In fairly unsurprising news, the Football League have announced that they will not back down from their insistence that Saints’ new owners agree to waive their right of appeal against the 10-point deduction given to them in April.

The League released a brief statement shortly after the meeting:

The Board of The Football League met today to consider representations from the ‘Pinnacle Group’ with regard to their proposed takeover of Southampton Football Club.

The Football League has the responsibility to ensure all League clubs start the season with certainty as regards the competition they compete in.

With that in mind, The Football League has responded directly to the Pinnacle Group, and will continue to liaise with their representatives going forward.

While there won’t be many Saints fans who would argue that, in the “spirit” of the rules, we don’t deserve the points deduction, many will point to the gaping loophole in the rules which suggested that we may have had a chance of avoiding the penalty. However, the main bone of contention for Saints fans now is that the new owners have had a gun held to their head before they’ve even changed the plaque on the chairman’s office, and have been refused a basic legal right that underpins a lot of the British legal system.

Convicted murderers, rapists and paedophiles get the opportunity to appeal, even if the evidence is stacked against them, so why is a football club being refused the option, particularly when the appeal would be heard by the Football League themselves? All it would take is for them to reject the appeal and that would pretty much be the end of it. Taking the decision they have opens up suggestions that they don’t have a great deal of confidence in the original penalty and that they were worried about losing an appeal which would have been hugely embarrassing and could have rendered the board’s position untenable.

It’s ironic that, despite the loophole that we supposedly exploited (relatively unwittingly), that loophole which implies that the Football League only has jurisdiction over the company registered with them (in our case, Southampton Football Club Limited) and not any connected subsidiaries or parent companies has still not been closed and only goes to show the bumbling attitude the Football League appear to have, and the belief that they are above the law and can essentially do as they please.

Someone somewhere will make things incredibly uncomfortable for Lord Mawhinney and his gentlemans’ club who sit around the table with him. The conflict of interests in having representatives of other clubs adjudicating on this shouldn’t be underestimated either.

Saints fans will now face an anxious wait to discover Pinnacle’s next move - while I would like to be determined to fight the Football League on this, it’s clear that they’re the ones holding all the aces (rightly or wrongly), and the only way we can move forward is if somebody just accepts the 10 points and gets on with things.

Whether that will be with Matt Le Tissier as chairman, who knows? Marc Jackson’s group are still waiting in the wings according to the Echo, and he may be linked to the “unhelpful outside influences” both Tony Lynam and Le Tissier have referred to in the past week or so. There also remains an unknown Swiss bid which, given Jackson’s “success” at taking over Bournemouth last year, would appear to have a slight advantage, but who knows…

At its Annual General Meeting, the member clubs of the Football League voted to introduce new regulations relating to tax payments.

With more and more clubs being forced into administration in recent years, the vast majority owing significant sums of money to HMRC, the League has brought in restrictions for those clubs who fall behind in their employee-related payments. The clubs have agreed to allow the League to have access and monitor their tax affairs directly through HMRC.

If clubs fall behind in their payments, they will have a transfer embargo placed upon them until they have rectified the situation. It also acts as an early-warning system for the Football League so they get an indication of when clubs are in trouble. The hope is that if clubs are keeping up to date with their tax payments, they won’t experience as many problems getting a CVA approved if the worst should happen and they are forced into administration.

Clubs failing to get a CVA approved (which requires 75% of the creditors to approve to be passed) are hit with a points deduction in addition to the statutory 10 points penalty for entering administration. Last season, Bournemouth and Rotherham started the season on -17 points for this reason, and Luton were hit with a 20-point penalty as it was the third time the club had been in administration.

It is another financial check to make sure that clubs aren’t overextending themselves, which for the long-term preservation of the game at a professional level is to be applauded. However, on the flip-side, it is likely to increase the gap between the Premier League and the Football League. The Premier League have no such regulations - hell, you can be a fraudster with a dubious human rights record and still pass their “Fit and Proper Persons” test - and generally allow their clubs carte blanche to do as they please.