BURY, England — The bailiffs turned up to collect the treadmills from Bury’s training ground last Friday. Considering that the League One team’s players had been paid six weeks’ wages by the club over the past six months, there was no surprise among the squad to see the debt collectors take away the most basic of equipment, but it was a grim warning of what was to come. “The bailiffs took the anti-gravity treadmill, too,” Bury defender Tom Miller told ESPN FC as he waited for news on the club’s future.
“It’s all a bit of mess, to be honest.”
D-Day was Friday, August 23. Founded in 1885, Bury needed to find new owners before 5 p.m. to avoid being kicked out of the Football League (EFL). After a proposal surfaced and hopes that the team may be salvaged, they were granted one more extension; nevertheless, at 11 p.m. on Tuesday, the plan to take over the club was shelved.
A Bury player told ESPN FC, “I’m all over the place,” after the club’s fate was confirmed. “My girlfriend is expecting, and I don’t have any money right now. I’m fucked up.”
Greetings from life beyond the Premier League. This is League One, the third division of English football, two promotions below the league dubbed the “most exciting league in the world,” where more and more clubs are finding it difficult to make ends meet.
Bury, the FA Cup winners in 1900 and 1903, are the first team to be ejected from the league since Maidstone United in August 1992. Bury could be the first of many clubs to go down this path, as Premier League wealth rarely makes its way to the lower leagues. Manchester United’s Carrington training facility is five minutes away from Bury’s training area, which they have been using without paying rent to Manchester City, the facility’s owner. However, they might as well
Bolton Wanderers was a Premier League team as recently as 2012, and they were among the original members of the Football League in 1888. The four-time FA Cup winners were given a deadline of 14 days to address their personal financial issues, and it seemed on Wednesday that they had done so when it was revealed that they had been sold.
They were meant to play Bury at home on September 8, but that game has been postponed. Supporters had nicknamed the game “El Brassico”. It was a fitting slogan for a meeting between two bedraggled neighbours, as “brassic” is slang meaning not having enough money to live or pay the bills in these regions of northern England.
A Premier League club between 2001 and 2012, Bolton suffered successive five-goal losses against Ipswich Town last Saturday and Tranmere Rovers the week before.
Against Ipswich, Bolton’s players wore a store-bought kit that is not even available to purchase in the club shop because nobody is prepared to offer them a kit deal or pay to sponsor the shirts. When Ipswich scored their third, the giant scoreboard inside the University of Bolton Stadium stopped showing the score, perhaps to save the four 17-year-olds playing for the managerless team the psychological scars of seeing the scoreline in big neon lights.
“Credit to the fans,” said Jimmy Phillips, Bolton’s caretaker manager, after the game. “They were outstanding for us. They’ve turned up and got behind the players, but patience is running thin.”
Patience, hope and certainty. All are in perilously short supply right now.
Bury and Bolton both started this season on -12 points, the penalty applied by the EFL for entering administration (a legal mechanism that allows insolvent companies to continue trading while facing serious cash-flow problems). The action was due to mounting debts and the inability of each club to pay their creditors.
Businessman Steve Dale bought Bury for £1 last December from Stewart Day, but the club’s debts were not cleared and wages for players and staff have not been paid in full for over six months. Local companies have also gone unpaid and the club’s financial situation was deemed so grave by the EFL at the beginning of this season that they were blocked from playing competitive fixtures until they were able to prove that funds were in place to complete a full campaign.
Not a single game has been possible for them to play.
– Mbappe heads the next group of stars in 30 under 21.
– Luck Index: What part did chance play in 2018–19?
“It’s been a nightmare,” Miller declared. “[We] have been training all week without having a final game to concentrate on. Last Friday, after training, the boys who are still here made the decision to go to the pub to unwind.”
Fans have attacked Dale for not doing enough to ensure the club’s survival, but on Tuesday, 75 minutes before the EFL’s 5 p.m. deadline, a buyout bid by C&N Sporting Risk fell through, leaving Bury at the mercy of the League’s board.
“We’ve had enough of this,” said Dave Giffard, chair of Bury Supporters’ group, Forever Bury, as the fans waited in hope for an unlikely saviour. “It’s been years since we’ve had a stable club and that’s what we want. We want to build a solid community club here.
“As a Trust, we’ve spent £36,000 to date on legal and consultancy fees, working separately from the club to try to save it. We’ve dealt with about a dozen prospective buyers but I say that loosely because a lot of them have just been sharks circling around.” (Even in the hours after Bury’s expulsion, one consortium claimed to have the funds available to save the club.)
At Bolton, where senior players went on strike in April over unpaid wages, owner Ken Anderson appeared to have struck a deal to sell the club to Football Ventures last Friday. But that collapsed on Saturday morning, prompting the administrator to threaten liquidation this week unless a deal was done by 5 p.m. Tuesday: the same time as Bury’s moment of truth.
Bolton were given an extra two weeks to find a solution, and subsequently have, but Bury had used up all of their chances, with the EFL withdrawing their membership of the league due to “repeated missed deadlines, the suspension of five league fixtures, in addition to not receiving the evidence we required in regard to financial commitments and a possible takeover not materialising.”
On Wednesday, roughly 100 people gathered at Gigg Lane following the club’s expulsion. The groundsman turned up on time for work but with no need to cut the grass.
Following a summer of financial turmoil at Bury, after winning promotion from League Two in May, the club had just four players on permanent contracts by this Tuesday. One of them, 29-year-old defender Miller, has spent the past month recovering from an injury which he attributes to the cash-flow problems that have left Bury on the brink of liquidation.
Miller said to ESPN FC, “I broke my foot’s fifth metatarsal.” “It was caused by the training ground’s pitches being so hard because they haven’t been maintained or watered.” For the same reason, a few other boys have experienced back issues.
“The swimming pool was just cleaned because it was in such a horrible state, and the ceiling tiles in the changing rooms are hanging down from the roof. However, since July 1st, we have been training in preparation for the return of play.”
Leave a Reply