The Party’s Over

At the end of my last contribution to STWHA, I had assumed the Dyche era would continue to the end of the season and, if relegated, hoped that “the new owners don’t go in for the usual pointless scapegoating and blood-letting of management and staff that moneymen are justly famed for”.

But the pointless scapegoating and blood-letting started early this year and, up until the late afternoon of 22 May, it looked like the venal quack-therapy of giving the manager the bullet might actually have worked. Only when the whistle blew at 17:49 on that Sunday, when Turf Moor rang silent and the players stood rooted to the spot, holding their poses like the mummified victims of Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, did reality bite and the realisation set in that you can only do so much, with so little, for so long and we were at that point.

The frustration of the home crowd at an anxious team - clearly exhausted and largely unchanged from two heroic performances in the previous seven days for the paltry reward of a single point - was obvious and ugly at times. But at the death, it was the collective sadness that such a great era was now at an end, and the appreciation that the teams - in all the incarnations over the last six seasons - had given their all, was what drove the gentle but sustained applause that rippled soothingly around the ground as many of the players left the field in Burnley shirts for the last time.

I won’t regurgitate the various permutations by which Burnley or Leeds would face the drop as I’m sure we all know what they were. I’m only pleased it didn’t come down to a single point, cruelly denied at Tottenham the week previously. It was small comfort but striking that the post-mortem of TV pundits and print journalists alike was this was a truly a dreadful decision, although they remained silent on why these decisions tend to go only in favour of these self-appointed ‘top’ sides.

Likewise, in this final week, everyone I know was rooting for Burnley to survive. For the penultimate match at Villa Park, we had scored a couple of fantastic seats complete with hospitality amidst well-heeled Brummies who are simply the most charming opposing supporters I’ve met. At the end of the match, the chap sat next to my mum had clocked we were rooting for Burnley and simply said: “Very best of luck for Sunday, we all love Burnley and hate Leeds” neatly summing up what I had heard from various quarters in previous days. This consistency of sentiment apparently driven by the twin forces of an enduring admiration for Sean Dyche and long, unfond memories of the Don Revie era and the somewhat robust style of play he favoured.

So after the shot of adrenaline that Mike Jackson provided and the brief, illusory glimpse of another day to fight, all we are left with that vague nauseous feeling after the Catecholamine subsides wondering what happens next…

If (and it’s has to be an ‘If’ as none of us really knows the finer contractural details) the reports are true about the loan-repayment-on-relegation clause, it’s difficult to fathom how any sentient being could have agreed to this. As someone remarked to me: “It’s like taking out a mortgage that you have to repay immediately if you get fired.  At the point you are least able to pay anything, they want everything. That’s nuts…”.

From another angle, It reminds me of a fruitless investor presentation I made a few years ago when attempting to justify my rather lofty valuation of my own firm to a similar business that had recently got funding.

“Ah…’ said the man in the bespoke suit at the end of the table “you are making the understandable mistake of thinking that ALL people who have money to invest are smart and that life is fair. This other company has got hold of some dumb money. It does exist. There’s really quite a lot of it about, but not here”.

So maybe it’s just as Gordon Gekko opined in ‘Wall Street’ “They say a fool and his money are soon parted; I’d say they were lucky to get together in the first place” and what we are witnessing is an aberration resulting from a modern day gold-rush. A desperate scramble to acquire the rights to one of the then-few Premiership club still in indigenous, private hands and a revisionist interpretation of Gresham’s Law insofar that the ‘bad money’ drove out the good.

Regardless. What remains is a rebuilding challenge. Only the scale and approach changes. If something can be worked over the Dell millions owed, a few choice transfers of solid players in the Autumn of their careers might be able to muscle their way back to the top flight immediately only for the same attritional cycle against relegation every season to start all over again.

The other option is to take the new training facilities, the ‘Footballer Factory’ that Dave Baldwin spoke about so passionately a few years ago at a London Clarets AGM, and the positive legacy  of the riches the last seven years have bought, and build a younger team from scratch.  Support this approach with current players not out-of-contract or those who choose to stay with Burnley while they play out their career and this looks a more optimistic approach. It scores lower on the risk-reward metrics and is probably hopelessly naive in the modern game but it appeals to me.

But what this tangled financial web has brought into sharp relief (along with similar tales from Bury, Derby and of course, the lovely Leeds and a tale that will no doubt be told again) is the league a club plays in is of secondary importance to its existence. Football clubs are woven into the national tapestry and they remain desperately important to their communities, particularly those communities with not a lot to cheer about.

As a ‘Child of Thatcher’, I never thought I would find myself arguing for government intervention but - similar to provision of transport infrastructure, defence, energy policy and so on - there are some things that only governments can do. Protecting a culture that football clubs are part of against the forces of a market distorted by sovereign wealth and private fortunes of sometimes dubious provenance is one of them. Passing legislation that requires football clubs to be audited against a sustainable business model would create much needed stability at all levels but would probably spell an end to clubs like Burnley, occasionally basking in the Premiership for a few seasons. Stability or excitement? Take your pick. You can have one but not both…

The problem is, for seven years we DID have both and it was great…