There but for the grace of god (hopefully)

[loweman2]

Incompetent owners have poisoned great clubs 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/incompetent-owners-have-poisoned-great-clubs-50c9vp7kf?shareToken=6be3bcb21454cfdfb2eab63bd0e38cfb

Oliver Kay says that crass decision-making has left fans across the country up in arms

Oliver Kay, Chief Football Correspondent

May 6 2017, 12:01am, The Times

The plight of Forest this season is indicative of the woes several clubs are experiencing under foreign ownership?

At 4pm today, there will be a gathering next to The Big One, the rollercoaster that dominates the skyline at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Those meeting there will not be joining the adrenaline junkies and thrill- seekers in the queue. This season has brought them enough ups and downs — mainly downs, downs, downs — to last them a lifetime.

They have had enough. Many of them will be Leyton Orient supporters, furious at how, after 112 years in the Football League, their club is doomed to relegation — and beyond that, potentially a fight for their existence — at the end of the third season under the calamitous ownership of Francesco Becchetti. They will be joined by fans of Blackpool, their opponents in Sky Bet League Two this evening, another club where relations between board and fanbase are routinely described as toxic. Then there will be a third group, fans of other clubs, eager to join the Football Supporters’ Federation’s (FSF) “Fans United” march, to express solidarity in the knowledge that their club could be next to suffer, if indeed they have not done already.

The protest march seems an appropriate ending for a traumatic EFL season, in which so many clubs have been brought to their knees by naive, inept or contemptuous ownership regimes. One of Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers and Nottingham Forest will be relegated from the Championship tomorrow — a ridiculous situation in theory, but the logical outcome of the idiocies witnessed under the ownerships of Trillion Trophy Asia, Venky’s and Fawaz al-Hasawi respectively.

Coventry City and Swindon Town, both former Premier League clubs, have already been relegated to League Two under regimes whose motives have been made even less clear by a lack of empathy for supporters’ very legitimate concerns.

Saddest of all is the case of Orient, where chaotic decision-making (eight managerial changes in 34 months) and a winding-up order were followed last month by employees having to wait four weeks to be paid their wages while Becchetti, who made his vast fortune from waste disposal, said nothing from behind the doors of his £25 million Mayfair mansion.

Add to this the persistent concerns of supporters at Leeds United, despite the relative stability of this season, Charlton Athletic and Blackpool and you are left with a picture of anarchy. Brighton & Hove Albion, Portsmouth and Plymouth Argyle have all, happily, demonstrated this season that there are ways to recover from off-the-field turmoil, but increasingly it feels as though fortunes are being dictated not by players and managers but by owners and directors — which is all the more worrying when, as Malcolm Clarke, the FSF chairman, said yesterday: “Too many owners are not fit to be guardians of [their clubs’] heritage.”

Disreputable owners are nothing new, but never before has it felt that so much damage is being caused by so much crass decision-making across so many clubs. Futures are being threatened not by insolvency, as often the case in the past, but, in many cases, incompetence.

Shaun Harvey, the EFL chief executive, sighs at the suggestion. He is not willing to endorse that statement outright, but he does concede that “supporters of clubs have the right to protest if they are unhappy — and we very much understand the frustrations of Leyton Orient supporters in particular at this difficult time.”

“Certainly dissatisfaction among fanbases is the greatest I’ve known,” Harvey adds. “Some of that is down to social media and some of it is increased as a result of relegation, although I do know that the majority of Leyton Orient fans are more concerned with where their club is going and where its long-term future lies than which division they are playing in. That is a credit to the fans of the club concerned.”

Blackburn fans released a chicken on to the pitch during a protest against the club’s ownership by venkeys.

Nobody is protesting about relegation, though. That, ultimately, is a consequence of the mismanagement that supporters — and indeed the media — have highlighted in a growing state of agitation and despair over recent seasons. Yes, owners and directors will often be easy targets and scapegoats for fans whose teams are just not good enough, but the worry is that too many clubs and their supporters are paying heavy and potentially irrevocable consequences due to shortcomings at board level.

