Home
Is it any great surprise there is still a feeling of resentment towards Wanderers in League One?
Phil Parkinson’s side were never supposed to snatch a promotion place while their financial wounds were still healing.
Those who had predicted the club was about to do a ‘Portsmouth’ had to check their doomsday scenario at the door as Phil Parkinson somehow managed to stabilise a team in freefall.
By the manager’s own admission, the Whites “got away” with remaining in embargo and still finding success. And anyone with a pair of eyes could see rules were being pushed to the limit as the squad quota was continually challenged and adapted. But were regulations broken? So far, there has been no indication from the EFL to suggest they have.
The league responded this summer by tightening some of the supposed loopholes and saddling Wanderers with a ridiculous salary cap. The fact they had to go through another transfer window unable to compete with the multi-millionaires of the Championship is their penance but they got no sympathy from their peers, and did not expect any.
It has taken until now for someone to go public and sum up the anger which still exists around the third tier. Unfortunately, Scunthorpe United’s chairman Peter Swann’s words came across more bitter than they needed to do.
For all their issues, Wanderers were not, as he said in an interview with BBC Radio Humberside, in “hundreds of millions of pounds worth of debt” last season. Eddie Davies had scrubbed those sort of numbers from the books by the point they entered the same division.
And though Swann brought up some interesting points about foreign ownership and the need for stronger governance below Premier League level to cope, surely no senior football figure should ever flippantly suggest another club will go into liquidation.
It was a classless comment, however well he had spoken elsewhere in the interview.
Scunthorpe led the way in League One until early in the New Year, played some great football and even tried to pinch Mark Beevers in the January window to shore up their defence.
They played well at Glanford Park to beat Wanderers at a time when I thought the play-offs were as good as it was going to get.
But they did not have enough at the business end of the season to get the job done, and Parkinson’s Whites most certainly did.
Blaming Wanderers for what they got away with in embargo is pointless. That anger should be aimed at the EFL.
And people in glass houses should not throw stones.
According to Keiran Maguire, football finance lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, Scunthorpe’s wage-to-turnover ratio in 2015/16 was a whopping 148 per cent.
Wanderers’ own accounts for the same period show a wage bill of £20.6million and a turnover – around nine times that of the Irons - of £30.76m, which makes theirs 66.9 per cent.
We know around £5m more was trimmed off Bolton’s books over the course of the summer and it is understood the wage bill is still around £3-4m more than Ken Anderson initially aimed for. But plenty of work has gone into streamlining the business costs, and still does.
Financially, Bolton and Scunthorpe are chalk and cheese. Of course Wanderers have debts to address urgently but none as eye-wateringly large as the ones suggested in Thursday night’s interview.
The boardroom battle between Anderson and Dean Holdsworth brought with it a whole host of unpalatable consequences, and some were certainly avoidable. Without raking up too much old ground, payment of wages and bills should be the paramount obligation of any employer.
But they are Bolton Wanderers issues. Others should butt out.
Mr Swann is looking to build a new stadium and bring on financial partners to help the Irons move on to the next level, and good luck to him. One can only hope the two clubs reunite in the Championship.
The EFL promised greater scrutiny of owner and director’s behaviour this summer and it is a safe bet a transcript landed in their email account at some point on Friday.
Anderson’s response made me chuckle – citing Aesop’s Fable of the Fox and the Grapes. For those not up on their Greek literature, the aforementioned fox struggles to reach the juicy fruit, sticks out its bottom lip and says the grapes are sour (hence the expression). Touché.
Source
Phil Parkinson’s side were never supposed to snatch a promotion place while their financial wounds were still healing.
Those who had predicted the club was about to do a ‘Portsmouth’ had to check their doomsday scenario at the door as Phil Parkinson somehow managed to stabilise a team in freefall.
By the manager’s own admission, the Whites “got away” with remaining in embargo and still finding success. And anyone with a pair of eyes could see rules were being pushed to the limit as the squad quota was continually challenged and adapted. But were regulations broken? So far, there has been no indication from the EFL to suggest they have.
The league responded this summer by tightening some of the supposed loopholes and saddling Wanderers with a ridiculous salary cap. The fact they had to go through another transfer window unable to compete with the multi-millionaires of the Championship is their penance but they got no sympathy from their peers, and did not expect any.
It has taken until now for someone to go public and sum up the anger which still exists around the third tier. Unfortunately, Scunthorpe United’s chairman Peter Swann’s words came across more bitter than they needed to do.
For all their issues, Wanderers were not, as he said in an interview with BBC Radio Humberside, in “hundreds of millions of pounds worth of debt” last season. Eddie Davies had scrubbed those sort of numbers from the books by the point they entered the same division.
And though Swann brought up some interesting points about foreign ownership and the need for stronger governance below Premier League level to cope, surely no senior football figure should ever flippantly suggest another club will go into liquidation.
It was a classless comment, however well he had spoken elsewhere in the interview.
Scunthorpe led the way in League One until early in the New Year, played some great football and even tried to pinch Mark Beevers in the January window to shore up their defence.
They played well at Glanford Park to beat Wanderers at a time when I thought the play-offs were as good as it was going to get.
But they did not have enough at the business end of the season to get the job done, and Parkinson’s Whites most certainly did.
Blaming Wanderers for what they got away with in embargo is pointless. That anger should be aimed at the EFL.
And people in glass houses should not throw stones.
According to Keiran Maguire, football finance lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, Scunthorpe’s wage-to-turnover ratio in 2015/16 was a whopping 148 per cent.
Wanderers’ own accounts for the same period show a wage bill of £20.6million and a turnover – around nine times that of the Irons - of £30.76m, which makes theirs 66.9 per cent.
We know around £5m more was trimmed off Bolton’s books over the course of the summer and it is understood the wage bill is still around £3-4m more than Ken Anderson initially aimed for. But plenty of work has gone into streamlining the business costs, and still does.
Financially, Bolton and Scunthorpe are chalk and cheese. Of course Wanderers have debts to address urgently but none as eye-wateringly large as the ones suggested in Thursday night’s interview.
The boardroom battle between Anderson and Dean Holdsworth brought with it a whole host of unpalatable consequences, and some were certainly avoidable. Without raking up too much old ground, payment of wages and bills should be the paramount obligation of any employer.
But they are Bolton Wanderers issues. Others should butt out.
Mr Swann is looking to build a new stadium and bring on financial partners to help the Irons move on to the next level, and good luck to him. One can only hope the two clubs reunite in the Championship.
The EFL promised greater scrutiny of owner and director’s behaviour this summer and it is a safe bet a transcript landed in their email account at some point on Friday.
Anderson’s response made me chuckle – citing Aesop’s Fable of the Fox and the Grapes. For those not up on their Greek literature, the aforementioned fox struggles to reach the juicy fruit, sticks out its bottom lip and says the grapes are sour (hence the expression). Touché.
Source