Yet Another Club in Financial Trouble: Chester

[QPR Report]

Chester - Club I associate with Ian Rush and the Futcher brothers

BBC - Chester Hit Rock Bottom - 9 October 2009
By Jonathan Legard -
BBC Formula 1 commentator and lifelong Chester City fan

Even Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger, never mind Jim Harvey, would baulk at the prospect of making sense of Chester City under the current style of ownership.

Chester fans watch the club's relegation last season
Perhaps if Avram Grant had really been up for a challenge back in English football, he would have tried his luck at the Deva Stadium rather than Fratton Park.

But it's not hard to see why he chose the bottom club in the Premier League, rather than the bottom club of the Blue Square Premier. Billionaire or threadbare?

You probably heard about the two spells in administration during the summer, the Football Association ban on pre-season games as well as the postponement of the opening Conference fixtures, and the 25-point deduction which virtually guarantees a second successive relegation - a first even in Chester's chequered history.

But the events of the last few weeks epitomise the malaise at the heart of the club which once upon a time announced Ian Rush to the world and nowadays just craves stability and continuity after owner Stephen Vaughan installed Jim Harvey as his 11th manager in eight seasons.

On 30 September Chester sacked Mick Wadsworth after just 13 games in charge. Wadsworth - in happier days, one of the late Sir Bobby Robson's most trusted coaches - had nine months left on his contract.

606: DEBATE
Personally I'm chuffed we've bagged such a good manager in our position

by KING A_star_blue_eaglefan4life
Days later, managing director Bob Gray revealed a projected loss of more than £600,000 for this season, and claimed that unless new investment was found the club would go out of business in a matter of weeks.

When word went round that September's salary cheques had bounced, as well as the cheque to pay for the team bus to Hayes and Yeading, the reality seemed even more perilous.

Then on 6 October, Harvey - previously prince of Prenton Park in his Tranmere Rovers playing career and more recently boss of Morecambe and Forest Green - was appointed amid familiar pledges of funding for new players.

At the same time, Vaughan strenuously denied the club was in danger, claiming he did not know how his managing director had produced the figures.

And in a move surely calculated to indicate progress, club director Ian Anderson was appointed chairman on Thursday evening. However Vaughan, the outright owner, does not have a seat on the board after resigning nearly two years ago.

This place is full of negativity and it's really difficult. I've never known an environment like it

Sacked manager Mick Wadsworth
So who or what do battle-hardened Chester supporters believe as they look on, appalled at the way their club is staggering ever more disturbingly from crisis to crisis, and possibly oblivion?

Even those with short memories will recall similar promises about new signings made to Mark Wright in his third incarnation as Chester boss last season.

During the doomed fight for Football League survival, the only arrival in five months was an emergency goalkeeper.

A proposed takeover by a Merseyside developer, Gary Metcalf, was grandly announced with due diligence seemingly an afterthought. Nothing has happened.

The same Mr Metcalf had been behind earlier grandiose multi-million pound plans for a stadium makeover including retail outlets. Nothing's happened.


Before his sparkling Liverpool career, Ian Rush was a Chester City player
What is happening, however, is a complete breakdown of the relationship between owner and supporters. Disillusionment and apathy are taking hold with a potentially fatal erosion of an already small support base.

The last home game attracted just 1,019 hardy souls to watch another defeat.

The gap between income and expenditure which dragged the club into administration can only deteriorate once more, this time for the new company, Chester City Football Club Ltd (2004), with the same majority shareholder as the old one - Stephen Vaughan.

A £225,000 parachute payment from the Football League has been blocked. A £30,000 payment from the Premier League is also on hold.

The Inland Revenue will soon be demanding payment in line with the terms of the administration order.

What's more, it's understood that an official at the club gave a personal guarantee that all football debts would be cleared by the middle of October. Time is almost up but how much money's gone down to meet the deadline? And how vigorously will the authorities act if the agreement is not honoured?

On the evidence of the Conference's decision to break its own rules to allow Chester to start the new season, despite owing money to creditors, Vaughan can probably bank on another positive result.

