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It is not straightforward sometimes understanding how Bolton Wanderers have strayed dangerously close to being financially shipwrecked when it does not seem too long ago that Sam Allardyce was dancing on the pitch with Jay-Jay Okocha and they were establishing themselves as the poster-boy team for every club of that size that wanted a place at the top table.
Yet there were a few clues offered up in a case at the high court recently about the kind of financial thinking that has helped to put them into this position and the only plausible reason why it has not generated more publicity is they are no longer involved in the glare of the Premier League.
The case was brought by an agent named Tony McGill, suing for £300,000 because he claimed he had set up a deal for Gavin McCann to sign from Aston Villa only to be cut out of the arrangement when Bolton brought in the sports agency SEM “at the last minute”. McGill lost his case, having not had a binding contract with McCann, but the judge did describe him as “basically credible” whereas it was a different choice of words to describe the Bolton chairman, Phil Gartside.
In court it emerged the agreement with SEM was dishonestly backdated to strengthen the agency’s position and, according to McGill’s lawyers, “forestall” any inquiry from the Football Association. Gartside originally claimed to have signed the document on 1 June but then admitted it was actually a week later. Judge Waksman describes the backdating as “amateurish”. He was not convinced Gartside was party to it but did note he was “becoming visibly uncomfortable when asked questions about this; I consider that he only accepted that he signed on 8 June when the other evidence rendered such a concession inevitable”. Gartside’s overall evidence, the judge concluded, contained “significant elements which were unsatisfactory”. As for SEM, the judge described evidence put forward by its chief executive, Jerome Anderson – and the supporters of Blackburn Rovers will remember this guy – as “very unreliable” and in one part “clearly implausible”. His colleague Jeff Weston was “unconvincing” and some of what he said had been “absurd”.
All that reflects badly on Gartside but it is the sums of money that really jump out and the fact that Bolton were willing to pay £300,000 in agent fees from what would ordinarily have been a routine £1m deal. Agents do not usually charge 30% unless they are dealing with exceedingly obliging clubs. And what did SEM do for that windfall? The judge makes it clear: “The result is that, in truth, SEM did little or nothing for their fee.” Little or nothing, and an invoice for £300,000, plus VAT. Nice work if you can get it.
Bolton, to recap, announced debts of £168.3m in their last financial figures, published in December. They are on their knees, without a manager and bottom of the Championship, and when the Bolton News interviewed Gartside a few days ago and asked him to explain the figures his answer was a wonderful piece of head-in-sand deflection. “I’m sick of answering that question,” he said. “If someone has been willing to invest that sort of money in this football team, why does anyone complain about it?”
That someone is the club’s owner, Eddie Davies, the Bolton-raised businessman who started watching his local team in 1958, the year Nat Lofthouse’s goals won the FA Cup, made his fortune through kettle parts and, at the age of 68, is the sole reason, from his home in the Isle of Man and via a company listed in Bermuda, why they are not rattling collection buckets outside the stadium.
Unfortunately for Gartside, the questions are perfectly legitimate given Bolton did, lest it be forgotten, spend 11 years in the most lucrative league in the world. Yes, their relegation in 2012 was a grievous setback and any club that struggles to get back under the parachute payments will inevitably suffer for it. Yet it is still staggering to see the speed at which Bolton have unravelled. There is more to it than just being a victim of circumstance and Gartside has to take a significant portion of the blame when the decision-making on his watch has been so profoundly poor.
It is certainly starting to seem like a trick of the mind that Gartside was once regarded as one of the sport’s more impressive administrators, thought of so highly he was given a place on the Wembley board and put in charge of the FA’s selection process when David Bernstein was made chairman. Then again, people used to rave about Peter Ridsdale at Leeds United. They do not have any fancy goldfish I am aware of in the ground we are now obliged to call the Macron but they do have a habit of being careless with their money and they have also been terribly short-sighted in their planning.
