Bury’s expulsion from EFL shows football’s regulations are meaningless
A good day to bury Bury. The swell of public sympathy at Bury FC’s expulsion from the English Football League was tangible on Wednesday morning. And yet, as ever with Big Football, the wheels will continue to grind on.
Thursday will bring the Champions League draw, with further details of how Europe’s club elite plan to divvy up the season’s £2bn revenue. Friday promises more news on a potential mega-move for the house of Neymar, with the proposed £135m transfer to Barcelona playing itself out up to deadline day. Beyond that, the Premier League fixture list will continue to fill the skies through the weekend, drowning out every other detail with its light and noise.
At first glance none of this seems to touch the turmoil at Bury, whose fate was confirmed late on Tuesday, the culmination of a period of wretched financial mismanagement. The dots might not connect. The ties that bind professional football’s component parts may have been distended and beaten thin. But, like it or not, all of this is still related.
Bury’s nickname, the Shakers, dates back to 1892, when the club chairman saidvictory in the Lancashire Cup final would shake the world of football.
The top-tier game has become something else in the years since, an orbiting super-industry, immune to parochial concerns but the plight of Bury is not something to be glossed or shrugged over, chalked up as another casualty of the market, just as English football would be right to feel a little shaken once again by the news from Gigg Lane.
The details of Bury’s collapse have played out like a slow-motion car crash over the past few months. The last-ditch takeover bid by C&N Sporting Risk collapsed on Tuesday, hours before the 5pm deadline for a viable buyer, but as recently as December the club were sold for £1 to one Steve Dale, a local building and property magnate.
Previously, Bury had been owned by Stewart Day, another building and property magnate, whose notion of club ownership involved pumping in pointless money to push a pointlessly overgeared squad towards an ultimately pointless promotion; in the process burdening Bury with a ruinous mortgage – as detailed in these pages by David Conn – and eviscerating from the inside a grand old community sporting club.
Expulsion from the league is an act of last resort. The EFL would maintain it had little choice. At the same time it is undoubtedly making an example of Bury to offer a degree of deterrence. This is doubly galling for the club’s fans, players and employees given Dale’s disastrous takeover was waved through by the EFL despite his failure to comply with rules on establishing his means to sustain the club.
It is at this point the bleak reality of how football is regulated starts to intrude. In practice, the league rules are something less than rules. There is no proper sanction for failing to provide proof of funding, or at least none that stops you from buying a club. So we end up, as always, at a dead end; the place where the value we see in our football clubs as social concerns meets the cold, hard edges of the market. Something must be done. But what?
The EFL has promised to review its rules. The admirably engaged Labour MP for Bury North, James Frith, has called for some form of unspecified parliamentary scrutiny. There will be talk about the “fit and proper person” test, a rule that, enforced correctly, would preclude from owning a club pretty much anyone with any interest in owning a club. Who is fit and proper anyway? The Glazer family? The state of Abu Dhabi? A hedge fund? Anyone lucky enough to gamble at sport and money and win?
As for parliament, well, successive governments have overseen the creation of our current state of arch-capitalism, where the only real
sin is interfering with the flow of the free market, and where a football club is simply a business like any other. Any kind of protectionism a regulatory body such as the EFL can provide is always fighting the wider tide, as the failure of financial fair play rules demonstrates.
The defenestration of Bury is a calamity for the club’s supporters and a note of loss for everyone who cares about English football. But it is all of these things within the rules as they stand and entirely in keeping with the broader culture. Bury failed because nothing within the current state of regulation could constrain the greed and ineptitude of their owners. And beyond that because the pyramid itself is on the verge of failing, something that is much more than simply a social concern.
English football’s current state of good health, the global commercial supremacy of the Premier League, is rooted in the substrata of clubs and leagues that have supported its robustness and sense of identity. A less rapacious football culture would retain in its structures some reminder of this, a sense that nobody really owns a club, that we’re all just passing through.
By the same process Bury FC will survive in some form. It was fan protests that prevented the club being renamed Manchester North End in 1971. In 2002, a supporters’ trust helped rescue the club from administration. Somewhere down the pyramid a Bury will rise again, although the mortgage on Gigg Lane remains the most serious problem, one that demands political action to preserve it as a community asset.
The broader question is how many other clubs are teetering close to a similar state of collapse, futures in hock to the greed and ineptitude of their owners; and to a sport that is willing to treat its own cultural wealth so carelessly.