We then drop down another division for a match from the Ryman League Premier Division between two teams chasing play-off places for the end of this season, Bury Town & Lewes, and this is followed by another match from the Ryman League, this time between mid-table Thamesmead Town and Needham Market, who are in third place in the table. Last of all – but definitely not least – we have the goals from this weekend’s FA Vase Quarter-Final match between Peterborough Northern Star of the United Counties Premier League and Dunston UTS of the Northern League. Our thanks, as ever, go to those that record, edit and upload these videos.

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Few people with any prior knowledge of the modus operandum when it comes to the hiring and firing of managers at Stamford Bridge will have been particularly surprised by the fact that another manager has been unable to hold onto their job at the club for less than a year. After all, Villa-Boas was himself the seventh manager – the eighth, if we include one game wonder Ray Wilkins – to take charge of the club in the nine years since Roman Abramovich arrived at the club. Roberto di Matteo will now remain in charge of the team until the end of this season, which will at least give the media time to fit in several months worth of feverish speculation about who will succeed him.

His appointment at the club last summer was met with furrowed eye-brows by some.  This, it could reasonably be ascertained, was not a typical Chelsea managerial appointment. Villa-Boas had deeply impressed in his prior appointment at Porto, but he was just thirty-four years old at the time of his arrival at the club, and with just a couple of years experience under his belt. It was, therefore, likely that he might make mistakes and that his period in charge of the club might come to be regarded as a transitional period, as the club sought to move the final vestiges of the Jose Mourinho era out to pasture. The perception that certain senior players at Chelsea have considerably too much power vested in them has come to be one of the more endearing tropes of recent years, but this would need to change if Viila-Boas was to stand must chance of moving the club forward this season.

The likes of Frank Lampard, John Terry and Didier Drogba, however, continue to exert their influence over the club and the one other thing that Boas needed to be able to have much of a chance to impose his will upon the club, time, was never likely to be in anything other than short supply at Chelsea. With this sort of division and little room for manoeuvre in terms of being able to buy himself more time at the club – the entire culture of modern football is about results at any cost, and this has been no more evident than at Stamford Bridge – he gave the impression of being little more than a dead man walking as soon as results started to go against him.

The question of where the responsibility for the position in which the club finds itself today is an interesting one, not least because there are so many individuals at which the finger of blame could be pointed. Perhaps the only way to answer it would be to say “everyone” – the senior players, for continuing to indulge themselves in a way that has been highly damaging to their club and the senior management of the club for continuing to allow this culture to fester within the club. His appointment at the club might have been regarded as a break with the previous hire ‘em and fire ‘em policy but, even if we are correct in the assumption that the club was full of good intentions with regards to giving him the sort of time that the playing side of the club would need to be reborn, time ended up having to take a back seat in comparison with the altogether more pressing need for results. In this regard, Chelsea Football Club is confirmed today as a leopard that most definitely has not been able to change its spots.

And it is precisely this that is the club’s biggest problem now. Who in their right mind, amongst the calibre of coaches that Chelsea would be looking for in the summer, would leave their existing position to head to Stamford Bridge in the knowledge that the senior players are treated by the club as more important than they will be and that results have to be achieved immediately? The reflex reaction of Chelsea supporters may well be to renew their clamour for Jose Mourinho to return to Stamford Bridge, but there is little to suggest that Mourinho would like to return to the club and there are no more guarantees of success under him either. If there is a consensus that Chelsea Football Club now needs to look forward rather than back if it is to reassert itself as one of the alpha males of the Premier League jungle, then even Mourinho, for all the warm memories that Chelsea supporters hold of him, might not even be the right decision even if he were to declare an interest in the position.

Andre Villa-Boas demonstrated his potential at Porto and, at thirty-five years old, there is plenty of time for him to rebuild his reputation elsewhere. If the supporters react angrily to the decision to relieve him of his duties, then there is a possibility that the culture within Chelsea FC might start to change. Perhaps if Chelsea can go to St Andrews and beat Birmingham City in the FA Cup next week there is a chance that much of this will be forgotten until the end of the season. There was, however, little on display at The Hawthorns yesterday to suggest that this is particularly likely. If Roberto di Matteo can turn the club’s fortunes around by the end of the season, though, he will have managed something significant. This is a club that looks unmanageable at present, and the feeling lingers that the culture behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge has to change if the future is not to amount to little more a perpetual cycle of hiring and firing of managers, while the team continues to mis-fire on the pitch.

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Yet there was always a suspicion – albeit a slight one – that there was more to the owners of the club than met the eye. Chairman Karl Oyston resigned his chairmanship in August of 2010, citing disillusionment at the way in which the modern game was headed as the biggest single reason behind his decision to step down while remaining as acting Chief Executive of the club. A month after this resignation, however, he filed for bankruptcy even though his family had been listed on The Sunday Times Rich List – with an estimated value of £105m – just two years earlier. After the Premier League announced that they would be investigating Oyston’s dealings, the bankruptcy vanished from the Insolvency Service’s online register, indicating that it had been withdrawn.

This morning, though, the Daily Mail’s website shone a particularly harsh light on this particular story with the news that the club’s accounts for the 2010/11 season show that Blackpool FC paid out an eye-watering £11m to a company called Zabaxe Ltd which is owned by Owen Oyston, the father of Karl Oyston. Indeed, Zabaxe Ltd – which is described as an Accounting, Auditing & Tax Consultancy and has its registered address the club’s home stadium – has just three company directors – Owen Oyston and his wife Vicki, both of whom are also directors of Blackpool Football Club, along with a Rosemary Conlon. This was a revelation that Blackpool supporters had been aware of for several days, but its release into the public domain will now surely only increase the pressure for this family to depart from this particular club.

