Bury FC

[alexbach]

Bury have been officially expelled from the EFL. Very sad news indeed.

Gigg lane always welcoming in my experience.Perhaps bringing a perspective to the constant whinging on a fixture change.And maybe time in the national league from 2020 beneficial

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Maybe but easy say when it not your money that was spent.
Also we not whinging we just writing our thoughts about it, IF this is not allowed then there is no point in having this message board.

actuallyletchbee Idid spend money, so try engaging before going down the Cranfield route of petulance

[becbee]

Bury have been officially expelled from the EFL. Very sad news indeed.

Gigg lane always welcoming in my experience.Perhaps bringing a perspective to the constant whinging on a fixture change.And maybe time in the national league from 2020 beneficial

Sent from my 5033X using Tapatalk

Maybe but easy say when it not your money that was spent.
Also we not whinging we just writing our thoughts about it, IF this is not allowed then there is no point in having this message board.

actuallyletchbee Idid spend money, so try engaging before going down the Cranfield route of petulance

I can't see that he's being remotely petulant.

[Roy57]

Bury threaten legal action. The latest statement from Bury FC that the BBC sport say they have seen 16.30 hrs today. Which is a letter to the EFL. Some points I can see there side. But some points in this statment. I do not agree with. Such as they don't agree they should be dropped five leagues and think the second division is fairer. Why should they be any different to other teams that have been folded. Clubs that have don't get dropped just one league. They also state how did previous owner Steve Dale pass the fit and proper person test. I believe this was a guide set up for clubs to follow. There the ones who sold the club to this idiot not the EFL. So the responsibility lays with them. To sell your club for £1 surely must or should of alerted alarms bells. Such as Neil Warnock stated at the time. The club surely did there own tests. Cannot start blaming everybody else now. Bury did not get into this state since Dale took control. This has been boiling for at least three years. Over spending on transfers. Over spending on wages. Wages of £8000 and £6000 per week has been mentioned for at least 3 -4 players. Think majority of supporters throughout the country feel for Bury with what has happened. But statements blaming others is not going to help with feelings of others.
Can also see now why Darren Curry and TC have had problems bringing in a top striker. If average players in league one and below are asking for such stupid wages.

[X-Bumble]

Gutted for the fans and the club. Football is a community and its all the weaker now. Im sure in looking forward to the club bouncing back guys.

I think their situation is more dire than many think. There will be a whole season with no club and no football. This is where the real damage will be done.

Non die-hard fans will find something else to do on a Saturday and I think that will be a hard habit to break, especially if some of the more casual supporters decide to switch clubs.

If I were in a Bury KBA type fan situation I would be doing all I could to try and get the team into a division for this season (if possible). It is vital they continue to be relevant ASAP.

When Rushden & Diamonds folded they managed to run a under 18 team for the season they had no senior football which kept people involved to fill the year gap between original club folding and new club starting playing. I would hope any new club if unable to use Gigg Lane could use FC United's ground after Bury accommodated them until they got their own ground!

Yeah, I think it would be the most likely outcome due to the links between them. Cannot see them keeping Gigg Lane, but I hope they do.

[Bee_Forever]

Gigg lane always welcoming in my experience.Perhaps bringing a perspective to the constant whinging on a fixture change.And maybe time in the national league from 2020 beneficial

Sent from my 5033X using Tapatalk

Maybe but easy say when it not your money that was spent.
Also we not whinging we just writing our thoughts about it, IF this is not allowed then there is no point in having this message board.

actuallyletchbee Idid spend money, so try engaging before going down the Cranfield route of petulance

I can't see that he's being remotely petulant.

Thank you becbee. It's not the first time that alex has resorted to insulting me but I try to rise above it.

The Bury situation is dreadful and their supporters who like many of us follow them all over the country must be devastated. I hope they will be back in conference north sooner or later and doing what Hereford are doing to resurrect their club


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[barnetjohn]

BBC has a story on the letter from Bury

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49526433



FWIW here's my view on the questions in the letter

Why a late £7m bid from Brazilian multi-millionaire pastor Gustavo Benedito, which emerged on Tuesday afternoon, was not accepted. Benedito is a close friend of Bury's goalkeeping coach Adriano Basso.

I think this very likely due to the fact the bid was tabled so late in the day, and the EFL didn't have time to go through the paperwork, fit and proper persons tests etc.

