withdeanwombat
Well-known member
Does anybody know which other clubs are in strife.I believe Cardiff,Southend and Hull are treading a fine line,and Accrington were close earlier in the season.
Any others?
Any others?
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Portsmouth Back In Court Tomorrow
- Thread starter Bwian
- Start date
Good article.
Football is not about corporations. It's about clubs and communities
The seduction of big business and rejection of its roots has prompted the crisis in English football
Simon Kuper
The Observer, Sunday 28 February 2010
Article history
In 1957, playwright John Osborne created clapped-out music-hall performer Archie Rice as the symbol of a clapped-out Britain. Like his country, Rice suffers delusions of grandeur. "I've played in front of them all," he boasts. "The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales… and, oh, what's the name of that other pub?"
The perfect symbol of today's debt-ridden Britain is debt-ridden Portsmouth Football Club. Pundits are busy berating Portsmouth – and football in general – for its profligacy. However, that's a bit rich (as it were). The spendthrift clubs are simply ourselves writ slightly larger. Portsmouth owes £60m, almost as much as its annual turnover. Well, the McKinsey Global Institute calculates that total British public, corporate and private debt is about 4.7 times bigger than Britain's annual economic output.
Still, football clubs, like the rest of us, need to cut back. To do that, they first need to drop their own delusions of grandeur and understand what they are. Football is not "big business". It's a piddling industry. Clubs such as Portsmouth rarely make profits and shouldn't even try to. Instead of pretending they are Tesco, they should model themselves on not-for-profit local museums.
It was Portsmouth that set off the current kerfuffle over football's debt. The club overspent on good players, won an FA Cup, and on Friday became the first Premier League club ever to go into administration. However, its rivals are almost as bad. Premier League clubs owe about £3.5bn between them. Clubs spend like big businesses – the average player in the Premier League makes well over £1m a year – but are small ones. A single large Tesco superstore turns over about as much as Portsmouth's £70m.
That's the paradox of the football industry: so visible, and yet so little. Football's problem is what economists call appropriability: clubs can't make money out of (can't appropriate) more than a tiny share of our love of football.
Perhaps tickets and replica shirts are overpriced, but few fans actually buy them. A Mori poll in 2003 found that 45% of British adults are interested in football, yet on any weekend only about 1.5% of Britons watch a professional game. In other words, most football fans rarely go near a stadium. They watch football only on TV, sometimes at the price of a subscription, or for the price of some pints in the pub. It's a cheap way to have fun.
And watching games is only a tiny part of the fans' engagement with football. Fans read newspapers, trawl internet sites, and play computer games. Then there is the football banter that passes time at work and school. All this entertainment is made possible by football clubs, but they cannot appropriate a penny of the value we attach to it. Portsmouth cannot charge us for talking or reading or thinking about Portsmouth. That's why Portsmouth is a small business.
Because clubs are small businesses that spend like big ones, they keep getting into trouble. From 1992 through May 2008, 40 of England's 92 professional clubs had been involved in insolvency proceedings, some more than once. But as Stefan Szymanski and I noted in our recent book Why England Lose, the peculiarity of the football business is that no club disappeared. True, Aldershot went bankrupt in 1992, but supporters simply started a new, almost identical, club. "We must be sustainable," clubs now say, parroting the latest business cliché. In fact they're fantastically sustainable. They survive even when they go bust. You can't get more sustainable than that. Even Portsmouth will most likely always be with us, in some form or other. If football clubs really did collapse under their debts, there would now be almost no football clubs left.
They are too beloved to go bust. Creditors dare not push them under. No bank manager or tax collector wants to say: "Portsmouth is closing. I'm turning off the lights." Luckily, society can keep football going fairly cheaply. The total revenues of European professional clubs for the 2007/08 season were €14.6bn. Tesco turns over four times as much.
None the less, football needs to spend less. Clubs from Leeds to Portsmouth have taught us that debts rarely generate commensurately higher revenues. Few clubs make profits, because to win prizes they have to spend every penny they can find on good players. So clubs that borrow fortunes can rarely repay them.
Clubs have begun cutting down. Most have abandoned transfers. Just possibly, players' salaries will fall too. But clubs need to go further, and rethink what they are. They don't exist to make money. Rather, their job is to make people happy. Football clubs fill a peculiar hole in British emotional life. Many people get ritual and community chiefly from football. For some, their club's stadium is more a home than the house they live in.
Football, once "the working man's ballet", has become the joy of all classes and ages, of women as well as men. It exists to serve fans. That's why for decades the Football Association forbade club owners from profiting from their clubs. Directors couldn't get paid, and dividends were capped. The aim was to ensure that clubs were run by "the right class of men who love football for its own sake". If such rules still existed, they might have stopped the rapacious owners of Liverpool and Manchester United from burdening these clubs with a combined £1bn in debt simply to finance their takeovers.
