I always think about the people who have lost jobs and families affected by this. That is why I would never laugh at any football club going under. At the end of the day, if CAFC folded, we all have lives outside of 11 men running around kicking a ball. But it is the people who rely on the club to live that would be hardest hit.
I wouldn't gloat but I've thought for a long time that, sooner or later, a club would have to go this way to stop others from knocking all their debt and walking away to start again.
I don't especially like Coventry, nor do I especially hate them but, sadly, they are as good a candidate as any to be made an example of, and it has been coming....
Sad to see. Quite like Coventry. Okay their fans have given it large in the past, but who hasn't? just banter & bragging rights that goes with the territory.
I for one hope they can sort out the mess they find themselves in & wouldn't wish it on (almost) any club......................
A good start to the season, followed by signing half a dozen players when they have cleared all the debts, and they won't go down, and they may well be chasing a playoff spot come May!
A good start to the season, followed by signing half a dozen players when they have cleared all the debts, and they won't go down, and they may well be chasing a playoff spot come May!
Sad to see. Quite like Coventry. Okay their fans have given it large in the past, but who hasn't? just banter & bragging rights that goes with the territory.
I for one hope they can sort out the mess they find themselves in & wouldn't wish it on (almost) any club......................
The seasons first use of the "banter" word...I claim my fiver!
10 points is easily overcome and others e.g. Bournemouth (17 points) have had many more points docked, which just makes no sense at all.
The way I read it, is that they are not in liquidation. It's just that ACL did not agree to the CVA, so they could not come out of administration & clear their debts.
Therefore, they start the season still in administration and have a 10 point deduction.
Football is in one hell of a mess. If it is ever to recover, it will take at least one and probably many failures for people to wake up and face the monster that's been created. I don't mean failures like Soton or Palace, but real teams going to the wall never to come back. I don't wish any ill of Coventry, but I'd rather them than us. Trouble is, it could be both.
Football is in one hell of a mess. If it is ever to recover, it will take at least one and probably many failures for people to wake up and face the monster that's been created. I don't mean failures like Soton or Palace, but real teams going to the wall never to come back. I don't wish any ill of Coventry, but I'd rather them than us. Trouble is, it could be both.
The problem is football won't do it of its own accord. The liquidation of a proud, historic footballing institution which is the pride and joy of thousands upon thousands of fans is just an investment risk to the sort of blokes currently investing in clubs. The only people who can control who gets to invest in a club is the FA, so far they've shown an abject lack of desire to do anything (remember their "fit and proper persons test"!).
It will, in my opinion take government intervention to improve the governance of the game. It's in the British culture to resist government intervention in pretty much any walk of life but I think this time it can be justified to protect what is now probably the thing that England is most famous for around the world, our footballing heritage.
I wrote this article on the subject and would be interested in what you guys think;
I see the RICOH were charging 1.2M for use of the stadium with limited revenue from the catering and parking, and they then mad an offer of 150,000 quid in league 1 rising to 400,000 in the championship. First point is congratulations to the Coventry board for accepting such a daft proposal in the first place and thus shafting themselves and the club good and proper. Are we supposed to feel sorry for such por business acumen? Secondly, the fact that the stadium felt able to revise their offer so drastically downwards shows they were raking it in during previous seasons, and have now woken up to the fact that having killed the Golden goose, there are'nt many alternative clubs around who'll want to pay that sort of money. I hope they go under too, and then someone can tear it down and plant some tres instead.
There is a big difference between Administration and Liquidation.
Administration means that external insolvency practioners (specialist accountants) have been brought in to try to run things, cut costs and sell assets so that the creditors get some of their money back. The aim of Administration is to try to maximise the payout to creditors and to sell the business ideally as a going concern.
Liquidation means the death of a company with its assets sold off.
If the football club is liquidated then it ceases to exist (as nearly happened to CAFC in 1980s) and what happened to Rangers. With Rangers the new company which started a brand new football club which bought the assets of the old dead club from the liquidator.
If a club goes into administration there are points deductions and probable relegation as a result - in liquidation the club ceases to exist and often a AFC Coventry will rise from the ashes several divisions lower.
The situation is more complicated of say the holding company is liquidated and the football club in a subsidiary is not - I would expect this would just lead to a points deduction similar to Southampton.
