Portsmouth failed to pay their players’ wages yesterday, the third time this season that payment has been late. The club hopes to get hold of enough funds to pay the outstanding wages by January 5th. Debts at the troubled south coast club are estimated at £60m, with £10m required by the Premier League to pay off creditors before a transfer embargo can be lifted. Supporters are getting increasingly frustrated with the situation and made their views known during the 4-1 home defeat by Arsenal on Wednesday: one chant was ‘Where has all the money gone?’.
Portsmouth failed to pay their players’ wages yesterday, the third time this season that payment has been late. The club hopes to get hold of enough funds to pay the outstanding wages by January 5th. Debts at the troubled south coast club are estimated at £60m, with £10m required by the Premier League to pay off creditors before a transfer embargo can be lifted. Supporters are getting increasingly frustrated with the situation and made their views known during the 4-1 home defeat by Arsenal on Wednesday: one chant was ‘Where has all the money gone?’. Supporters would like to take over the running of the club through a Supporters’ Trust. To those who say that this would be the lunatics taking over the asylum, Dave Boyle of Supporters Direct commented ‘Portsmouth is a case where they would struggle to do any worse.’ Dr John Beech, a Portsmouth fan and football finance expert at Coventry University, commented, ‘It all seems to depend on “the new investors”, but if I was a multimillionaire, I wouldn’t invest in them. I would want to keep being a multimillionaire.’ That logic often doesn’t work in football, but there are better footballing and catchment area prospects than Portsmouth for someone with some money to burn.
As far as the winding up order is concerned, Portsmouth claim that they owe only two months’ worth of PAYE, VAT and National Insurance contrbutions. However, this still amounts to an estimated £3.5m. It is thought that the Revenue would like to sell players in the January transfer window. They could also offload England keeper David James. They wouldn’t get that much for the 40-year old keeper, but it is understood that he is on high wages. The broader agenda of the Revenue is to push themselves high up the payment pecking order which normally sees football debts settled first. With tax revenues falling and a massive government debt, the Revenue is getting fed up with the failure of football clubs to settle their tax bills, or to treat them as the last bill to be paid. It is understood that five winding-up orders have been issued against clubs in the last two months.