Why the EFL said that a bid from an Italian consortium had not been received when the club insist it had.

This is harder to judge- one thing I will say that is based on experience from when Barnet have been in trouble, there are always rumours going round that "X has a put a bid in", "Y wants to buy the club", and these can encompass a broad spectrum from false rumours, to someone expressing an interest, to someone formally tabling a bid. It will be interesting to see what if any evidence can be brought forward to see where on the above spectrum the bid was.

Why the offer from C&N Sporting Risk was the only one accepted by the EFL and the only one granted an extension.

This is a fair question- if there genuinely were multiple bids. That said, I think the EFL's answer will be that the other bids came in after the deadline. Given that Bury's problems were well known and the club had been in dire straits for a while, you have to ask why these other bids didn't come sooner. The EFL decided to pull the plug - rightly or wrongly- because of the time elapsed into the season.

Why is it proportionate to consider dropping Bury five leagues - the club want the EFL to consider dropping them down to League Two instead.

I think the key thing here is that procedurally speaking Bury have been expelled as football league members, not relegated any number of divisions. If the EFL expel a club, then if/where/when they reform or start playing again isn't really an EFL decision. Bury were kicked out - rightly or wrongly - for failing to fulfil their fixtures, so the situation would be the same if they were in league 2. I guess the key problem for the EFL was the ongoing pileup of fixtures, and this would have been the same in league two as in league one.

Why owner Steve Dale passed the fit and proper person test.

This, this and thrice this. It is genuinely astonishing that the EFL concluded he was a fit and proper person to take over the club. He had no prior interest in football, a background in buying up and then liquidating troubled businesses, and didn't get the full paperwork in. The EFL has a lot of questions to answer here.

Why the EFL refused to meet with representatives of Bury on Friday.
Why ex-Port Vale chairman Norman Smurthwaite was not considered to be an appropriate owner.

Don't know enough about this to comment.

***

The EFL has major questions to answer about how it allowed Bury to get taken over by Dale, and more broadly about football governance. At the moment the league is basically a members organisation- it's owned and run by the clubs themselves so it's effectively the club's setting the rules for themselves. As a result lots of the rules around ownership and governance are fairly week.

An obvious reform would be to introduce a wage cap as a percentage of turnover to prevent clubs over-spending on wages. There's a bit of an "arms race" element to wage spending where clubs just keep trying to outdo each other, end up bidding up wages, but since the pool of players is basically the same, its a zero sum game. Introducing a salary cap would prevent some of this overspending, and would constraint the more financially lax clubs than the more prudent ones.

And for avoidance of doubt, I have a lot of sympathy with Bury fans. They have basically fallen victim to poor decision making and dodgy owners. The EFL have been asleep at the wheel for the former, and then suddenly come down very hard on them when financial problems come. One thing that should- but probably won't - come out of this sorry story is a big reform of the EFL, starting with stronger regulation and more independence from clubs.

[#Beebot]

The answer re. the different bids is that C&N was the only credible one. The Brazilian bid was from the owner of tinpot step 6 team Fire United, the Italian bid was from ex-Gateshead whackjob Joe Cala so was rightly dismissed, while Smurthwaite caused havoc at Port Vale and if the EFL really did not view him as fit and proper then that was also the right call.

Any of those bids going through would have been out of the frying pan, into the fire.

[pgbee]

Much as I feel sympathy for the Bury fans, the club seem to think they are a special causa and should only drop one league, presumably due to their history. Sorry do not agree with that and I'm sure fans of Maidstone, Aldershot etc wouldn't either.

[#Beebot]

Much as I feel sympathy for the Bury fans, the club seem to think they are a special causa and should only drop one league, presumably due to their history. Sorry do not agree with that and I'm sure fans of Maidstone, Aldershot etc wouldn't either.

In fairness, those clubs were both liquidated. Bury have not been (yet).

[HertsBee]

I see that MP's are now getting involved and insisting that Bury be re-instated in League 2 next season. Having already told clubs that only 1 will be relegated from League 2, surely the EFL can't go against their own rules and change their minds. It will make a mockery of the whole situation. Bottom line is that Bury clearly overspent on getting promotion and cheated their way up, at the expense of all the abiding Teams who stuck to what they could afford. They have been found out and should just accept the punishment given to them.

