Bury FC

There is a recruitment embargo on Chelsea, as l understand it. From my point of view the EFL/FA/Premiership have to take measures to stop clubs from getting an unfair advantage. Bury had an unfair advantage last season, on the basis that they employed players they could not afford. I would be utterly furious if I was a Mansfield supporter!

 

What good is failing them though? That wouldn't have helped Bury because once the purchase has gone through they can't force an owner to sell the club. There is a reason why Bury's owner was willing to let the club goto the wall rather than take offers he felt were below value and that's because the club going to the wall was better financially.

Chelsea's ban is for signing minors not for any breach in spending though.

And it's almost impossible for things to be done to control it. Firstly it's like the transfer window change, if everyone does it then it's great but if other countries aren't suddenly there is a massive disadvantage to being stricter on these things. It needs to be a world football thing but getting clubs in the Premier League to agree on FFP regulations and punishments is hard enough, let alone all leagues in every country

And second you have clubs who will cheat their way around it. Take Man City for example who got around FFP regulations via various sneaky actions including

• Farmed almost all non-playing staff out to a 3rd party company belonging to the owners who lease it back
• The owners paid a 3rd party to buy the image rights at an inflated amount allowing them to put money into the club that they aren't allowed to do directly
• Signed sponsor deals at inflated amounts with companies owned by the owners or the owners family.

How do you combat clubs being sneaky? And clubs with rich owners for their level will like city do argue that its unfair not letting their owners pick up the bill even though it leaves them on a cliff edge where they couldn't survive without the owner while pushing everyone to spend more than they should to keep up. Doing things like giving them fines or kicking them out of competitions doesn't help as it makes them more reliant on owner bail uts

That's, why I've said in the past fans, have to take some responsibility. You can be an owner and go in with the intention to run the club right BUT fans don't like clubs being run right as in their eyes that means underinvestment. An owner ends up in that between a rock and a hard place, they spend within means and have the fans on their back or they spend beyond their means and put the club at risk and potentially end up like Bury. It's easy when you love football and the club to get blinkered by the desire for results but across the board fans maybe need to take a bigger picture view and realise having a club is better than winning the league but the club being dead next season. It's a situation people only really bother about when their club gets to the point of going to the wall

 

In the current EFL set-up, very little could have been done differently in the end game. If an owner of a club, even one on the verge of being liquidated, doesn't want to sell, he can't be forced to sell. It's his call as to whether it makes financial sense to sell or liquidate. Personally, I think he underestimated how the EFL would respond in this particular situation. Short of implementing some kind of golden share arrangement, there is little the EFL can do at that point. And something similar could happen again to another club.

But tightening up the rules around SCMP, the O&D test, the rules on having adequate funding in place could have avoided the situation from developing in the first place. Better to tighten up the rules and avoid the situation arising where a club is operating beyond its means by improving the governance and pinning personal responsibility on those who have made poor decisions or flouted existing EFL rules. The fans might not have wanted to stay in the bottom division and would clearly have wanted promotion. But unfortunately and not through the fans' decisions, the club's financing was unsustainable, and overspending on the playing side to secure promotion resulted in the demise of the club. That's the stage where things have to improve and not simply focus on the end game.