actually liquidated

Chester City are no more: the first club I can recall to be actually liquidated, rather than being fashionably put into receivership. They did, however, seem to have fallen into dubious company:

In November 2007, the fans were asked to honour a minute's silence for a man, Colin Smith, described as a friend of Vaughan's and a benefactor to the club. Supporters bewildered about Smith's identity would soon read he was a major Liverpool cocaine dealer – although he was never actually convicted of any drug-related offences – who had been killed the previous month in a shooting widely described and reported as a gang execution.

So who’s next? Southend, and they’re still in the league.

Comments

[chris y]

Accrington Stanley (pt 1) were liquidated, I think. But they were out of the league by then.

[Michael Taylor]

Aldershot and Maidstone United both folded in the early 1990s.

There's a story in the book Cocky about Curtis Warren flying in a helicopter over Barrow FC (then owned by S.Vaughan) and saying - "I own that".

[ejh]

Halifax, I think? The current club is not the one that played in the League for decades (and was promoted back to it after demotion).

In true Eighties socialist style, I think the meidia coverage of this sort of stuff (or general absence thereof) annoys me almost more than the process itself. The Chester palaver has been going on for a very long time - and Vaughan, as suggested in the anecdote above, had form going back years, at Widnes RLFC as well as Barrow - and yet it's hard to find very much that was written about it by anybody outside the Guardian. One could say the same about the Notts County farce and for that matter any number of disgraceful situations.

It's partly the non-coverage, and partly the way in which the media as a whole like to treat club owners as if they were benefactors and saviours whereas, as often as not, they're the dregs of the business class. It really shouldn't take until a club actually goes into liquidation to see that something's amiss - I mean sites like Twohundredpercent will keep you informed on a daily basis - but, well, they don't, do they?

[Phil]

That reminds me, is there any dirt on Karren Brady (financial dirt or general insider-networking dirt, that is)? She baffles me otherwise.

[ejh]

She did have a police interview not so very long ago, if I recall.

[Igor Belanov]

It is amazing that football teams think it's OK not to pay their debts. A running theme at Scarborough seemed to be that the owners would let the club's finances deteriorate to crisis point then blame the club's creditors, in particular the taxpayer, for threatening to send the club into liquidation. Eventually this proved to be a typical 'cry wolf' strategy and the club eventually folded in 2007.

The problem is that only when the club has been destroyed do the fans get the opportunity to reform and run it at a much lower level and often with the loss of its ground and facilities.

[ejh]

Ken Bates is the king of the writing-off-debt strategy: I believe a speciality is creating debt in order to dilute the percentage of debts owned by existing creditors, so that the new, suspiciously friendly debtors can outvote them.

Twohundredpercent has a running line about football clubs using their tax debt as an overdraft.

[Alex]

Well, that was the Leeds scenario, wasn't it? You had this mystery debtor that was bizarrely keen for Ken Bates to own the club and the milkman, the Revenue, and the West Yorkshire Police to lose their unpaid bills.

Regarding the tax issue, I always wondered how so many Rugby League clubs that were permanently loss-making managed to owe any tax in the first place, until I realised it was VAT and they were just sticking to it in order to help their cashflow.

My favourite sporting financial irregularity was when a former director of Keighley RLFC, who had joied the board of Batley, showed up at the Keighley-Batley game, a big match, and took away the entire gate takings in Tesco carrier bags in settlement of a debt he claimed he was owed - and nobody apparently did anything to stop him. Various stories circulated, including that someone didn't know he'd left the club, or that letting him take the money was cheaper than paying him in full.

[ejh]

Mind you, the whole gruesome history of English sporting club owners has nobody even close to Jesús Gil.

[Igor Belanov]

I should add as well that the Bates strategy was incredibly successful in that a vast amount of people in Leeds actually blamed the Inland Revenue and the council for the clubs 15 point deduction, despite the fact that they were owed a fortune!

[Richard J]

until I realised it was VAT and they were just sticking to it in order to help their cashflow.

Don't forget PAYE + NI contributions as well...