CRASS TO DUMP FINANCIAL ISSUES ON PREMIER LEAGUE

ANYONE fancy owning a Championship football club? It seems quite easy. Buy it and then, four weeks later, place it into administration. Then get the Premier League to bail you out.

This would appear to be the stunning business plan of Julian Knight, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, whose opportunistic reaction to the carnage at Wigan was particularly useless, even by his low standards.

‘What’s needed now is leadership from the very top of the pyramid to help save Wigan and the jobs of those who work for it,’ Knight declared.

This ignores the fact Wigan were subject to a takeover by the Next Leader Fund on June 4, having been previously owned by the International Entertainment Corporation, a group fronted by a professional poker player. What could go wrong?

Gerald Krasner, one of three administrators, confirmed there is no prospect of Next Leader Fund putting any money into the club. It even seems as if the buying and selling groups might be linked. Krasner (above) is promising some ‘incredible’ revelations in the future.

So why is this the Premier League’s responsibility? It is most shallow to repeatedly blame football’s ills on the elite division, and the mediocre minds at the DCMS committee rarely disappoint.

Perhaps, on the subject of executive leadership, Knight might instead recall his old friend Rick Parry, the Football League chairman, to explain how this rogue takeover came to be sanctioned?