I see the RICOH were charging 1.2M for use of the stadium with limited revenue from the catering and parking, and they then mad an offer of 150,000 quid in league 1 rising to 400,000 in the championship. First point is congratulations to the Coventry board for accepting such a daft proposal in the first place and thus shafting themselves and the club good and proper. Are we supposed to feel sorry for such por business acumen? Secondly, the fact that the stadium felt able to revise their offer so drastically downwards shows they were raking it in during previous seasons, and have now woken up to the fact that having killed the Golden goose, there are'nt many alternative clubs around who'll want to pay that sort of money. I hope they go under too, and then someone can tear it down and plant some tres instead.
Rant over!
The problem is that someone had to buy the land and build the 32,000 capacity stadium. The repayments on the loan are probably significantly more than £150k a year.
Football is in one hell of a mess. If it is ever to recover, it will take at least one and probably many failures for people to wake up and face the monster that's been created. I don't mean failures like Soton or Palace, but real teams going to the wall never to come back. I don't wish any ill of Coventry, but I'd rather them than us. Trouble is, it could be both.
The problem is football won't do it of its own accord. The liquidation of a proud, historic footballing institution which is the pride and joy of thousands upon thousands of fans is just an investment risk to the sort of blokes currently investing in clubs. The only people who can control who gets to invest in a club is the FA, so far they've shown an abject lack of desire to do anything (remember their "fit and proper persons test"!).
It will, in my opinion take government intervention to improve the governance of the game. It's in the British culture to resist government intervention in pretty much any walk of life but I think this time it can be justified to protect what is now probably the thing that England is most famous for around the world, our footballing heritage.
I wrote this article on the subject and would be interested in what you guys think;
Firstly, and this is just a point of note, you talk about the DCMS without explaining what it is - it might be that most people on the Trust board know what it is, but I don't, and many readers might not also.
Secondly, and this is a general point - I wasn't, at all, surprised to discover that this was a return of something that the Labour Party suggested in 1997, as it sounds very popular politically and absolutely unaffordable.
Government intervention is, in my view, not a terribly desirable solution to many problems but the main problem football has in this country comes from the inability of it to be funded from the huge incomes that it now benefits from, and the debt it has run up in the meantime. Most, if not all, of these problems come from footballer's wages.
The answers seem to be:
1. Reducing ticket prices 2. Giving (somehow) ownership of the clubs to groups that have no money - compared to those that currently own the clubs 3. Protecting the stadia - that are in many cases the only assets the clubs have and are used as security for an aggregate debt of, literally, billions and billions of pounds
My thoughts on these dream solutions are as follows:
1. Supply and demand and the market price seems to be working well enough at clubs like Arsenal and Man Utd who sell out over 135,000 tickets for their home games. If the ticket prices are going to be cut from say, £40 average to £10 average where is the shortfall going to come from and who is going to underwrite the debts the clubs up and down the country have that will never be repaid once the clubs so into administration?
2. This has been done to death but, ignoring their inability to fund continuing losses, who is going to stand accountable for the billions and billions of pounds of debt English football has when the clubs are given to the fans who have little money and no contractual requirement to repay the debts of the previous owners.
3. The stadia have in most cases been lent upon for development, and in many cases to fund ongoing running costs. The legislation currently just ensures a delay from the sale of the stadia, but any more than that and it could make it unsuitable security for lending. If the clubs were all able to go into Administration and knock all their debts with the banks being unable to repossess the land for development we could well find ourselves with another Tax Payer led bailout.
I am all for football reforming itself, but I believe that the plans, in their current state, are nothing more than political point scoring with the electorate that can never realistically come to anything.
The biggest intervention that will make any difference will be the significant reduction of footballers wages and agents fees. I don't know if EU law would allow it, but anything else is totally unrealistic.
A salary cap based on the division the club is in would be the ideal way to police it, but in each division some clubs can afford to pay more than others. Also if we do introduce that in England the best footballers in the world would just play abroad and that is, probably, not what the politicians want to be remembered for, so they daren't go near that.
Thus they all get together and spend thousands of pounds producing documents and plans for reform safe in the knowledge that they will win them popularity by standing up for the working class fans {or voters} while knowing that they will never have to follow it up as the ideas are totally unworkable.
I suspect that you won't thank me for my thoughts, but you did ask.
