BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “FIT FOR FOOTBALL”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 29th September 2020 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 4th October 2020 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Adrian Goldberg PRODUCER: Kate West EDITOR: Carl Johnston
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6331LH0 - 1 -
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 29th September 2020 Repeat: Sunday 4th October 2020
Producer: Kate West Reporter: Adrian Goldberg Editor: Carl Johnston
MUSIC
ACTUALITY OF FOOTBALL MATCH
GOLDBERG: Football is back - the national sport and a hugely successful export.
ACTUALITY OF CHEERING
GOLDBERG: The Premier League generates a £7 billion kick to the economy - and even without crowds in this time of Coronavirus, TV subscriptions to watch the likes of Liverpool, Chelsea and the two Manchester teams, City and United, generate a healthy income for the twenty elite clubs.
ACTUALITY – CROWD SINGING ‘GLORY GLORY MAN UNITED’
GOLDBERG: But the English game isn’t all about the glitz and glamour of the Prem. Below that is the Football League - rebranded now as the EFL - the oldest league in the world. The EFL has 72 professional clubs playing in the Championship, League One and League Two, spanning the length and breadth of England - and parts of - 2 -
GOLDBERG cont: Wales too. Testament to the deep and enduring affection many people have for their local team.
DAMIAN: The fans’ relationship with the club is what makes football. Year in, year out, generation after generation, those clubs, they really belong to the community and someone should be looking out for them.
EXTRACT FROM FOOTBALL RESULTS
REPORTER: Wigan athletic 2, Gillingham 3. League 2 …
GOLDBERG: The Football League gave me my first geography lesson, sparking an interest in the improbable romance of towns like Rochdale, Southend, Hartlepool, Swindon - places where the local football clubs help define a sense of community.
REPORTER: Milton Keynes Dons 1, Lincoln City 2 …
GOLDBERG: Now there are warnings that Covid-19 will bring EFL clubs close to financial meltdown. Plans to welcome fans back into stadiums have been paused indefinitely, denying clubs vital revenue. But many inside the game say this is a crisis that has been brewing for years - the result of financial recklessness and weak governance. We’ve already seen non-playing staff at one club using food banks.
ARCHIVE RECORDING
MAN: Staff at the club haven’t been paid for two weeks - that’s ground staff, that’s office staff, that’s receptionists, that’s cleaners.
MAN 2: These are ordinary people, some on minimum wage, who desperately need those funds in order to live day to day.
GOLDBERG: And clubs are already going to the wall.
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ACTUALITY AT BURY AFC
WOMAN: I’ve been going with my dad from when I was little, so it just felt like losing a member of the family – heartbreaking. No words can say what it was like.
MAN: It has died, it feels like somebody’s died.
GOLDBERG: I know that comparing the loss of a football club to the death of a loved one might seem like an exaggeration, but I’m a fan myself and I just can’t imagine weekends without a match - and there are millions more like me. Kick off times define our family timetable, results determine the mood. My Dad took me to football, now I take my girls. Yet in recent times, Bury FC have disappeared from the Football League, Macclesfield Town have been wound up as clubs outside the Premier League teeter on the edge of a financial precipice. So how did football reach such a wretched financial state even before coronavirus? And why have owners been allowed to run clubs in an unsustainable way, putting their futures in jeopardy?
ACTUALITY GETTING INTO CAR
GOLDBERG: I’m on a journey through the football heartlands of England to find out, with a couple of my favourite commentators for company.
EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE RECORDING
OATLEY: This is Jacqui Oatley and alongside me tonight is John Murray. Evening John.
MURRAY: Good evening, Jacqui, yes, very much looking forward to seeing what happens next in this story.
OATLEY: Wigan Athletic, John. This is a proper football fairytale. We talk about the great stories of the game, but they don’t come too much bigger and better than what has happened to Wigan. - 4 -
MURRAY: What we’re witnessing here is the kind of thing that all football supporters dream of. This club has risen up from the non-league, all the way to the Premier League and now they’ve won the FA Cup as well.
OATLEY: And a key factor in all of that, John, as well, the owner, Dave Whelan, he was a player once, and he broke his leg famously playing in an FA cup final, and now here he is, lifting the trophy for his hometown club. What a story.
