"If you want some accessible but informative insight into football then I suggest you couldn't do better than the Political Economy of Football website, which is not only intelligible but comes with the added bonus of being written by Addicks fan Wyn Grant." Ben Hayes - Charlton Athletic programme
Articles and reports on financial issues within football – soccer – from The Political Economy of Football.
The Financial Times runs some good pieces of analysis on the business side of football, although invariably they seem to rely quite heavily on quotes from the admittedly authoritative and very well informed Dan Jones of Deloitte Sports Business.
Balram Chainrai has brushed aside concerns expressed by the Football League about whether he is a suitable person to run a football club, but the future of Portsmouth FC is once again uncertain.
His Portpin group was thought to be favoured by the administrators to take Portsmouth out of administration. However, the reservations expressed by the football authorities put the Portsmouth Supporters’ Trust in pole position.
In between sorting out his other problems, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been looking for foreign investment for AC Milan who need a shot in the arm to revive their fortunes. It looks as if his boat may have come in.
Truro City now seem to have been given more reprieves than the average prisoner on an American death row. The latest stay of execution is for one week.
To be fair to the Conference, who held an emergency board meeting to discuss the issue, it’s a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The Conference have been criticised for giving clubs too much rope, but also for doing not enough to help them.
Some might argue that a degree in economics doesn’t help you to do anything with the ‘dismal science’ coming under some criticism since the global financial crisis. Arsene Wenger has a degree in economics which perhaps helps to explain his somewhat professorial manner. I remember going to Highbury some years ago and watching a pre-match talk by him on the big screen which seemed to have shot against the background of a fake library.
Flotation of football clubs in which fans are encouraged to take a stake have gone out of fashion. The recent offer of a stake in Manchester United was a debt reduction measure aimed at (supposedly) sophisticated institutional investors.
Patience is a virtue argues the Yorkshire Post as Leeds fans wait for the outcome of the long-running Leeds saga. Not surprisingly, they are inclined to blame Ken Bates who is not as popular a figure as he thinks he deserves to be and perhaps it is a case of ‘they all hate me, I don’t care’.
Truro City Football Club has been suspended from the Football Conference and is now likely to be liquidated. The football authorities bent over backwards to help the club, extending the final deadline by half an hour. But although the club was able to produce a £10,000 bond from Cornwall County Council to fund its next run of games, this was well short of the £50,000 the Conference required.
The Southern League have announced that tomorrow’s game between Kettering Town and Bideford Town is off given that the electricity has been cut off at Nene Park. Meanwhile, Leamington chairman Jim Scott is claiming that they could lose thousands if the Poppies go under. Their match with Kettering was called off on Tuesday.
Most clubs have pulled out of the stock market because of the costs involved and the disclosure requirements. However, Rangers have announced that they are floating on the second tier AIM market with registration opening at the end of today.