[beew]

I see that MP's are now getting involved and insisting that Bury be re-instated in League 2 next season. Having already told clubs that only 1 will be relegated from League 2, surely the EFL can't go against their own rules and change their minds. It will make a mockery of the whole situation. Bottom line is that Bury clearly overspent on getting promotion and cheated their way up, at the expense of all the abiding Teams who stuck to what they could afford. They have been found out and should just accept the punishment given to them.

And that is what all happen to them. They broke the rules and couldn't get a deal through in the extended timescales. The other 23 clubs in L1 will now suffer financial hardships from the lost game that they can't put on. No way back from here, unfortunately.

[barnetjohn]

I see that MP's are now getting involved and insisting that Bury be re-instated in League 2 next season. Having already told clubs that only 1 will be relegated from League 2, surely the EFL can't go against their own rules and change their minds. It will make a mockery of the whole situation. Bottom line is that Bury clearly overspent on getting promotion and cheated their way up, at the expense of all the abiding Teams who stuck to what they could afford. They have been found out and should just accept the punishment given to them.

Agree with the idea that financial laxity shouldn't be rewarded because it hands an unfair advantage to a club. The key thing is what is a proportional punishment. Kicking a club out of the league, and thus effectively forcing them out of existence or down 4 or 5 divisions seems too hard to me.

There are penalties available in the game like points deductions which can be pretty severe. Its true that they might have benefitted from spending a lot to get promotion (though that was within the rules), but if a team gets a points deduction or an automatic relegation, you can undo the intital advantage they got without forcing them out of business. That's a big part of the reason the 10 point penalty was introduced for clubs who entered a CVA (Creditors Voluntary Agreement = deal to pay off debtors less than you owe them).

In terms of the league processes- worth saying that Bury weren't kicked out as a punishment for spending too much, technically speaking it was because they couldn't fulfil their fixtures. But in any event- the league could have the rule that any team which can't fulfil fixtures gets relegated rather than kicked out. That would be a pretty powerful deterrent and rectify any previous financial overspending, but would avoid directly forcing a club out of business.

In the future, I'd also support having either salary caps which mean you can't spend more than a certain amount of turnover on wages, or require that any wages above a certain % of turnover have to be pre-funded. There's other rules around borrowing, mortgaging club assets that could be brought in to prevent similar situations. In many cases, clubs getting into financial difficulties is not (just) because they have spent more than they have coming in on the regular football operations side, its often because of other issues around debt, assets and other stuff away from the football side which could and should be more heavily regulated.

[becbee]

Salary caps become meaningless when a club goes months without paying the wages.
Dale bought Bury for £1 then made no attempt to pay off the debts, which had come about from years of mis-management. There were mortgages on mortgages, etc.
Why should L2 have to have a club which can't fulfill their fixtures and pay their wages any more than L1 should?

IMO the EFL gave Bolton and Bury every opportunity to sort themselves out. Far more so than the Conference did to Hereford, Salisbury, Scarborough, Chester, etc. Three of those are ex FL clubs but they all had to start again pretty low down.

[barnetjohn]

I definitely agree that salary caps are basically useless as a a cure once a club has saddled itself with debts. Maybe my post wasn't very clear that I see them as a preventative measure to stop clubs running up big wage bills in the first place.

In the specific case of Bury the problems also stemmed from Dale using the club's assets to try to prop up / finance other businesses. That wasn't anything to do with the football side and in the future this should be prevented by stronger EFL rules.

I think this season EFL were quite flexible with both but my criticism of the EFL is that they let Dale take over in the first place and have very weak governance rules.

I think that missing a season and then a relegation and enforced points deduction is punishment enough. Forcing them out of business is a step to far.

Worth saying too- Aldershot and Maidstone went bust first and then had to reform way down the structure. It wasn't a decision by the league to relegate them that far.

Bury made mistakes but that was mainly down to their chairman. In 1993, we were in a similar plight and made the case that fans shouldn't be punished with their club getting kicked out because of the decisions of a chairman they didn't like or choose.

I'd go for the same principle here: punish them with relegation (even down to the conference) but don't kill them off entirely.

[X-Bumble]

It is my understanding that the club is unable to pay its outstanding debts, so without a benefactor the club will fall into insolvency. This is why the EFL expelled and not relegated. but I could be wrong on that.