ACTUALITY AT DW STADIUM
GOLDBERG: In 2013, against all the odds, Wigan Athletic won the FA Cup Final. Fast forward seven years though and there’s been a nasty plot twist in that football fairytale. In July, the club was placed in administration, meaning that unless a new buyer can be found, it will go out of business. I’ve come to the DW stadium - named after former owner Dave Whelan’s sports business - to meet a group of Wigan supporters.
ACTUALITY OF FANS CHANTING
TONY: The high point was winning the FA Cup, I think everybody would say that. The day at Wembley, I think we all agree, it was the greatest day of our lives. At the time I was just thinking, keep the score down, we don’t want to get embarrassed in front of millions of people across the world playing Manchester City. And then, when we got a corner in the last minute, I just had a feeling that we’d get a goal. And when we did [ACTUALITY OF CROWD CHEERING], oh, it was so emotional, you know. It was raining that day, I just looked up to the sky and I thought of my dad who’d died eight years earlier, and there were people around you crying and it was just magnificent.
GOLDBERG: While spectators are kept away from the DW as well as other stadiums because of coronavirus, fans can submit pictures of themselves or their family members to the club. These are then placed amongst the seats as life-sized cardboard cut- outs. Christine Lamb tells me about the one she sent in of her son Jack.
LAMB: My son died five years ago, he was five months old, so we never got the chance to take him to a game. I met his dad through a Wigan Athletic game. - 5 -
LAMB cont: So when they was doing the cardboard cut-outs, I just thought I’d get Jack one. It felt special. That’s what we are, we are a family club, it’s a special club, and what’s happening at the minute is just heartbreaking for everyone.
ACTUALITY OF PROTEST
MAN [VIA LOUDSPEAKER]: What do we want?
CROWD: Krasner out.
MAN: When do we want it?
CROWD: Now!
MAN: Krasner Krasner Krasner!
CROWD: Out out out!
GOLDBERG: These Wigan supporters are protesting in Manchester at the offices of the administrators appointed to try and sell the club as a going concern - if they can. The fans are unhappy at what they regard as slow progress.
MAN: Well, the ultimate fear, of course, is liquidation really, you know. We’re stood in a beautiful stadium now and will we ever get to see a game of football here again? That’s the fear. Because just down the road, twelve months ago, Bury Football Club came to an end, so it can happen in the Football League. The next couple of weeks are absolutely crucial.
GOLDBERG: The club was sold in June for more than £40 million to the Next Leader Fund - registered in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven. New owner, Au Yeung, bizarrely pulled the plug on the business less than a month later. Going into administration led to a 12-point penalty, ensuring Wigan were relegated from the Championship to League 1. Yet Au Yeung had passed the EFL’s Owners and Directors Test,
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GOLDBERG cont: against which anyone with more than a 30% shareholding in a club has to be assessed. Kieran Maguire is a football finance expert at the University of Liverpool.
MAGUIRE: Well, the tests are broadly split into two areas, the first of which is an assessment of the individual’s personal circumstances, and effectively, it’s looking to determine whether or not the potential owner of a football club has any convictions, any outstanding court issues which might make them undesirable from a football perspective. So somebody that’s been on the sex offenders register, somebody who has an outstanding conviction would not be allowed to be an owner of a football club until that conviction is spent, and it is very much a box ticking exercise. The second element to the Owners and Directors Test is in relation to proof of funding. They have to be able to present details of their business plan for the club, to see whether or not the individual concerned has the resources to run the club.
GOLDBERG: So on the face of it, the test looks quite rigorous. But less than four weeks after passing it, Au Yeung put Wigan Athletic into administration. How come? Kieran Maguire again.
MAGUIRE: He had the resources to support the club financially. He then decided that he wasn’t going to actually maintain his promise. He wasn’t going to pay the next wage bill that was due, went to a firm of accountants and put the club into administration.
