Bury - EFL to discuss re-entry to L2 | and Bolton - sold

Wayne's World

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Excuse my ignorance but does this mean Bury will now start back in the lower leagues as in the National league or have they completed folded as a football club altogether?
 

Rolandofgilead

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Presumably an extra promotion place from the conference or one less relegated. They say they'll come to a ruling on the details (like whether the extra place will be allocated on position or playoff etc) at their September meeting.

There have been suggestions that Bury could be allowed to join League Two next season having sat out this year. But I think that's all just pure speculation and a lot of wishful thinking.
Well i don't know the ins and outs of the financial rules and laws etc, but i would imagine that if they liquidate the company which would clear the debts then they would have to start again completely. However, i assume that if they can clear the dates somehow in the next 9/10 months then they could start again higher up the pyramid?
 

Bojan11

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Disgraceful how it’s reached this stage. EFL and EPL should be doing better also to support these teams. The tons of money being thrown around in football yet nobody can seem to help Bury or Bolton.
 

Rolandofgilead

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In 1992 when a new Maidstone club was formed after Maidstone United were expelled from the football league (called Maidstone Invicta) they were forced to restart in the Kent counties forth division.

I discovered this researching them for my first commentary of the season.
 

FootballHQ

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Bolton "fans" outside the stadium doing fortnight dances and jumping and waving in front of the camera, as their club is on it's deathbed. Sky with their deadline clock. The state of modern football.

People all over twitter saying us and City should have bailed them both out. Sets a bad precedent though doesn't it. What in the feck happened with Bolton? They were a top 10 Premier League club ten years ago.
Eddie Davies passed away. He was their main benefactor in the premier league years and bankrolled the signings of Okocha, Djorkeff, Hierro etc. After getting relegated he kept on writing off debt and giving them loans.

With Bury they have sailed closed to the wind many times and simply not learnt their lesson. Just two years ago they had strikeforce of Beckford, Tom Pope, Ish Miller, Brown all on ridiculous money.

Can understand the stick Steve Dale is getting but their previous owner created much of this mess.

This from 2014:

https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...v/12/bury-high-interest-loans-shadow-recovery

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2016/10/...winding-up-petition-and-search-for-gigg-lane/

From 2016. Bury demise HAS NOT happened overnight. Simply been years in the making.
 

Rafaeldagold

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I don’t know if I’m a bit confused here but everyone saying ‘rip bury’ - they’re only being expelled from the football league right? Sad & shameful of course but The club is still alive for now?
 

Rolandofgilead

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I don’t know if I’m a bit confused here but everyone saying ‘rip bury’ - they’re only being expelled from the football league right? Sad & shameful of course but The club is still alive for now?
Well yeah, but with they still have the debt and now have absolutely no way at all of generating any income so liquidation now looks very likely from what i understand.
 

Big Ben Foster

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I don’t know if I’m a bit confused here but everyone saying ‘rip bury’ - they’re only being expelled from the football league right? Sad & shameful of course but The club is still alive for now?
I'm guessing they'll be liquidated and a successor club will be formed by the fans, starting at the bottom of the pyramid.
 

Charlie Foley

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Eddie Davies passed away. He was their main benefactor in the premier league years and bankrolled the signings of Okocha, Djorkeff, Hierro etc. After getting relegated he kept on writing off debt and giving them loans.

With Bury they have sailed closed to the wind many times and simply not learnt their lesson. Just two years ago they had strikeforce of Beckford, Tom Pope, Ish Miller, Brown all on ridiculous money.

Can understand the stick Steve Dale is getting but their previous owner created much of this mess.

This from 2014:

https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...v/12/bury-high-interest-loans-shadow-recovery

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2016/10/...winding-up-petition-and-search-for-gigg-lane/

From 2016. Bury demise HAS NOT happened overnight. Simply been years in the making.
Very informative cheers
 

Rolandofgilead

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Are you the commentary guy for Weymouth?:lol: I'll have definitely listened to you before if so.
I am but i only started this season, trying to learn as much as i can and get a job doing it somewhere, but i know the chances are slim to none.
 

dumbo

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Yeah but amongst all your waffle it still isn't Man United, or City's fault, which was the point.
Yeah but amongst all your I'm alright Jack hand washing it still bears mentioning a broader view of the game and the pressures the financial disparity can have on clubs lower down the pyramid, which was the point.
 
