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Later this month, Phil Gartside will complete 15 years as Bolton Wanderers chairman and yet the current situation at the Macron Stadium gives him little cause for celebration.
With fans calling for his resignation, the club bottom of the Championship and searching for its fourth manager in seven years, Gartside has come to a defining point in his tenure.
Here he gives his side of the story in an exclusive and candid question and answer session with The Bolton News
Q: Owner Eddie Davies has not spoken publically on the situation – can you tell us what he has made of the club’s plight?
A: Eddie is a Bolton Wanderers supporter first and foremost and that’s why he’s done what he’s done. He delegates that responsibility on a daily basis to me and others.
As any other fan he’s frustrated with how things have gone.
He’s frustrated with some of the attitudes of people. And when it comes to some people saying ‘Eddie Davies out’ it certainly isn’t going to help.
It’s okay if it’s my name. I’m not saying I don’t care but I can take it. That’s part of the job I’m doing.
But when they start shouting at good people, who don’t deserve it whatsoever, then you are going to question what you are doing. That’s my biggest fear.
It’s naive and misguided for people to do that. How does Eddie feel? Frustrated and disappointed but he’s also aware of how difficult it is to get out of the Championship, how impossible it is to put more money in. Even if he wanted to. It’s Catch 22.
Q: To what extent has Financial Fair Play shaped the club? And is the club now in-line with the regulations?
A: Eddie generously invested for 10-12 years but the reality is that he’s not getting any younger and he wants to stop that cash drain.
Getting relegated from the Premier League on the last day of the season on goal difference didn’t help much.
People forget that adjustment in the Championship over the first year is difficult.
The parachute payment only allows you to restructure some of the wages. Players are on two or three-year contracts and you can’t sack them.
You can’t sell them either because the double whammy on FFP is that the transfer market at this level is gone.
Very few players transfer from this level to Premier League – they [Premier League clubs] would much rather, as a rule, buy a foreign player rather than recognise a player that has dropped down.
There are exceptions, but it’s not a regular thing. The value of our squad was significantly discounted from day one. The players we thought would be sellable and valuable are all of a sudden not. And you have Premier League wages hanging around them too.
Q: Do you have regrets over how the club was managed financially during the Premier League, especially given relegation?
A: Hindsight is wonderful. Given our time again we wouldn’t spend as much money but then the overall quality of the squad would have suffered by doing that.
It would heighten our chances of getting relegated.
I go back to where we were. I know you don’t get relegated solely on what you do on the last day but when you look at the cards we were dealt that year with injuries – Mark Davies, Stuart Holden, what happened with Fabrice (Muamba). Our midfield was wiped out.
With hindsight would I have done things differently? Yes, I would.
Transfer fees wouldn’t have been as high, the wages wouldn’t have been increased as they were, but they were the circumstances we worked in.
Q: For the record, can you explain the £163.8m debt announced in the previous financial accounts and how the figure got so high?
A: I’m sick of answering that question. If someone has been willing to invest that sort of money in this football team, why does anyone complain about it?
Where has the money gone? Well we have all the assets – the stadium, training ground, hotel, car parks the lot. And not many clubs do that, by the way, some are built by the council like overseas.
If you look at this country there are quite a few clubs who just haven’t got these assets.
It sounds easy that we should be able to release capital from those assets to invest into a football team and if we find some way of doing that, then great.
We own it all. We have no incumbent debt other than a small overdraft to Barclays of £5million. It was £15m but because we are in the Championship Barclays wanted it to be less; no doubt next year they will want it to be even less.
The reality is that other clubs just don’t have the benefit of an Eddie Davies investing in (them).
You can start going through every transfer we’ve ever done. Why didn’t we sell Johan Elmander before he left on a free. Don’t think we didn’t try.
Why did we only get £7m for Gary Cahill? That’s because nobody tried to buy him for any more than that.
All sort of ridiculous innuendos are put out on these finances and people need to sit down and actually go through the detail. It’s a complex and difficult story to tell but we’re not avoiding telling it because we’ve got something to hide. It’s irrelevant that Eddie has invested £160m – he’s done it because he could and because he wanted to.
Instead of saying why are we £160m in debt to Eddie? We should be saying ‘thank you Eddie for being such a great benefactor.
Nobody goes and asks Roman Abramovich or Mohammed Al Fayed, when he was at Fulham, why they did it. Why Eddie?”