MUSIC
GOLDBERG: Quite why Au Yeung would put a football club into administration less than a month after buying it for £40 million has never been adequately explained. One theory is that previous owner, Stanley Choi - a casino owner and high stakes poker player - simply wanted rid of the club because its losses were dragging down the share price of its parent company, IEC, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Au Yeung, so the theory goes, agreed to take the club off his hands before calling in the administrators, allowing Stanley Choi to save face whilst at the same time removing a significant drain on his
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GOLDBERG cont: resources. At the time, Au Yeung gave a different version of events, blaming the financial impact of coronavirus. The EFL said they ‘fundamentally disagreed’ with that claim. Neither Au Yeung or Stanley Choi responded to our requests for a comment. In any event, running Wigan is estimated to have cost Stanley Choi something like £24 million in the previous 18 months as they attempted – unsuccessfully - to make the step back to the Premier League from the Championship; a record of overspending all too common in the EFL. Kieran Maguire again.
MAGUIRE: If we take a look at the Championship, which is the division below the Premier League, the average TV revenues under the broadcast deals works out as around about £7 million per season. Now, when you move to the Premier League, that £7 million pounds becomes a minimum of £100 million and it could go up to, say, £140, £150 if the club proves to be successful. So we’ve seen a casino-style mentality within clubs, within the Championship, because owners, they see these bright lights and they say, well, we’re not going to worry about breaking even, we’re just going to do everything that we can to become promoted.
ACTUALITY AT WIGAN
GOLDBERG: The EFL has now introduced spending limits for Championship clubs, but they are still allowed to run up losses of £39 million over three seasons and stay within the rules. This season the EFL has also introduced salary caps in Leagues One and League Two. In the meantime at Wigan, it’s left to ordinary fans to show what their football club means to the town, by raising more than £670,000 through crowdfunding to help save the club. Wigan fan Adam Pendlebury remains wary of any potential new owner.
PENDLEBURY: You only have to have the money in the bank. There’s no commitment to spend it on the club. You could say football as a whole is responsible to allow these people to come into the game, and that’s why, you know, we pushed a petition to get this looked at Government level and look at whether it’s now time to have a separate body to regulate football, because they can then look at maybe licencing systems for owners who are coming in, because otherwise one day you could be sat there, everything’s going well and then these people just pull that money out. Seventy-five people are made - 8 -
PENDLEBURY cont: unemployed a couple of days later, massive effect on people’s wellbeing, mental health, breaking up a fantastic team.
GOLDBERG: Now you might think Wigan was just bad luck - a curious one-off. But eight miles down the road, another famous old football club has been taken to the brink of extinction.
ACTUALITY OF CAR STARTING
EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE RECORDING
OATLEY: Well, here we are at Bolton Wanderers. It’s a famous old club which was founded back in 1874. They have a very rich history – won the FA Cup four times.
MURRAY: They’ve got a nice ground here too – it’s one of my favourites. It is out of town, but it looks the part.
HOLDSWORTH: As a footballer, it was amazing, I loved being there, I loved playing there, had a great relationship with the fans and the manager, and then later on, being involved with the takeover and the ownership of Bolton was an incredible experience, a wonderful one.
GOLDBERG: That’s Dean Holdsworth, a former Bolton Wanderers striker - and in 1997, the club’s record signing. He returned in 2016 as the leader of a consortium which saved the Trotters from being wound up.
HOLDSWORTH: I was in my office and you’d thought I’d scored the winner at Wembley [ACTUALITY OF CROWD CHEERING] because it just felt like such a release after what we’d been through, an absolutely incredible moment. A massive release and, as I say, punching the air was just all you could do at the time.
GOLDBERG: How close was the club at that point to going out of business? - 9 -
HOLDSWORTH: Five minutes or a decision by the judge to say yes or no - if he thought you couldn’t do it, it was goodnight.
GOLDBERG: One of Holdsworth’s partners in the deal pulled out just days before the court hearing which would determine their fate. An intermediary introduced him to a sports agent called Ken Anderson. With the clock ticking on Bolton’s future, Holdsworth snatched at Anderson’s late offer of assistance.
HOLDSWORTH: It seemed good, it seemed fine and I believed what I was being told or wanted to believe it, because we literally had to have certain things in place for the EFL. He was offering that and that’s how that came about.
GOLDBERG: Before Bolton could be saved, your ownership had to be approved by the EFL. How rigorous was the Owners and Directors Test?
HOLDSWORTH: For me personally and the finance people we were using, they had to pass quite an extensive period of questions, the same as myself. I felt that for me personally, the EFL done a good job - a lot of passports and stuff like that and anti money laundering stuff. It wasn’t something which you could just be blasé about, you had to give it and they had to approve it.
