Portsmouth, Chester City, Southend – A Dark Day for English Football

Prominent sports writer Brian Glanville has for some time referred to the Premier League as the ‘Greed is Good’ League. A cynical reflection of the fact that English football’s top flight, with it’s £3.4 billion pounds worth of total debt, has for some time been living well beyond it’s means in a desperate, rampant scramble for dollars and cents.

Today some of those chickens came home to roost on what will no doubt go down as a dark day for English football.

First came the news this morning that we had all been expecting for some time: Portsmouth became the first ever Premier League club to enter administration. With debts of £70 million, a winding up order issued by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs recently adjourned in the High Court over a VAT bill of £7.4 million and the club struggling to find new investors, Portsmouth enter administration to try and avoid the ultimate punishment – complete liquidation.

Administration means Portsmouth will be docked 9 points. Already bottom of the league, it almost certainly hammers the final nail in their Premier League coffin. Pompey will be relegated.

The Fratton Park club’s problems do not end there either. Significant cost-cutting will now take place and insolvency practitioners Andrew Andronikou and Peter Kubik now have the difficult task of assessing the damage and eradicating all unnecessary costs. “I will be cutting to the bone, I can assure you,” Andronikou stated in his press conference, aired on BBC News and Sky Sports News amidst a clamour of public and media interest that appeared a surprise to him. “Restructuring starts today. There will be significant cost cuts at all levels. We have a huge job to deal with.”

Though administration will ultimately help Portsmouth in that it should stop them from going out of business altogether, this is no silver lining for Pompey fans. With relegation all but done, after the hacksaw of administration chops away ruthlessly at the club’s costs Portsmouth will then need to agree a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) as a route out of administration. If they do not agree one the Football League will probably look very harshly on them – as Luton Town can attest. Luton were deducted 20 points for failing to agree a CVA in 2008 and consequently tumbled down the leagues all the way to their current position in the Conference.

To use a football analogy, Portsmouth may have saved a penalty by entering administration, but the striker is bearing down on goal ready to slam home the rebound.

It is not just Portsmouth for whom this is a bleak day. It was also announced today that Chester City have been expelled from the Conference with immediate effect after the club admitted to breaking five Conference rules including failure to fulfil their fixtures.

The Blue Square Premier outfit have stumbled from crisis to crisis in recent months, covered nowhere better than over at twohundredpercent, and today’s ruling means that Chester, who also face a winding-up order on the 10th March, are now unable to fulfil their fixtures for the rest of the season. An embarrassing outcome as it completely disfigures this season’s Blue Square Premier with results against Chester having to be re-jigged and the table changing markedly due to their expulsion.

In a statement, City Fans United, a Chester City supporters group, summed up the opinions of many within the game at the moment with calls for tighter financial control and responsibility from football’s authorities:

“City Fans United are dismayed and saddened that this situation has been allowed to occur. However, we have previously stated our belief that years of financial mismanagement meant that this decision was inevitable.

“We are angry that Chester City FC was allowed to fall into such a sorry state. And we call upon the football authorities to review their rules on the ownership and financial control of football clubs, before the supporters of another football club are forced to endure the pain felt by fans of Chester City FC.”

Will their plea fall on deaf ears? Quite possibly. In another bit of messy financial news (good day to bury bad news for football clubs perhaps?), Sky Sports News announced that Southend had failed to pay their players for February, a claim not yet corroborated by the club itself. Southend’s financial situation is in decidedly bad condition though, with a winding-up hearing at the High Court currently adjourned for 28 days. HMRC claim Southend owe an outstanding £205,000 tax bill.

Portsmouth entering administration represents a major blow to the reputation of Richard Scudamore’s Premier League juggernaut. In a league seemingly swimming with cash, envy of league football around the globe, how has one of it’s elite 20 members been allowed to implode so dramatically? It all represents great embarrassment to the status of Scudamore’s golden goose.

Throw Chester and Southend into the mix and, all in all, today is a dark day for a country that likes to claim it possesses the greatest league in the world.

Chester City, England, English Premier League, Football and Finance, Money Money Money, Portsmouth, Southend