Q: Fans question where the money comes from because of where Eddie’s business interests are based. Can you say definitively that the cash invested in Bolton Wanderers comes directly from him?
A: It’s Eddie’s money. However you see it, if he wrote off all that money tomorrow and there was no ‘debt’ then it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.
Yes, it would make the balance sheet look reasonable because it has all these assets on it without any problems.
If Eddie is going to get his money back, the only way is to sell it or lend us some more [money], because no-one else is [going to be] lending us any.”
Q: Are the club open-minded about being for sale?
A: If you want to go and put a for sale sign outside, do it. Every club is for sale. If someone knocks on the door and says they want to buy the club, we’d listen.
It’s not for want of putting that message out that we haven’t changed ownership. But you have guard against who you sell it to.
Hopefully Eddie is not going to sell it to just anybody. It’s the same with me, anyone who walks through the door will get an audience, but having done that it’s about due diligence that they do on the football club and that is done on them.
Eddie would want to sell it to someone who is responsible, who has belief in it. He would want to know it’s not a property strip.
Q: Have you been in a position where you have turned down an offer?
A: No. We’ve had approaches and we have talked to people but they have said no. It has never been one where we have turned anyone away. Not a single one.
Q: Do you feel a personal responsibility for where the club is at the moment?
A: I can’t say I don’t. I’m part of the team of people responsible for making sure it didn’t get to where it is.
I don’t pick the team and don’t do training in the week, so in terms of football performance it’s hard for me to be directly responsible.
But I do have a sense of responsibility for everything that goes on in this place. That’s the job I have.
I do take it seriously. If anything I care too much. And it does affect you.”
Q: Is it a harder job than people realise?
A: I have been here a long time. A lot of people would say too long.
It is not an easy business, it’s a complex one, and we’ve got lots of other revenue streams and we’re trying to build a business but the only thing we’re ever judged on is what happens on the football pitch. If we didn’t have a football team, we’d be quite a successful business.
We’re trying to build something that is self-sustainable and it’s not easy.
Q: Have you considered walking away/resigning?
A: I want to do the job I’ve been asked to do by Eddie Davies.
Whatever anyone says, I have got an obligation to him to look after the club in the way he wants it looking after, making joint decisions on certain things, for as long as he asks me to.
As much as sometimes I walk out of here on a Friday night and think ‘was that week worth it?’ in the same way everyone does at one point or another, I’m sure everyone goes through that process.
I do have my moment and say ‘is this really worth it?’ I have not been on holiday for two years and it affects your family.
I will do this job for as long as Eddie asks me to do it. When there comes a time where he says ‘listen, it’s time you chucked it in’ then I’ll do it.
But I have an obligation to do what I’m doing and I’ll keep to it for as long as he wants me to.
Q: Can you ‘get around’ FFP? And has the club brought itself into line with FFP?
A: We’re not a million miles off this year. We might be slightly out but there is an acceptable deviation that we will be within.
Are there ways round it? We haven’t tried. We have tried to work with the rules.
If other clubs have tried to get around it and subsequently get fined then I don’t want us to be in that situation.
We have made a tremendous effort to get this club into order. The players’ wage bill has come down from £50million-plus to £20million in two years.
It’s massive jumps because players are on three or four-year contracts. You can’t just switch them off. You can’t tell them to go away. Even giving them free transfers doesn’t seem to shift them.”
Q: Did the club support Dougie Freedman enough, financially?
A: People say we didn’t but we did. We bought players like Jay Spearing, younger ones like Robert Hall. We put loans signings in, as and when, he’s never been refused a loan signing.
We supported him and people don’t come here for nothing, in terms of wages.
What we’ve had to do with the rest of the business, 80 people plus have left in the last couple of years. It’s probably a net 50 because some have come back in.
That in itself has created a bunch of people out there that don’t particularly like me.
I have had to make tough decisions.
The other side is that we had to reduce the wage bill but Dougie worked with me on that, so he did a good job.
Q: How do you respond to the judge’s comments in his summing up of the recent Tony McGill trial, which was won by the club?
A: It was said that my evidence was unsatisfactory. When you have been hounded for seven-and-a-half years by an individual you have never met. The first I had ever heard of him was a text I received, either shortly before or after, I can’t give you the date, that the deal was announced. I had never heard of him so I took the text to someone who I thought might know, and they hadn’t, but finally Simon (Marland) said he might be an agent in the North East.
