Cod Almighty | Diary

Football club or vanity project? Town have caught a break.

3 May 2022

A bank holiday Monday and we didn't have a game, or more accurately we had a "Macclesfield Day" when we remember those teams that have stumbled and been trampled on the road to glory. Poor ownership and spending like you have won the pools has become a feature of football. Lower league owners who see being chairman of a football club as a status symbol in their local pond, disreputable financiers or foreign leaders seeing a top flight club as a status symbol on a grander scale. Sportswashing anyone? You've got it.

This diary has taken an unexpected turn, I was only planning to write about the lack of a fixture on a day when the rest of the league played but there you have it, folks, politics gets everywhere. Far more knowledgeable people than me have written about how unsustainable many clubs are in the English footballing world. Some of the ongoing losses are eye-watering and these are just weekly running costs, usually wages.

If you're interested, have a read of this thread by the Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt about Salford losing £91,000 a week. I don't agree with him on many things but he knows about running a lower league club and they are very open about their finances. Whilst I hate to see a football club disappear, I don't have a lot of sympathy when clubs spend big and then crash and burn. It has become fashionable to sell your ground to the owner's "other" company to offset some of the debt and I wonder if that's where Town was headed at one point. We caught a break but football is broken.

Anyway, onto cheerier things. The ups and downs for the season are starting to be resolved. I am crossing everything for Forest to beat Bournemouth tonight to put automatic promotion in their own hands. I've always had a soft spot for Forest as my dad used to take us to mid-week games in the late 1970s. I wouldn't wish the lottery of the play-offs on them but they have momentum so maybe they would be okay.

Derby down. Repeat what I was just saying about poorly run clubs.

Nearer our end FGR are still on their trajectory. Their overall losses exceed £11million, funded by owner Dale Vince but sustainable if he was to leave? I doubt it. It's unlikely they have a huge untapped following just waiting for them to get higher up the leagues before they start going to games but, who knows, maybe the Cheltenham fans will defect. Oldham and Scunthorpe going down. The only surprise for the latter is that it has taken this long. Bounce straight back? Yes, we hoped that first time too. We're more realistic this time but we live in hope. I was thinking Boston United might get promoted into our current league but they've made it tough for themselves with Saturday's draw. King's Lynn down. There's a team that should never have risen to this level without the basic facilities for fans, like a terrace.

Don't forget to vote for your player of the year. I'd like to see Waterfall get it but I imagine it will go to McAtee, who you couldn't argue against. Who knows, maybe it will be a draw. UTM!