Sign of the times I suppose. Hopefully the bad press that comes from these incidents is enough to turn heads and tune supporters in to scrutinising club finances to a greater extent than it has in the past. As a football fan it would be naive to be unaware of the obfuscation and lack of clarity or openness with regards to financial matters in football and I'm dead certain this is going to be a major talking point in the coming years, especially with the value the transfer market places on individual players at the moment. As for the EFL - I can't make heads or tails of whether the "requests" they are making of Bury and Bolton to provide information about finances are reasonable or not...
What I mean is that all the recent examples of where clubs have deliberately and willingly overspent in order to gain an advantage on the playing side, in many cases now breaking the so called rules put in place to prevent them doing so, the club has been able to remain in the same division and continue with a ‘new company’ owning the football league share by it being transferred to them with the league giving them the chance to carry out this transaction. None of these ‘New’ clubs have had to start afresh in the football league. At some point there has to be rules put in place and punishments that are a big enough deterrent or we will just continue to see people willing to gamble.
Fingers crossed today is the day a Football League club finally goes bust. Hopefully the first in a big line of clubs finally having to accept their cheating by staring again at the bottom.
Threads like that are stupid. It's not the job of Alexis Sanchez or any other football player to bail out a club not living in their means. If they did then another club might want the same bail out in the future. It's a shame for the fans who haven't done wrong but if the gamble with the cash had paid off with success they wouldn't have been complaining then.
I’m not convinced all this about requests etc is actually nothing but a convenient sideshow. What I mean by that is Bury more so and Bolton this week are being unable to fulfil their fixtures now and the reasons for that don’t appear to be directly connected to the requests. Surely it should be as simple as can you fulfill the fixtures yes or no. Given their current playing quotas it would appear not
Bolton’s problems have been going on for years, being massively in debt! Every looming deadline, there’s been an imminent takeover which has then ended - time to go!
Ahhh, good old Jim White, the bloke who claimed to have spoken with and knew the gay footballer who was supposedly about to come out. Wouldn't trust him at all.
******** to that. Why the hell do you want Bury to go bust? What real purpose would it serve? Would the big clubs take note? Would they ********. Bury is a great club with a proud tradition. It has its own sense of community like BFC does. If Bury goes bust I'll be well pissed off for the local people
It's going to take a club going bust for clubs to start taking living in their means more seriously. Why should the big clubs take note? They haven't been the one's spending the income of Bury. They tried to cheat their way to success and isn't it like the third time they have been in the **** in hardly any years at all. The club never learn and are even daft enough to remortgage their ground a number of different times. It's totally different to us nearly going under over a small amount the one and only time we've had serious issues and when we didn't get that debt through chasing a dream.
The fans haven't cheated. The fans do what fans do and use the club as a focus for their community/saturday afternoon. To hope that a club goes bust is to hope that regular, innocent working people have their history stripped away. The fans don't deserve that. The real culprits are the dodgy men in suits-its them that should 'go bust'. Better regulation and accountability is necessary so that clubs DONT go under. Wishing for clubs to go bust is not the way to look at it.
Sorry KCP but I'm on the other side of all this and, as I've said before, the fans won't suffer. Loads of clubs have gone bust. They've all been replaced by phoenix clubs. The fans will just watch AFC Bury or whatever the new incarnation is. Bury going under will have little or no impact though. Bolton just might.