“The questioning I was under was on things seven-and-a-half years ago. With due respect to anyone, they’d struggle to recall that. A lot of my answers to questions were ‘I can’t remember’ and they were interpreted as ‘unsatisfactory’ but it was honest because I couldn’t remember.
“We’d signed 12 players that summer. It was Sammy Lee’s summer.
“We lost 12 staff because Sam (Allardyce) had walked out and took half the staff with him. I think Gavin McCann was the first signing Sammy made because we wanted to back him, he was a quality signing, and he was experienced around the Premier League. It wasn’t expensive at that time – especially in terms of wages.
“I did speak to Aston Villa. I did speak to Richard Fitzgerald and that’s how the deal came about.
“That was my involvement until someone put a piece of paper in front of me, which was a representation agreement it turns out, and I signed it. I was accused of back-dating it but I didn’t because I didn’t date it in the first place.
“I get a lot of documents, week after week, day after day, that I sign.
“They get brought into me by the company secretary, the finance director, whoever. I don’t ask what it is, I sign it, and I trust that that’s their job.
“To accuse me of back-dating a document when I didn’t do it in the first place is a little bit difficult.
“It wasn’t a significant document in the case. It wouldn’t have altered the judge’s view, but the claimant was using it as an example of how we did things in the wrong manner.
“Then I was accused of being visibly uncomfortable giving evidence, well, I’ve never been in court before, I’ve never given evidence other than as a character witness for someone in the High Court in London, and I can tell you I was more visibly uncomfortable doing that.
“When you’ve got a barrister who I think is more intelligent and eloquent than I am and they are sitting there saying ‘I suggest to you Mr Gartside’ that I have done this or that, when I know I haven’t, I am not going to sit and smile.
“I am uncomfortable when people are telling me I have told lies, when I haven’t told any.
“For that to be used to slaughter my character is very upsetting. It’s damaging.
“I believe in principles and if someone is not got the right to something, I’ll fight it. Why should I concede and give someone money they don’t deserve?”
Q: Do you regret what came out in a radio interview about Dietmar Hamman and the deal that took him to Manchester City?
A: “No. I do regret people’s reaction because I did it as something I was asked to do. I thought Colin Murray was getting a favour out of me.
“The only thing I said in there that was actually wrong was that we did sign a piece of paper, put it in a draw and waited until the first of July.
“Maybe it was a bit daft. Maybe I should be less honest and open about it.”
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With fans calling for his resignation, the club bottom of the Championship and searching for its fourth manager in seven years, Gartside has come to a defining point in his tenure.
Here he gives his side of the story in an exclusive and candid question and answer session with The Bolton News
Q: Owner Eddie Davies has not spoken publically on the situation – can you tell us what he has made of the club’s plight?
A: Eddie is a Bolton Wanderers supporter first and foremost and that’s why he’s done what he’s done. He delegates that responsibility on a daily basis to me and others.
As any other fan he’s frustrated with how things have gone.
He’s frustrated with some of the attitudes of people. And when it comes to some people saying ‘Eddie Davies out’ it certainly isn’t going to help.
It’s okay if it’s my name. I’m not saying I don’t care but I can take it. That’s part of the job I’m doing.
But when they start shouting at good people, who don’t deserve it whatsoever, then you are going to question what you are doing. That’s my biggest fear.
It’s naive and misguided for people to do that. How does Eddie feel? Frustrated and disappointed but he’s also aware of how difficult it is to get out of the Championship, how impossible it is to put more money in. Even if he wanted to. It’s Catch 22.
Q: To what extent has Financial Fair Play shaped the club? And is the club now in-line with the regulations?
A: Eddie generously invested for 10-12 years but the reality is that he’s not getting any younger and he wants to stop that cash drain.
Getting relegated from the Premier League on the last day of the season on goal difference didn’t help much.
People forget that adjustment in the Championship over the first year is difficult.
The parachute payment only allows you to restructure some of the wages. Players are on two or three-year contracts and you can’t sack them.
You can’t sell them either because the double whammy on FFP is that the transfer market at this level is gone.
Very few players transfer from this level to Premier League – they [Premier League clubs] would much rather, as a rule, buy a foreign player rather than recognise a player that has dropped down.
There are exceptions, but it’s not a regular thing. The value of our squad was significantly discounted from day one. The players we thought would be sellable and valuable are all of a sudden not. And you have Premier League wages hanging around them too.
Q: Do you have regrets over how the club was managed financially during the Premier League, especially given relegation?
A: Hindsight is wonderful. Given our time again we wouldn’t spend as much money but then the overall quality of the squad would have suffered by doing that.
