Sweating spinal fluid

It’s worse than I thought. I’m over­whelmed by the scale of the prob­lems facing Brad­ford City. Novem­ber is not going to be a happy month.

This is a club that, after sev­eral years of struggle in League Two, had finally been releg­ated six months ago. Finally exit­ing the Foot­ball League is the cul­min­a­tion of a dec­ade of decline. The league table doesn’t lie, as they say, and this graph neatly describes Bradford’s recent history:

Who likes skiing?

I don’t know the ins and outs of the club’s his­tory, but just from the graph alone, I can’t help think­ing that the pro­mo­tion to the Premi­er­ship was a blip. Maybe the club over­reached itself? Maybe it tried too hard to com­pete at the top level and has suffered the con­sequences. Still, on the basis of the attend­ance fig­ures and the capa­city of the ground, I feel that the club’s nat­ural level might be found in the Cham­pi­on­ship. Given that many clubs in that divi­sion have com­par­able levels of sup­port, it doesn’t seem unreas­on­able to be able to com­pete with them assum­ing suf­fi­cient rev­enue to pay the required wages. Still, given that we are cur­rently near the bot­tom of the Blue Square Premier, it’s prob­ably best not to put the cart before the horse.

The club has an out­stand­ing loan of over one mil­lion pounds, and are deep into their over­draft. So, you’d think that now they are inhab­it­ing the less-than-lucrative upper ech­el­ons of non-league foot­ball, someone would have taken a hard look at the club and what it is spend­ing its money on. Right?

Nope.

There are 75 play­ers on the books. Aston­ish­ing for a debt-ridden non-league club. The wage bill is in excess of £1M per annum. The club is haem­or­rhaging money. Apart from being utterly demor­al­ised, the first team doesn’t look too bad. The real prob­lems seem to be with the youth set up. There are 45 play­ers in the U18 squad, and none of them are rated by the back­room staff at all. There doesn’t seem to be a pro­spect amongst them. So why are they here at all?

In my first week, I ter­min­ate the con­tracts of 29 play­ers and three staff mem­bers. It’s a pretty gruelling start to the job. I retain six­teen U18s to be able to ful­fil their fix­tures for the rest of the sea­son, but I know that they will be leav­ing come next May too. Still, youth con­tracts are inex­pens­ive, so this only makes a small dent in the wage bill. The board’s budget is par­tic­u­larly miserly at only 18% of turnover, but I have to accept that they are determ­ined to get the club’s bank bal­ance look­ing a bit healthier.

I can’t help feel­ing annoyed at my pre­de­cessors. What were they think­ing? In gen­eral, I think that foot­ball clubs are too will­ing to arbit­rar­ily sack their man­agers. Often, the core of the back­room team will leave with the man­ager, and the res­ult­ing tur­moil can only lead to pro­longed instabil­ity. It’s short-sighted and destruct­ive. In Bradford’s case, though, I think they were prob­ably right to sack their man­ager: I simply can’t think of any jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the mess I have inherited.