Bust In The Morning...

Something is going wrong when a club like Portsmouth is likely to be wound up on Monday. Ok, the winding up order could be deferred for another couple of months/the club could put itself in administration, but will it make a difference? In the short run possibly, in the long run almost certainly not. The size of their debt is so severe than only serious investment very quickly can save them and there’s been no serious interest thus far.
If Pompey were a one off then there would be no real cause for concern: not much anyway. Alas, they are just one in a whole string of clubs that could well be liquadated shortly. Southend, West Ham, Cardiff City, Chester...all clubs on the brink, not to mention Palace and several others.
For what it’s worth, I think we’ll be taken over soon: the fairly relaxed attitude of the administrators seem to indicate that this is the case and let’s hope so. Performances have been pretty good, and even if we’re only a couple of points above the drop zone at the moment, I’m confident that we can stay up.
Teams have been getting into debt for an age, and it’s never been a problem: so why is it such a problem now, why this bad? For a start, the influx of foreign owners doesn’t help. 1, because they raise the barrier of player needed to compete at the top yet futher and 2, because they more often than not don’t understand how English football works. If Palace got an Arab billionaire owner, I doubt I would bother going anymore: a chairman needs to be a fan first and foremost. Anyhow, this desire to match the big guns has seen teams spend way beyond their means. How could a little club like Pompey ever afford the likes of Crouch, Defoe, Krancjar and Campbell? You can look at the smaller clubs too: Chester are going under, and I’d be amazed if Histon were still going in three years time, with Baldwin withdrawing his funding. You look at a team like Fleetwood Town and your gut reaction is that it will all go horribly wrong.
The main issue though is undeinably the wages: John Utaka on 80K per week is a prime example of what is wrong with the modern game: Why on earth did the Premier league officials allow Pompey to spend such extravagent wages on such an unknown player? Surely they could and should have intervened?
Who knows what will happen to Pompey and indeed all the rest of the clubs in trouble. We’re by no means out of the woods yet, and until the takeover is completed, I’l l still be very anxious. With the impact of Sky and the fairly modern way of running a football club, teams are living off assets that they don’t have, something that needs to stop. The sooner the Football Association do something decent for once and try and stop this, the better football will become.