BURIED

Printed in the National League South game v Hemel Hempstead Town 3rd September 2019. We won 2-0 in front of 713

The harsh reality of our wild west football finances has come home to roost in heart breaking fashion for the fans and employees of Bury FC who've been kicked out of The Football League after 125 years membership.

The expulsion of Bury should come as another warning sign but will anyone from the English Football League (EFL) listen? Bought by Steven Dale for £1 last December, 11 days later he set up two new companies, Bury Heritage and Bury Leisure and started transferring assets to them, including the club’s trophies. Dale said he didn't even realise Bury had a football club, but then this is a man who has had 43 businesses liquidated. He makes his money from buying ailing companies, taking what he can, then closing them down. Bury is just another asset stripping project for him. How the hell was this man allowed to take over a football club? He never even satisfied the league that he had the necessary money to sustain the club, a supposed requirement of EFL rules for new owners before a takeover.

The former owner Steve Day mortaged the club to its eyeballs before fleeing; fleecing people with car parking scams and jerry built student homes, that have made Bury such a financial mess no one wants to touch it.

Meanwhile Bolton are back from the brink after an eleventh hour take-over. In 2005, Ken Anderson was banned from being a UK company director for eight years after 8 of his companies went bust. That still wasn’t enough to fail the EFL's fit and proper test, because anything goes in the gangster capitalism football jungle.

In the past decade, a quarter of EFL clubs have faced liquidation so none of this should really come as a surprise. The EFL do not insist on their member clubs having accounts audited, do not insist on member clubs publishing full accounts for fan scrutiny, do not punish clubs for late publication of accounts. We could deduce from all this that the EFL do not have a clue and are not fit and proper to run a piss up in a brewery let alone 72 member clubs (now 71).

Football clubs aren't just any sort of business. You wouldn't go and clean Tescos for free if they put out a plea on social media. Yet 400 people turned up at Bury to clean the place in the forlorn hope that they might have a future.

The problem is that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I helped breathe new life into The Bevy, a housing estate pub which was closed for five years and which on any spreadsheet is financially unviable. But what if that isn't the only way to measure life? What about measuring social impact? Once a pub has gone its gone. With a loneliness epidemic we need more places for people to meet not less and I have seen the community grow, friendships form and the Bevy be a lifeline for many people to get the support they need when everything else has been cut to the bone.

Slough struck gold with our former chairman Steve Easterbrook, but that's more good luck than anything. We were homeless and on our knees, not even the council wanted to know. But now look. However to be certain for the future I reckon its time for the club to be run by supporters. To be a club that publishes its matchday takings, its expediture and has regular meetings with fans. There are now over 200 supporters trusts in the UK and 50 of those have full ownership under the Community Benefit Society model that sees clubs run democratically and not for profit.

Just like Aldershot, Maidstone, Dartford, Accrington Stanley, Newport and others, Bury will rise again. After the heartache, a new club will no doubt start life back in the lower leagues having a lot of fun on the way while ironically their supporters will help clubs lower down the pyramid pecking order with increased gates and exposure.

But it should never have come to this. Football clubs just like schools, youth clubs, libraries and pubs are community assets; part of the glue that binds those communities together. But as Bury have shown they need proper protection to stop them from being stripped by vultures and they need those that value them in charge. It's time we started to measure things for what they really mean to people.