New Year, New Money Worries

As the Abba song goes, "Money Money Money, must be funny, in a Rich man's world". Football is certainly a tale of two extremes in early 2010. With Rich Man City now able to gamble with their wealth on Patrick Vieira at a reported £100,000 per week, contrast their financial fortunes with the "new skint" of Portsmouth, Cardiff and Notts County who haven't been able to pay their players, have been issued winding up orders and high court writs respectively. Certainly the desperation for success in football has led to some (retrospectively) poor choices being made by each of those three clubs.

Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the alarm bells should certainly have rung loudly for Portsmouth fans with the Comical Ali of football owners, Dr Suleiman Al-Fahim regularly proclaiming that "funds will be in place soon". Methinks he doth protest too much. It does seem strange that the man who got the Abu Dhabi United Group involved with Manchester City was not retained by that new regime. His emergence at Portsmouth over the summer asked more questions than it answered; who was this unshaven, overweight guy dressed like a tramp, looking less like a wealthy Arabic investor and more like the chancer he obviously turned out to be. The board got rid of Al-Fahim, brokering yet another takeover, this time from Saudi Arabian Ali al-Faraj, who has also struggled to find the finance to pay the players, pay off the transfer fees owed to other clubs, and has been unable/unwilling to put the fans in the picture regarding his future financing plans. It does appear that Portsmouth are not so much knocking on the door of the administrators, as battering it down with the sort of oak previously only seen in the Marie Rose.

I wrote some months ago on the subject of Sven's Notts County revolution, and the somewhat mysterious nature of the consortium taking over at Meadow Lane. Little more than 4 months into the experiment, Munto Finance have withdrawn their backing and Notts have descended into chaos. Players weren't paid, rumours were rife that Eriksson would follow his manager Hans Backe out of the revolving door, and the expensively assembled squad looked like being broken up in a huge fire sale. The Chairman, Peter Trembling, who was the mouthpiece for the shadowy Munto operation, has suggested that he has some new investors lined up (a line that Portsmouth fans will be able to relate to), so it remains to be seen if Eriksson remains to see out the season. I would suggest there is little or no chance of that.

Cardiff's problems are much more mysterious, and as a result should really give even more cause for concern. Despite regularly selling off their best players (Ramsay, Chopra, Parry, Johnson to name but a few) netting more than £15m in income and having had a cup final appearance 2 years ago, they have today been issued another winding up order by the Inland Revenue over unpaid tax. The Cardiff Chairman, Peter Ridsdale, has previous for this situation having presided over the meltdown at Leeds which eventually led to two relegations, administration and the sale of their ground. It must be stressed that Cardiff were in a vulnerable position when Ridsdale arrived, and it does appear that he's managed to keep them ticking over, but the rot at the heart of the club seems to be a long-term problem. Even their move to a new ground, with all the commercial advantages that gives, has not eased their woes. Cardiff fans must surely be worried that they'll not see out the season.

There must be something that the football league can do to ensure that clubs don't overstretch themselves (salary caps as in Rugby League?), but there must also be a crackdown in the irresponsible ownership that can lead to such circumstances. The fact that the Notts County owners never publicly declared themselves must be an indicator of the fact that their activities weren't in the interests of the football club.

Even England's most successful clubs, Manchester United and Liverpool, aren't immune. Significant debts were placed upon them both by their new "owners" who mortgaged the clubs and their future incomes to the banks in order to have a fashionable Premier League toy. I remember in the 1980s, one of the major London banks had the power of life or death over Spurs, but chose to allow them to continue to dig themselves out of their financial hole as they didn't want to be known as the bank who killed a famous football club. The current financial climate means that this almost certainly won't be the situation this time around, so the loans secured on these two famous clubs must be a source of concern.

It seems that the haves are now proportionally richer, and the have-nots are ever nearer extinction. I completed a football league survey several months ago where one question addressed "what should the priority be for The Football League". One option, and the answer I selected, was "ensuring the survival of the 92 football league teams". I've previously blogged about how the fall through the divisions can affect teams, and the threat of administration is currently hovering over several clubs. Southampton and, Darlington started the new season with points penalties for entering administration, but there are also several league clubs under transfer embargos, including Portsmouth, due to financial irregularities.

If nothing is done to safeguard the future of the football league, we'll eventually end up seeing American Football style franchises, the playthings of billionaires in major cities, with the smaller towns reduced to watching primarily amateur teams. That would be return to how football first started. Maybe not a bad thing...