Owen Oyston isn’t without skeletons in his own closet, either. He was convicted of the rape of a model in 1996 and served three years of a six year prison sentence having failed in an appeal to get the verdict overturned. This process of appeals ended up at the European Court of Human Rights in 2002, where it was rejected as ”manifestly ill-founded”, with the court stating that ”there was no reason to reach a different conclusion in the present case.” He was adjudged in by The Radio Authority to be unfit to hold a controlling interest in the four commercial radio stations that he had at the time in 1997, and had to resign the chairmanship of Blackpool FC two years later. A civil case brought by the victim of the original crime was settled in the same year.

There will be those of the opinion that the Oyston family are entitled to do as they wish with the profits of the company that they have been running. The high-mindedness of Karl Oyston as he resigned from the chairmanship in August 2010, however, certainly sticks in the craw, with the benefit of hindsight. “Everyone else seems to subscribe to the way business seems to be conducted and it is a way I find unacceptable”, he said at the time, adding that, “I don’t think any deal should be about the agent”, a comment which should be set against rumours of discontent within Bloomfield Road at the time from the players over a lack of bonuses and manager Ian Holloway over being unable to compete in the transfer market because of the Oyston-imposed £10,000 per week salary cap at the club.

It is worth taking a moment to consider just how much money this £11m actually is. The exact amount paid out was £11,067,554, which equates to £211,538 – more than the basic salary of any player in the Premier League at the moment. It is also seven and a half times the £1,464,200 which was the highest amount of money paid out to agents by a Premier League club (Middlesbrough) for period from July 2009 to the end of June 2010. Even if we are to disregard the staggering hypocrisy of Oyston’s weasel words, Blackpool supporters (and, in all likelihood, manager Ian Holloway) will likely now always be left wondering whether their team might have won the extra couple of points that would have kept the team in the Premier League had it been released to strengthen the club’s playing staff rather than finding its way into the back pocket of one of its directors.

Blackpool Football Club has spent enough time in the lower divisions over the years for everybody connected with the club to be fully aware of the fact that there are precious few football clubs that can afford to give away £11m under any circumstances. Moreover, there have already been suggestions that this amount of money may not be the final total of money that has been taken out of the club by the family in recent years, although we may have to wait and see what happens with regard to that. What we can say, however, is that Karl Oyston must explain clearly and precisely why this company was paid such a massive amount of money and the reputation of him and his family will likely stand or fall on how convincing his answer is. Their behaviour may not have been illegal, but it is immoral and they should be called to account for it.

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The first edit of this page had Rosemary Conlon named as Rosemary Oyston. This has now been corrected.

Balram Chainrai is on a ‘charm offensive’. He has bought himself acres of publicity this weekend in order to yet again paint himself as the victim of circumstances, a reluctant owner, whose sentimental attachment to our battered old club prevents him from allowing it to finally be put out of its misery. You wouldn’t do to an old dog what Chainrai is prepared to do to Pompey. These tears over the twitching corpse would make even Ken Bates pause and check the credibility monitor.

Pompey has been on death row since September 2009 when the unholy struggle for control of the club, orchestrated by the recently re-emerging Peter Storrie, began. Between October 2009 and January 2010 Balram Chainrai’s Portpin had attained a £17m charge on all Portsmouth Football Club assets for loans to the club’s then owners, Falcondrone. Falcondrone hid its identity off shore, behind the mirage of Ali Al Faraj. Pompey fans uncovered an alliance of Israeli business connections behind this supposedly Saudi front. No Bank would lend the club money at the point in its history, but Chainrai and Kushnir’s Portpin did. You have to ask – why? And why are they still hanging around, constantly wanting to revive the twitching corpse? And further, is there anyone else from this allegedly Storrie and Pini Zahavi created consortium who still retains an interest at Pompey? Because this relentless pursuit of a debt, now claimed to be £29m by Chainrai, seems to be becoming an obsession.

Yet the whole legality of his debenture is in question. There are those who would wish to see evidence that Portpin’s loan ever actually benefited the club before believing his claims. However, the clear fact is that when Chainrai received the club out of administration in October 2010, he not only gained ownership of the football club and its ground in return for the £17m debt, he also quietly moved the charge he had on the club pre-administration from the to-be-liquidated Portsmouth City Football Club Ltd to the new post-administration company. Yet no new injection of capital into the club appears to have been made. It seems that ‘milking the asset’ is key to the business model, not running a football club. Not illegal in itself, of course, but not in the best interests of the football club either. Balram Chainrai claims to have not received one penny back on his money, yet this is at odds with details given to me in a telephone interview with his administrator, Andrew Andronikou. Andronikou said that Chainrai took £2m from the sale of Younis Kaboul to Tottenham in January 2010, although other sources have the figure higher. This money was said to have been taken in breach of the insolvency laws during the HMRC court case against PFC’s CVA in May 2010, the money having left the club while it was subject to a winding up order. In addition, Mr Andronikou said, Chainrai had received one interest payment from Pompey’s parent company CSI before that company was put into administration in November 2011. Mr Chainrai is the chief and secured creditor of CSI and now lays claim to Pompey’s debt to its erstwhile parent, totalling some £10.5m. So the money put into the club by Vladimir Antonov is now owed to Chainrai without him risking more than his original, alleged, £17m. On which his own appointed officer-of-the-court administrator claims he has received two, reasonably hefty considering the state of the club, interest payments.

Portpin’s hopes of getting the money back took a blow when Pompey was put into administration on 17th February. The judge in the administration hearing ruled that Chainrai’s preferred administrator, Andronikou, already being administrator of CSI, had a clear conflict of interests. He said that “I can understand why they (the creditors) would want an administrator who plainly stands well outside the cosy club of former owners and current owners.” Pompey fans were relieved at the appointment of Trevor Birch of PKF, a football man who they hoped would have a good understanding of the situation at the club. Chainrai’s media offensive this weekend seems to be clearly aimed at countering his loss of control at  Fratton Park.

However, Birch’s tenure seems to have brought forward a raft of gloomy prognoses and mistimed and misleading press interviews. Although his initial realism was welcomed and his diagnosis that liquidation was still not off the cards painful but realistic, he does not seem above panicky press revelations and a strangely precipitous offering of closed options. At the same time he seems unable to ensure the smooth running of operations at the club whilst it does continue to trade.

