Is Financial Crisis Beneficial For Smaller Clubs?

Earlier in the season Vital Lincoln ran a story highlighting the cash plight facing English Football clubs and the time bomb posed by HMRC’s decision to target 40 clubs. The Taxman’s time of leniency and patience had run out threatening the cosy little arrangement with regard to football creditors within administratration. Under league rules, clubs pay football-related debts such as salaries and player transfers first, with HMRC challenging the fairness of this given the tax payer was £28 millions out of pocket.Leicester for instance paid 10% of their £7m tax bill. Bet that helped with the Dany Fee and what a fantastic stadium they and Southampton are blessed with.

Irish Imp a new contributor to the message board like myself believes this to be an opportunity.


We have all seen the soap drama that Portsmouth Football Club have become. The rumours, the insinuations and the accusations et al. After all of this they have still gone into administration. My initial thoughts on this were that a club of that size going into administration could only be a bad thing, but then I got to do some more thinking. How many more are in the same state? Manchester United have a bigger debt than some small banana republics, so if that is the case with one of the biggest clubs in the world, where does that leave the rest?

Well, just let’s say, for arguments sake that most if not all clubs at the top are struggling financially, is that a bad thing for us? Just think. Premiership clubs start to reduce their playing staff and the wages that they are paying. More players looking for clubs and they need to be far more realistic in their financial outlook as to the amount of money they are going to get paid. Ex-Premiership players start being snapped up by Championship clubs, who then release players who move down to Division 1 and lo and behold more players there are released. So the problems for employment for the players tumbles down the pyramid and who is there to mop up the leftovers? The clubs in the lower divisions that are reasonably financially solvent, would be my answer.

There would be a lot of free transfer players available or out of contract players and the wages they would be looking for would be reduced and therefore far more realistic and affordable. A benefit for the likes of LCFC who are being managed sensibly? I would say yes. Conversely, a lot of players already on-loan at smaller clubs could most certainly become available for those clubs to sign permanently, as their parent clubs would not necessarily want them back. In our case, as has been bandied about on our beloved forum, we would be looking at the likes of Herd, Lennon and even perhaps Somma et al. So is it really a financial crisis? To some maybe, but, as they say every cloud has a silver lining, well potentially anyway.