FAO Tricky: Decline

Are all Championship clubs similarly in decline? Well I'd have to be a proper football finance journalist rather than a big-mouth on a message board to answer that with any confidence. But I'll hazard a guess: take out the ones who have evaded problems by going into administration, and the ones who actually managed to make money from a stint in the premier league,
and those who have mega-rich sugar daddies - then for the rest probably most of them are.

As for the cost base and income level - compared to others I don't know. What I do know that arguments which rely on us having 20,000 season tickets and therefore being well-off are false. A huge amount of the season ticket money goes on servicing debt, and will for years to come. If for any reason season ticket numbers decline, then we really are in the soup.

The cause of the decline which now manifests itself on the pitch I do believe is down to successive managers having their hands tied by the drain the debt makes on the cashflow. Essentially we blundered our stint in the Premiership. Immediately promotion was achieved Ms Smith told the BBC that there would not be a lot of money to spend on the team because it would be put towards reducing long-term debt. That didn't happen - long term debt was the same a year later - and it's still much the same now - despite the Watling bequest. What also happened was that we managed to return to the Championship with a substantially weaker squad than when we left. Quite how we managed to do all that I don't know.

There are other problems - some of these don't bear re-hashing, some do: notably the rebuilding of the ground which has contributed to a large part of the debt. I don't have the figures to hand - but comparing the cost of the South Stand / River End infill to the revenue it generates the project seemed to me to make no sense at all. As for the South Stand itself: we
have been constantly told that we had to rebuild because it would not get a safety certificate - as I have travelled around it seems to fly in the face of common sense that some of those stands get safety certificates but the South Stand couldn't.

Then there is the quality of the stand - which is high. Would it not have made sense to have a cheaper stand? I'd rather watch promotion chasers in a stand like Plymouth have, than watch relegation fodder from the South Stand.This is all still relevant because the construction of a new tier on the Main Stand is still planned. I'm not sure it is necessary. Our highest
attendance this season still saw 2,097 empty seats in the ground. For Scunthorpe the attendance the attendance was 19,236. If I were the club I'd concentrate on getting the buy-back scheme working a lot better before I worried about yet another new
stand.

Mention of the South Stand links to another problem: spending moneys we haven't yet received and then not actually getting them. Notably in connection with ITV Digital but also in connection with our much-vaunted property development where we
under-estimated by a seven figure sum the costs involved.

Then there is the Academy. Anyone simply looking at the region's track record could see that it was unlikely that we could provide a conveyor belt of talent. And so it has proved. At the time it was suggested that the thing was a Bob Cooper vanity project. Indeed a senior club employee who told him so was sacked for his trouble. But he was right.

Whether the decline is reversible I doubt it unless we go for one of the three options outlined above. We have to hope that Glenn can somehow get lucky in the loan market and fluke promotion - and if that happens we have to learn our lesson and not piss the money away on dis-interested fancy dans, or a new stand, but clear out the debt once and for all.

Posted By: Mr Creosote, May 27, 13:29:28