GOLDBERG: Do you know how rigorous the procedure was with Ken Anderson?
HOLDSWORTH: No, not one bit. It wasn’t something I was ever given. I asked the question and I was never given an answer.
GOLDBERG: Do you think somebody with his kind of track record should be allowed to take over a football club?
HOLDSWORTH: In my opinion, no, not one bit.
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GOLDBERG: But Ken Anderson was allowed to become a Bolton director, even though it emerged that he had been disqualified from being a company director for eight years in 2005. The official Insolvency Service notice at the time stated that Anderson had failed to ensure his companies paid VAT, then failed to cooperate with liquidators. But his period of disqualification expired in October 2013, which meant that by 2016 he was a suitable owner for Bolton - in the eyes of the EFL at least.
ACTUALITY OF APPLAUSE
GOLDBERG: At first things went well. Bolton were promoted to the Championship, but in the summer of 2017, Dean Holdsworth left the club - just twelve months after helping to save it - and Ken Anderson took full control.
ILES: The first problems we noticed were in the summer of 2017. There were some problems with the bonus structures, the promotion bonuses. Ken basically told players that he wasn’t going to be paying them.
GOLDBERG: Marc Iles from the Bolton News. A year later, those promotion bonuses remained unpaid, prompting the players to refuse to take part in a pre- season friendly. The following spring, in April 2019, Bolton became the first club in Football League history to forfeit a game because their players were on strike. Their grievance was over unpaid wages - an issue which affected both playing and non-playing staff alike.
EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE
REPORTER: Bolton Wanderers Football Club, which went into administration yesterday, they’ve opened an emergency foodbank for staff at the stadium.
MAN: These are ordinary people, some on minimum wage, who desperately need those funds in order to live day to day. Bills are catching up with them, mortgage payments, maybe …
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ILES: They weren’t paid for six months and nobody found this an enjoyable experience. Everybody struggled to a certain degree. Some of them could not afford to get to work. Some of them had mental problems, family issues, serious issues that caused them to walk away, tear their contracts up completely. As far as the staff are concerned, obviously on a much lower wage scale, there were people who couldn’t afford to live.
GOLDBERG: Not everyone connected with Bolton Wanderers was facing hardship though. Accounts for the year 2016/17, for instance, showed that Ken Anderson was entitled to a payment from the club of more than half a million pounds in consultancy fees. I wanted to get Ken’s side of the story. He called me from Monaco, where he now lives.
MUSIC
ACTUALITY OF PHONE CALL
GOLDBERG: Hi Ken. Yes, it’s for Radio 4, for File on 4. Have you got a few minutes now then? Ken Anderson didn’t want to be interviewed for the programme, but said his business problems that led to his disqualification happened nearly twenty years ago. He told me the consultancy fees paid by Bolton covered 18 months’ work. He acknowledged that there were a couple of occasions when players were paid late, but insisted most of the issues with wages occurred after an administrator took over the club in May 2019. [MUSIC] By September 2019, the clock was ticking again and Bolton were given just 14 days to find a new owner or face expulsion from the League. They were given another last-minute reprieve when a new consortium moved in to rescue the club, much to the delight of the man who had previously saved them - Dean Holdsworth. He believes that all new owners should have to take out a bond as a form of insurance in case a club gets into financial problems.
HOLDSWORTH: People won’t mess around if they know their funds are going to be used, if they mislead or they try and pull away from a club. I think that would give everybody peace of mind. The only person who won’t like it is the person who has to put a bond in, because then they’ll have to be true to their word. - 12 -
GOLDBERG: File on 4 spoke to others inside football who supported the idea of a compulsory bond. The co-owner of League One Sunderland, Charlie Methven, believes that more should be done to encourage owners to behave responsibly, but says that under the current EFL setup, there is a limit to what can be done.
