Derby on the brink...

[Oakeshott]

For decades there were relatively well-run clubs like ours and Reading (where my grandfather was chairman in the late twenties) which were genuinely local clubs with, mostly, locally-born players.

With the removal of the wage cap, clubs like us had to respond, as we did with Haynes. But paying a player what he was worth was neither a reason nor an excuse for bad financial management.

Since the end of the wage cap, an iniquitous restraint on trade, there was the opportunity of having an owner prepared personally to finance a club living beyond its means in the sense of spending in wages more than receipts, but again no problem with a prudent owner, of which there have been some (we've been lucky of have two in row, for years A Villa had one).

The problems arise from three things:

1) basic poor financial management - Bury as far as I can see;

2) the so-called financial fair play rules which serve to protect the established top sides from serious competition from a smaller club (like ourselves) who, for whatever reason is prepared to spend their personal money to enable a club to spend much more than its basic income streams;

3) grandiosity on the part of an owner with insufficient substance to see the thing through (Leeds some years ago, Derby to an extent now).

If wages were left to the market and the financial fair play rules were abolished, clubs would be free to find their own level, which for most is NOT Premiership. As things are, clubs like WBA, Brentford, Watford, Bournemouth and us will always have problems when promoted, as owners are competing in essentially a rigged market, because of the financial fair play rules. And the rules actually work against clubs slightly less successful than the five mentioned, because although under the rules we can't spend as much as an owner might wish, and therefore find it virtually impossible to join the top Premiership clubs, the parachute payments give us an advantage over the Peterboroughs or Barnsleys when we come down.

Suitable ownership is another, different but important matter. Do we in the UK want rich people who don't share the normal democratic values of our country and most of western europe buying our football clubs or anything else here of importance? It is obviously a matter of personal view, but in a liberal, free society do we want friends of dictators or those part of the governing elites in countries whose social policies regarding women or gay or lesbian people are in the dark ages having any ownership here at all. I don't.