Sponsored by
Premier League football clubs are just like any other business
THE hullabaloo about the financial problems at a number of football clubs, Premier League Portsmouth in particular, set Mr Pendle thinking.
What is so different about a football club with a cash debt than any other financially-strapped business?
If a club has to go into administration, it is surely because it has been badly run, spent money it has not got, paid wages far in excess of what it should have and, as in the case of Portsmouth, not paid the taxman his due.
Any other business run in such a fashion would be shut down, without all the bleating in the national press about how it must not be allowed to happen - so why not a football club?
Talk of rescue packages to save beleaguered clubs who owe millions of pounds must sound hollow to anyone working for all those companies who have lost their jobs recently without any crocodile tears being shed.
Football has, in the last 20 years, become an industry swimming in money and is an ever-swelling balloon which someone, some day will stick the pin into.
Portsmouth, Cardiff City, Notts County and Southend United are just the latest to experience problems. Others, like Leeds United and Southampton, went into administration in recent times and Accrington Stanley were only saved at the 11th hour last year by a local businessman.
Sooner or later, the balloon will be burst and a club is going to go under. And despite the wailings and gnashings of teeth from the sporting press, it will not be before time and could be just the beginning of the collapse of the beautiful game.
To try to make out that football people are in some way special from everyone else and deserve special treatment is an insult to the ordinary, hard-working workers who make this country tick, many of them whose money paid at the turnstiles has, at the end of the day, kept football clubs going for so long.
SPOILSPORT primary school bosses in Weston-super-Mare apparently stopped young children from sending one another Valentine's cards the other week.
Parents, seeing the cards for what they were – a simple bit of fun by six and seven-year-olds enjoying themselves – were understandably falling about laughing when they received a newsletter informing them of the ban.
But the bosses, obviously suffering the effects of post-humour bypass syndrome, said the children were not emotionally mature enough to cope with the trauma of being rejected.
It's a pity they haven't something really serious to worry about than young boys and girls having a bit of harmless fun.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Pendle
Thursday 09 February 2012
Today
Light sleet
Temperature: 0 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Light sleet showers
Temperature: -0 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South