Johan Elmander may be taken as one example. He did not do a great deal for Bolton – he once went 11 months without a league goal – but the Swedish striker was the club’s record signing when he arrived from Toulouse in 2008. They gave him a three-year contract and, first of all, what a strange piece of business that was when a player’s valuation starts to depreciate as soon as he is down to two years. Elmander was extremely poor for two seasons then had a better third year and left for Galatasaray on a free transfer. He had cost Bolton £8.2m and he was on £45,000-a-week wages. So, in total, one player alone cost Bolton in excess of £15m.
Perhaps Gartside could explain why he considered a 31-year-old midfielder worthy of a three-year contract and £25,000-a-week wages as he did in 2012 for Keith Andrews, a moderate player who has been loaned out for the past two seasons. Yet there are plenty of other examples. The list is substantial and this, more than anything, is where Bolton have lost their money: poor signings, exorbitant wages, muddled thinking.
Gartside once described as “numpties” the Bolton supporters who dared criticise him. The volume has been turned up lately – a poll in the local newspaper shows 94% want him to resign – and the crowd are probably entitled to be jumpy when, a few miles up the road, there is another club that Bolton once looked down on but who could probably now teach them a thing or two. Wigan Athletic’s debt is a manageable £20.7m and their last financial figures showed an £822,000 profit. True, this is only their second season in the Championship, compared with Bolton’s third, and the next set of results might be revealing. Yet there is no hint of implosion; just the sense they are run with clarity and common sense.
At Bolton it is a history of strange and often unexplained goings-on if one thinks back to the infamous Panorama documentary about Allardyce and, later on, the considerable influence of Mark Curtis, one of the industry’s more controversial agents. Bolton never did get round to replying to the list of 20 questions my colleague David Conn put to them in 2007 about their financial dealings (although all of those named in the Panorama programme denied the allegations).
“I’m sick of answering that question,” Gartside said about the mountain of debt, and no doubt he is. In football the people in powerful positions never do like to go into detail when, ultimately, it might highlight their failures.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/oct/11/phil-gartside-bolton-wanderers-abyss?CMP=twt_gu
Yet there were a few clues offered up in a case at the high court recently about the kind of financial thinking that has helped to put them into this position and the only plausible reason why it has not generated more publicity is they are no longer involved in the glare of the Premier League.
The case was brought by an agent named Tony McGill, suing for £300,000 because he claimed he had set up a deal for Gavin McCann to sign from Aston Villa only to be cut out of the arrangement when Bolton brought in the sports agency SEM “at the last minute”. McGill lost his case, having not had a binding contract with McCann, but the judge did describe him as “basically credible” whereas it was a different choice of words to describe the Bolton chairman, Phil Gartside.
In court it emerged the agreement with SEM was dishonestly backdated to strengthen the agency’s position and, according to McGill’s lawyers, “forestall” any inquiry from the Football Association. Gartside originally claimed to have signed the document on 1 June but then admitted it was actually a week later. Judge Waksman describes the backdating as “amateurish”. He was not convinced Gartside was party to it but did note he was “becoming visibly uncomfortable when asked questions about this; I consider that he only accepted that he signed on 8 June when the other evidence rendered such a concession inevitable”. Gartside’s overall evidence, the judge concluded, contained “significant elements which were unsatisfactory”. As for SEM, the judge described evidence put forward by its chief executive, Jerome Anderson – and the supporters of Blackburn Rovers will remember this guy – as “very unreliable” and in one part “clearly implausible”. His colleague Jeff Weston was “unconvincing” and some of what he said had been “absurd”.
All that reflects badly on Gartside but it is the sums of money that really jump out and the fact that Bolton were willing to pay £300,000 in agent fees from what would ordinarily have been a routine £1m deal. Agents do not usually charge 30% unless they are dealing with exceedingly obliging clubs. And what did SEM do for that windfall? The judge makes it clear: “The result is that, in truth, SEM did little or nothing for their fee.” Little or nothing, and an invoice for £300,000, plus VAT. Nice work if you can get it.