In first suggesting that Pompey’s parachute payments from the Premier League would all go to past-owner-but-five Sacha Gaydamak it appeared that Birch was entering into the running Chainrai vs Gaydamak battle that is behind this whole sorry mess. Gradually is became clear though that this was not exactly the case and he was forced to ‘clear up’ his statement, with the Premier League clearly unhappy that its reputation had taken something of a knock in the idea that it would direct football money straight to a non-football creditor in this way. During this time fans were beginning to believe that Saturday’s game against Middlesbrough would be the last ever at Fratton Park.

In a meeting with fans’ representatives before the Middlesbrough game however, Birch was a little more optimistic. After the shock of finding out about payments that most fans already knew about and further talks with the Premier League he now feels that the club might just manage to get to the end of the season. Asked if he was an HMRC ‘plant’ sent to finish the club off he denied the suggestion. But we should make no mistake that Birch is there on behalf of Pompey’s creditors and the future of the club comes second to that. He is legally required to shut the club down if he feels it is insolvent to the point where it should no longer trade. It is his judgement to make.

This was brought into sharp focus when Birch asked the meeting for a show of hands as to whether fans would prefer ‘liquidation or Chainrai as owner.’ Putting aside that he was talking to a hastily convened meeting that many reps were unable to attend, this was a question that just should not have been put. Despite the fact that only one person present showed to be in favour of Chainrai, it is Birch’s job to seek as many alternatives as possible and look for better ways of managing the club to assist its survival. In asking this question he has put himself in the position of seeming to wish to manipulate fans into supporting one of his two options. Fans are already sick of bearing the blame for the club’s demise and are not likely to be easily drawn any longer. We have been subjected to enough spin and manipulation over the last few years to be able to easily recognise the signs. Indeed liquidation does seem very attractive at the moment, preferable to the continued slow bleeding to death that the club has been subject to. But the fans are not those responsible for the wounds, and being continually told they are merely customers who are a frequent nuisance to the club, are not the ones who should take on the responsibility for the club’s ultimate fate. Is it really too much to ask to let those that caused the problems take the hit and put something back into a community they have treated with such indifference.

Indeed yesterday the fans were considered to be such a nuisance nobody bothered to open the ticket office to sell tickets for the Middlesbrough game, nor did they in any way redirect fans to the last-minute ticket booths placed around the ground. One member of SOS Pompey spent his morning redirecting people who wanted to watch a football match, the staging of which, it seems to have escaped the administrator, is the sole income-earning purpose of the business.

And what of the vet in all this? The football authorities who have accredited unsuitable owner after unsuitable owner at Portsmouth for what now seems to be a life time? They were busy fudging their response to the Government’s enquiry into Football Governance. Unprepared to make their response public, the little that journalists do know seems to indicate that yet again the Premier League holds sway over the game. The powers that be, who seem to think transfer business is the driving interest in the game, appear to have no will for allowing fans into the game’s governance. So no humanitarian arguments there for allowing Pompey as it is to slip away and be reborn as a new fan-owned entity. They just attach another drip and keep it going rather than face up to the anger of alleged creditors who just will not let go.

Given the malign influences at play at Portsmouth, you sometimes have to ask just what it is that they are so scared of?

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The watershed moment which saw Haslam’s controlling connection to the club swirl down the plug hole came on Thursday. Radford took it right down to the wire, announcing the news that he would be completing the deal on Friday after already agreeing a long term lease extension just hours ahead of a deadline of 5pm imposed by the Football Conference meaning a promotion push for the Stags is now viable with the final box for membership criteria ticked. Barely able to contain his joy, Dean Foulkes, chairman of the Stags Supporters Association, told the local press: “This is fantastic news for the club and finally banishes the black cloud that has been hanging over the club. We now have a wonderful springboard to move the club forward and I hope everyone will get behind Mansfield Town and drive us towards our goal of promotion.”

Radford, who has made good his promise to give the club its ground back 18 months after becoming owner of the Stags, declared it a momentous day in Mansfield’s history. Manager Paul Cox likened it to the Berlin Wall coming down, heralding in a new era for the Stags. He told the Nottingham Evening Post:

“When you look at the mindset that the supporters have had in the past few years, this is a watershed moment. It is almost like the Berlin Wall coming down for the Stags fans. There has been a whole anxiety around the club and its future that has now been lifted. They will understand now that John is the real McCoy. We can start planning ahead because this is a real landmark.”

Although March 1 marks a new chapter for the club just being able to turn that page has been a near Herculean task. Last year Ian reported on ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ in the battle for Field Mill, a civil war already several years old by then, with news of a legal agreement between the club and Haslam put paid to a repeat of the dark days of 2010 when the gates were padlocked shut. It is believed Radford had previous offers for the freehold turned down by Haslam. The club had even started eying up an alternative plan, in the event that they won promotion but couldn’t use Field Mill.

Radford himself has worked hard to win the trust and respect of his fans, a hard task with the Stags supporters who, like a pet abandoned at a rescue centre, were understandably wary of a new owner. He took over at a time when the Stags were haemorrhaging £10,000 a week and wobbling close to administration. It’s taken blood, sweat, tears and a rumoured seven figure sum for the ground alone (not counting court costs picked up along the way) to secure a ground with many fans believed was theirs all along. Haslam’s connection with the Stags is gone after 17 years and as manager Paul Cox puts it, Radford has proved himself good. He said:

John has said all the way through to me that he would get it sorted and he has been true to his word. When the chairman came to me I knew it was something special because he was like an excited schoolboy!” He showed me some paperwork and said: “I’m buying it.” I couldn’t believe it. He really has pulled out all the stops to buy the ground for the club – way beyond the call of duty – when he doesn’t owe them anything. Everyone can now get behind the club and concentrate on football. The uncertainty and stigmas have gone.