METHVEN: And this goes back into who it is who’s setting the rules and what their motivations are, because the Football League is a members’ club, which is owned effectively by the owners, the existing owners of those football clubs, so they set their own rules. Now, if you’re an owner of a football club, one thing that you want to make absolutely sure is that when you come to sell your football club, there are as many people as possible who are in a position to buy it from you as can be. And once you start saying that all sorts of different types of people aren’t eligible to buy a football club, you’re the turkey voting for Christmas, aren’t you? Because at some point, whether it be a year from now, five years from now or ten years from now, you’re going to want to sell your football club and you’re going to have voted for a system which basically means that a lot of potential buyers have been disqualified.
GOLDBERG: The cases of Wigan and Bolton Wanderers show that passing the EFL’s Owners and Directors Test is no guarantee that a club will be run in a sustainable way. The League has no day to day oversight and little in the way of effective sanctions against those whose actions - unwittingly or otherwise - place clubs in jeopardy. But here’s what’s really odd. It’s possible to take control of a club without passing the Owners and Directors Test. Charlie Methven again.
METHVEN: There are other smaller clubs in severe financial distress which exchange hands for a pound, and the problem we’ve got with that is that those clubs can be sold as a private business to somebody paying a pound before they’ve taken the Owners and Directors Test, and there’s nothing legally to prevent them becoming the owner of the private business that is a football club. The only check that the EFL has is effectively you say, well, you’re not yet qualified to be an EFL owner and therefore we’re going to effectively place your club under a transfer embargo or we’re going to stop you doing X, Y and Z, various sort of sanctions they can place on you, but they can’t stop that person owning that business. And that’s just a loophole that seems to have become a big problem in recent years. - 13 -
EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE RECORDING
OATLEY: And we’re hearing news of some new owners for Charlton Athletic. John Murray.
MURRAY: Yes, East Street Investments are taking over the club. That’s Tahnoon Nimer, some people call him Sheik Tahnoon, and he’s the chairman of an Abu Dhabi based company. He and his partners own 65% of East Street Investments.
OATLEY: So who owns the rest of the company, John?
MURRAY: Well, the rest of the company is owned by Matt Southall, who is from rather closer to home, he’s a businessman from Manchester.
ACTUALITY AT CHARLTON ATHLETIC GROUND
GOLDBERG: So I’m sitting now on some steps behind the big red and grey main stand of Charlton Athletic, their home ground, the Valley, and the supporters here have probably had as much of the toings and froings of football club ownership as any supporter can stand. They were bought by a consortium last December. Unfortunately, that consortium failed to prove to the EFL that they had the necessary financial wherewithal to take the club forward. They sold it to new owners - or so the fans were told - in June. Unfortunately, those new owners failed the EFL’s Owners and Directors Test. Lifelong fan Dave Thompson is sitting here with me. How does it feel to be a Charlton fan at the moment, Dave?
THOMPSON: Confusing, frustrating and ultimately, I guess, very disappointing.
ACTUALITY OF FANS CHANTING
FANS: We want Roland out, we want Roland out!
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GOLDBERG: Charlton were previously owned by Roland Duchatelet, a multi-millionaire who made his money in micro-electronics and helped found a political party in his home country of Belgium. His dream was to create a network of interconnected clubs across Europe, but Charlton supporters accused him of meddling in team affairs and lacking any love for - or knowledge of - their club. There were frequent protests against his ownership ...
ACTUALITY OF FANS CHANTING
FANS: Our famous football club, we just don’t really want you here, we want Roland out …
THOMPSON: We had an announcement that the club had been bought from Roland Duchatelet lock stock and barrel by a new company to us called East Street Investments and that they had huge ambition for the club, and we heard all the usual plaudits you get with new owners, so there was great excitement.
GOLDBERG: And some of the money was coming from Abu Dhabi. So Manchester City are owned by people from Abu Dhabi. Was there any sense that perhaps Charlton might be trying to compete in the big league?
THOMPSON: Understandably, many fans thought that all of a sudden we’d turn into the Manchester City of the south, but that aura didn’t last particularly long.
