Thetownend.com

New TV deal could ruin lower league clubs - Booth
           

  The latest television rights deal could lead to as many as 23 clubs going out of business, according to Football Trade Directory's commercial director John Booth.

           

http://www.thisisswindontownfc.co.uk/news/headlines/8958440.New_TV_deal_could_ruin_lower_league_clubs___Booth/?ref=rss
           

Might be good news for us, if 23 clubs went out of business we might have a chance of staying up :D

"“Without naming names I know of at least 10 Football League clubs who are very close to going to the wall,” he said. "

Plymouth, Acrington (their manager is doing a fantastic job) and who else?

Oldham

Apart from those already named and entirely off the top of my head, Watford, Port Vale, Cardiff, Coventry, Portsmouth are far from being out of the shit even after their CVA, Tranmere are reportedly struggling and up for sale, wouldn't like to look at the books at the Wendies without a stiff drink to hand, Southend are perennially on the brink of going tits-up with Sainsbury's bailing them out four or five times over the past year or so, Hull went down with horrendous debts I can't imagine they're anywhere near sorting, Bournemouth are only just out of continual player embargos and still pretty hand to mouth IIRC, and there'll be a dozen or so no-one even knows about that have overstretched themselves badly on promotion gambles.

Makes you wonder how clubs survived before the monstrosity that is Sky came along. Even more reason now to run a club along sound financial guidelines

A lot better. Sky and the Premier League monster it begat have caused/exacerbated many of the problems. Not Sky's fault per se - they simply acted as enabler of the top clubs' greed.

They are as much to blame in the greed stakes as the top clubs, with their constant price increases coupled with the shed load of adverts that they like to ram down our throats. Would have been great for the lower leagues to say,  shove your money up your arse

We, the PEOPLE, are to blame, it's all very good to blame corporations, but again, WE THE PEOPLE, are culpable for this, in our gullible ways.

True, but I made my stand about 5 years ago and stopped subscribing

Fair do's STFC in Bournemouth, but I never have subscribed towards that monstrous organ called SKY. I saw it on the horizon rising like a beast. Look at all these fair dinkum clubs like Hereford and Stockport struggling. Makes me weep considering the earthful appeal at our level and all these glory hunters latch onto the big boys.

The ITV Digital collapse in 2002 was the beginning of all this. Football League clubs, under that TV deal, went mental and started spending money they didn't have, just based on the forecasts. Look at Bradford City.

No it wasn't. The initial Sky deal for the Premiership was. It was the Sky/Premiership deal that started the massive financial spiral that meant what trickled down was not the money but the wage/transfer inflation. IOU Digital were just a piss-poor imitator. And clubs still haven't learned the lesson - wage inflation of 171% in the Championship last season. Fucking crazy.

Football (and possibly the housing market...but that's a different story) seems to be the only area untouched by the financial crisis.  But some day, something has to give.  None of this makes economic sense.  When the foreign money men decide they want to move their capital somewhere else, the house of cards will come crashing down.  The timing of the crash is impossible to predict, but it has to happen at some point.

Lower league clubs started going into administration after the ITV digital collapse. I agree that Sky (before that) gave the Premier League a massive advantage, money wise, however the gamble that the Football League clubs took when ITV were promising millions of pounds over x amount of years, backfired and many clubs even to this day haven't recovered. The ITV deal was huge to the Championship, Lge 1 and Lge 2.

Oh and FWIW (as no-one seems to have mentioned it but I guess that's probably because we're all taking it as read), this is one of many threads that should act as a counterbalance to the ones criticising Fitton et al for this season's fuck-ups. It doesn't excuse this season's fuck-ups but we are one of the few clubs in the FL who will be in a position to not just weather this kind of financial storm but also potentially take advantage of it

If you mean that that was when clubs started going into admin and they hadn't been doing before, again, this just isn't true. I can think of one not too far from here that had already gone into admin twice and emerged with a CVA when it happened, for just one example.

Yes I know. I was just disputing your contention that it all started with ITV Digital, it didn't. ITV Digital's own poor management and subsequent collapse and club's poor management of their expected pay-days around that certainly exacerbated the situation, but it didn't originate there.

As pauld says the seeds of the problem were laid by the Sky deal. The ITV Digital collapse just pushed a lot more over the edge.

Quite strong parallels with the financial crisis of '08 actually, where the systemic problems were there and the cracks were being papered over, until the Bear Stearns/Lehmann Bros collapses sparked a domino effect.

Ok, the Sky deal set the wheels in motion however there were 10 clubs in admin/CVA post the ITV Digital collapse in 2002 and 7 in 2003 compared with just 3 in 2001 and only 1 in 2000.

The whole financial side of football is just a complete and utter mess.

Yup. Irrespective of the precise place when/where it started, you're damn right there.

I think london_red's comparison with the banking collapse is an extremely good one. For once, though, we're not one of the basket cases just waiting for the next little thing that will tip us over the edge.

Spot on Paul, saved me a lot of typing did that.