Now the Stags sit within touching distance of the play offs, working closely with the Supporters Trust and the local community, poised for a possible return to the Football League. This weekend was going to be set in fans minds as the day former manager David Holdsworth returned to Field Mill with his Lincoln side, for the first time since leaving Mansfield but that will be a mere footnote in this new chapter of the Stags’ history. In light of the dark stories which will litter this site in the coming weeks and months it is important and refreshing to note that there are still some good guys left in the game.

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I can’t have been alone in thinking: “Hooray, Peter Miller’s resigned… oooh, hang on… why now?” when Bratt’s brief-but-not-brief-enough successor chairman left Vale last weekend. The immediate practical impact was to make an already-ineffective board formally ineffective, as it fell short of the constitutional requirement of having four members, as well as the general requirement of knowing their arse from their elbow. Football Club and Supporters Club (SC) solicitors reportedly met after Miller’s announcement. No-one would say why, with the SC blaming “political and commercial sensitivities” at the club for their rare silence. Then chairman Pete Williams said they’d been “working extremely hard behind the scenes to get rid of the current regime.” But Miller didn’t get where he is today without knowing where the edge of the law is. Trading while knowingly insolvent is over the edge of the law. So he went before the money – begged, borrowed or (ahem!) otherwise – ran out.

Football club insolvencies have been frequent enough over the last decade to develop a tradition. And a traditional early sign of trouble is the transfer embargo, which duly arrived from the Football League the same day Miller departed. Less traditional was the tale of an un-named Vale employee who received a “demand from HMRC for unpaid tax.” The story appeared to get key details confused, but it provided an early warning of tax problems ahead. The employee initially suggested HMRC was making him personally liable for unpaid tax on his Vale salary, leading some fans to ask how Vale could “stoop so low.” They hadn’t, for once. But they had deducted tax from staff salaries without passing it on to HMRC, apparently a not uncommon practice among struggling businesses, football and non-football.

The next sign of trouble made me wince, so the ends of fans’ tethers must have been reached when they read that Vale were on the cadge to Stoke-on-Trent city council for between £300,000 and £600,000 (the amount rising daily at inflation rates rarely seen since the Weimar Republic). Vale needed the loan to survive long enough to even reach administration; it was described as “cash for administration”, which I suppose is one up on “cash for questions.” And the ghastly timing of the request ruthlessly exposed the damage done by the board’s unwillingness to admit the true state of Vale’s finances. The council announced £24m budget cuts just before the board began begging. And cabinet member for finance, Sarah Hill, announced that Vale still owed £9,033 of their February repayment of the £2.25m the authority loaned the club in 2006.

The board must have been encouraged when Hill expressed a desire to “work with them as much as possible to protect…the club’s future…(and)…no desire to place the club under undue pressure at this stage.” But Hill also noted the need to “protect the money owed to us” and the council’s “responsibility to the public purse.” And, as one well-informed reader of the local Sentinel newspaper noted, the council cannot do anything ultra vires, (“beyond their power”) or else they’d be in breach of the “Wednesbury Principle,” (a 64-year-old legal principle that basically requires council decisions not to be absurd). Having googled ultra vires and “Wednesbury Principle,” the council debated the issue, subjected it to a considerable scrutiny process and unlikely as it seems, decided it may be sensible to lend to Vale even though 80% of the last loan, which left the “public purse” six years ago, still hasn’t come back.

Council leader Mohammed Pervez said his cabinet had given a “steer to council officers to explore putting Port Vale into administration” rather than instructing them to do so, which perhaps betrayed an uncertainty about this strategy. Had Vale come remotely clean about their finances before the budget cuts announcement, the politics of a bail-out would have been less fraught. And Vale still haven’t come clean, as the council have delayed a loan decision until “at least” Monday due to “confusion over the precise amount needed.”

Inevitably, the players were not paid on time this month. And the board’s reluctance even to come clean to them left an understandably furious manager Micky Adams to break the bad news, just hours before their pay was due. Before the begging bowl could go out to the players’ union, the Professional Footballers Association, its CEO Gordon Taylor tied financial help to “a realistic possibility of the club being viable in the long-term,” a possibility which apparently Taylor won’t yet consider. The begging bowl wasn’t long under ex-director Stan Meigh’s nose, either. Meigh was one of the enemy when he was voted off Vale’s board at last June’s infamously indecisive EGM. But he recently became the enemy of the enemy by pledging to vote his considerable shareholding in favour of ousting the current board. This week, he suggested a willingness to help with unpaid tax and wages “if I could be sure where the money was going.” Vale fans could perhaps have been forgiven for thinking “well, go on, then,” as HMRC are “in the process” of serving a winding-up petition on Vale,

Meigh could therefore direct any payment straight to them rather than “pay towards (departing Vale CE) Perry Deakin’s salary,” as he said he feared. He noted, correctly at the time, that “no-one knows how much we owe.” And no-one is going to be writing blank cheques in Vale’s direction at the moment. HMRC themselves are refusing to say how much Vale owe (although the transfer embargo stemmed from a reported £88,000 tax debt). But they never do. “We cannot discuss individual cases,” is the usual mantra from the “HMRC spokesman” quoted in such newspaper stories. Even the “spokesman’s” harsh-sounding warnings about clubs “heading for trouble” if they “regard paying tax as an optional extra” or use “tax collected from employees or customers as working capital” is a standard press release. Auditors citing “material uncertainties” which “cast significant doubt” about clubs continuing as a “going concern,” used to make headlines but have equally become standard for struggling clubs; and doubtless Vale’s accounts contain the phrase. But we’ll have to wait, possibly for ever, to find out, as the March 13th AGM/EGM became an unsurprising casualty of the week’s events when the “information packs” due to be sent to shareholders on February 25th… erm… weren’t.