Clubs are more than businesses. Even the most pathetic of them inspire love. In 1998 I went to watch Portsmouth-Ipswich with a diehard Portsmouth fan, his father and his son. Portsmouth were appalling and lost. Yet 18,000 people cheered them on, and sang: "Play up, Pompey." The fan, film director Anthony Minghella (I was writing an article about him) remarked: "Portsmouth have performed mediocrely for decades, but it's supported as if it were a great club."
Afterwards, Minghella's father, an Italian immigrant who made ice cream on the Isle of Wight, distributed kisses and disappeared. "Grandpa always looks like he doesn't care," Minghella's son observed. "Oh, he cares a lot," said Minghella, miserably. "He's just better at hiding it than we are."
Minghella died in March 2008, aged 54. Portsmouth hadn't won a prize in his lifetime. Two months later, they won the FA Cup. Minghella would have loved that, but he wouldn't have needed it. Few English fans demand glory. Even today, most people who attend professional games watch the three divisions below the Premier League. Portsmouth didn't need to buy success.
It would be a shame to let football's current crisis go to waste. The English game should adopt a strict licensing system like Germany's to limit clubs' debts. It should again bar club owners from profiting from their investments. And it should instruct clubs to break even while serving their communities, as museums do. The only business of football is football.
Simon Kuper is co-author of Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained and a columnist for FT Weekend
Football is not about corporations. It's about clubs and communities
The seduction of big business and rejection of its roots has prompted the crisis in English football
Simon Kuper
The Observer, Sunday 28 February 2010
Article history
In 1957, playwright John Osborne created clapped-out music-hall performer Archie Rice as the symbol of a clapped-out Britain. Like his country, Rice suffers delusions of grandeur. "I've played in front of them all," he boasts. "The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales… and, oh, what's the name of that other pub?"
The perfect symbol of today's debt-ridden Britain is debt-ridden Portsmouth Football Club. Pundits are busy berating Portsmouth – and football in general – for its profligacy. However, that's a bit rich (as it were). The spendthrift clubs are simply ourselves writ slightly larger. Portsmouth owes £60m, almost as much as its annual turnover. Well, the McKinsey Global Institute calculates that total British public, corporate and private debt is about 4.7 times bigger than Britain's annual economic output.
Still, football clubs, like the rest of us, need to cut back. To do that, they first need to drop their own delusions of grandeur and understand what they are. Football is not "big business". It's a piddling industry. Clubs such as Portsmouth rarely make profits and shouldn't even try to. Instead of pretending they are Tesco, they should model themselves on not-for-profit local museums.
It was Portsmouth that set off the current kerfuffle over football's debt. The club overspent on good players, won an FA Cup, and on Friday became the first Premier League club ever to go into administration. However, its rivals are almost as bad. Premier League clubs owe about £3.5bn between them. Clubs spend like big businesses – the average player in the Premier League makes well over £1m a year – but are small ones. A single large Tesco superstore turns over about as much as Portsmouth's £70m.
That's the paradox of the football industry: so visible, and yet so little. Football's problem is what economists call appropriability: clubs can't make money out of (can't appropriate) more than a tiny share of our love of football.
Perhaps tickets and replica shirts are overpriced, but few fans actually buy them. A Mori poll in 2003 found that 45% of British adults are interested in football, yet on any weekend only about 1.5% of Britons watch a professional game. In other words, most football fans rarely go near a stadium. They watch football only on TV, sometimes at the price of a subscription, or for the price of some pints in the pub. It's a cheap way to have fun.
And watching games is only a tiny part of the fans' engagement with football. Fans read newspapers, trawl internet sites, and play computer games. Then there is the football banter that passes time at work and school. All this entertainment is made possible by football clubs, but they cannot appropriate a penny of the value we attach to it. Portsmouth cannot charge us for talking or reading or thinking about Portsmouth. That's why Portsmouth is a small business.
Because clubs are small businesses that spend like big ones, they keep getting into trouble. From 1992 through May 2008, 40 of England's 92 professional clubs had been involved in insolvency proceedings, some more than once. But as Stefan Szymanski and I noted in our recent book Why England Lose, the peculiarity of the football business is that no club disappeared. True, Aldershot went bankrupt in 1992, but supporters simply started a new, almost identical, club. "We must be sustainable," clubs now say, parroting the latest business cliché. In fact they're fantastically sustainable. They survive even when they go bust. You can't get more sustainable than that. Even Portsmouth will most likely always be with us, in some form or other. If football clubs really did collapse under their debts, there would now be almost no football clubs left.
They are too beloved to go bust. Creditors dare not push them under. No bank manager or tax collector wants to say: "Portsmouth is closing. I'm turning off the lights." Luckily, society can keep football going fairly cheaply. The total revenues of European professional clubs for the 2007/08 season were €14.6bn. Tesco turns over four times as much.
None the less, football needs to spend less. Clubs from Leeds to Portsmouth have taught us that debts rarely generate commensurately higher revenues. Few clubs make profits, because to win prizes they have to spend every penny they can find on good players. So clubs that borrow fortunes can rarely repay them.
