You-Tar Saints? The League of Extradordinary Inactivity

By BallsMania Admin, Tue 21 Apr 2009, 8:33 am

Read more: Aspley Red, Two Footed Tackle

“They do not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; they consist of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty.” – Mein Kampf

You know, if it wasn’t for the Football League’s ceaseless commitment to self-parody, they might actually find the time to start sorting out football every now and again. Unfortunately, though, this commitment is hewn into the same rock that spawned Sam Allardyce’s jaw, a relentless pledge that is all-consuming. At Soho Square, doubt and uncertainty are not so much inclinations as magnetic compulsions: it is a swamp of ill-governed dawdling, where the simplest of matters acquires the windy palaver of a Womens’ Institute cheesecake seminar. Consequently, the Football League’s management of the domestic game has all the cogency, gravitas and influence of a harassed supply teacher.

Their latest reactionary spluttering comes in the wake of Southampton’s marvellously transparent attempt to slalom an administrative points deduction, simply by heaving their debts on to the shoulders of a parent group; to whit, a holding company so unconvincing, it may very well be run from a Harefield caravan. Despite pleading very public poverty for some time now, with the club lurching from one crisis to the next, the insufferably smug Rupert Lowe has so bamboozled the FL with his chicanery that they’ve been forced into an independent inquiry to ascertain the legal and financial position of Southampton FC, in the wake of Southampton Leisure Holdings’ collapse. In this particular case, ‘inquiry’ is a tidy euphemism for ‘curling into a tight, foetal ball, and stalling against the pressure of legal posturing that’s now looming ineluctably on the horizon, all because your rules have failed – again, unbelievably – to account for one of the most predictable manoeuvres in the realm of corporate delinquency’. The administration issue has been flogged raw for the last six years, ever since Leicester Etch-a-Sketched away a £30m debt in 2003: for all the cons, concealments and casuistries in the interim, you’d think the League could have cobbled together some halfway thorough legislation by now.

Southampton Leisure Holdings’ portfolio includes Southampton Football Club Ltd, St Mary’s Stadium Ltd, St Mary’s SPV Ltd, Saints Supporters Club Ltd, Dell Estates Ltd and Stadium 2000 Ltd: in short, the bulk of their holdings qualify as associate concerns of Southampton Football Club. It’s not unreasonable to assume, too, that the vast majority of SLH’s revenue is generated by the club. As such, the line between parent company and primary subsidiary is so thin as to be imperceptible, and it’s abundantly clear what Southampton FC are trying to do.

That’s not to say that their efforts, whilst dubious, aren’t within the remit of existing FL statutes. Southampton haven’t engineered a loophole; they’ve simply found one, as did Derby, Leeds and Leicester before them. They’ve tweezered a neat little hole in the Football League’s Maginot Line of legislation; a stocky, obdurate thing, incurably prone to the lateral onslaughts of lawyers, hounds and hustlers. Now the League are holding back on their judgement, waiting to see if Southampton can do the decent thing and get themselves relegated, without recourse for a punishment that wavers between moral and legal poles that are almost critically distinct. The League has bottled it, once again. Grubby and opportunistic the deed may be, but Southampton knew that the League’s response would be neither swift nor decisive: already, the delay is a tacit admission that the game’s governing body are unable to present a just and defensible punishment. Southampton have simply positioned themselves in one of the acres of regulatory grey that pad out the FL’s rule book – that no one at Soho Square could foresee one of the most basic aspects of creative accountancy transplanting itself into the world of football is the real crime here.

The concern is that if SLH can absorb the administrative hit, and Southampton then emerge chuckling and unscathed into a new dawn, then a dreadful precedent is set. Hereafter, scrupulous owners need only embroider industrial units with spray-paint, pin a mucky calendar to the wall, and shoe-horn their embattled clubs into a bustling new portfolio of falafel delivery firms, touring bouncy castles, and freelance priests. That’s not likely to happen, though, as banks – having now realised that granting credit to football clubs is the logical equivalent of giving a gun to a monkey – will be even less inclined to give funds, without first accepting the club’s revenue as collateral. Whilst Nathan Ellington would no doubt welcome his legal qualification as an asset, it’s not a sustainable state of affairs. No, in all likelihood, the manifesto of FL rules – already Tippexed and biroed to the brink of incomprehensibility – will once again be amended, in the depths of summer, when everyone’s busy watching the cricket. Amended for the fourth time in as many years, on this issue alone. Football will echo to the sound of a gate slamming shut, as another horse bolts into the distance, and harmony will return to the kingdom. Until October, that is, when Watford uncover a loophole that teams with a vowel in their postcode don’t need a CVA to exit administration.