The worst comment of a normal week would have been Bratt’s; though some might ask why the Sentinel wanted his opinion, which was: “the club isn’t being run right otherwise these bills would be paid on time.” I suspect “you’re a fine one to talk” would be an abridged and heavily-bowdlerised version of Vale fans’ reaction. But we’re not in a normal week. So current (acting) chairman Mike Lloyd took the prize, the biscuit and the p**s by blaming a “revenue shortfall” and “a loss of £200,000 so far this season” on “the various (anti-board) campaigners.” Lloyd is not alone in playing the blame game, with one of the “various” anti-board campaigning groups, “Starve ‘Em Out” (SEO) packing their response with criticisms of “Vale directors past and present” for “eight years…haemorrhaging of cash and assets.”

The difference is, of course, SEO were right. Their organised boycott of season tickets has had an inevitable impact on Vale’s revenues – otherwise directors such as Lloyd would have lauded its failure long ago. But for a £200,000 loss in eight months, the blame lies mostly elsewhere. So, as one financial expert told the Sentinel, “everybody would want administration, even some fans.” Vale cannot make the step with only three directors. But the council are prepared to do so as they would be secured creditors, entitled to full repayment from an administration process.

There will be six “interim board” candidates who probably didn’t fancy digging into Vale’s finances, digging up the problems/bodies and finding a buyer without attracting accusations of favouritism towards local businessman Mo Chaudry. Chaudry himself claimed, with an immodest air of ‘I told you so’ that: “the board had a fantastic opportunity 15 months ago, they could have talked to me but they turned their backs.” And he appears to have already started negotiations to buy Vale. He declared his “duty to see if the right deal can be structured” to allow him to “give the club a future.” However, he was quick to add that “the more I have to pay to buy the club, the less there is going to be in the kitty to preserve its future.”

His critics have picked up on this. But when he added “I have to make a business decision,” he was surely echoing the thoughts of any sensible potential bidder. Of course, administration would terminate the old regime, unless the two “investors” who persuaded Adams “right up until last Saturday” that “everything was rosy” were real rather than a 94th attempt by the board to cling to power. It would also rid Vale of the shareholder “democracy,” including the unpopular “24.9% rule” which denied Chaudry the authoritarian control he demanded when he bid for half of Vale last year. Adminstration would also end the team’s promotion play-off push, which was surviving recent traumas remarkably well. Fans may view that as a small price to pay for a securer future.

Ultimately, administration will be in the interests of Vale’s creditors rather than the club itself, which fans – and Chaudry – ought to remember from the off. As for Vale’s future structure, V2001 was only ever nominally a “supporters” organisation and fans appear willing to cede what little formal influence they had over club affairs in return for whatever Chaudry eventually offers. However, V2001’s demise shouldn’t signal the death of “the vision of a fan-run club”, as the Sentinel suggested this week, anymore than former owner Bill Bell taking Vale into administration in 2002 signalled the death of the “benefactor model.”

Until the Supporters Club’s recent transformation, fans have lacked the cohesive voice of supporters’ trusts at other clubs. Even (especially?) under Chaudry, fans will require that voice. But that is a secondary argument for now. Should Vale emerge to rebuild its fortunes, it will require two simple things from its “leaders,” credibility and competence. Too often in football, and especially at Vale in recent years, that has proved too much to ask. It shouldn’t be.

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Administrator Trevor Birch of  the PKF group, the court-appointed administrators for Portsmouth Football Club this time around, put the matter in the starkest possible terms in his statement on the club’s current position yesterday. ”We had previously stated that there was a real danger of the club running out of cash before the end of the season.”, he said, “The more we uncover, the worse the picture appears to get.” He did reappear in the press today to quash a little confusion over the suggestion that parachute payments which are being advanced by the Premier League would be ending up going to former owner Sacha Gaydamak. “The issue is that a mechanism was put in place by the old company,” he said today, “which had the effect of giving an assignment of £2.2 million of parachute payments to a previous owner.”

The irony in the fact that one of the people ultimately responsible for the chain of events that has culminated in where Portsmouth FC finds itself today possibly finding himself being repaid for a mess that he helped to create whilst other creditors – including considerably more blame-free creditors in this sorriest of tales – have continued to hover over the carcass of English football’s hardiest story of financial mismanagement of the last decade or so. More than this, the administrators also confirmed this week that a number of the club’s staff are to be made redundant, whilst others will have their working hours cut from full-time to part-time and more still – including the players – have been requested to defer their wages in order to try and help to keep the club afloat.

Portsmouth entered into administration for the second time on the seventeenth of February, following the collapse of their parent company, Convers Sport International, in November. The club had been issued with a winding up order at the start of January by HMRC over the non-payment of tax, and is understood to have fresh debts of around £4m. Entering into administration removed the immediate threat of going out of business, but the administrators have, in view of recent events at the club, been left with little option but to pursue a hard line with the club this time around. Birch had tough words following his company’s initial look at the club’s books last week, noting that, “Our initial analysis of the club’s financial position has revealed that the situation is more serious than many people had expected”, and that, “To put it bluntly, Portsmouth Football Club has a Premier League cost base but only Championship income.”

Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that the Pompey Supporters Trust (PST) is working so hard to try and secure a future for the club. It supports The 12th Man initiative, which is seeking to galvanise the club’s substantial support to create a voice for a new model of ownership for Portsmouth Football Club which finally rids it of the self-serving speculators that have hovered around it over the last few years. The latest manifestation of this is the Pay4aPal initiative, which is asking Portsmouth supporters worldwide to donate money which will then be spent on match tickets to be distributed for home matches in order to fill Fratton Park. It is hoped that such fund-raising may allow a new, community focused club to emerge from the ashes of the last four years or so. The question of what league that club might be playing in or even where it might be playing its home matches, however, is very much up in the air.

It is with this in mind that the PST recently made public its Plan B to safeguard the future of football in the city. Plan B is is the contingency plan that the Trust has been working on for the dread scenario of it ceasing to exist. It is very clear about the dangers currently facing the club and pulls no punches in its description of the perilous position in which the club finds itself in stating that, “If the worst does happen, one thing for sure is that no Pompey fan will want this to be the end of 114 years of proud footballing history that has woven the football club into the very fabric of the City”, but at the same time it sensibly reminds readers that, “This doesn’t mean that the PST advocate this course of action, far from it, the PST will always seek to save PFC in its current form.” That the PST is so well organised this time around should be no great surprise. After all, they have more experience than most when it comes to the rank mismanagement of their club. It may feel like a mere crumb at present, but Portsmouth supporters should be proud of the work that is being done on their behalf by their supporters trust at the moment.

