Reading Report on Their Finances

Sounds a bit defensive. We're not happy about this huge debt, about relegation, heavy losses, and player sales. But the Club is STILL heavily in debt to Madjewski - surprise, surprise - so we can't afford to upset him, because he might call in his loans.

They're saying things are going well, but it doesn't sound like it. Not if you take into account relegation, huge losses, selling £11 million pounds-worth of players, and the enormous unpaid debts Madjewski has been running up at the Club's expense.

In 100 years, they've been in the top division for, what, 2 seasons (if this recent promotion was their first), in one of which they were relegated. They seem to think that that amounts to stability. Perhaps it is. Aside from the massive debts, enormous losses, player sales, and relegation.

I always ask myself why these 'benefactors' don't make their loans repayable from the Club's profits. They don't have to make a gift of it, and anyway, there would be no point because any gift would be the Club's money, not theirs.

But then again, the loans are the Club's money too.

If loans were repaid out of profits, they could charge, say, ten per cent, twenty per cent, or whatever they liked. Until the money was all repaid. Provided they earned enough in the way of profits to do so. And if the loan period expires before sufficient profits have been earned, the loan is cancelled.

In that way, they WOULD seem more like benefactors, and not a swarm of locusts stripping the Clubs of every penny and every asset they have.

And doesn't that more nearly resemble 'investment' as most people think of it?

Why do Clubs like Reading suddenly improve so much? In a league where competitiveness is almost entirely based on borrowing, rather than raw talent, the Clubs which have just received the borrowed money may improve dramatically at the expense of the Clubs which borrowed some time ago, and have already spent and lost their borrowed cash.

Charlton, Reading, Middlesbrough, Norwich, have enjoyed varying degrees of success. Not all that much. Not for all that long. And now they're back down again.

To date, the response has been to borrow more. If businessmen are winners outside football, the reasoning goes, they can be winners inside football. But they can't. In business, 92 businessmen can be winners in the same field of endeavour. In football, they can't. In football, everyone is eliminated until only one is left, year after year. Business isn't even remotely like that.

So the Readings must now borrow more and more just to get back to the top tier and stay there. While the Clubs they replace must borrow more than them, to recover THEIR position at the top.

For the time being, it is working out all right for moneylenders like Madjewski. They get the kudos for putting "their" money where their mouth is, even though it isn't their money. They get the kudos for the success, if there is any. And when things go wrong, and their successors have to cope with the problems they've created, their time is remembered as a golden age.

Provided they sell up quickly, and slip away before they're enmeshed in the traumas of artificially raised expectations, lack of talent, know-how and experience, and steadily increasing losses.