Bolton, to recap, announced debts of £168.3m in their last financial figures, published in December. They are on their knees, without a manager and bottom of the Championship, and when the Bolton News interviewed Gartside a few days ago and asked him to explain the figures his answer was a wonderful piece of head-in-sand deflection. “I’m sick of answering that question,” he said. “If someone has been willing to invest that sort of money in this football team, why does anyone complain about it?”
That someone is the club’s owner, Eddie Davies, the Bolton-raised businessman who started watching his local team in 1958, the year Nat Lofthouse’s goals won the FA Cup, made his fortune through kettle parts and, at the age of 68, is the sole reason, from his home in the Isle of Man and via a company listed in Bermuda, why they are not rattling collection buckets outside the stadium.
Unfortunately for Gartside, the questions are perfectly legitimate given Bolton did, lest it be forgotten, spend 11 years in the most lucrative league in the world. Yes, their relegation in 2012 was a grievous setback and any club that struggles to get back under the parachute payments will inevitably suffer for it. Yet it is still staggering to see the speed at which Bolton have unravelled. There is more to it than just being a victim of circumstance and Gartside has to take a significant portion of the blame when the decision-making on his watch has been so profoundly poor.
It is certainly starting to seem like a trick of the mind that Gartside was once regarded as one of the sport’s more impressive administrators, thought of so highly he was given a place on the Wembley board and put in charge of the FA’s selection process when David Bernstein was made chairman. Then again, people used to rave about Peter Ridsdale at Leeds United. They do not have any fancy goldfish I am aware of in the ground we are now obliged to call the Macron but they do have a habit of being careless with their money and they have also been terribly short-sighted in their planning.
Johan Elmander may be taken as one example. He did not do a great deal for Bolton – he once went 11 months without a league goal – but the Swedish striker was the club’s record signing when he arrived from Toulouse in 2008. They gave him a three-year contract and, first of all, what a strange piece of business that was when a player’s valuation starts to depreciate as soon as he is down to two years. Elmander was extremely poor for two seasons then had a better third year and left for Galatasaray on a free transfer. He had cost Bolton £8.2m and he was on £45,000-a-week wages. So, in total, one player alone cost Bolton in excess of £15m.
Perhaps Gartside could explain why he considered a 31-year-old midfielder worthy of a three-year contract and £25,000-a-week wages as he did in 2012 for Keith Andrews, a moderate player who has been loaned out for the past two seasons. Yet there are plenty of other examples. The list is substantial and this, more than anything, is where Bolton have lost their money: poor signings, exorbitant wages, muddled thinking.
Gartside once described as “numpties” the Bolton supporters who dared criticise him. The volume has been turned up lately – a poll in the local newspaper shows 94% want him to resign – and the crowd are probably entitled to be jumpy when, a few miles up the road, there is another club that Bolton once looked down on but who could probably now teach them a thing or two. Wigan Athletic’s debt is a manageable £20.7m and their last financial figures showed an £822,000 profit. True, this is only their second season in the Championship, compared with Bolton’s third, and the next set of results might be revealing. Yet there is no hint of implosion; just the sense they are run with clarity and common sense.
At Bolton it is a history of strange and often unexplained goings-on if one thinks back to the infamous Panorama documentary about Allardyce and, later on, the considerable influence of Mark Curtis, one of the industry’s more controversial agents. Bolton never did get round to replying to the list of 20 questions my colleague David Conn put to them in 2007 about their financial dealings (although all of those named in the Panorama programme denied the allegations).
“I’m sick of answering that question,” Gartside said about the mountain of debt, and no doubt he is. In football the people in powerful positions never do like to go into detail when, ultimately, it might highlight their failures.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/oct/11/phil-gartside-bolton-wanderers-abyss?CMP=twt_gu