ACTUALITY IN LONDON
GOLDBERG: Now this elegant apartment block in central London behind me became the focus of a bitter war of words between two of the key players in East Street Investments after they bought Charlton. It’s called Sugar Quay. Lovely cream stone and square windows with green blinds pulled down to block out the afternoon sun. But it’s the views that you’d want a place here for. Away to the left, Tower Bridge. Across the river, there’s the grey battleship HMS Belfast, and looming behind it, high into the sky, the Shard. And it’s beautiful this afternoon, with the sun bouncing off the River Thames below. Now, one investor Thanoon Nimer, claimed that another, Charlton’s executive chairman, - 15 -
GOLDBERG cont: Matt Southall, was misusing club funds by renting an apartment here for more than £12,500 a month, as well as leasing a fleet of Range Rovers - all this while Charlton were under a transfer embargo, because the new owners couldn’t prove they had the money to keep the club going. We put these allegations to Mr Southall, who said any money paid to him or companies he was involved with were in line with contractual arrangements approved by the board. Supporters have also asked questions of majority shareholder Tahnoon Nimer, after the EFL revealed in March that East Street Investments had failed to reassure them that it had sufficient funds to run Charlton. Dave Thompson again.
THOMPSON: After a period of time, it became clear that the club had had a transfer embargo imposed very early on. And that, we discovered, was because they hadn’t seen proof of funds from Nimer, we believe it was from Tahnoon Nimer in Abu Dhabi, and the question then evolved into it wasn’t just proof of funds, it was the source of the funds. So perhaps they’d seen the money but weren’t convinced that it had come, you know, it had arrived from a proper source. So that was the initial position.
GOLDBERG: In June it was reported that Tahnoon Nimer had sold East Street Investments - and with it, Charlton Athletic. But then the club’s new directors failed the Owners and Directors Test. It seemed astonishing that the EFL could have a member club controlled by a succession of owners who hadn’t passed its key test for the best part of a year. Dave Thompson told me he feared a worst case scenario in which the club was expelled, like Bury FC in 2019. But just as we were putting the final touches to this programme, Charlton announced that they had been bought again, this time by wealthy US businessman, Thomas Sandgaard. And what’s more, he had passed the Owners and Directors Test. Dave sent us this message.
THOMPSON: Dave Thompson here. One happy Charlton fan, Saturday 26th of September and I’ve woken up in hospital after an operation to the fantastic news that Thomas Sandgaard has managed to buy our football club and save it from God knows what. The transfer embargo has been lifted and we signed our first player yesterday. Absolutely great news. More players to come. This isn’t going to be a disaster of a season after all. So, so pleased.
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EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE RECORDING
OATLEY: Bury Football Club, John, entirely overshadowed these days by their neighbours down the road in Manchester, but at the start of the twentieth century Bury were a real powerhouse, weren’t they?
MURRAY: Yeah, just look around the place, Jacqui, Gigg Lane. It’s a real football place. It’s not all about black pudding and ecky thump, don’t listen to the people who say that. This place here has got a proper football history.
MUSIC ‘UP THE SHAKERS’
ACTUALITY AT GIGG LANE
GOLDBERG: For a football fan, this has to be one of the saddest sites of all, a now defunct football ground. Gigg Lane, the home of the original Bury FC. I’ve just tried knocking on the front door, but the handle is actually covered in cobwebs. In front of the club offices though, there are railings and they’re draped with what appears to be a kind of funeral tribute - scarves and shirts from many of Bury’s traditional local rivals. There’s a navy blue and white scarf from Preston North End, a yellow and blue shirt from Bolton Wanderers, an Oldham Athletic shirt, Manchester United and Manchester City. And, from further afield, a scarf from Motherwell in Scotland. The reason for that makeshift shrine? Bury, founder members of the Football League, had been expelled from it.
MAN: My dad almost played for them, my brother’s played for this football club, it’s taken my guts out, literally it’s taken my guts out.
MAN 2: I’m just gutted that my future son or daughter won’t ever get to come and watch Bury play.
MUSIC
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GOLDBERG: The story of Bury FC is perhaps one of the saddest in the EFL, but it also underlines how the Owners and Directors Test can spectacularly fail. Property developer Stewart Day passed the test in 2013, but went on an unchecked and unsustainable spending spree in pursuit of playing success before his business empire collapsed. Enter Cheshire businessman Steve Dale, who bought Bury for £1 in December 2018 and took control before undergoing the Owners and Directors Test. The League said evidence that the club would meet its financial commitments was simply not provided, despite repeated requests, and so in August 2019, Bury FC was kicked out of the Football League.