It is time for Portsmouth FC to step away from this wretched cycle. For a company to be in administration two years after agreeing a CVA is a disgrace, a humiliating indictment of the state of modern football. From Gaydamak through to Antonov, Portsmouth Football Club have systematically circled by individuals that have given no indication of understanding the importance of the custodianship that they took on and all too aware of how to look after their own interests. The only way forward for Portsmouth Football Club is to be run democratically by its supporters and to break this cycle of mismanagement. The cowboy businessmen must be run out of town once and for all. They have had their chance and failed.

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Consider the names of some of those that have found themselves in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons over the last few weeks or so. Rangers, the club of the Scottish establishment, the first club in the world to win fifty league championships and still the record holders for the most league championships won, have been disemboweled over the last few months, or perhaps years. Birmingham City, winners at Wembley just twelve months ago, are under a transfer embargo for not completing their accounts on time following the arrest of owner Carson Yeung in June on money laundering charges, while their Midlands rivals Coventry City, who played for more than four decades consecutively in the top division of English football, face the same sanction and are riven apart by in-fighting.

Elsewhere in the Championship, Portsmouth, FA Cup winners less than three years ago, are back in the headlines for all too familiar reasons. The club, just two years after entering into a Companies Voluntary Arrangement which was supposed to give the club something approaching a new start, is back in administration with dire warnings coming from the administrators themselves about the future viability of the club.  If we drop down a couple of divisions, League Two’s Port Vale are to be placed into administration by their local council while various factions scrap for control of the club while earlier this season Plymouth Argyle only just escaped their appointment with the grim reaper after months of prevarication by insolvency specialists and a property developer that almost killed the club altogether.

If the situation is bad in the Football League, then it is positively dismal in non-league football. Darlington remain in administration, although a community buy-out of their club is now on the cards, and Kettering Town were today docked three points by the Football Conference after failing to prove they had plans in place to finance their debts. The situation below the Football Conference, either. Northwich Victoria of the Northern Premier League, who left their ancestral home for pastures new which turned out to be more akin to a curse, have been expelled from a ground that they only played at for seven years and Weymouth of the Southern League Premier Division have continued to be kicked from pillar to post, although they may now be finally in a position to move away from danger after a take-over last week. There are also other worrying rumours from elsewhere, though these remain anecdotal for now.

What, then, are we to make of it all? Well, the first thing to say is that the cases of Portsmouth, Darlington, Northwich Victoria and Weymouth are all repeat offenders, which can only indicate that the steps already taken by those that run the game in this country have been hopelessly ineffective with the measures that they have already taken in order to try and force clubs to manage themselves better. Secondly, we should point out that these are all cases which involve failures of neo-capitalism, to some extent or other. Every single one of the clubs listed above has had some sort of contact with an asset-stripper, carpet-bagger, venture capitalist, speculator or someone otherwise unconnected with their club at some point over the last five years or so which has left them in their currently enfeebled states.

Finally, and most importantly, the problems of the clubs that have recently fallen into difficulty frequently have little to do with football itself. Where exactly, supporters of Kettering Town, Darlington or Coventry City may well ask, were the dizzying highs that are supposed to come before these falls from grace? Why, we all might well ask, is it that so many of the people that hover over these clubs like vultures give no indication of giving an tu’penny damn for enriching anybody but themselves, and why do those in a position to be able to regulate against these very people not do exactly that?

Over the next few days, we’re going to be trying to bring you up to date with all of these stories, which span the entire length and breadth of the country. In recent weeks, the grim financial state of football in Britain has started to feel thoroughly alarming and supporters of many clubs will now be wondering who will be next to join this particular carnival of the damned. It used to be said that football supporters looked at other clubs in difficulty and thought quietly to themselves, “There but for the grace of God go I”, but those days also now feel increasingly distant. The financial position of so many clubs is starting to unite supporters of all clubs in disgust and is becoming an absolute humiliation for the game in a general sense. Something has to change.

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To be English is to be afflicted. History’s ever-unravelling twine simply doesn’t have the courtesy to cut this seat of Mars a bit of slack, and thanks to Western civilisation’s added prejudice against demographics of a largely white, heterosexual and male background, the England football team understand this more than most. Gary Lineker, in his documentary Can England Win the Next World Cup? opined ‘there are all sorts of reasons why we’ve been so unsuccessful for so long’. No Gary, there is only one. It is not because our coaching structures are as unmanned as a Maeve Binchy appreciation evening on Sputnik 1. It is not because our children are told to, God forbid, win the Kelly’s Erotic Cakes Junior County Challenge Cup and liquidise the skulls of any kid tactically astute enough to get in their way. And you know what, it is not because the media in this country chum up to dumb young prodigies, capitalise on any microscopic failure of theirs and then slip them the required change for their final, cortex-collapsing can of Tennent’s Super. No, it’s none of that. It is simply because we are English and so, we are damned. Stuart Pearce will never understand this.

During the build-up to last night’s international friendly against the Netherlands, sceptics hashed and rehashed anecdotes which questioned the England caretaker boss’ ability to write down eleven names and shout at their physical representatives. The suggestion from our ever-prescient smartarses seemed to be that a man with previous of selecting a team sans goalkeeper and putting David James up front would come up tactically spent when attempting to reign in your archetypically sophisticated English footballer. Yet something as superfluous as not having a spare hand tend to some poles pales in irrelevance against Pearce’s one acutely tragic flaw – he has hope.