Anyone showing no sympathy for their supporters whatsoever needs to have a long hard look at themselves. Disgraceful way to tall about another football club that has no rivalry connection to Charlton whatsoever.
What a mess. Goodness only knows what the buffoons at Sisu Capital Management had in mind when they bought Coventry initially, but it would now seem that they are trying every legal trick in the book in order to salvage some value. If their plan, eventually, is to acquire the Ricoh arena at a knock down price and then sell it for development, let's hope they burn in hell. There is nothing more dangerous than smart, determined people with no judgement.
In the meantime, if, as is now being suggested, the Football League agreed to the move to Northampton, despite there being no credible plan to return to Coventry, simply because Sisu threatened legal action, then that tells us everything we need to know about both parties; the League has again shown a lack of both backbone and integrity whilst the hedge fund will continue to exploit the letter of the law whatever it's spirit might be.
Football is in one hell of a mess. If it is ever to recover, it will take at least one and probably many failures for people to wake up and face the monster that's been created. I don't mean failures like Soton or Palace, but real teams going to the wall never to come back. I don't wish any ill of Coventry, but I'd rather them than us. Trouble is, it could be both.
It will, in my opinion take government intervention to improve the governance of the game. It's in the British culture to resist government intervention in pretty much any walk of life but I think this time it can be justified to protect what is now probably the thing that England is most famous for around the world, our footballing heritage.
I wrote this article on the subject and would be interested in what you guys think;
I tend to agree. In my view, for what it's worth, David Mellor had it right in 1997. Football is not capable of self governance and the authorities will continue to stumble incompetently and erratically from crisis to crisis until some form of robust accountability is established. I don't really like the idea of government involvement, but imagine that the Football League had to account to Parliament for its decision to allow Coventry to play at Northampton, for example? Or that the FA had to explain, publically, the background to the appalling Tevez debacle? As a minimum, I'd expect the result to be an increase in standards and less muddled and less conflicted decision making. More optimistically, we might, ultimately, get a more coherent vision for the game in this country and the necessary courage to execute it.
That having been said, there is no simple answer to Football's financial plight and as fans we should be careful what we wish for. The fundamental problem is that our entertainment, our passion is being subsidised either by TV money or by wealthy owners or both. We need a more sustainable model, at least outside the increasingly rareified atmosphere of the Premier League, but it's hard to see how lower ticket prices can be a part of that solution, for example. Something has to give and that will need to include something from us too.
Comments
I don't especially like Coventry, nor do I especially hate them but, sadly, they are as good a candidate as any to be made an example of, and it has been coming....
I for one hope they can sort out the mess they find themselves in & wouldn't wish it on (almost) any club......................
theres 3 clubs I wouldn't care if they went to the wall
millwall
palace
Coventry
1 down 2 to go
10 points is easily overcome and others e.g. Bournemouth (17 points) have had many more points docked, which just makes no sense at all.
Therefore, they start the season still in administration and have a 10 point deduction.
It will, in my opinion take government intervention to improve the governance of the game. It's in the British culture to resist government intervention in pretty much any walk of life but I think this time it can be justified to protect what is now probably the thing that England is most famous for around the world, our footballing heritage.
I wrote this article on the subject and would be interested in what you guys think;
http://www.castrust.org/2013/07/governance-government-time-for-legislation-in-football/
First point is congratulations to the Coventry board for accepting such a daft proposal in the first place and thus shafting themselves and the club good and proper. Are we supposed to feel sorry for such por business acumen?
Secondly, the fact that the stadium felt able to revise their offer so drastically downwards shows they were raking it in during previous seasons, and have now woken up to the fact that having killed the Golden goose, there are'nt many alternative clubs around who'll want to pay that sort of money. I hope they go under too, and then someone can tear it down and plant some tres instead.
Rant over!
Shame as before that Coventry were a well run Premier league side.
Administration means that external insolvency practioners (specialist accountants) have been brought in to try to run things, cut costs and sell assets so that the creditors get some of their money back. The aim of Administration is to try to maximise the payout to creditors and to sell the business ideally as a going concern.
Liquidation means the death of a company with its assets sold off.
If the football club is liquidated then it ceases to exist (as nearly happened to CAFC in 1980s) and what happened to Rangers. With Rangers the new company which started a brand new football club which bought the assets of the old dead club from the liquidator.
