League lets owners get away with being useless
MAnAGER of the month awards are rarely handed out to those sitting mid-table in League One, but if there is any justice, Terry McPhillips will be recognised this August.
McPhillips is a 49- year- old former Halifax striker, who spent time as a youth coach at Crewe and Blackburn before following Gary Bowyer to Blackpool as assistant manager. When Bowyer quit after the first game of the season, McPhillips was the battlefield promotion.
Since when he has knocked Barnsley out of the EFL Cup, earning a winnable tie at Doncaster, drawn at last season’s play-off finalists Shrewsbury, and beaten Coventry. Blackpool, despite the best efforts of their owners, lie 11th in the table.
In chaotic circumstances — eight of the players who started the first game at Wycombe were making debuts — McPhillips has stopped the club toppling off a cliff. Again. Just as Bowyer did.
The fans were devastated when he left but the frustration of a Blackpool manager must be immense. The Oystons have asset-stripped the club and the best part of £31.27million is still owed to former director Valeri Belokon. Incredibly, it is Belokon — whose investment was key in Blackpool’s promotion to the Premier League in 2010 — and not the Oystons, who the Football League regard as unfit to run a football club.
Maybe it is the League themselves who are unfit, considering the messes over which they gladly preside. Blackpool has been ruined and is tearing itself apart.
A friend, now based in London, will be travelling north on Saturday to see Blackpool play at home to Accrington Stanley. He goes a few times each year because, despite everything, he still loves his club but half of his mates won’t be there because they are part of an on- going boycott. Meaning, just by paying his money at the turnstile, he is made to feel like a traitor.
Last season, even the death of Jimmy Armfield failed to unify the support. The Oyston family have left Blackpool fractured beyond repair. Just 3,656 turned up for the match with Coventry on Tuesday, compared with 11,414 for a Championship game between the clubs in 2012, or 8,869 for the same fixture in the same division in 2016. AND yet they sail on, these useless owners. The League doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t mediate, and makes ownership a random factor because once an individual is through the fit and proper person’s test, it no longer matters how the place is run.
If the Oystons are fit and proper custodians of Blackpool, what of Roland Duchatelet at Charlton? He is cutting to the bone in a bid to restore financial health, meaning paper towels are no longer provided in toilets at the Valley, and there are even restrictions on nutritional items. Bottled water is now supplied only to the first team at the Sparrow Lane training complex.
Charlton are currently working without a permanent manager or chief executive officer and staff are threatening action over unpaid bonuses. Yet from the League, nothing. They probably admire Duchatalet’s parsimony even if it leaves the youth players thirsty and the supporters inconvenienced.
Only if Charlton’s owner tried to spend money in a cavalier attempt to return the club to the Premier League, would the League get involved. As happened at Queens Park Rangers, they would use their sledgehammer FFP rules and penalties to turn drama into crisis, and mistakes into fullblown catastrophe.
Staff at Charlton live in hope of a takeover by a mysterious Australian consortium, believed to have reached the due diligence stage. One member has been identified as Andrew Muir, who sold his retail business The Good Guys for close to £500million in 2016, and is on the board of Australian rules club Essendon.
The Australian Football Consortium says on its website that its goal is ‘…to rebuild the club that we acquire and over time, attempt to elevate it to the Premier League’.
Ooh, that sounds suspiciously like ambition. Could cost money with no guarantee of success. The League won’t like it. A new owner might even start splashing out on luxury items like hand driers or Gatorade.
If one does it, others might follow — and then where would all these fit and proper clubs be?