Attendance for the final: 8049. That's embarrassing, and sums the whole thing up.
Plastic Club beats Plastic Club to win fourth promotion in five years. While proper clubs like Notts County go down and proper clubs like Bury and Bolton are on their uppers financially. Sad. Really sad.
Salford GTF. Fylde GTF. Crawley GTF. Brickbats to the lot of 'em. Bouquets to Leyton Orient and, a division further down, Stockport.
(05-12-2019, 06:38 AM)Alan Partridge Wrote: Notts county and Bolton who spent way beyond their means?
Every club does it.
Bolton, I agree. County aren't in this situation because of what happened there years ago though.
The problem, essentially, is this. Clubs without proper fanbases cannot sustain themselves beyond a certain point without ridiculously large injections of cash. Nowadays, football is supposed to be a business, yet these are profoundly anti-competitive practices.
That wage bill Acey posted above is from the National League North. It'll have been much, much higher this season. Hopefully, the EFL's FFP rules - which are pretty stringent, especially in League 2 - will stop Salford in their tracks.
Rushden and Diamonds did this too. It was always obvious they'd hit a glass ceiling; at which moment, Max Griggs pulled his cash out and they went bust. See also: Gretna. Was that a fairytale? Or a complete nonsense?
I'm all for any club growing sustainably. This is different though. And disastrous for many clubs in the same Greater Manchester area.
(05-12-2019, 06:55 AM)Hendricks Wrote: Far too many professional clubs both sides of the border.
I'd say there's far too many clubs playing in nationwide leagues both sides of the border. Scotland has - what, 20 full time clubs? Alloa have done unbelievably well to stay up, like Dumbarton used to do. Raith are doing pretty badly to still be in League 1, playoff final permitting.
20 full time clubs doesn't seem too many to me. What I've always thought was crazy is part time clubs with not many fans having to play midweek games in deep midwinter hundreds of miles away. How do players get the time off work? How do those teams prepare properly? What happens to those players when games are called off? How many businesses have the understanding needed for that?
As for England: its issues could be fixed if it had five (possibly even six) top divisions, all of 20 clubs, all with three up, three down. At present, one up plus one through the playoffs between the National League and League 2 is an anachronism; so is the faintly ridiculous four up, four down between Leagues 1 and 2, which dates back to the old Division Three North and South.
As it stands, this season's National League North - Level 6 in England - had Stockport County, Altrincham, Blyth Spartans, Bradford Park Avenue, Telford, Chester, Kidderminster, Boston, York City, Southport, Darlington, Hereford, FC United, and Nuneaton. Quite an insanely strong division packed with famous old clubs and/or clubs related to them.
(05-12-2019, 07:17 AM)Chris Benoit Wrote: Yup totally agree. They should always live within their means and not have to rely on external cash injections to survive
Not to this extent, they shouldn't.
If Salford were losing 1.7m a year in National League North, it'll have been at least 3m this season. Maybe 4m. That's absurd. And that's also precisely why FFP exists in the EFL. It's high time the National League followed suit.
Very few clubs can tut at living out with their means these days tbh. It won us 3 cups. It's still not easy to fire through the leagues, will be interesting to see where they end up.
I think at that level throwing a bit of money around and getting players in way above the standard of the league it's easy to just fire through the leagues, it will naturally get more difficult going forward and it will end up in tears eventually.