Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 29 September 2011
29 September 2011
Valuing some things is fairly easy. If an estate agent is showing you round a two-bedroom house on Castle Street and tells you they're looking for offers in the region of £189,950, you won't need much prompting to look elsewhere. If you're in a bar in London and they're charging £4.58 for a pint of Foster's, you can tell them to stick it up their arse and find a Sam Smith's pub instead. But how much would you pay for Grimsby Town Football Club? Chief executive Ian Fleming - who is sort of nominally running the club after the stunt resignation of chairman Deadly John (Topcon) the other week - has told the Grimsby Telegraph that his colleagues are open to offers. "Anything has a value - everything is up for sale. That doesn't discount a footballer or a football club," he said.
To even begin to arrive at a valuation, you'd need to take a good look at what you'd be getting for your money. You'd be getting a football club at the lowest point in its 133-year history, in an economically depressed and isolated provincial town which forgot the meaning of hope three or four decades ago. You'd be inheriting a business model in which the annual wage bill equates to the annual loss, so the only way to break even would be for all your staff to work for free. You'd be acquiring a supporter base comprising about 2,000 superbly loyal diehards and several thousand more ADHD-afflicted Football Manager addicts who squeal for sackings like brats for ice-cream when a manager fails in the impossible task of reversing a ten-year cycle of decay within six months in the job. And you'd be getting the obligation to give Deadly John (Topcon) his two million quid worth of loans back.
How much would you pay for the privilege? Your original/regular Diary is reminded of Ken Bates - and nobody wants to be reminded of Ken Bates while you're eating your sandwiches. One day, before he started describing fans as "parasites" and living in Monaco to avoid paying his taxes, Kuddly Ken acquired Chelsea FC for the sum of one English pound. Try as I might, I can see no reason at all to value the Fenty-ravaged remains of a Cleethorpes football club any more highly now than the then troubled west London outfit was priced up at when Bates took it over in 1982. Let's be generous and allow for inflation, though. A pound in 1982 would be worth £2.82 today. So if the directors are asking any more for GTFC than £2.82, then they're going to have to come up with a pretty good reason why.
In other news, former Town defender Ryan Bennett - who appeared for the England under-18 team while still on the books at Blundell Park - has at last received a call-up to the under-21s. The sound of congratulations wending through cyberspace from North East Lincolnshire is drowned out only by expressions of regret from the GTFC boardroom at forgetting to add the relevant add-on clause to the fee when they sold him to Peterborough.