Up next is the Terras turn to be offering so many pence in the pound to it’s creditors.If a big club ,in a large affluent town like Weymouth cannot get it right,then where will this end.
The manager Gerry Gill has resigned,partly because the wage bill was reduced from £2500 -£800 per week.
I have visited the resort twice in the last five years and the place is packed during the holiday season.A London based hotelier has tried his luck with the club but he has commented in the last few years of watching his money being swallowed up in a black hole.
I guess they have been caught in a catch-22 situation due to their location.In the Setanta days they went down the professional route obviously giving players a helping hand in relocating to the area.It was a gamble that did not pay off.
Back in the Alliance/Gola days,this proud club was hardly ever out of the top five.I remember watching a young Steve Claridge play for the Terras at Canal Street.It was a morning kick-off to avoid clashing with the Grand National.
It is puzzling at times seeing lesser clubs above Witton,then along comes Weymouth,getting it all wrong and then it makes you realize that what we are doing makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately I think we are going to see more clubs go under before the situation starts to get any better. Punishment for financial mismanagement and administration needs to be more severe than a simple points deduction, for there to be any threat from this it needs to be more a case of having to start right at the bottom and to work your way back up.
Right at the top of the game the dictate is spend as much as you can, don’t worry about losing money as long as you win trophies. The losses made by clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City are colossal, United as the richest club in the club have been plunged into debt when they should never be in that position.
There have to be caps on players wage bills as a percentage of gate receipts or overall revenue to try and combat this.
I think clubs also need to balance realism with ambition, in our case we are never going to play in the football championship or premier league, we are probably a team that could aspire to conference north at best. The issue is you need to be run prudently and build on foundations rather than a s*** or bust mentality. Mark Harris is doing the right things in reducing budgets, he is 100% right. At the same time he has strengthened the commercial activity and any/all initiatives are positive steps to build the profile of the club. Whilst we may not have riches to throw at it it does not mean that we can’t ‘market’ the club to the best of our ability.
We are in a better position than many, we own our ground, have manageable debt (significantly lower than our assets) and an opportunity to benefit from the sale of this in the future with the right deal (which as Mark has previously stated must include the building and ownership of a new ground or it won’t happen).
We have to maximise the revenue from what we own (a football ground), occupy the place as much as we can through tenants, private hire and social club activities. On top of this (and the economy is working against us) we need to bring in outside money from business. One of the other most successful ways (although easier said than done) is to grow your own local talent and sell it on. A £50k plus transfer fee and sell on clauses would run this club for a whole season (Crewe understood this and did it for years). Again lets use what we have and build on solid foundations. There will be many many others going under in the next couple of seasons.
There is an interesting article in this months FHM magazine on the broken state of football and if the issue of football/finance interests you read anything by the journalist David Conn (his stuff is superb).
Back to the old Cheshire League set-up I say. It would make the Cheshire Senior Cup more competitive and you would still have the FA Trophy & FA Cup to pit yours skills against clubs from other parts of the country. The FA have to get their house in order and sort out football from bottom to top in that order ASAP.
There is so much in all of the above posts that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Above all clubs need to be run realistically and the chancers than have run a number of league and non-league clubs into the ground need to be removed from football permanently. At present there seems little prospect of the FA and others providing any kind of lead on this issue which is why they have just lost yet another chief executive. David Conn provides more analysis of this in today’s Guardian, which you can read online.
I would offer a number of suggestions;
[ul]wages to be capped at a fixed proportion of turnover say 75%
limit borrowings to a reasonable level
outlaw borrowing against future earnings
prevent any more leveraged buyouts
re-organise lower leagues into more compact geographical zones to reduce travelling costs
[/ul]
I think the majority of decisions at the club have been done with these principles in mind which is more than can be said about our near neighbours…
There is so much in all of the above posts that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Above all clubs need to be run realistically and the chancers than have run a number of league and non-league clubs into the ground need to be removed from football permanently. At present there seems little prospect of the FA and others providing any kind of lead on this issue which is why they have just lost yet another chief executive. David Conn provides more analysis of this in today’s Guardian, which you can read online.
I would offer a number of suggestions;
[ul]wages to be capped at a fixed proportion of turnover say 75%
limit borrowings to a reasonable level
outlaw borrowing against future earnings
prevent any more leveraged buyouts
re-organise lower leagues into more compact geographical zones to reduce travelling costs
[/ul]
I think the majority of decisions at the club have been done with these principles in mind which is more than can be said about our near neighbours…
It was worth posting twice, 5 very good suggestions RS that would seem to make complete sense on every level. I would add to that that all clubs should have to submit accounts to the FA at the start of the season as proof of their ability to see out the season they are about to enter into. Unless tighter controls are put in place the accumulated debt gets further out of control.
It is to be hoped that the FA eventually work out that something needs doing sooner rather than later, it may be too late to stop 10 or 20 clubs from going under but the controls need implementing as soon as possible.
This comment from Steve Claridge’s BBC Sport column caught my eye today…
I worry about a lack of investment at Wycombe. They cut their cloth according to their means. At some point, they will have to throw off the shackles if they want to compete.
Yes Steve, and that’s exactly why so many clubs are going belly-up!
Yeah cracking idea Steve, why don’t they run up some huge loans, sign some ex higher league players, extend the ground capacity and then in three seasons time find themselves going under and having to start again.
Fortunately Steve is not running the club.
The Wycombe story is a great one, the club spent something like 100 years as non-league club and then reached the league in the 90’s. They have been a league team for less than 20 years and managed to reach an FA Cup Semi Final. Whilst I don’t admit to knowing a lot about them they have a very proud and what appears to be a stable history. Sure they may go down this season but they have a good fan base in relation to their catchment area.
They stupidity of Claridge’s comment is that they are ‘competing’, they are in the same division as Leeds United, a club that topped the Premier League 10 years ago and then went bump owing £30+ million.
Leeds might be nearer the top than the bottom of Division 1 but I think Wycombe are the success story.