Section:GDN 1N PaGe:49 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 20:28 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •Sport^49
FootballBury’s demise shows football’s
regulations are meaningless
A
good day to bury Bury.
The swell of public
sympathy at Bury
FC’s expulsion from
the English Football
League was tangible
yester day morning. And yet, as ever
with Big Football, the wheels will
continue to grind on.
Today will bring the Champions
League draw, with further details
of how Europe’s club elite plan to
divvy up the season’s £2bn revenue.
Tomorrow promises more news on a
potential mega-move for the house
of Neymar, with the proposed £135m
transfer to Barcelona playing itself
out up to deadline day. Beyond that,
the Premier League fi xture list will
continue to fi ll the skies through the
weekend, drowning out every other
detail with its light and noise.
At fi rst glance none of this seems
to touch the turmoil at Bury, whose
fate was confi rmed late on Tuesday ,
the culmination of a period of
wretched fi nancial mismanagement.
The dots might not connect. The
ties that bind professional football’s
component parts may have been
distended and beaten thin. But, like
it or not, all of this is still related.
Bury’s nickname, the Shakers,
dates back to 1892, when the
club chairman said victory in the
Lancashire Cup fi nal would shake
the world of football.
The top-tier game has become
something else in the years since, an
orbiting super-industry, immune to
parochial concerns but the plight of
Bury is not something to be chalked
up as another casualty of the market,
just as English football would be
right to feel a little shaken once again
by the news from Gigg Lane.
The details of Bury’s collapse
have played out like a slow-motion
car crash over the past few months.
The last-ditch takeover bid by C&N
Sporting Risk collapsed on Tuesday ,
hours before the 5pm deadline for
a viable buyer, but as recently as
December the club were sold for £1
to one Steve Dale , a local building
and property magnate.
Previously, Bury had been owned
by Stewart Day , another building
and property magnate, whose
notion of club ownership involved
pumping in pointless money to
push a pointlessly over geared squad
towards an ultimately pointless
promotion; in the process burdening
Bury with a ruinous mortgage – as
detailed in these pages by David
Conn – and eviscerating a grand old
community sporting club.hedge fund? Anyone lucky enough to
gamble at sport and money and win?A
s for parliament,
well, successive
governments have
overseen the creation
of our current state
of arch-capitalism,
where the only real sin is interfering
with the fl ow of the free market,
and where a football club is simply
a business like any other. Any
kind of protectionism a body such
as the EFL can provide is always
fi ghting the wider tide, as the
failure of fi nancial fair play rules
demonstrates.The defenestration of Bury is a
calamity for the club’s supporters
and a note of loss for everyone who
cares about English football. But it
is all of these things within the rules
as they stand and entirely in keeping
with the broader culture. Bury failed
because nothing within the current
state of regulation could constrain
the greed and ineptitude of their
owners. And beyond that because
the pyramid itself is on the verge of
failing, something that is much more
than simply a social concern.
English football’s current good
health, the global commercial
supremacy of the Premier League,
is rooted in the sub strata of clubs
and leagues that have supported its
robustness and sense of identity.
A less rapacious football culture
would retain in its structures some
reminder of this, a sense that
nobody really owns a club, that
we’re all just passing through.
By the same process Bury FC will
survive in some form. It was fan
protests that prevented the club
being renamed Manchester North
End in 1971. In 2002, a supporters’
trust helped rescue the club from
administration. Somewhere down
the pyramid a Bury will rise again,
although the mortgage on Gigg Lane
remains the most serious problem,
one that demands political action to
preserve it as a community asset.
The broader question is how
many other clubs are teetering close
to a similar state of collapse, futures
in hock to the greed and ineptitude
of their owners; and to a sport that
is willing to treat its own cultural
wealth so carelessly.Barney Ronay
Expulsion is an act of last resort.
The EFL would maintain it ha d
little choice. At the same time it is
undoubtedly making an example of
Bury to off er a degree of deterrence.
This is doubly galling for the fans,
players and employees given Dale’s
disastrous takeover was waved
through despite his failure to comply
with EFL rules on establishing his
means to sustain the club.
It is at this point the bleak reality
of how football is regulated starts to
intrude. In practice, the league rules
are something less than rules. There
is no proper sanction for failing to
provide proof of funding, or at least
none that stops you from buyingMaidstone United
The last club before Bury to drop
out of the Football League without
being relegated, Maidstone resigned
and promptly went into liquidation
in August 1992. Escalating debts
allied to the council’s refusal to
grant planning permission for a new
stadium dictated that Maidstone- whose owners had gambled on
investing £400,000 on a patch of
land on which they would not be
allowed to build – were playing
home matches at Dartford. The
league rejected a proposal that the
club relocate to Tyneside and merge
with Newcastle Blue Star. Maidstone
had spent beyond their means to win
promotion to the Football League
in 1989 and lacked an adequate
ground. After folding, a new
Maidstone were formed. This outfi t
almost went bust before Oliver Ash
and Terry Casey took over in 2010.
Maidstone’s Gallagher Stadium
opened in 2012 and they compete in
the National League South.Aldershot
Aldershot FC were elected to
the Football League in 1932 and
remained there until they were
wound up in the high court in
March 1992 and forced to resign.
Laden with debt, the struggling
fourth-division club had been in
deep fi nancial diffi culty and, during
their fi nal months, were unable
to pay the players. A new entity
called Aldershot Town were quickly
built , beginning life in the Isthmian
League division three returning tothe League in 2008. In 2013 they
were relegated from League Two
and went into administration before
being rescued by a takeover. They
play in the National League.Accrington Stanley
Accrington’s resignation in
March 1962 proved a real shock.
Financial diffi culties prompted by
the purchase of a stand plunged
them into severe trouble and they
resigned from the league. The
club spent four seasons in the
Lancashire Combination before
being disbanded. Accrington Stanley
FC were formed in their place in
1968 and won promotion to the
Football League in 2006. They
compete in League One.
Louise TaylorLeague’s last three lost teams What happened next?
a club. So we end up, as always, at
a dead end; the place where the
value we see in our clubs as social
concerns meets the cold, hard edges
of the market. Something must be
done. But what?
The EFL has promised to review
its rules. The Labour MP for Bury
North, James Frith, has called
for some form of unspecifi ed
parliamentary scrutiny. There will be
talk about the “fi t and proper person”
test, a rule that, enforced correctly,
would preclude from owning a
club pretty much anyone with any
interest in owning a club. Who is
fi t and proper anyway? The Glazer
family? The state of Abu Dhabi? A▼ Danny Mayor
(right) fi ghts for
the ball against
Port Vale in May.
It turned out to
be Bury’s fi nal
competitive
game in the EFLExpulsion is another warning
that huge social value of
clubs cannot beat the cold,
hard edges of a free marketANTHONY DEVLIN/EMPICS SPORTRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws