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 It’s supposed to be the journalistic silly season, but if you put some of the stories we have run in www.footballeconomy.com this month in a novel they wouldn’t be believed. Tranmere Rovers found that the club had been put up for sale on E-Bay with a reserve price of $10m. Sometimes fans put up allegedly useless players with a reserve price of 1p, but this was supposedly serious. The owner has been trying to sell the club for a year and having had no luck, the North Carolina firm hired to find a buyer decided to see if they could flush one out in this unusual way. The owner was, not surprisingly, furious complaining that the club was not an old bicycle.
This led me to think about which club I would recommend to a Middle Eastern potentate with money to spend on a trophy club, but not enough to underwrite big transfers and wage bills in the style of Manchester City. I am afraid I wouldn’t recommend Tranmere Rovers. No offence to the club’s supporters: they are a welcoming club and I haven’t anything against them.
But although they play on the Wirral side of the Mersey, they face tough competition from Everton and Liverpool, even if playing matches on a Friday night is an attempt to get round this challenge. Birkenhead has been going downhill economically ever since the decline of the shipbuilding industry and now the Vauxhall Motors plant at nearby Ellesmere Port is under threat. There used to be another club on the Wirral, New Brighton, but they were voted out of the league in 1951 after years of poor attendances and finally collapsed in the early 1980s.
I wouldn’t recommend a club in a crowded local market of which Tranmere Rovers is an example. That would also rule out a London club, even including my club, Charlton, although they try to present themselves as the Kent club that plays in London.
What one really needs is a club in a reasonably prosperous area that doesn’t have any nearby rivals. One candidate presents itself: Norwich. There are no other league clubs in Norfolk, it’s a reasonably prosperous and well populated county, and not near enough London to make supporting a club there that attractive. Moreover, it has a large and dedicated fan base and a history of achievement. Just send in your bid on a postcard to Delia who has had to do more culinary work than she would like to keep the club afloat. And you won’t have to go out on the pitch at half time and shout ‘let’s be having yer’.
There has been an extraordinary sequence of events at Scottish Division 1 club Livingston who nearly went of business. West Lothian Council applied to the Court of Session to recover debts of £330,000 and they appointed an interim manager. He tried to buy out the owner, Angelo Massone, initially for £25,000. Apparently Massone is a lawyer and restaurant owner in his native land.
In an unconnected event in the same week, Massone appeared at Edinburgh Sherriff Court after being found slumped in his car in the Scottish capital. He told police that he could not understand English, but then refused to read a leaflet in Italian giving him his rights. He claimed that he had felt unwell and had sat in his car with the window open to recover, but he was found to have 59 microgrammes of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath. His lawyer said in court that his client’s understanding of English had improved since he had come to the country which was just as well given that he was supposedly running a football club. Fined £800 and banned for one year.
The interim manager, Donald McGruther, then persuaded Massone to sell his shares for £50,000 and brought in former Cowdenbeath owner Gordon MacDougall and former Dumbarton supreme Neil Rankine to keep the club going. The pair has generously agreed to fund the club for a year and the Scottish Football League have allowed it to continue in the competition. By the way, if you are wondering where Livingston is, if you fly into Edinburgh’s Turnhouse Airport you often see the ground as the plane banks for its approach. It’s a new town and the club was once in the SPL.
As for Massone he was told to leave the club. Neil Rankine commented, ‘I’ve never met a character like Massone. It has been the most difficult negotiations I have ever been involved in’. However, the Italian described his season with Livingston as a ‘fantastic experience’. Scottish fans will be pleased to hear that he did not rule out being involved with a Scottish football club in future. Just what is a ‘fit and proper person’?
Talking of running clubs into the ground, the owners of Liverpool managed to re-finance their loan after the deadline but they had to pay back some money to the banks. However, given their track record and current difficult economic conditions it is difficult to see where the money to build the much needed new stadium at Stanley Park is going to come from. Without it and the extra gate money it is going to be that much harder for Liverpool to compete in the longer run. Having said that, things aren’t too rosy at Arsenal where key players have departed. The club’s property development at Highbury is not delivering the expected revenue. Will Manchester City’s spending spree knock them out of the top four? We shall have to wait and see.
The death of Sir Bobby Robson removed a gentleman giant from the game. He served it well at both club and national level. Unfortunately, the Durham coalfield no longer produces individuals of his calibre who enhance the game in so many ways. Rest in Peace.
Wyn Grant is a regular contributor to Albion Road and also the publisher of footballeconomy.com, a website covering the business and economy of the game of football. |
