Clubs from top to bottom in admin or on the brink of it.Being bought and then sold again like a ford mondeo.Players wages completely disproportionate to the capital in the clubs that pay them.
Genuine Knights in shining armour would be well advised to stay away from football.And it appears most of them have.
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Everyone always knew it was obscene paying people 100K plus a week to kick a football about.
Maybe this is where we get a dose of reality.........would that be such a bad thing?
It may be that the whole shithouse needs to come down so that we get a bit of sanity and fans and the pampered primmadonnas who lord it over them can connect again. The whole business has gone from a working man's game to a rich man's plaything in the space of a generation.
Been coming for a while now, from before the Risdale madness at Leeds
Start again wouldnt be so bad with a clear out of the governing bodies and removal of every agent who isnt working solo.
It's all very sad really, and I fear deep down for Charlton's future.
The gravy train has just about stopped.
At the very top we hear that Barca/Real/United have vast debts and could be in big trouble when interest rates go up...of if Sky decided they were to halve their TV money offer next time around.
The irony for palace is that several more Championship clubs could go bust and thus make their battle against relegation much easier.
Absolutely agree, Wolves fielding a second XI in a League game, Arsenal not giving a flying one about the FA CUP !! and Fulham "refusing" to use a League clubs changing room are all things that have happened in tha past month that are convincing me that the game is being lost to the real fans of the game ........................... is this what we all really want ? whilst the PL couldn't give a toss about 86 of the 92 League clubs if push came to shove. and as for the CL ................ don't get me started.............
Real and Barca are 'special' cases.
Real because the Spanish government has and always will bail them out whenever the going gets tough (witness the ludicrous sum of money (close to 500 million euros in total) the government paid for the land Real's training ground was on a few years back - allowing them to completely clear their debts.)
Barca because the club is 'owned' almost entirely by the fans. The 'debt' of Barcelona isn't largely bank debt - with the penurious interest rates that naturally follow. I think the current figure on debt to banks is around the 40 million euro mark. If there were ever any serious concern about the state of their finances, the club would be bailed out by something similar to a bond issue.
Agree though - football is utterly f***ed - and to stick with Spain for proof, you only have to look at Valencia - a massive club (the equivalent of Arsenal in the UK) in such dire straits that they've been insolvent for about three years and, seemingly every month, appear to be on the brink of going out of business completely. It's sad.
Sure, financially they may depend on regular Champions League appearances, there'll be no crisis at Liverpool until the receiver's padlock goes on the Shankly Gates.
Before that happens, we'll be hearing more whines from the spoilt big four who have bled football dry than the real heartbreak of real community clubs going to the wall.
How so very very true, the irony of the Man U fans moaning this week about the Glazers .......... hhmmm
Which is highly likely seeing as people are ditching sky quicker than Tiger Wood's missus divorce lawyer stuck a 'no more cases' sign on the office door.
If there was to be an issue with Sky, it's more likely to be the Football League that suffers.
Agents are not silly, they know how much each club generates in revenues and how much they are paying out in wages, so they play clubs off against each other to get the most possible money for their client.
What needs to happen is for the clubs to sit down and agree on a maximum wage cap for a player and not go above it - the problem is that this will NEVER happen because clubs will compete for the best players on how much they can pay them.
The only viable long-term proposition is for football to be run by a proper central body like the NFL in the US where the league regulates the clubs wages and so on to ensure the health of the entire league. The AFL here in Australia is another very good example of how well this can work.
Again, though, this is unlikely to be approved by the "Big Five" because they like being able to rule the game with the power of their money.
Crystal Palace are the first Football League club to enter into administration this season, and the only aspects of this that are surprising about this are that it was them rather than any of the other members of football’s current rogues gallery and that it took so long this season for it to happen to anyone. On the surface, it seems like little more than a setback that costs them any realistic chance of promotion this season. Their ten point deduction leaves them hovering just above the relegation places, but they should theoretically have enough about them to stabilse back into a mid-table position in the league. The ten point deduction, however, has a tendency to be seen as the be all and end all of problems, but there are more serious issues at play that threaten the future of the club.
Firstly, the current squad is likely to be broken up. Palace had been enjoying a reasonable season on the pitch, but with administrators now in charge of the club a fire sale is quite possible. The adminstrators, it should be remembered, have no responsibility to the supporters or to the good of the club’s league position. Their job is to keep the club as a going concern and if this means selling their best player off, then so be it. This probably couldn’t be happening at a worse time for them. The transfer market has been flat for over twelve months now, and the knowledge that the administrators will be looking to realise funds and that alone is hardly likely to inflate the value of the players in the current Crystal Palace squad. None of this, however, is inevitable. The administrators don’t have to (and with only four days of the transfer window left may be unable to) sell.
The timing of the decision was predictable. Palace are just one of number of clubs living on their means and effectively using the non-payment of tax as some sort of unofficial bank overdraft that they can dip in and out of. Need to piss fifty thousand pounds away on a new central defender but haven’t got the money coming into the club to be able to support it? Never mind! Just stop paying your tax bills for a few months. They’ll never even notice! It can only be presumed that Simon Jordan (with whom, obviously, the buck stops) had been trying as hard as he could to get someone to throw money onto the Crystal Palace bonfire in order to head off the winding up order and has failed. As such, administration was probably a last ditch push to earn – to such an extent that one could “earn” such a thing – protection from further insolvency action from being taken against them. A considerably worse action for Palace supporters would have been for this action and the club to have been wound up at the High Court.
The administrators, it has be said, sound confident. They are talking of a quick sale of Crystal Palace Football Club. How good this turns out to be depends obviously and entirely on who any new owners prove to be. We can be almost certain, however, that the club will no longer be under the ownership of Simon Jordan, who has been spending more than Palace could realistically afford for a couple of years now and is paying the price for his profligacy. Meanwhile, former owner (and one-time racist) Ron Noades has been spreading his wisdom about what administration could mean for Crystal Palace Football Club.
For Palace’s future it is probably the best thing that could have happened to them. It gives them a chance for a new start without the liability of having debts having over the club’s head. It was most difficult for somebody to go in there and buy Palace, settle the debts and still have money to invest in the club The next problem is that whoever goes in there would have to secure the freehold to the stadium before they can buy the club.
It’s an easy mistake, of course, mistaking the word “somebody” for the name “Ron Noades”. It would be surprising if Noades wasn’t one of the consortia that stepped in to “save the day” by putting in a cut price bid to buy the club out. Indeed, Noades hasn’t stopped far short of being the Superman of South East London this week, albeit with a degree less success than his Gotham City counterpart. Rather than stepping in himself, he stated that he had suggested to David Sullivan and David Gold that they should buy Crystal Palace. This was reported yesterday, but this wasn’t his only involvement with Crystal Palace recently. Today, he confirmed to the same local newspaper – the South London Press – that he had made an offer to buy Selhurst Park, apparently within seconds of the club being put into administration.
In the meantime, Crystal Palace supporters can only wait and hope. Their club – although coverage in much of the national press may try to prove you otherwise – remains marketable and capable if making it back into the Premier League, even if their chances of doing so this season are somewhat less likely than they were earlier on today. What their supporters will come to realise over the next few days, however, is that a ten point deduction is likely to be the least of their problems. Much will now come down to the willingness of the likes of Ron Noades to dig them out of their current hole. Meltdown seems unlikely, but there may be tough times ahead for Crystal Palace Football Club.