Would we be in a better financial position if the business side of the club has been handled better?
In my last article, I slated Eddie Davies, without really giving him credit for the good stuff he`s done for Bolton Wanderers. In 2003, our club was incredibly close to falling into administration when he increased his stake in the club to 94.5% from 29.7% for just £2.25 million. Unbelievably valuing Bolton at just under £3.5 million! From there he continued to finance the club which allowed us to blossom into a top Premier League side, who in 2005, missed out on a Champions League place to Liverpool on goal difference. He continued to finance us up until just a couple of years ago, which has kept from an even worse financial situation than we`re in now.
Since the arrival of Financial FairPlay regulations, it has become less feasible for Davies to bankroll the club like he used. Perhaps he would have lent us more money recently, but couldn’t due to the rules.
A more likely reason for our current situation is the poor business that has done by the club, meaning we`ve been unable to maximise our profits, or in our case, minimise our losses.
This starts with failing to find the right manager after Big Sam left, we could have saved ourselves a lot of money had we not had to “buy in” new managers after sacking and paying off old ones.
The thing that bugs me, purely for the footballing reasons, has been the way that the club has poorly organised its contracts with players. It is certainly not easy to get it right, but it feels like we`ve had too many poor players, who have sat around the club taking a wage for the final year or two of their contract without contributing on the pitch. I`m hoping Liam Trotter doesn’t turn into one of these players but it seems like he will.
What is even more frustrating is that we`ve had a number of brilliant players who we`ve failed to sign on long term contracts and have left for nothing, players like Marcos Alonso. He only really came into form during his last year, however he was a young and exciting talent at left back, so ideally with a couple of years left on his contract, he could have been offered a long term contract to keep him with us for four or five years. Tal Ben Haim was good defender who left us for a big club, Chelsea for free. Gary Cahill also when to Chelsea, players like him should never have been allowed to play into the final year of their contract. As a result, we lost him to Chelsea for just £7 million, making a profit of just £2 million from when we signed him. Had we signed these players up for three or four or five more years, then at least if they wanted to leave we`d have some leverage, and wouldn’t lose them for free or such small fees. We could have taken significant sums for these three players if they had two or three years left.
Maybe we did offer these contracts but the players didn’t sign, or the club might have not have been in a financial position where it could afford to hand out such big contracts.
The club did manage to take a pretty good fee of £15 million for Nicholas Anelka back in January 2008, so credit to them for that. That money was reasonably well spent. Before the January window was over, the club had spent most of this money, buying in Gary Cahill, Matty Taylor and Gretar Steinsson. All of whom made performed well for us.
If the club had managed for fill the stadium week in week out that could have solved a lot of our problems. Admittedly it isn’t easy to fill 28,000 seats, but if we didn’t have any of the problems mentioned above, we probably would have had more money to spend on players and would have been playing better football, which is what fills stadiums.
I don`t know whether these issues are down to Phil Gartside, Eddie Davies or the host of managers we`ve had in recent years, but all of them would have some responsibilty. Running a football club certainly isn’t easy, but hopefully these mistakes aren`t made again in the future.