On Wednesday it was football’s turn to take its place in the unhappy queue of failing companies, with Premier League Portsmouth at its head.
Court 56 on the fifth floor of the Thomas More building, a modern extension to the Gothic court precincts on the Strand, is not a cheerful place.
Insolvency is a daily occurrence there, and more than 200 companies lined up to be consigned to liquidation with a stroke of the pen from the registrar, Christine Derrett.
Such hearings are not unusual for Football League clubs. Cardiff City, represented appropriately enough by Peter Ridsdale, the original live-the-dream chairman, have been here before. Likewise Southend United, who will be back in 28 days to hear their fate settled.
But for Premier League Portsmouth, a club with guaranteed annual revenues of £30million, it was chastening to jostle for standing room alongside the hopeful directors of less celebrated entities such as Essex Beer Limited, Deepcar Concrete and The Bell Inn (Yarpole) Limited.
The make-up of the Portsmouth delegation illustrated the chaos at Fratton Park this season. Daniel Azougy, the Israeli lawyer with fraud convictions who until recently ran the club’s finances, was there, though he declined to say why, or if he still had an interest in the club.
His presence did not seem to please Mark Jacob, the lawyer appointed to the club board by erstwhile absentee owner Ali Al Faraj. Jacob was the only director present, with chief executive Peter Storrie, himself facing charges of tax evasion, minding the shop at Fratton Park.
Tania Robbins, the former finance director ejected from the board by the Faraj regime, was present, and her latest witness statement — the third she has given to the court — formed the basis of the evidence that earned the club their brief reprieve.
Of new owner Balram Chainrai there was no sign, only a brief reference to his being a man of “financial substance” committed to selling the club to someone “who wants to operate the business as a football club”, though not apparently to settle its liabilities.
Who this new owner might be remains a mystery, though two unnamed buyers were dangled before the court, their interest in the club apparently secured in writing late on Tuesday night and early yesterday. This did nothing to appease the handful of supporters in replica shirts present, who are on their fourth owner of the season and know better than to believe promises from proprietors.
It was enough to secure the indulgence of Derrett, however, and she granted the club a week to try to convince her that a solvent company could be salvaged from the wreckage.
If this spectacle was humiliating for Portsmouth, it marked a terrible day for the Premier League. The League will soon announce that overseas television revenue has topped £1 billion for the first time, a 60 per cent increase in a global downturn, yet here was a member club revealed in court as unable to meet their basic commitments to the public purse.
Pompey’s fate may be the result of years of mismanagement and short-term thinking, but it occurred in a league framework that allows clubs to speculate almost without constraint.
The League has one of the lengthiest rule-books in sport, but the current edition contains very little that encourages restraint. Clubs entering administration are penalised nine points but, as Portsmouth may soon discover, by then it is too late.
New rules introduced after Pompey’s slide was irreversible will be applied from next month, with clubs required to provide future financial forecasts so that problems are spotted earlier and the League can act to prevent them getting worse.
The aim is to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic failures that took Portsmouth to court, but it may be too late to repair the damage done to the League’s reputation on the Strand.