MAN: 134 years of history, a very proud history. For it to go to the wall the way it did, I think the football authorities could’ve done a lot more.
GOLDBERG: What about Steve Dale? Do you hold him responsible?
MAN: Yes, I do. I do really. He is not a football fan. He admits that. I think he’s just seen it as a business opportunity, not as a football club, not as part of the community.
GOLDBERG: Whatever the rights and wrongs of Dale’s ownership, expelling Bury was a blunt instrument, which surely hurt the supporters of the club more than the owner who, by his own admission, didn’t even know the town had a football club.
EXTRACT FROM ARCHIVE RECORDING
DALE: I never went to Bury, not a place I frequented, so for me to walk away from Bury and never go back is a very easy thing to do, because I don’t do anything up there, I’m not, I wouldn’t …. I didn’t even know there was a football team called Bury, to be honest with you. I’m not a football fan.
GOLDBERG: Steve Dale told File on 4 the club is still active and still trading, although it should be pointed out that Bury FC doesn’t currently have a team. Dale insists that his method of business was best for the club who, he says, will return to action next season - and he hopes they’ll be playing at Gigg Lane. The Bury owner told us the - 18 -
GOLDBERG cont: governance of football was ‘a broken model’ and ‘like a carcass rotting and not fit for purpose.’ The EFL told File on 4 they are now talking to clubs about making changes to the Owners and Directors Test, which would mean their approval had to be given before any new owner takes over.
ACTUALITY OF FANS APPLAUDING
GOLDBERG: Conservative MP Damian Collins is the former Chair of the Department for Culture Media and Sport Select Committee. He argues the time for change is long overdue.
COLLINS: Despite all the assurances that the football authorities have given, there is no proper oversight of what goes on inside a football club - how much money it’s spending in real time on player salaries, whether it can afford it, whether the owners have got the cash that they say they have. And because of that lack of oversight, clubs get into difficulties. And when they do, the football authorities only really intervene at the last minute, when the club’s gone into administration, about to go bust. And often what they do is impose hefty sanctions, which either ensure relegation or even expulsion from the league. And fans quite rightly say in that situation, well, why didn’t someone do something before?
GOLDBERG: Last week the return of spectators to stadiums was paused indefinitely, depriving clubs outside the Premier League of their largest income stream. That’s led to dire warnings about the future of EFL clubs.
COLLINS: What it’s done is, it’s taken a game that was already very financially distressed, and for clubs certainly outside the top tier, it’s taken away their principal source of income, which is fans going to watch them play matches. And without that income, they’re not going to be able to pay their bills. Many of those clubs are indebted already, having to pay their players quite large salaries whilst they’ve got no income, and that is clearly a completely unsustainable position, and my fear is we will, we could see multiple club failures this autumn as clubs simply run out of cash.
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GOLDBERG: Damian Collins has told File on 4 the Government should bail out clubs who might otherwise go under. But with strings attached. Clubs would have to accept supporter or community reps on their board and they would have to submit to a new watchdog - the Football Finance Authority, which would monitor their operations in real time and have the power to intervene if an owner was spending recklessly.
COLLINS: And I believe if there was a way of intervening earlier, of keeping tabs on what clubs are doing, then you could stop clubs before it’s too late, before they get into too big a difficulties.
ACTUALITY OF FANS APPLAUDING
GOLDBERG: In the meantime, it’s left to fans to pick up the pieces when the club they love disappears. These supporters of Bury FC have set up a new fan owned club - Bury AFC. Unlike the old Bury, Bury AFC doesn’t have professional players. They’ve started in non-league, at the base of football’s pyramid - the North West Counties League Division One. It’s eight divisions below where they used to be, and instead of playing at Bury’s old home, Gigg Lane, they share a local non-league ground. But it’s still a club called Bury - and it’s theirs.
MAN: I think ultimately now, you know, what I can say is that as a fan group, we’ve turned it into a positive, and the support in the community that we’ve got here now is amazing. All these people are here just for a match day. It’s Tuesday, it’s raining, but they want to come down and they want to build the club. On a personal level, I’ve, you know, I’m one of the members of the board, so I’ve kind of got involved in the matchday operations. And, you know, it’s given me that passion back for football again.
ACTUALITY OF FINAL WHISTLE AND APPLAUSE