Clubs in trouble

[Dave Cooper please]

Paulie, I see your point, but thinking of football clubs as "just another business" is on a par with getting all annoyed because some footballers earn more in a week than you do in a year.
 Football, rightly or wrongly, works on a different world to real life, how many hundreds of fans has your business got who are willing to give you cash to watch your workers ply their trade for 90 minutes while you flog them overpriced pies?

[nechells]

 Kings Lynn went under because their previous owners neglected to pay a £64,000 tax bill to the Inland Revenue, the fans raised nearly half of it, but still they went, 130 years of history gone for Sidwell's weekly wage.

Owing money to the taxman is just like any other bill, if you don't pay it, you get shut down, just like any other business which doesn't pay what it owes.  If the directors spent the money they should have been paying in PAYE and NI, then tough as it is on the Linnets' fans, they deserved to be wound up.  The fact that it's miniscule by Premier League standards is neither here nor there.

 There but for the grace of God and all that.
 If Randy walked tomorrow, demanded his £80m and no buyer was found before the next tax bill was due, I assume you'd be saying the same? That Villa deserved to be wound up because the owner happened to turn out to be a shyster?
 It wouldn't happen to Villa of course for many reasons, but why are fans of "big clubs" more worthy than fans of a club only five years younger than ourselves just because they can always find someone else to bail them out?

I don't think its a case of just walking away from the club-he would still be liable.

As I see it,the club are in debt on paper but RL owns the club & is also the person who is owed money by the club.

If RL wanted to sell tomorrow & the club was worth for arguments sake £130mil but had debts of £100mil,the liklehood is that RL would recieve offers for the club of around £30mil along with proposals to re-pay the debt in stage payments.

This myth that you buy into that football owners are ruthless sharks who want to fool joe public into helping them make even more money is just a pipe dream.There is a lot of money in football but it all goes to the players,these are the only real winners in all of this.

[nechells]

No club should be protected - owe money, don't pay it, get shut down. Unfortunately, that's the way it has to be.

I run a business and spend half my life writing cheques to HMRC. If we suddenly stopped paying them, they'd come after us and keep coming after us until they got the money.

I don't run a 100 year old football club, but if my business got shut down and I heard football clubs were getting special treatment because of the sport, I'd be very annoyed, and so would all the people who lost their jobs as a result of our demise.

Clubs in trouble are mostly in trouble becasue of the way the big clubs act. Football is still a sport and everyone involved owes it to the sport to look after those least able. Ultimately, if there's only one club left who do they play against?

Football is also a business & I don't see why clubs who are run well & within budgets should be asked to bail out clubs like Pompey & Leeds who went for broke & it didn't work out for them.

[pauliewalnuts]

Paulie, I see your point, but thinking of football clubs as "just another business" is on a par with getting all annoyed because some footballers earn more in a week than you do in a year.
 Football, rightly or wrongly, works on a different world to real life, how many hundreds of fans has your business got who are willing to give you cash to watch your workers ply their trade for 90 minutes while you flog them overpriced pies?

I understand it is not another business to the supporters, but in legal terms, football clubs are also companies, and they have to operate under company law like any other company.

The consequences of not paying a 64k bill to HMRC have got to be the same for a football club as they are to a widget factory.

[dave.woodhall]

No club should be protected - owe money, don't pay it, get shut down. Unfortunately, that's the way it has to be.

I run a business and spend half my life writing cheques to HMRC. If we suddenly stopped paying them, they'd come after us and keep coming after us until they got the money.

I don't run a 100 year old football club, but if my business got shut down and I heard football clubs were getting special treatment because of the sport, I'd be very annoyed, and so would all the people who lost their jobs as a result of our demise.

Clubs in trouble are mostly in trouble becasue of the way the big clubs act. Football is still a sport and everyone involved owes it to the sport to look after those least able. Ultimately, if there's only one club left who do they play against?

Football is also a business & I don't see why clubs who are run well & within budgets should be asked to bail out clubs like Pompey & Leeds who went for broke & it didn't work out for them.

They aren't the issue here. It's clubs like Kings Lynn, who were doing perfectly well until the Premier League came along.

[pauliewalnuts]

No club should be protected - owe money, don't pay it, get shut down. Unfortunately, that's the way it has to be.

I run a business and spend half my life writing cheques to HMRC. If we suddenly stopped paying them, they'd come after us and keep coming after us until they got the money.

I don't run a 100 year old football club, but if my business got shut down and I heard football clubs were getting special treatment because of the sport, I'd be very annoyed, and so would all the people who lost their jobs as a result of our demise.

Clubs in trouble are mostly in trouble becasue of the way the big clubs act. Football is still a sport and everyone involved owes it to the sport to look after those least able. Ultimately, if there's only one club left who do they play against?

There are two issues there, though.

The first one is the (using Dave C's example here) not paying the HMRC. As I said in my last post, that's the law, you can't have exceptions for football clubs.

The second one is whether other football clubs should help out. I understand that point, and have some sympathy with it. I just dont have any with football clubs dodging their legal and financial obligations.

[nechells]

No club should be protected - owe money, don't pay it, get shut down. Unfortunately, that's the way it has to be.