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SambaBoy

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Baffling that Bury were spending such big sums on wages considering their income and the division they were in. Giving multiple players over the age of 25, 3 year contracts on wages over £7-8k a week. They were always going to run into trouble, and it seems they have been doing it for years and skirting the line.
 

jojojo

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"Bury" didn't over spend, its owner did.

Bury was owned by Stewart Day who was selling student accommodation (some of which never got built) as a property investment. Hundreds of people lost money in what was sold as an investment in multiple buy-to-let properties. To give an example of how his business worked:

The freehold of Appleton Point was sold in May 2015 to E & J Ground Rents No 1 LLP for £850,000, who subsequently leased the basement car park back to Mederco for 999 years at a peppercorn rent. Mederco then sold the car parking spaces to another batch of investors for £9,995 each, again for a guaranteed yield of 9% for five years with an uplifted buy-back after that.
It had a lot of appeal to small investors with small pension pots and people using P2P investment umbrella groups like Lendy (investors who didn't know that £27m of the £152m in the fund were invested in Day's companies) - who saw the "guaranteed" high interest and didn't see that its heart was something that looks very like a Ponzi scheme.

Bury FC got wrapped up in that same game and the speculate to accumulate "spend now, pay later" philosophy. Day was showing that "he" had so much money he could even treat a local football club as a charity. Except he didn't, he mortgaged its assets and put his (and ultimately his property business investors) money in as loans.

He put the Bury FC car park into a lease-resale scheme like the one in that apartment block. It's not that people were asked to buy a lease on parking place at Bury FC - they were told about a guaranteed 9% yield on parking spaces.

He went bankrupt when he ran out of new investors, the tax men closed in and some of his building projects went wrong. The club was an extension of the same game for him.

Bury didn't run up debts - Day did and some of them were on his football operation. Whether what Day did was a con or a gamble gone wrong is for the courts.

The question for the EFL is whether an individual can be allowed to destabilise a club, saddle it with debt (not "give it" money) and sell off its assets - and yet still be its owner.
 

JohnnyKills

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I don’t know if I’m a bit confused here but everyone saying ‘rip bury’ - they’re only being expelled from the football league right? Sad & shameful of course but The club is still alive for now?
The club will keep going as long as there are people to support it, right? It may have to reform and start from the bottom though.
 

jojojo

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I don’t know if I’m a bit confused here but everyone saying ‘rip bury’ - they’re only being expelled from the football league right? Sad & shameful of course but The club is still alive for now?
Alive but with no assets and no income. So alive is a bit of a moot point.

There's an argument that any deal that could have been done yesterday can now be done next week at a discount price. If they manage to do it, which relies on there still being a buyer and the companies who own the stadium and car park accepting that they can't make money on the land, then there's still a glimmer.
 

DomesticTadpole

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People saying they can go and support United or City. No they can't. Bury is their football club, has been all their lives. The EFL should never have allowed this scumbag to buy the club. It isn't just awful for the fans it is for the community, any work they did with the town.
 

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Baffling that Bury were spending such big sums on wages considering their income and the division they were in. Giving multiple players over the age of 25, 3 year contracts on wages over £7-8k a week. They were always going to run into trouble, and it seems they have been doing it for years and skirting the line.
That’s where I have sympathy with the workers and the community, but when the fans were on the pitch celebrating promotion they didn’t care that they’d basically cheated another team out of it. It’s very easy to blame the EFL, but this hasn’t exactly been something that has happened for the first time or very quickly either. It’s easy to turn a blind eye when you’re getting new players and winning leagues.

They have had help too. City gave them a training ground but they couldn’t even maintain that properly.

The same with Rangers. Cheated for years and years and expect the other clubs to have any sympathy when it all comes crashing down.
 