It is often said, but come 2028 and the inevitable military apocalypse that will befall our island from the East, one imagines Pearce, emboldened by a fresh coaching experience at the previous summer’s UEFA U-17 Keepy-Uppy Super Knockout Slam, defiantly emerging from his lonely foxhole, firing a bazooka aimlessly into the stampede advancing towards him and all the while, permitting a solitary tear to slalom about his eyeballs before it falls onto the last square foot of Lindisfarne that the English can still call their own. None of us will see these last days of England – we and our lily livers will be on the last chopper out of Market Drayton – but Pearce will, and even when Overlord Bao and his billion minions have pulped the sorry carcass of our last patriot, that pulp will still beat in time to ‘Jerusalem’. That pulp will still be English, and could still coach us to win a major football tournament. Mutilation is merely finite disappointment because Stuart Pearce is infinite hope. English football, on the other hand, is relentless failure. To mix the two would be total embarrassment forever. Never the twain should meet.

At Wembley last night, they did. Optimism briefly abounded. Since the late 00s, supporters, learned media personalities and Adrian Chiles alike have placed great expectations on this team because there is not any real expectation of them. But of course, as who needs world class players in the prime of their careers to propel us to global domination when we have Joleon Lescott and an overwhelming sense of despair? In what can only be interpreted as an attempt to empirically support this way of thinking, Pearce named a starting eleven so unremittingly average it could only be the ‘final piece’ in the worn-out, partly misplaced jigsaw that will eventually shape to reveal Bobby Moore crying. Surprising it was then, when England applied themselves assertively, if not effectively in the first half.

What the home side undoubtedly proved in the first goalless forty-five minutes is that they exist. You could not help but concur with Andy Townsend following an early touchline sally from the English left-back, when he conclusively noted, ‘Leighton Baines, there’. However, existing is not always enough at international level, especially when it is in some flux state between tiki-taka at gunpoint and mild ‘pump-it-long’ peril. If your writer was not already in danger of building a coffee shop on Pseud’s Corner, he’d throw in the terms ‘ego’ and ‘id’ to further demonstrate this psychological catastrophe, but one look at Steven Gerrard’s performance should explain enough. A man never concerned with his sense of self, the Liverpool skipper reacted graciously to Pearce’s decision to hand Scott Parker the armband, continually passing the ball into areas of the field where all team-mates had equal opportunity of receiving it. After half an hour and his voluntary substitution, he proceeded to the dressing room rather than the substitutes’ bench, presumably to avoid restricting the view of Theo Walcott, who had just settled himself in for the night.

Come the second half, England were skewered. The earlier stasis, interpreted as ‘doing pretty well’ by the punditry, came undone through wild movement as Chris Smalling swept himself up in Klaas Jan-Huntelaar’s gravitational pull and allowed Arjen Robben the space to open the scoring from outside the box. Moments later, the attraction between Smalling and Huntelaar proved fatal – the Dutch striker heading in a Dirk Kuyt cross for 2-0 and simultaneously knocking himself and his opponent spark out. Smalling offered the viewing millions a glimpse of his own brand of strawberry porridge, perhaps foreshadowing what this new, ‘gutsy’ age of Pearce power might be all about.

And then, the inconsequence. Routine defeat isn’t particularly English, after all – one does not simply resign one’s neck to the tulip-botherer’s blade without pissing in his clogs first. Five minutes from time then, centre-back Gary Cahill indisputably secured his place at the European Championships, poaching a goal from six yards out in open play and displaying the positional sense of a hedgehog on the M6 – underwater. Ashley Young’s equaliser came next in stoppage time and looked to have finally rebutted history’s dogma, but as student of the English condition P.G. Wodehouse once noted, it is usually just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. Up the other end, Robben assimilated every one of his sinews with what Dutch football is apparently about to rasp an effort into Joe Hart’s top right-hand corner. The most English of victories – a well-earned defeat.

Post-match, Chiles enthusiastically posited that the game had offered a microcosm of the England fan experience, albeit with the volume turned down. There was a hint of truth in this. A spirited defeat against superior opponents and an England team under the most English of managers leaves the feeling that everything is in its right place again. Football in this country has gone through its years of vague pretence and come out no better. Perhaps under Pearce, if he is to take on the role permanently, the national team will regain the pure sense of pre-determined misery that so many in this country associate it with. That would, however, mean placing its fortunes in the hands of the only ‘natural born leader’ who is so deferent he salutes his set of 1981 Royal Wedding tea coasters. It would effectively mean giving up hope. Something about the generally positive reaction to last night’s game tells me that Stuart Pearce isn’t the only one who’d struggle to do that.

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When one Mike Gilbert of Beaconsfield wrote to the Non-League Paper last year bemoaning the current structure below the Football League, he was spot-on in his analysis. Non-League football clubs are travelling too far for league games and screwing themselves up in the process. Fixtures like Bath City versus Gateshead have no place at this level, or anywhere below League One for that matter. For those arguing that wages, not travel is the problem, try turning out for Gateshead at Bath and getting to work the next morning, and you will understand why the Tynesiders’ Chairman Graham Wood took his club full-time.

Bath City, who remain semi-pro, face midweek trips to Barrow and Gateshead in March (who drafts these fixtures?),  something that irks Director/Manager Adie Britton, who supports regionalisation from League Two downwards. “We are trying to run a Conference club on gates of 700-800. How can it work? It is unsustainable. There are nineteen full-time clubs in the Conference out of twenty-four, with managers looking at their personal ambitions, not the viability of the clubs. Clubs drop out of the Conference and go into oblivion. Is that success or not?”

Britton is right. Clubs are over-reaching themselves, and the semi-pro game harmed itself in scrapping regional leagues for its top clubs. They could be reintroduced if the Conference National was incorporated into the Football League, giving the full-timers the status they crave and leaving the remaining structure in place. But this won’t happen because of the effort in creating the current set-up, and the egos of those running it. Then, of course, there’s ‘direct promotion’. It is almost sacrilege to say it, but promotion to the Football League and the formation of the Conference harmed the semi-pro game and brought a ‘League football at any price’ mentality. Maidstone United were the biggest casualties as clubs mortgaged themselves in the process. The Conference brought all the costs of Football League membership such as nationwide travel (and the full-time status required to accommodate it) without an equivalent increase in income.