“There’s no doubt that football games are decided on the field,” Harvey says. “However, the team that is put out on the field is increasingly reflecting the club’s ownership. That’s not from an interference perspective but from a business management perspective.

“We are facing an increasing number of challenges. Everyone who buys a football club does it for their own reasons. I’m not categorising owners by nationality, but back in the days when owners tended to be supporters of the club, usually from the local community, there did tend to be a deeper understanding. Recent years have brought a different type of investor and owner. With that have come different challenges. All we can do, as a competition organiser, is to try to work with those owners on areas of best practice and pass on experience, in terms of what has worked, and to hope they take that on board.” Few of them do, however. Several seem unwilling or unable to learn from their own mistakes, let alone anybody else’s. Criticism ensues and then, in an increasing number of cases, comes disengagement — whether out of resignation or spite — as clubs drift into ever-stormier waters.

Does Becchetti care that Orient will play non-League football next year or indeed if the club are wound up? Do the people at Venky’s, an Indian poultry firm, or Sisu, a Mayfair hedge fund, care about Blackburn and Coventry respectively now that the asset appears distressed beyond repair? It has become extremely difficult, based on the evidence of recent years, to believe that they do.

For Harvey to refer to the EFL’s role as that of “competition organiser” reflects a sense of powerlessness — and a growing desire for people to recognise it. The EFL has an owners and directors test, but Becchetti passed it, as did Sisu, as did Roland Duchâtelet at Charlton, with no hint of the problems to come.

“Until they’ve run the club for a period of time, there’s no way of telling whether they’re going to do it well or otherwise,” Harvey says. “We’re in a position where the test is an objective one. It isn’t a franchise system, like they have in America, where [the league] can sit around a table and decide who they want to own a club. Our clubs are private businesses and if someone wants to buy a private business in this country, how can we regulate that beyond the objective test that we already have? If a [would-be] owner meets those criteria, they can proceed. What nobody appreciates is how many people might look to buy a club but can’t do so because of the test.”

That, though, simply underlines how the sport attracts the wrong sort — many of them perfectly sensible businessmen in other fields but wholly oblivious to the specific challenges and/or the wider responsibilities of running a football club (or both), incapable of realising the effect that ruinous ownership can have on a community.

The FA might regard itself as English football’s governing body, but it takes no responsibility whatsoever for issues such as these, which fall under the EFL’s jurisdiction. So we are left with a situation in which clubs are being dragged down or trampled on by individuals or corporations who do not know better or could hardly care less. This season has felt like rock bottom. The concern is that, unless something is done, it will get even worse.

DRAGGING THEM DOWN

Birmingham City
Owner: Trillion Trophy Asia, Hong Kong
Took over: Oct 2016
Position then: Championship, 10th
Position now: Championship, 20th

Nottingham Forest
Owner: Fawaz al-Hasawi, Kuwait
Took over: July 2012
Position then: Championship, 19th
Position now: Championship, 21st

Blackburn
Owner: Venky’s, India
Took over: Nov 2010
League position then: Premier League, 10th
Position now: Championship, 22nd

Swindon Town
Owner: Lee Power, England
Took over: April 2013
Position then: League One, 8th
Position now: League One, 22nd

Coventry City
Owner: Sisu, England
Took over: Dec 2007
Position then: Championship, 17th 
Position now: League One, 23rd

Leyton Orient
Owner: Francesco Becchetti, Italy
Took over: July 2014
Position then: League One, 3rd
Position now: League Two, 24th

[Guest]

It's ok blaming the owners all of the time but these guys are ploughing millions of their own money into clubs.

About time people saw the bigger picture and realised that it is agent's and players that are equally to blame.

[Curtains]

Good job we have a good owner then in Mel Morris.