Stop The Madness

Portsmouth. Palace. Southend. Notts County. Chester. Farsley. Weymouth.

Source

That's one club from each of the first 6 levels of English football that is currently staring oblivion squarely in the face. North of the border, things are even more precarious. From the Auld Firm down through Clydebank and Stranraer, to the supposedly modern-day cautionary tale of Brechin. A truly sorry state of affairs. The lower down you go, the tighter the financial constraints, and the more clubs appear to be staring over the precipice. How have the authorities allowed this to happen?


Football clubs gambling with their very existence is nothing new of course. The grass is, and always has been, greener, and for every club that has been fortunate to have a board who are prepared to live within their means, whatever that means for the level of football played,
there has been an Accrington, a Bristol City, or a Newport County.



These days the rewards for reaching the promised land of the Premiership, the football league or simply the next step up, are financially greater than they have ever been. However wide the divide between the Haves and the Have Nots continues to grow, the preceived benefits of playing at a higher level are such that businessmen of seemingly sound financial acumen simply cannot get enough of Playing Roman. 

You don't need me to tell you to read When Saturday Comes, surely? And really, I shouldn't need to point you in the direction of 200% either. After all, if you can find an obscure site like Beat The First Man in amongst all the other self-indulgent and poorly envisaged football
blogs, you are clearly know your way around the interwebs. These esteemed sites have covered the plights of some of the above-mentioned clubs in far more detail than I am prepared to. I don't pretend to have the answers, or come that the questions. But I have seen too many innocents get embroiled in the fiasco that is British football in the 21st Century, and it needs to stop.


A caller to a radio phone in said that even if Pompey recovered or reformed, he'd had enough, and was going to give his alegiance to an as-yet undecided foreign team. At first this rankled with me. Surely Havant would be a better bet, if he had truly had his fill of his home town club? But the more I pondered, the more I understood. The sickness of Premiership greed has filtered down to the extent that non-league clubs talk of ten and twenty year plans for Championship football. And he, like so many others, has had enough of  the bullshit.