Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Friday 28 November 2008

28 November 2008

Town record profit. Your Guest Diarist read this superb new official website headline as usual, the wrong way. Hmm, I thought, is a £100k or so operating profit really a record? I know Town are not a profit-making institution but surely one of those years when we sold somebody for a big six-figure number we ended up making more than that? Of course, "Town record profit" was written as a short sentence with a verb in it so the club only just scraped a profit despite one of those 'slices of footballing fortune' the tax people talk about.

If you burrow through the accounts (and I don't suggest you bother: it's just too dispiriting), as well as the small shiny nuggets of improvement in all the main revenue streams which Mr Diary highlighted yesterday, you see the same old depressing stuff. Stubborn, hard-to-shift debts, an obstinately high cost base and a right old tangle of loans and converted sponsorship deals that have now become pension contributions or summat. All owed to one Mr J Fenty, honourable Conservative councillor.

Honest John, of course you will remember, has attempted to secure his various loans and financial guarantees to the club of about £1.5m by a debenture which means he gets the club's assets if it goes down. The bank, to whom we are perpetually maxed out to about half a million quid, has a similar debenture. None of the directors bought any shares and in fact there was only a total of £1,300 invested in shares in the whole year (and no-one has bought any at all this season, the auditors say). No-one has the confidence any more to invest in Grimsby Town Football club and that's a fact.

And the substantial sums spent on the Fentydome pipe dream which the club attempted to capitalise last year (as though the stadium construction had really started!) have had to be written off as of no tangible value. "In view of the protracted planning application" was the board's reasoning to do this, according to the accounts. The council's fault again, they imply - I just don't understand how this over-ambitious scheme whose business model was completely outmoded and rendered unviable over the ten years or so it existed can be said to have failed for regulatory reasons. They just never bothered to keep sanity-testing the idea for continuing viability as times changed. The chairman's pipe dream has been added to the debenture he holds over the club. Yes, it was his money that was invested but you have to assume that the club now owes that £600,000 to the chairman.

You know you have to tug your forelock and thank Christ that Fenty has kept our club going through a real bad spell. But sometimes I wonder what would have happened without his intervention. Whether the club could have managed the position better and who might have stepped forward as it reached the very edge of the financial abyss. But it's too late now - only the most partisan of white knights would step in now and rich Grimsby fans are few and far between. So surely the club must play the percentage game and slash the cost base? Here's the question the fans must face up to: do they want a more financially stable club, even if it plays Conference football - or take odds of about 1/3 that the club will go broke?

But wait; I am too gloomy - readers want good news every day. Well, young Mr Normington has been given a two-year senior contract by Mr Re-Newell. Does this mean Lord Buckley was right to contract the lad in the first place? Buckley bashers have been predicting wholesale changes in the Town squad but this move implies that Newell's predecessor perhaps did retain an eye for the future. And it was also good to read that the club has reached an amicable settlement with Buckley - the least he deserved for having the courage to come back when asked. I still say the way he was dismissed was handled in a very poor and cowardly way by the Town board.

The tiny part of you that is relieved when Town don't have a game these days is far outweighed by the prospect of a long weekend without anything to root for or worry about. Still, I'm sure you will each find your own way to do it. Having digested these wretched figures I know where I'm going - the nearest opium den. Have a good one, and see yer.