I run a business and spend half my life writing cheques to HMRC. If we suddenly stopped paying them, they'd come after us and keep coming after us until they got the money.

I don't run a 100 year old football club, but if my business got shut down and I heard football clubs were getting special treatment because of the sport, I'd be very annoyed, and so would all the people who lost their jobs as a result of our demise.

Clubs in trouble are mostly in trouble becasue of the way the big clubs act. Football is still a sport and everyone involved owes it to the sport to look after those least able. Ultimately, if there's only one club left who do they play against?

Football is also a business & I don't see why clubs who are run well & within budgets should be asked to bail out clubs like Pompey & Leeds who went for broke & it didn't work out for them.

They aren't the issue here. It's clubs like Kings Lynn, who were doing perfectly well until the Premier League came along.

You'll have to enlighten me on how the Premier League has affected clubs as far down the tier as Kings Lynn-This is a new one on me.

I am all for supporting grass roots football-It was the likes of Pompey etc that I felt deserved no help from other clubs.

[PeterWithe]

You'll have to enlighten me on how the Premier League has affected clubs as far down the tier as Kings Lynn-This is a new one on me.

One example is since the start of the PL the FA cup has got gradually devalued as the financial rewards for winning it have got relatively smaller, as we have seen even if a small club is lucky enough to pull a tie against one of the big boys they are looking at a share of a gate way down on the normal attendance, why? Because remaining in the PL or qualifying for the CL is now the be all and end all.

[dave.woodhall]

You'll have to enlighten me on how the Premier League has affected clubs as far down the tier as Kings Lynn-This is a new one on me.

I am all for supporting grass roots football-It was the likes of Pompey etc that I felt deserved no help from other clubs.

Pre-Premier League football was still a going-to-watch-it sport. If you lived in King's Lynn there was a good chance you watched them even if they were crap. Now the mentality is such that you support Manchester United from your armchair and sneer at every other club because they're crap. You wouldn't dream of going to watch a game, even if it didn't clash with Sky Ford Super Duper Sunday.

I read something on BBC Sport today where the chairman of King's Lynn said their gates went from 900 to 300 once wall to wall live coverage kicked in.

[hawkeye]

The issue is that football clubs are the supporters and Barcelona is the embodyment of this where the club are the supportrs who own the club, the people that run the club are merely custodians and answerable to the club which is its supporters.

Some time ago football clubs in England became companys and the normal corporate rules apply which has created the disconnect between the club which we all feel we belong to and the reality that it is in fact merely a corporation that we dont belong to.

[dave.woodhall]

The issue is that football clubs are the supporters and Barcelona is the embodyment of this where the club are the supportrs who own the club, the people that run the club are merely custodians and answerable to the club which is its supporters.

Some time ago football clubs in England became companys and the normal corporate rules apply which has created the disconnect between the club which we all feel we belong to and the reality that it is in fact merely a corporation that we dont belong to.

Remember when we said this was the way we wanted Villa to go? No one man and all that?

Remember the rush to sell our shares to Randy?

[hawkeye]

The issue is that football clubs are the supporters and Barcelona is the embodyment of this where the club are the supportrs who own the club, the people that run the club are merely custodians and answerable to the club which is its supporters.

Some time ago football clubs in England became companys and the normal corporate rules apply which has created the disconnect between the club which we all feel we belong to and the reality that it is in fact merely a corporation that we dont belong to.

Remember when we said this was the way we wanted Villa to go? No one man and all that?

Remember the rush to sell our shares to Randy?

dave but it happened before that, doug floating the company and retaining majority control did not change the status quo, we are lucky i guess because it appears that Randy sees himself as a custodian, we as supporters have never had a say in how the club has been run,

[dave.woodhall]

dave but it happened before that, doug floating the company and retaining majority control did not change the status quo, we are lucky i guess because it appears that Randy sees himself as a custodian, we as supporters have never had a say in how the club has been run,

I know all that (although we did have a say from 1968-79) but it still shows we're willing to forego our principles when necessary.

[hawkeye]

dave but it happened before that, doug floating the company and retaining majority control did not change the status quo, we are lucky i guess because it appears that Randy sees himself as a custodian, we as supporters have never had a say in how the club has been run,

I know all that (although we did have a say from 1968-79) but it still shows we're willing to forego our principles when necessary.

did we really? i remember  because my dad was an original shareholder, the ordinary shareholders made up a significant minority and were split when the big issues of controll were decided but it was hardly a fans democracy or am i missing something?

[pdiddybaby]

dave but it happened before that, doug floating the company and retaining majority control did not change the status quo, we are lucky i guess because it appears that Randy sees himself as a custodian, we as supporters have never had a say in how the club has been run,

I know all that (although we did have a say from 1968-79) but it still shows we're willing to forego our principles when necessary.

depends on what principles they are, Notts County, support trust sold out to Munto upon great promises of riches and look at them now, barely 6 months on

at Villa we sold out to Randy with actually few solid promises except from reports  we thought he would be good and pump money in, he has done and at the same renforced the princiles on which the club was founded, relative to the modern age.