Search: 'administration'

Tom Davies examines the day to day struggle for survival of three clubs in the lower leagues

The wheels have well and truly come off at Barry Town. Mounting debts have caught up with the seven-times League of Wales champions, forcing the club into administration and the team to the bottom of the Welsh Premier table. The crisis came to a head shortly after shy and retiring John Fashanu quit in August. As reported in WSC 192, Fashanu took over at the end of last year with talk of using the club as a gateway to European foot­ball for African players for whom he acted as agent. But none of this came to pass and fans now see his tenure as just a publicity stunt.

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Monday 1 On transfer deadline day, Chelsea finally snap up Claude Makelele from Real Madrid for, ooh, £80 million or so. Everton fans might be pleased by the arrival of James McFadden from Motherwell, but possibly less excited by that of Kevin Kilbane and the return on loan of Franny Jeffers. Among other loan deals, Marcus Bent leaves impoverished Ipswich for Leicester and Portsmouth take Jason Roberts from West Brom.

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The ever-promising Chris Plummer has gone down and down and is now out of Queens Park Rangers, but Anthony Hobbs and his fellow Rs have a soft spot for the fellow

Centre-half Chris Plummer could justly claim to be the very-nearly man of QPR over the last ten years. His final appearance for Rangers – at Layer Road, Colchester at the end of last season – completed a series of just over 50 first-team appearances, spread over an eight-season period that started with Rangers in the Premiership and finished with us in Division Two.

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Neil Warnock’s love of Sheffield United has received plenty of publicity but the Wednesday are currently managed by a fan, too. Chris Turner has the job of rescuing the former Premiership regulars from Division Two and talks to Al Needham about how he plans to do it in these difficult times

Managers who have been successful elsewhere have struggled at Hillsborough. Was there a particular set of circumstances that made it a difficult place to succeed?
Very much so. Terry Yorath, Peter Shreeves and Paul Jewell were battling against the financial position. They had a lot of players signed during the Premiership days on high salaries who wouldn’t or couldn’t be moved on. From what I’ve heard from Terry and Paul, a number weren’t interested in playing or training. The difficulties they had were insurmountable. Peter Shreeves inherited a squad of players who had three years on their contracts who weren’t doing the business. While managers came and went, these players stayed. I was in the fortunate position of coming in at a time when something like 14 players were out of contract. So I didn’t have the worry of having to move these play­ers on. That doesn’t mean the problem of high salaries has gone – we still have players here on high wages, certainly too high for Second Division football.

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Four years after the Football Task Force recommended them, the FA still haven't produced rules on who can and cannot own a club. James McNamara explains why

Despite their latest move to investigate an initiative designed to rid the game of opportunist asset-strippers, the Football Association have been accused of dragging their feet over introducing a Fit and Proper Persons Test (FPPT). The 1999 Football Task Force report Commercial Issues recommended the introduction of a vetting procedure for those wishing to become large shareholders in a football club, but the proposal has remained on the drawing board. On the back of recent speculation about “mysterious” foreign in­vestors circling the game, the government has hard­ened its pressure on the FA to address the matter. Following the Chelsea takeover, a source from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reportedly told the Guardian that Tessa Jowell hoped football would introduce a "fit and proper per­sons" test in the near future. By mid August the FA’s newly formed Finance Advisory Committee (FAC) met for the first time and pledged to introduce the test at next sum-mer’s FA Annual General Meeting, ready to be implemented at the start of the 2005-06 season.

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