directors jetting around the world in search of rich Russians, Chinese, Arabs or Lancashire kettle makers prepared to write off a proportion of their personal wealth in return for a slice of the dream. It can't last.
What we hope our cover story demonstrates is that the dream is over. The mess we have inherited has surely proved that football can't be judged as a business, because it has a different role to play. There is a school of thought, lucidly argued by Professor Tom Cannon, well-known in this parish as an expert on the football business, that football has only one place left to go - to the fans. This time they're wealthier, better organised and better informed and surely will make a better job of it than the suits have done.
Michael Taylor, editor
PS. We've produced this magazine for you without access to the internet for a week, and although we're a bit fed up, most of us have got on with it and reverted to a time when there was no web or email.
Our friends in Buxton have been even more inconvenienced. Can you imagine the media wailing and gnashing if this had been in London? It would have been the lead item on every news bulletin all week. Yet by Tuesday it was old news and we struggled on with a disrupted service and without the rest of the world aware of the extent of the problem.
Spirit of the blitz, my arse.
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Now it's the rage for shareholders to put clubs under the spotlight, we have a few questions of our own - for clubs and shareholders alike
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