If a club goes into administration there are points deductions and probable relegation as a result - in liquidation the club ceases to exist and often a AFC Coventry will rise from the ashes several divisions lower.
The situation is more complicated of say the holding company is liquidated and the football club in a subsidiary is not - I would expect this would just lead to a points deduction similar to Southampton.
Firstly, and this is just a point of note, you talk about the DCMS without explaining what it is - it might be that most people on the Trust board know what it is, but I don't, and many readers might not also.
Secondly, and this is a general point - I wasn't, at all, surprised to discover that this was a return of something that the Labour Party suggested in 1997, as it sounds very popular politically and absolutely unaffordable.
Government intervention is, in my view, not a terribly desirable solution to many problems but the main problem football has in this country comes from the inability of it to be funded from the huge incomes that it now benefits from, and the debt it has run up in the meantime. Most, if not all, of these problems come from footballer's wages.
The answers seem to be:
1. Reducing ticket prices
2. Giving (somehow) ownership of the clubs to groups that have no money - compared to those that currently own the clubs
3. Protecting the stadia - that are in many cases the only assets the clubs have and are used as security for an aggregate debt of, literally, billions and billions of pounds
My thoughts on these dream solutions are as follows:
1. Supply and demand and the market price seems to be working well enough at clubs like Arsenal and Man Utd who sell out over 135,000 tickets for their home games. If the ticket prices are going to be cut from say, £40 average to £10 average where is the shortfall going to come from and who is going to underwrite the debts the clubs up and down the country have that will never be repaid once the clubs so into administration?
2. This has been done to death but, ignoring their inability to fund continuing losses, who is going to stand accountable for the billions and billions of pounds of debt English football has when the clubs are given to the fans who have little money and no contractual requirement to repay the debts of the previous owners.
3. The stadia have in most cases been lent upon for development, and in many cases to fund ongoing running costs. The legislation currently just ensures a delay from the sale of the stadia, but any more than that and it could make it unsuitable security for lending. If the clubs were all able to go into Administration and knock all their debts with the banks being unable to repossess the land for development we could well find ourselves with another Tax Payer led bailout.
I am all for football reforming itself, but I believe that the plans, in their current state, are nothing more than political point scoring with the electorate that can never realistically come to anything.
The biggest intervention that will make any difference will be the significant reduction of footballers wages and agents fees. I don't know if EU law would allow it, but anything else is totally unrealistic.
A salary cap based on the division the club is in would be the ideal way to police it, but in each division some clubs can afford to pay more than others. Also if we do introduce that in England the best footballers in the world would just play abroad and that is, probably, not what the politicians want to be remembered for, so they daren't go near that.
Thus they all get together and spend thousands of pounds producing documents and plans for reform safe in the knowledge that they will win them popularity by standing up for the working class fans {or voters} while knowing that they will never have to follow it up as the ideas are totally unworkable.
I suspect that you won't thank me for my thoughts, but you did ask.
In the meantime, if, as is now being suggested, the Football League agreed to the move to Northampton, despite there being no credible plan to return to Coventry, simply because Sisu threatened legal action, then that tells us everything we need to know about both parties; the League has again shown a lack of both backbone and integrity whilst the hedge fund will continue to exploit the letter of the law whatever it's spirit might be. I tend to agree. In my view, for what it's worth, David Mellor had it right in 1997. Football is not capable of self governance and the authorities will continue to stumble incompetently and erratically from crisis to crisis until some form of robust accountability is established. I don't really like the idea of government involvement, but imagine that the Football League had to account to Parliament for its decision to allow Coventry to play at Northampton, for example? Or that the FA had to explain, publically, the background to the appalling Tevez debacle? As a minimum, I'd expect the result to be an increase in standards and less muddled and less conflicted decision making. More optimistically, we might, ultimately, get a more coherent vision for the game in this country and the necessary courage to execute it.
That having been said, there is no simple answer to Football's financial plight and as fans we should be careful what we wish for. The fundamental problem is that our entertainment, our passion is being subsidised either by TV money or by wealthy owners or both. We need a more sustainable model, at least outside the increasingly rareified atmosphere of the Premier League, but it's hard to see how lower ticket prices can be a part of that solution, for example. Something has to give and that will need to include something from us too.