NFR Bury

[gang]

In all honesty, would the demise of Bury be that big a deal? They may have won the FA Cup a million years ago and people go on on about their long rich history but generally they're just a little tin pot club in the north west that hardly anyone supports as shown by a handful of supporters who demonstrated at the ground over the last few weeks, the likes of Utd, City, Salford City are on the doorstop so they'll be far more appealing teams to follow, have barely troubled the higher divisions of the professional game in quite some time. I appreciate people have lost their jobs but there must be plenty of Morrison's supermarkets around the Bury area 4 employment. Look, even the wealthy Neville brothers chose to invest in another club. They can just regroup in the coal miners north western flat cap Warburton bread counties league next season 😉

How shameful, there but for fortune go you or I, or Fulham.

[Twig]

No I wasn't,  but I sent my butler with a duster instead😉

Not even close to witty.

[The Rational Fan]

Owners do what fans want. Fans say "It's Premier League or Nothing", so owners choose a high risk strategy that has a high probability of "getting into premier league" or alternatively "becoming nothing".

If fans are on the streets protesting that their club is buying players it cannot afford, then the EFL should do something; but if supporters don't complaining when spending they shouldn't complain when they are broke.

Most of these clubs that go broke, release their financial information every year and most are clearly risking going broke for several seasons in a row. Bury accounts reveal its been overspending since 2003, i'm sure fans didn't say much then but if clubs spend more than they earn year after year what else can happen except going broke.

Even Fulham's figures from June 2018 are within £4 million from borrowing against the ground or asking the Khans for more money (which they have provided more of).

[toshes mate]

Is something that happened nineteen years ago behind one of football's founding fathers demise?   Forget owners and their egos and instead focus on the evidence.

Bury FC's financial failings can be traced back to when ITV-digital collapsed under pressure from BSKyB in 2001 and much that football as a whole needs to learn about the fragile nature of media money is embedded in that moment.  Just as football clubs operate on the margins of financial stability so too do the media empires.  One minute you have control of that media empire but there is a whole bunch of probability issues in the next minute and the one after that, and if just one percentage point of margin dictates what a company can safely do then, sooner or later, an erroneous judgement will occur.   That is the problem with probability – it can never be a safe measure and so we play the game of managing risk as best we can (which, unless you are betting or insurance company, is never as good as we think it should be).

It was the losses of TV revenue that resulted in Bury falling into serious debt in 2001.  Bury suffered but not sufficiently for those in charge of things in their regal palaces in Preston or elsewhere to be bothered to actually notice.   Are we going to have another two decades of blind man's bluff when another media company crashes?  Once a football club is on the financial ropes they are wide open to bully boy tactics from prospective and dangerous new owners who will not be stopped from abusing a club while spinning ever more intricate patterns of debt hidden from view by current regulation enforcement as it was by Bury's owners over a good few years.  It took C&N's forensic examination of the books to reveal something that should never have been hidden from plain sight in the first case.  Hopefully C&N's work will also help in any ongoing or future criminal investigations too.

When media corporation products begin to look shabbier, cheaper, shoddier, and less value for money we should all be asking the questions that were not asked about Bury for two whole decades.  We should make it a responsibility as supporters of our game to insist we get proper value for money in everything about that game and complain to and question the EFL in whatever ways we can when it doesn't happen (the EFL cannot then say they didn't know).  That is something the FSA (Football Supporters Association) could begin to build processes upon in order to get the EFL to deliver a much higher standard than currently appears to be on offer.   As a supporter we are each the lowest common denominator.

Is the current football business model better or worse than what went before?  Statistics are unreliable and may never tell the truth and that means it is a very risky business relying upon them to prove a case one way or the other.   Perhaps if we learned that lesson for once and took it on board then the Burys of this world will not be the victims of a much larger ignorance.