Today yet another club, Boston United, went into administration. Earlier this week it was Leeds. Why is it that football clubs are so badly run financially? Most are in debt, trying to buy success with money they don't have. A non-league club near where I live will be going bust this summer. I read in the paper that players hadn't been paid wages for months, and thought why the hell are they paying players in the first place when they have no income? Is it too difficult a concept to only spend what you can afford?
Because people are short sighted .. they want success now and aren't patient enough to build slowly but surely. Funnily enough it's the same in business, the number of companies that setup strong foundations are a handful, the rest mosey along not fulfilling their potential ..
This isn't just a business, but a competitive sport. You could run a small store and put do quite well for yourself without worrying about challenging the big megastore nearby, but football is about direct competition. The choice here isn't between simply being solvent or not. It's between doing what must be done to make a football club successful -buying players and management who can bring titles to the club- and hoping it works out, and being a business that can afford the expenses it has but will never be relevant as a competitive footballing entity. There's no point in existing if you've no chance at success in the forseeable future (and just so it's clear, success means a country's top-division title, a league cup title or a continental club title), so the choice is to overspend, which it appears has happened quite a bit recently or continue to wallow every season in midtable and near-relegation positions, or, even worse, lower-division football. As much as I have to agree that these are poor business decisions, I think clubs owe it to their fanbases to either put themselves in a position to win the big titles or they should fall on their swords. What's happening here is a good thing, in a way, because it rids the federation of clubs whose only contributon to the Game is donating four points a season to the four or five real clubs in the league, and providing a stadium for their fans to watch them fail. This would never happen in the NFL.