Wigan Athletic Petition

Here’s a plea to sign the Wigan Athletic petition. Help save other clubs from unscrupulous owners. Link at the bottom.

The fact that the EFL are responsible for deciding on who should buy a football club is ridiculous. They have limited powers and are unable to prevent unwelcome owners from destroying clubs.

I have sympathy with the EFL from the viewpoint that they relatively little control in who buys a football club.

Where I would take umbrage with them is that they know this. Their fit and proper persons test and financial scrutiny are inadequate and do little to prevent takeovers of clubs that are financially insolvent. The EFL can only make it appear that it has teeth and subsequently comes in for abuse. Trouble is, most people now know how wafer thin the EFL controls are, so it is easy to circumnavigate the requirements.

Football clubs can carry on trading when most ordinary businesses would go bust. Surely, the administrator would be called in much earlier on most companies if they were demonstrating such dreadful figures.

Get hold of some club accounts. The most recent only date up to the end of June 2019, so even those figures will be much worse now with no crowd receipts.

Take Charlton Athletic as an example. Turnover of £7.9m with administration expenses of £19.7m. Why would anyone want to buy a business with those figures?

The lure and riches of the Premier League, I hear you say. Well, what a poor risk / reward ratio. Each year of not being in the top-flight costs over £10m. At the start of the season the bookies were quoting Charlton at 25/1 for promotion, so unless your strategy is to pump some serious money into the club for a promotion push, an investment simply does not make any sense.

But what if you could buy a club for £1? What if there were funds in a club that were accessible? What if the business buying a club had no money but could make things look like it did? What if another company could lend the new owners / club money at an exorbitant interest rate and demand that money back any time they felt like it?

This is what the EFL are dealing with. To deduct points for clubs going into administration serves to penalise the fans. Certain owners who have no interest in the wellbeing of football clubs couldn’t care less. The EFL have attempted to prevent manipulation by carrying points deductions forward if clubs wouldn’t be relegated because of points deductions after a certain date. It does not work because it’s predicated on the fact that owners have the clubs’ interests at heart.

Taking 12 points off Wigan Athletic this season will see them relegated. If a 12-point deduction hadn’t relegated then it would have been carried forward to the next season.  Who does that serve? The previous owners are long gone, the new owners will carry a burden and the fans will be miserable for the most part of the season because the team has a massive deficit to make up.

This isn’t about suggesting EFL incompetence. It is about inadequate company regulations that allow people who shouldn’t be anywhere near football clubs to get involved.

The solution is not easy. The gap between Premier League and the rest has accelerated so fast that people are willing to take short-term risks on the chance that they hit a big payday, but that is not the whole story.

Some clubs in the EFL are struggling to survive. Many rely on willing benefactors to subside the club. Ideally, clubs should be self-sustainable.

Here are a few ideas.

1)      The Premier League acknowledges these massive differences and funnels money through to lower league clubs. A solid grass roots pyramid helps sustain clubs at the top. The flipside to this is that it creates more incentive for owners without real interest in the club to take advantage of extra payments and has scope to exacerbate the problem.

2)      Fans get to run their club. Conceptually wonderful but most fans want to enjoy the experience of watching their team play rather than being burdened with part ownership. It still requires somebody to oversee the running of the whole operation with potential for greater disagreement with more people involved and doesn’t eliminate the losses.

3)      The EFL admits the magnitude of an impossible remit. Stronger security checks are forced upon purchasers. I hark back to the EFL rule 16.21.1 where a new owner is required to produce evidence of funds only after they have purchased the club. That’s a bit late! Football clubs need protecting. Bearing in mind that running costs of a lower budget Championship side are around £20m per annum it is not unreasonable to insist a certain amount, if not all, is lodged in advance of a takeover. That way you have got a chance of getting an owner who has your interests at heart.

There is a petition doing the rounds and has got to be worth signing by football fans everywhere. 10,000 signatures receive a response from Government, 100,000 and the petition will be considered for debate in Parliament.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/331589