Clubs have begun cutting down. Most have abandoned transfers. Just possibly, players' salaries will fall too. But clubs need to go further, and rethink what they are. They don't exist to make money. Rather, their job is to make people happy. Football clubs fill a peculiar hole in British emotional life. Many people get ritual and community chiefly from football. For some, their club's stadium is more a home than the house they live in.
Football, once "the working man's ballet", has become the joy of all classes and ages, of women as well as men. It exists to serve fans. That's why for decades the Football Association forbade club owners from profiting from their clubs. Directors couldn't get paid, and dividends were capped. The aim was to ensure that clubs were run by "the right class of men who love football for its own sake". If such rules still existed, they might have stopped the rapacious owners of Liverpool and Manchester United from burdening these clubs with a combined £1bn in debt simply to finance their takeovers.
Clubs are more than businesses. Even the most pathetic of them inspire love. In 1998 I went to watch Portsmouth-Ipswich with a diehard Portsmouth fan, his father and his son. Portsmouth were appalling and lost. Yet 18,000 people cheered them on, and sang: "Play up, Pompey." The fan, film director Anthony Minghella (I was writing an article about him) remarked: "Portsmouth have performed mediocrely for decades, but it's supported as if it were a great club."
Afterwards, Minghella's father, an Italian immigrant who made ice cream on the Isle of Wight, distributed kisses and disappeared. "Grandpa always looks like he doesn't care," Minghella's son observed. "Oh, he cares a lot," said Minghella, miserably. "He's just better at hiding it than we are."
Minghella died in March 2008, aged 54. Portsmouth hadn't won a prize in his lifetime. Two months later, they won the FA Cup. Minghella would have loved that, but he wouldn't have needed it. Few English fans demand glory. Even today, most people who attend professional games watch the three divisions below the Premier League. Portsmouth didn't need to buy success.
It would be a shame to let football's current crisis go to waste. The English game should adopt a strict licensing system like Germany's to limit clubs' debts. It should again bar club owners from profiting from their investments. And it should instruct clubs to break even while serving their communities, as museums do. The only business of football is football.
Simon Kuper is co-author of Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained and a columnist for FT Weekend
the excellent david conn in the guardian said in a recent article, of the current prem clubs, both west ham and liverpool are sailing very very close to the wind.
i think its about time hmrc got tough with clubs, specifically larger clubs with jumbo debts, who take the piss with administration. the football creditors rule is a joke, and the current system allows clubs to walk away from and clear their debts at almost no cost to the club or owners. at least the football league has started to try and impose meaningful punishment albeit its been mainly the smaller clubs - luton, b'mouth, rotherham - that have been hammered.
pompey should be relegated to the conference south and made to work from there.
Tom Hark Preston Park
Will Post For Cash
- Jul 6, 2003
- 71,964
Football will always continue. Only not in its current bloated form. Everything points to that, from AFC Wimbledon, to the Albion's fight for survival, to MUFC fans with the green and yellow scarves. Even with all the money sucked out of it, it's the Saturday afternoon drug of choice for huge numbers of people. Proper community IMHO.
Pavilionaire
Well-known member
- Jul 7, 2003
- 31,109
Really good article by Kuper, that. Very thought-provoking.
$way Test
I don't believe it!
People run the show. If the charlatans f*** up: they will go BUST !
This objective is further set against the "Rotarian four-way test", used to see if a planned action is compatible with the Rotarian spirit. The test was developed by Rotarian and entrepreneur Herbert J. Taylor during the Great Depression as a set of guidelines for restoring faltering businesses and was adopted as the standard of ethics by Rotary in 1942. It is still seen as a standard for ethics in business management:[5]
* Is it the truth?
* Is it fair to all concerned?
* Will it build good will and better friendships?
* Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
I don't think Portsmouth FC will pass the test
Is it the truth ? No it ain't !
I don't believe it!
People run the show. If the charlatans f*** up: they will go BUST !
This objective is further set against the "Rotarian four-way test", used to see if a planned action is compatible with the Rotarian spirit. The test was developed by Rotarian and entrepreneur Herbert J. Taylor during the Great Depression as a set of guidelines for restoring faltering businesses and was adopted as the standard of ethics by Rotary in 1942. It is still seen as a standard for ethics in business management:[5]
* Is it the truth?
* Is it fair to all concerned?
* Will it build good will and better friendships?
* Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
I don't think Portsmouth FC will pass the test
Is it the truth ? No it ain't !
Whatever else you can say about administrators, they are not stupid. They are very adept at picking at the bones of a business and getting rid of anything of value and making sure costs are brought under control. He's not necessarily interested in doing what's best from a football club's point of view.
TBH, to start ranting and raving about someone doing his job effectively makes you sound like one of the green ink brigade who writes looney letters to local newspapers.
D
Deleted member 2719
Guest
Harsh on the fans if they go but maybe this is the time that fans wake up and don't let foreign investment into there clubs, i am so glad we have "Our Tony".
Just go steady on the betting thou eh!!
Just go steady on the betting thou eh!!