A quick look at the bottom of League Two and the top of the Conference makes you wonder whether the system is working at all. Ten or so clubs have bounced between the two divisions in the past decade, or reached the bottom half of League Two and stayed there. At time of writing, seven of the Conference top eleven have played League football in the last ten years  and six of League Two’s bottom ten have been in the Conference. Promoted clubs play at a level they can’t afford, and hover around the bottom of the the Football League awaiting relegation.

Promotion to the Football League was supposed to revolutionise English football. But after the novelty wore off, it became clear that the Conference was just a temporary home for ex-League clubs taking a breather (Oxford, Colchester, Doncaster, Torquay, Shrewsbury), before regaining their former status while remaining full-time. Two-up, two-down brought more full-timers to the Conference, making it harder for relegated sides to make a quick return. In response, existing Conference clubs went full-time to compete; a far cry from the 80s and talk of semi-pro status in the old fourth division. Of the original ‘non-Leaguers’, only Wycombe, Stevenage, Yeovil and (to a lesser extent) Cheltenham have made a real success of things, while Accrington, initially at least, traded promotion for financial problems. Meanwhile, the non-League game has lost a setup that was working well.

In the days of re-election, Wimbledon and Wigan entered the League in successive seasons. A similar system would work today if non-League football was regionalised, with one or two clubs promoted from each region, and no Wembley playoffs (and don’t get me started on that subject).Clubs would not have to travel the length of the country for low-profile fixtures, and would have time to generate support and develop their stadia.

Wimbledon, under Alan Batsford’s inspired management, were Southern League champions three seasons running before their election, and eventually presented a cast-iron case for Football League membership. Wigan, meanwhile were in the top two of the Northern Premier League in five of their last eight seasons; a momentum they carried into League football. Common to both was success on the field without the burden of excessive travellling and full-time football.

Altrincham should have been next, but in 1979, the League’s bottom four were returned at the expense of the Robins – then NPL champions – and Kettering Town; with the League unwilling to jettison another club. The ‘great leap forward’ of the Alliance Premier League the following season made little difference. No-one else was elected. It took direct promotion in 1986 for Scarborough to claim their overdue League status – and we know what happened there. Maidstone, meanwhile, were on borrowed time the moment they sold their ground, with promotion to the League a mere prelude to bankruptcy. Had the non-League game kept its nerve and retained its regional setup, clubs like Scarborough and Maidstone would not have drained the coffers travelling the country on diminishing crowds and declining resources.

As Conference clubs have tried to compete with newly-relegated rivals, short-term thinking has inflated players’ wages, with predictable results. In 2008, clubs voted to ease the limits on the Approved Player Budget (APB). This scrapped the previous limit of 60% of turnover which could go on wages, and gave the league’s big fish all the incentive they needed to spend their way into the Football League. The APB was replaced by the Financial Reporting Protocol (FRP). This required all  member clubs to provide quarterly reports on payments to customs and excise.. While Conference clubs’ tax debt has dropped 83% since the FRP was introduced, the  system has not been a complete success.

In 2010, Forest Green Rovers had to be rescued by green energy tycoon Dale Vince, after previous chairman Trevor Horsley had revealed serious debts, while in 2009 the original Kings Lynn club  folded over an HMRC debt of £67,000. At the time, the Linnets were paying a ‘four figure’ weekly wage bill to a squad including  Julian Joachim (ex-Leicester) and Andy Johnson (ex-Norwich City). Chester City, meanwhile, were expelled from the Conference in February 2010 for failing to fulfil a fixture at Forest Green after the players had gone unpaid. The club’s debts included £26,125 owed to Customs and Excise, which their parent company, Chester City 2004 Ltd, had failed to settle. For their part, the renamed Kings Lynn Town, now run by speedway owner Buster Chapman, gained a 25 year lease on The Walks stadium and currently top the United Counties League.

The UCL or Southern League may be their ideal level. There is no point joining the Conference or its regional setup unless you have Football League ambitions. And if you can’t do that from your own resources, don’t do it at all. As Crewe manager Dario Gradi told the Chester Chronicle, “clubs keep getting to the brink of disaster and then being saved. That doesn’t discourage people from overspending.” Such good sense seems rare in the game, though there is good practice further down the Pyramid.

Marine FC are a model of stability who have maintained their place in the Northern Premier League while managing their money and cutting the playing budget if necessary. There is no big backer at Rossett Park, just an experienced committee unfazed by the lure of Conference football. The emphasis on sound finance is refreshing, as the alternative if the books don’t balance is the arrival of the Sugar Daddy, an all-too-frequent visitor to non-League football. Over-reliance on a major investor, such as Michael Chinn at Kings Lynn, leaves clubs banking on the goodwill of that person.

For most non-League clubs, life is a world away from the professional game. People at Conference level and lower down should consider this, and think what they would lose before spending their way up the Pyramid. Fans are attracted to local football by the relaxed atmosphere, lower prices and closer relationship with players and officials. Because clubs at this level depend on fans for survival, they (usually) speak to supporters and act accordingly. Non-League clubs should be social clubs and sports centres for their communities, offering players a chance to progress in the game. Once the club is self-financing, then they can consider promotion. The ‘Conference National’ does not fit this ideal. The emphasis on promotion to the League and the presence of the playoffs encourages over-ambitiion, with excessive spending (usually on wages) the inevitable result. This won’t befall Bath City, according  to Adie Britton; “Whatever happens, we will run on a sustainable budget and we will have a club next year whether we’re relegated or not.”

The message must be; appreciate your worth as a non-League club and enjoy your football. Make ends meet. Provide opportunities for local players and low cost admission for supporters. Do these things and you will serve your purpose. You may not get into the Football League or even the Conference, but you will have attractive local derbies and occasional Cup runs, and you won’t have to sell your ground to bail yourself out. And these days, there’s a lot to be said for that. Just ask Maidstone United or Scarborough.

This is an updated version of an article first published in the Non League Digest.