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Yeah but amongst all your I'm alright Jack hand washing it still bears mentioning a broader view of the game and the pressures the financial disparity can have on clubs lower down the pyramid, which was the point.
Why should other clubs be responsible for a club being run irresponsibly?

How is it fair to the clubs who make the effort to operate their finances in a proper sustainable manner if somebody else can offer higher wages and spend more on transfers to give themselves an advantage and then be rescued when it goes tits up?

It's only a matter of time before we see more cases like this. Just look at the wage to turnover ratios in the Championship as clubs chase the Premier League dream, it's unsustainable and it's not the fault of the bigger clubs.
 

jojojo

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The club will keep going as long as there are people to support it, right? It may have to reform and start from the bottom though.
If it loses the stadium, it would have to move out of town. If it does that, it'll never have quite the same meaning for its fans. It's role in connecting the generations and the community will be hard to reproduce.

There will be some kind of club formed. If only because the club was the umbrella for kids teams etc in the area. It might even be called Bury. Who knows, one day it might get a Salford City sort of boom. Hard though, there's not a lot of money floating around in Bury, so in some ways - "once it's gone, it's gone".
 

TheLiverBird

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It’s certainly a sad day for football to see such a thing happen to an EFL Club.

Everyone involved in the Club especially the fans, it must be incredibly hard going. It’s not just a case of meh, that’s that then onto the next thing, for thousands supporting Bury has been tradition, a lifestyle, all of a sudden just ripped away from them.

It’s easy to say the big Clubs should have bailed them out considering what was on the line, especially considering 16 of the the 20 premier league teams were happy to pay £250k each to just one man in Richard Scudamore upon leaving his position, yet bailing out a fellow professional football club collectively is a step too far.....

Only problem with that is, it sets a dangerous precedent, don’t worry lower league clubs, stumble into trouble and we’ll bail you out, it’s not a great message to send out.

All in all there has been massive catastrophic failures at Bury because of one or 2 people that is no fault of anybody else.

I genuinely feel for my fellow supporters of football.
 

matt10000

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Disgraceful how it’s reached this stage. EFL and EPL should be doing better also to support these teams. The tons of money being thrown around in football yet nobody can seem to help Bury or Bolton.
You can’t just give money to clubs that have been mis-managed and over spent, it is not fair on the clubs that are run properly. Could you imagine Aldi being told that they have to contribute money to Tesco? No it is down to the fit and proper person test - the kind of people who run these clubs badly should never have been allowed to run them.
 
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yumtum

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It’s certainly a sad day for football to see such a thing happen to an EFL Club.

Everyone involved in the Club especially the fans, it must be incredibly hard going. It’s not just a case of meh, that’s that then onto the next thing, for thousands supporting Bury has been tradition, a lifestyle, all of a sudden just ripped away from them.

It’s easy to say the big Clubs should have bailed them out considering what was on the line, especially considering 16 of the the 20 premier league teams were happy to pay £250k each to just one man in Richard Scudamore upon leaving his position, yet bailing out a fellow professional football club collectively is a step too far.....

Only problem with that is, it sets a dangerous precedent, don’t worry lower league clubs, stumble into trouble and we’ll bail you out, it’s not a great message to send out.

All in all there has been massive catastrophic failures at Bury because of one or 2 people that is no fault of anybody else.

I genuinely feel for my fellow supporters of football.
Read @jojojo post above.

PL clubs could give more money than they already do, it would just go in the pockets of these owners, Bury would still be in this position if PL clubs gave them 1m a month.

The Premier League is wealthy because of smart businessmen, they're not going to vote to give away more money to potential seedy guys like Day and Dale.
 

Robbo's Shoulder

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Chester is one of my local teams, I'm fairly certain the guy who owned Chester was extremely dodgy.
It was a scouse boxing promoter/businessman and convicted criminal who was heavily linked to Curtis Warren called Steven Vaughan. He did exactly the same at Barrow AFC, luckily we survived although we were kicked out of the Conference for improper administration. We did warn Chester not to get involved as we warned Bangor City who are in all sorts of troubles under his ownership.
 

