Football and the Financial Crisis - the FreeBetBookmaker viewpoint

First it was a credit crunch, and now it's a global crisis - but football teams seem to have sleepwalked their way through it, with Manchester United spending £30m to get Dimitar Berbatov, City being taken over by Abu Dhabi and Liverpool spending millions on every Spanish footballer that was ever born.

But football clubs are beginning to see the dark at the end of the tunnel, and they don't like what they see. Everton's Bill Kenwright has already admitted that it's a game for the billionnaires and the club's finances have hit rock bottom with Kenwright forced to mortgage the club's future against a stadium that may not even get the go-ahead. Everton are in a bad state and badly need someone like Anil Ambani to bail them out - but the three who maintain the debts are the three in the frontline: Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United. Together they own £1bn worth of debt - and Football Association Chairman Lord Triesman says that's a third of the debt owed by English football clubs.

Take a look at West Ham today, with chairman Magnus Eggertson having to issue a statement saying that the club will not be affected by Landsbanki going into receivership. The club is already set to hand out millions over the Tevez affair and have had to scale back their spending plans as a result. What happens when the Glazers or Gillette & Hicks wind up in trouble? They have already put the new stadium on hold...

Just as nobody predicted the collapse of Lehman's, nobody has predicted the collapse of a Premiership football club.

The Premier League, of course, have tried to deflect attention away by claiming that the FA itself is heavily indebted and that clubs' income is proportionate to their expenditure - but the debt packages that have been tied into Liverpool and Manchester United are just as murky as any of those that have been bringing down American banks - and now banks around the world.

As long as there are billionnaires around to bail out clubs, those with chairmen who view their clubs as playthings will survive - until they get bored or see their fortune halved overnight and decide they're going to stop playing around. Arsenal, too, will remain solid - having invested wisely in their stadium and a youth scheme that is paying dividends. But there are clubs in the Premier League who have been playing around with debt - and if one does start to struggle, it could pull the others down with it.

The future? Unless every Premiership club gets itself a billionnaire, then the Premier League clubs ought to think along the lines of the Championship which sees clubs start on a relatively equal footing, and punishes those with poor financial records. However, even in this volatile market, I don't see that happening unless a club collapses. And as long as there's debt involved, there remains a possibility that we'll Sir Alex carrying the items from his desk out of Old Trafford in a cardboard box. A small one, but not as crazy as Lehman brothers or Utd's own sponsors AIG going bust.

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published: 8th October 2008 by Free Bet Bookmaker

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