It would heighten our chances of getting relegated.
I go back to where we were. I know you don’t get relegated solely on what you do on the last day but when you look at the cards we were dealt that year with injuries – Mark Davies, Stuart Holden, what happened with Fabrice (Muamba). Our midfield was wiped out.
With hindsight would I have done things differently? Yes, I would.
Transfer fees wouldn’t have been as high, the wages wouldn’t have been increased as they were, but they were the circumstances we worked in.
Q: For the record, can you explain the £163.8m debt announced in the previous financial accounts and how the figure got so high?
A: I’m sick of answering that question. If someone has been willing to invest that sort of money in this football team, why does anyone complain about it?
Where has the money gone? Well we have all the assets – the stadium, training ground, hotel, car parks the lot. And not many clubs do that, by the way, some are built by the council like overseas.
If you look at this country there are quite a few clubs who just haven’t got these assets.
It sounds easy that we should be able to release capital from those assets to invest into a football team and if we find some way of doing that, then great.
We own it all. We have no incumbent debt other than a small overdraft to Barclays of £5million. It was £15m but because we are in the Championship Barclays wanted it to be less; no doubt next year they will want it to be even less.
The reality is that other clubs just don’t have the benefit of an Eddie Davies investing in (them).
You can start going through every transfer we’ve ever done. Why didn’t we sell Johan Elmander before he left on a free. Don’t think we didn’t try.
Why did we only get £7m for Gary Cahill? That’s because nobody tried to buy him for any more than that.
All sort of ridiculous innuendos are put out on these finances and people need to sit down and actually go through the detail. It’s a complex and difficult story to tell but we’re not avoiding telling it because we’ve got something to hide. It’s irrelevant that Eddie has invested £160m – he’s done it because he could and because he wanted to.
Instead of saying why are we £160m in debt to Eddie? We should be saying ‘thank you Eddie for being such a great benefactor.
Nobody goes and asks Roman Abramovich or Mohammed Al Fayed, when he was at Fulham, why they did it. Why Eddie?”
Q: Fans question where the money comes from because of where Eddie’s business interests are based. Can you say definitively that the cash invested in Bolton Wanderers comes directly from him?
A: It’s Eddie’s money. However you see it, if he wrote off all that money tomorrow and there was no ‘debt’ then it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.
Yes, it would make the balance sheet look reasonable because it has all these assets on it without any problems.
If Eddie is going to get his money back, the only way is to sell it or lend us some more [money], because no-one else is [going to be] lending us any.”
Q: Are the club open-minded about being for sale?
A: If you want to go and put a for sale sign outside, do it. Every club is for sale. If someone knocks on the door and says they want to buy the club, we’d listen.
It’s not for want of putting that message out that we haven’t changed ownership. But you have guard against who you sell it to.
Hopefully Eddie is not going to sell it to just anybody. It’s the same with me, anyone who walks through the door will get an audience, but having done that it’s about due diligence that they do on the football club and that is done on them.
Eddie would want to sell it to someone who is responsible, who has belief in it. He would want to know it’s not a property strip.
Q: Have you been in a position where you have turned down an offer?
A: No. We’ve had approaches and we have talked to people but they have said no. It has never been one where we have turned anyone away. Not a single one.
Q: Do you feel a personal responsibility for where the club is at the moment?
A: I can’t say I don’t. I’m part of the team of people responsible for making sure it didn’t get to where it is.
I don’t pick the team and don’t do training in the week, so in terms of football performance it’s hard for me to be directly responsible.
But I do have a sense of responsibility for everything that goes on in this place. That’s the job I have.
I do take it seriously. If anything I care too much. And it does affect you.”
Q: Is it a harder job than people realise?
A: I have been here a long time. A lot of people would say too long.
It is not an easy business, it’s a complex one, and we’ve got lots of other revenue streams and we’re trying to build a business but the only thing we’re ever judged on is what happens on the football pitch. If we didn’t have a football team, we’d be quite a successful business.
We’re trying to build something that is self-sustainable and it’s not easy.
Q: Have you considered walking away/resigning?
A: I want to do the job I’ve been asked to do by Eddie Davies.
Whatever anyone says, I have got an obligation to him to look after the club in the way he wants it looking after, making joint decisions on certain things, for as long as he asks me to.
As much as sometimes I walk out of here on a Friday night and think ‘was that week worth it?’ in the same way everyone does at one point or another, I’m sure everyone goes through that process.
