Club owners need to have some clear intentions

PREMIER LEAGUE:Some clubs are financially on their knees and little is known about who is at fault, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

IT WAS sometimes said that the Premier League offered a sporting equivalent of reality television, with its cast of leering misanthropes followed 24-hours-a-day by a devoted band of goggle-eyed viewers.

Well, not any more it doesn’t. The leering misanthropes are still present and correct – even if Joey Barton is propagating his unique brand of thuggish charm in the Championship these days – but it is a long time since the top flight bore even the vaguest resemblance to reality as we know it.

Take West Ham, for example. You know West Ham: good, old- fashioned sort of club, full of aged tea ladies with names like Ivy and Ethel and where a mash-up is the responsibility of the catering department preparing the half-time pies rather than the bloke who runs the sound system.

Anyway, this coming Friday, a group of men will assemble to discuss the future of this venerable old club, not in some wood-panelled chamber at Upton Park, or even a shiny central London office-block. Instead, it is scheduled for a courtroom in Reykjavik, where an Icelandic judge will decide whether to allow Straumur, the stricken bank that owns West Ham, more time to clear its debts.

If the judgement goes against Straumur, the club must be sold with indecent haste. If they fail, there is the doomsday scenario of Straumur deciding they can no longer afford to service the club’s €110 million debts and place it in administration, which would almost certainly condemn them to relegation given the attendant nine-point penalty.

Then there is Portsmouth. Having flirted with the clownish Sulaiman al Fahim, Pompey are now in the control of Ali Al Faraj, a man whose enthusiasm for public life makes Tiger Woods look like Jordan.

There are two things we know for certain about Al Faraj: the first is that he is a property developer in that luminous beacon of the free world, Saudi Arabia; the second is that, having needed to take out loans to pay Portsmouth’s players in October, he failed to pay the majority of the squad their November wages when they were due last week.

The rest is a mystery. His background, other business interests and the depth of his pockets are all “known unknowables”, as Donald Rumsfeld would have it, although the fact that he seems to be struggling to cover Portsmouth’s running costs suggest they might be shallower than many imagined.

A public press conference would help disperse the mushroom cloud of doubt which currently shrouds Fratton Park but this is not the way of things in the Premier League.

Instead, taking their lead from the likes of Malcolm Glazer, Roman Abramovich and Stan Kroenke, the new owners of Portsmouth and West Ham appear to believe direct communication with their clubs’ supporters – or, to put it in terms they might better understand, their shareholders – beneath them.

Al Faraj might be planning to relocate Portsmouth, in time-honoured Gulf fashion, to a man-made archipelago constructed in the shape of his own face and not one of the club’s 14,000 season ticket holders would be any the wiser. Similarly, West Ham’s followers have no more of a bond with their discredited Icelandic banker owners than they do with their own discredited British bankers.

To expect fans to pour hundreds of pounds into clubs whose owners resolutely refuse to reveal their long-term intentions – or, even worse, have no long-term intentions – is not only grossly unfair, it is also bad business practice.

Sooner or later, their customers will weary of being taken for granted and keep their cash in their pockets. If the wide open spaces on view at Pompey on Saturday are anything to go by, it may already be happening.

The days when clubs were owned by prominent local businessmen or life-long supporters who happened to strike it rich was by no means a golden age. West Ham fans still shudder at the memories of Eastender-made-good Terry Brown and his ludicrous bond scheme, while Fratton Park regulars would have gladly pursued their former owner, Martin Gregory, out of Portsmouth with pitchforks given half the chance.

The regimes of Gregory, Aston Villa’s Doug Ellis or Manchester United’s Martin Edwards were flawed in their own right but at least they were men who understood the concept of public accountability. Ellis was many things, but he was certainly not a faceless oligarch too afraid to stick his head above the parapet.

Icelandic financiers and Saudi property developers might know little of the traditions or cultural significance of their new playthings, and care even less. But they must realise that these particular investments have values that are measured in more than pounds – and they deserve to be treated with some respect.