stevegrant

HMRC (surprisingly, IMO) not opposing administration application, but opposing proposal to appoint UHY

He's a ****ing idiot. "Shock horror a football club relies on owner subsidy" - well yes, but a football club who's just come out of administration having wiped around £80m of debt from their books doing so (and not for the purposes of debt repayment) is rather reckless, I'd suggest.

Textbook

Coventry aren't looking that useless anymore, especially at home, and of their 7 remaining home games, only one is against a top-half side (Birmingham). The rest are all very winnable (Barnsley, Palace, Pompey, Peterborough, Millwall, Doncaster)

I see Appleton's fallen into the "it's not fair on everyone else if we've got a depleted squad, so we should be allowed to sign loads more loan players" trap. I wouldn't say that's to the detriment of the division, I'd imagine the likes of Coventry, Doncaster, Nottingham Forest and Millwall will be quite happy to see a limbs-nearly-falling-off starting lineup for the rest of the season.

That must be a ****ing huge wall

Last call for players - if I can't get at least another 5 by the weekend (long shot), we'll probably have to cancel.

I'm not sure the £83,700 for 3100 adult tickets will stretch that far, to be honest.

Sadly, I'm not entirely convinced that publicly saying "we're going to ask the court on Friday to allow us to enter administration" is the same as lodging a Notice of Intention to Appoint an Administrator. I suspect the latter has to be done in court. Also, I assume the rules on what constitutes an Insolvency Event have changed in recent years because Coventry DID lodge that particular Notice to the court a few years ago, giving it ten days to appoint someone, and on the final day, SISU rode in on their trusty steed to bail them out with their ill-thought-out business plan, bought the club and avoided a points deduction.

Early conspiracy theories when that claim came out was that Chainrai had someone waiting in the wings to be the new "saviour", so anyone who had any genuine interest was scared off by AA with a ridiculous price tag.

FIFA and UEFA have jurisdiction over the FA - to an extent (they wouldn't want to be seen to be dictating how national associations should manage the game in their country) - but not over the leagues affiliated to the national associations, especially in the cases of the Premier League and Football League as they're not run by the national association. In many countries, the national league IS run by the national association, but not here.

All results voided, we go back to the top of the table

A scruffy cockney who needs a shave, I reckon

They are effectively private members' clubs and can basically impose whatever eligibility criteria they like. One of those criteria is that creditors deemed "Football Creditors" must be satisfied in full in the case of an insolvency event, otherwise membership will be revoked/refused. If I had run up a bar bill at a members' club and then tried to renew my membership, I'd expect them to refuse until I'd settled that debt.

As far as I'm aware, foreign clubs do not count as "Football Creditors", hence why Udinese (I think) were heavily involved in the CVA process last time around, so they're left waiting in line with the likes of Terry the Builder and St John's Ambulance for a percentage of the scraps.

In Pompey's case, IMO, the main problem is that there's been a whole succession of owners with a somewhat chequered past, so why would any legitimate potential owner believe the numbers they're presented with if they showed an interest in buying the club? Sporting sanctions will do the trick for the vast majority of clubs, who haven't had money launderers, arms dealers and tax dodgers as owners - realistically, the authorities should be putting a framework in place to cover the majority, while accepting that they're unlikely to be able to legislate for every single issue that may arise. The idea of making an owner personally responsible is a non-starter, football clubs are nearly always limited companies - legally, the shareholders are not personally liable for losses sustained by the company directors/management. The escrow account is an interesting idea, but you're then getting into the very dodgy ground of the authorities basically running the club. The club should be (within reason, clearly) free to run their business as they see fit, within whatever restrictions the authorities place on all clubs. There's a fair argument to suggest that clubs with a history of financial mismanagement should be subject to additional scrutiny, but as we've seen with your situation with CSI, there's still plenty of scope for it to go horribly wrong. How the FL justified allowing CSI to pump in what seems to equate to £2m a month genuinely baffles me.

Schneiderlin cost €250k. No idea where this bizarre £1m figure comes from. I'm intrigued as to what Leeds offered, then, considering we signed him on a free transfer.

Definitely. The Football League/Premier League (actually, **** it, it should be an FA directive, they should re-stamp their authority on the game they are supposed to govern) should basically replace the Football Creditors rule with sporting sanctions for non-payment of agreed transfer fees and tax. If clubs knew they'd be docked points if they missed payments (or were significantly late), they'd soon get their house in order. The Conference should be used as a blueprint here, they regularly impose points deductions for teams missing payment deadlines.

He seems to be pretty much the only person down there coming out of this situation with any sort of credit. However, I would also argue that he was rather naive to take Lampitt and Antonov's promises at face value when even the slightest bit of research (and apparently a West Brom director warned him of the pending crisis) would have painted a fairly bleak picture.

I don't have a problem with transfer fees being paid in instalments or being incentivised (i.e. extra payments based on the player and/or team fulfilling certain criteria), but they should simply do away with the Football Creditors rule for any transfers conducted from this summer onwards. It should remain in place for transfers that have already taken place because I don't think it's particularly fair on selling clubs to move the goalposts on a deal they concluded under the old system of secure knowledge that they'll receive 100% of the agreed fees, but from the summer onwards, it should be down to selling clubs to do due diligence on any other club they're looking to do business with.

#firstworldproblems

Sort of, except the latter was achieved by very good fortune rather than by design. Crouch had tried for months, maybe even years (as did Lowe, as did Wilde), to find proper investors to buy the club but absolutely nobody was interested. Therefore, he assumed that nobody would be interested once the club slipped into administration, leaving just one person with the capability of rescuing the club and being pronounced the Saviour (with the side-effect of 1. buying the club for **** all, and 2. getting one over Lowe and Wilde)

More by luck than judgement. I'm certainly not going to give him praise for selfishly jeopardising the future of the club in the misguided belief that nobody else was going to be willing or able to buy the club when it went into admin. Clearly it's one of those things which nobody will ever be able to prove, neither Crouch or Richard Fry would ever admit to such a conspiracy. Forced administration because of a £6k cheque, when the overdraft was at £4.1m, having been reduced from £6.5m? Cracking business sense there...

Arguably without Crouch's various interventions, we might not even have had to go into administration in the first place.

No. However, the Football League do reserve the right to bend/make up the rules as they see fit, so it's not entirely cut and dried that they'll only receive the statutory 10-point deduction on Friday.