I do have my moment and say ‘is this really worth it?’ I have not been on holiday for two years and it affects your family.
I will do this job for as long as Eddie asks me to do it. When there comes a time where he says ‘listen, it’s time you chucked it in’ then I’ll do it.
But I have an obligation to do what I’m doing and I’ll keep to it for as long as he wants me to.
Q: Can you ‘get around’ FFP? And has the club brought itself into line with FFP?
A: We’re not a million miles off this year. We might be slightly out but there is an acceptable deviation that we will be within.
Are there ways round it? We haven’t tried. We have tried to work with the rules.
If other clubs have tried to get around it and subsequently get fined then I don’t want us to be in that situation.
We have made a tremendous effort to get this club into order. The players’ wage bill has come down from £50million-plus to £20million in two years.
It’s massive jumps because players are on three or four-year contracts. You can’t just switch them off. You can’t tell them to go away. Even giving them free transfers doesn’t seem to shift them.”
Q: Did the club support Dougie Freedman enough, financially?
A: People say we didn’t but we did. We bought players like Jay Spearing, younger ones like Robert Hall. We put loans signings in, as and when, he’s never been refused a loan signing.
We supported him and people don’t come here for nothing, in terms of wages.
What we’ve had to do with the rest of the business, 80 people plus have left in the last couple of years. It’s probably a net 50 because some have come back in.
That in itself has created a bunch of people out there that don’t particularly like me.
I have had to make tough decisions.
The other side is that we had to reduce the wage bill but Dougie worked with me on that, so he did a good job.
Q: How do you respond to the judge’s comments in his summing up of the recent Tony McGill trial, which was won by the club?
A: It was said that my evidence was unsatisfactory. When you have been hounded for seven-and-a-half years by an individual you have never met. The first I had ever heard of him was a text I received, either shortly before or after, I can’t give you the date, that the deal was announced. I had never heard of him so I took the text to someone who I thought might know, and they hadn’t, but finally Simon (Marland) said he might be an agent in the North East.
“The questioning I was under was on things seven-and-a-half years ago. With due respect to anyone, they’d struggle to recall that. A lot of my answers to questions were ‘I can’t remember’ and they were interpreted as ‘unsatisfactory’ but it was honest because I couldn’t remember.
“We’d signed 12 players that summer. It was Sammy Lee’s summer.
“We lost 12 staff because Sam (Allardyce) had walked out and took half the staff with him. I think Gavin McCann was the first signing Sammy made because we wanted to back him, he was a quality signing, and he was experienced around the Premier League. It wasn’t expensive at that time – especially in terms of wages.
“I did speak to Aston Villa. I did speak to Richard Fitzgerald and that’s how the deal came about.
“That was my involvement until someone put a piece of paper in front of me, which was a representation agreement it turns out, and I signed it. I was accused of back-dating it but I didn’t because I didn’t date it in the first place.
“I get a lot of documents, week after week, day after day, that I sign.
“They get brought into me by the company secretary, the finance director, whoever. I don’t ask what it is, I sign it, and I trust that that’s their job.
“To accuse me of back-dating a document when I didn’t do it in the first place is a little bit difficult.
“It wasn’t a significant document in the case. It wouldn’t have altered the judge’s view, but the claimant was using it as an example of how we did things in the wrong manner.
“Then I was accused of being visibly uncomfortable giving evidence, well, I’ve never been in court before, I’ve never given evidence other than as a character witness for someone in the High Court in London, and I can tell you I was more visibly uncomfortable doing that.
“When you’ve got a barrister who I think is more intelligent and eloquent than I am and they are sitting there saying ‘I suggest to you Mr Gartside’ that I have done this or that, when I know I haven’t, I am not going to sit and smile.
“I am uncomfortable when people are telling me I have told lies, when I haven’t told any.
“For that to be used to slaughter my character is very upsetting. It’s damaging.
“I believe in principles and if someone is not got the right to something, I’ll fight it. Why should I concede and give someone money they don’t deserve?”
Q: Do you regret what came out in a radio interview about Dietmar Hamman and the deal that took him to Manchester City?
A: “No. I do regret people’s reaction because I did it as something I was asked to do. I thought Colin Murray was getting a favour out of me.
“The only thing I said in there that was actually wrong was that we did sign a piece of paper, put it in a draw and waited until the first of July.
“Maybe it was a bit daft. Maybe I should be less honest and open about it.”
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