He remains consistently defiant over calls for him to sell the club. The question is, what's it worth? Given the predicted losses, surely not much. Hence the nominal offers from local businessmen, so far rejected by the owner.


Harvey believes his style of passing football may be what City need
Reports that the former York City chairman, John Batchelor, with plans for rebranding as Harchester Rovers or even Red Bull Chester City, was prepared to pay in excess of £1m might explain why Vaughan appears in no rush for an exit.

The longer he holds out for that sort of improbably Hollywood payday, the more grisly the club's predicament.

Mick Wadsworth's parting shot will serve as a warning to Harvey before his first game as Chester City manager, home to Rushden & Diamonds this weekend.

"This place is full of negativity and it's really difficult. I've never known an environment like it," he said.

Few supporters would disagree. But most would concur that changing the name on the manager's door doesn't get to the root of the problem at the Deva Stadium.

newsvote.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/c/chester/8299012.stm

[cpr]

Inland Revenue will soon be demanding payment......

[ingham]

Football has only itself to blame. The game has never addressed its own vulnerability to clowns, losers and chancers of every description.

The authorities, desperate to get their own hands on some of the money which is being extorted from Clubs by means of unnecessary loans, have never challenged a concept of 'investment' which amounts to nothing more than dumping vast unpaid debts on institutions which never made money and are never likely to.

No-one thinks it strange that the Clubs themselves are represented by the moneylenders who immediately run up enormous debts on the Clubs' accounts. They can even vote officially to endorse conflicts of interest between the investors and the Club as the Board did recently at QPR. It's all right to act against the Club's interests. Well, we knew that, we've been living with it for 40 years, so no surprise there.

The authorities might have offered the Clubs independent lega and financial advice so the Clubs could reject the overtures and the schemes of the unqualified, incompetent, predatory and repulsive losers who are crawling all over them these days.

Because all the Clubs will get from the losers will be advice of the kind that tells them that shares always go up in value and football teams run by losers always win, and QPR will be in the Champions League next year.

Essentially, the Clubs remain an unprotected resource. And like all other unprotected resources, they find themselves targeted, not by winners, because winners in football are extraordinarily rare. But by all sorts of unspeakable jackals, vain, greedy, stupid and incompetent on a good day, and how many good days do most Clubs experience?

And the Clubs in the person of their supporters remain remarkably susceptible to anyone who says 'we need more investment in the playing squad'. Nobody challenges this nonsense. When almost every Club has shown it has little or no idea how to make such improvements on any scale, with any noticeable effect, and for any significant length of time.

Has it occurred to the authorities that the Clubs' supposed 'need' for investment - the dire finances, incompetent appointments, and pathetically overpaid playing squad - is due, not to a lack of so-called 'investment', but far too much of it.

The authorities might take investors at their word when they make grandiose claims, fining THEM the stated sums when the money 'put in' turns out not to be 'put in' to the Club after all, but pumped out of it in the form of losses and accumulated debt.

And fining them the equivalent sums when the playing squad proves not to have been 'strengthened', 'improved', or propelled effortlessly into the stratosphere of the Champions League like a rocket, even though money-losing moneylenders like Briatore and his mates insisted that it would be.

When they behave like pathetic, deluded and self-dramatising losers, why not refer to them as such. We are accustomed to big corporations distorting the truth, lying, covering up their mistakes, and pretending that what is in their interest is really in our interest.

But we don't identify ourselves with them. Why, then, do we identify ourselves with the predators who batten on football clubs? It is a commonplace in business to pretend that things are going well when they aren't, that the product is the best in the marketplace when it isn't, that their own opinion of themselves is the truth.

But we don't believe it.

If the authorities had said to the 'investors', a handful of you may make a few quid, but it is unlikely, and it is far more likely that you will lose millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of your own money, I wonder how many would have chanced their arm at their own expense - just for love of 'their' Club.

Clubs are moved out of what is often an enticing city-centre site so the developers and other jackals can make a killing while the Club is beguiled into thinking that a new ground means a new era.

Unfortunately, in all too many cases, it does.