DomesticTadpole

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It was a scouse boxing promoter/businessman and convicted criminal who was heavily linked to Curtis Warren called Steven Vaughan. He did exactly the same at Barrow AFC, luckily we survived although we were kicked out of the Conference for improper administration. We did warn Chester not to get involved as we warned Bangor City who are in all sorts of troubles under his ownership.
Steve Vaughan!!!! Boooooo!!!!
There was a Rochdale fan on Talksport before. Bury is their biggest derby and that game brings in a lot of money, which Rochdale will now lose as well. The amount of business in Bury this will affect, pubs, food outlets which are now going to lose valuable income.
 

SambaBoy

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Why should other clubs be responsible for a club being run irresponsibly?

How is it fair to the clubs who make the effort to operate their finances in a proper sustainable manner if somebody else can offer higher wages and spend more on transfers to give themselves an advantage and then be rescued when it goes tits up?

It's only a matter of time before we see more cases like this. Just look at the wage to turnover ratios in the Championship as clubs chase the Premier League dream, it's unsustainable and it's not the fault of the bigger clubs.
Read somewhere that in 17/18 season, the wage to turnover ratio for teams in the Championship was on average 110% which is crazy. These owners are putting money into it hoping to make the big time to get the parachute payments and the TV money from the PL and if it fails, they just can leave the club in a mess.
 

Rado_N

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Read somewhere that in 17/18 season, the wage to turnover ratio for teams in the Championship was on average 110% which is crazy. These owners are putting money into it hoping to make the big time to get the parachute payments and the TV money from the PL and if it fails, they just can leave the club in a mess.
Exactly, and that's the average, there's some up around 160-170%.
 

JohnnyKills

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If it loses the stadium, it would have to move out of town. If it does that, it'll never have quite the same meaning for its fans. It's role in connecting the generations and the community will be hard to reproduce.

There will be some kind of club formed. If only because the club was the umbrella for kids teams etc in the area. It might even be called Bury. Who knows, one day it might get a Salford City sort of boom. Hard though, there's not a lot of money floating around in Bury, so in some ways - "once it's gone, it's gone".
Could they merge with Salford or would that be too much for the fans to cope with?
 

JohnnyKills

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Read somewhere that in 17/18 season, the wage to turnover ratio for teams in the Championship was on average 110% which is crazy. These owners are putting money into it hoping to make the big time to get the parachute payments and the TV money from the PL and if it fails, they just can leave the club in a mess.
Completely. It's absurd. In this day and age it should be impossible for football clubs to lose money.

The solution isn't for the EFL clubs to get more money from the top flight. It's for them to spend less.
 

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In 1992 when a new Maidstone club was formed after Maidstone United were expelled from the football league (called Maidstone Invicta) they were forced to restart in the Kent counties forth division.

I discovered this researching them for my first commentary of the season.
Halifax Town too. They got relegated three divisions and couldn’t operate under that name anymore, they’re now FC Halifax.
 

Robbo's Shoulder

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Steve Vaughan!!!! Boooooo!!!!
There was a Rochdale fan on Talksport before. Bury is their biggest derby and that game brings in a lot of money, which Rochdale will now lose as well. The amount of business in Bury this will affect, pubs, food outlets which are now going to lose valuable income.
It's really sad, football clubs are the heart and soul of many towns and communities and bring a certain identity and publicity which they otherwise wouldn't get.
I can honestly see a few other smaller clubs going the same way over the next few years tbh.
 

DomesticTadpole

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It's really sad, football clubs are the heart and soul of many towns communities and bring a certain identity and publicity which they otherwise wouldn't get.
I can honestly see a few other smaller clubs going the same way over the next few years tbh.
It's sad the way they might go. Through crooks wanting to make a fat buck and thinking the club is just lateral damage. They then leave with no thought to the lives they ruin, as long as they make their money out of it.
 

balaks

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People saying they can go and support United or City. No they can't. Bury is their football club, has been all their lives. The EFL should never have allowed this scumbag to buy the club. It isn't just awful for the fans it is for the community, any work they did with the town.
Honestly don't understand people could think that is an option - how can a true football fan not understand the bond you have with the team you support?