Fooball finance: Regulation required to stop the lunatics taking over the Asylum

The new owners of West Ham state that the club has no money as the next two years' season ticket sales have already been spent, in addition to 70% of a three year sponsorship deal has already been paid and presumably disappeared into some black hole. Things aren't any better among lower league clubs either as Crystal Palace entered administration for the second time in eleven years.

If this doesn't demonstrate the hideous and perilous state of England's clubs football financial management then nothing ever will. How can the man in the street reconcile the fact, that grounds are full, ticket price inflation resembles that of the Zimbabwean economy and TV companies continue to fall over themselves to pay ever increasing sums of money to provide global coverage. Yet almost every day the back pages have coverage of players not getting paid and established clubs being issued winding up orders.

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Never mind the banks destroying the world's economy someone sooner or later is going to have to be held accountable for destroying England's national obsession "The Beautiful game" .

How has it come to this? How can something that is so awash with cash, much of it paid well in advance in the form of season ticket sales and corporate sponsorship, reach the point where the country's most decorated football club, Liverpool, are unable to provide their manager with a single penny to spend in the January?

The truth is that the true fabric of the "people's game" is slowly being destroyed by foreign owners and the loose lipped retail salesmen "Living the dream" shouting their mouths off in New York bars about becoming the biggest club in the world. People who masquerade as knowledgeable football business people in reality have no real concept of football finances - or what the everyday fan wants.

Almost every foreign takeover of recent times has seen some unrecognisable Arab, American or Eastern European standing on the club's pitch with a scarf wrapped around his neck promising fans that millions of pounds would be spent on new players and that the goal was Champions League football within four years. And for a period the fans had been willing to believe, dreaming of silverware and watching the world's best players.

The reality now is you are more likely to see placards at grounds demanding "Yanks out" and protests demanding to know where all the money has gone, and in the most extreme cases fans in tears dreading the news that the centre of their universe, the club they have spent a fortune supporting in terms of hard earned cash and emotions, could be wound up in the High Court because someone with no concept of what being a true fan is decided to lose all sense of reality and spend money that quite simply did not exist.

Supporters from Liverpool to Lewes want success, but what the likes of Sasha Gadaymak at Portsmouth and Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson at West Ham failed to realize is that the plain existence of every fan's club will always be more important than winning trophies.

No football fan should ever have to dread reading the back pages with the possibility of finding out that their club is days from going under, but the horrible truth is they are and sooner or later their worst fears will come true, just ask anyone who supported Gretna.

But the real blame has to be laid at the door of those who supposedly run the game, namely Sepp Blatter, Richard Scudamore, and Ian Watmore. Why hasn't anyone put spending regulations in place?

Why does football seem to continuously see itself above everything else, at the potential cost to the dreams of everyday people?
If the clubs themselves can't run their finances on sensible business practices then it has to be incumbent upon the governing bodies to find regulations to force them to live within their means.

If the people in charge truly wanted to do something good for the game they should bring in a rule that states that every club affiliated to any FIFA league quite simply has to have made an operating profit within any given season.

Any team that doesn't do this would be deducted a certain amount of points depending on the severity of their debt. In addition there should be a regulation to limit un-earned subsidies to no more than around 20% of their income generated through football related activities e.g. gate receipts , TV etc , this would have an immediate impact upon the game.

At a stroke players' wages would have to be linked to the reality of a business and not the depth of the pockets of some mysterious foreigner. Clubs would be forced to develop their own locally born players, stick with their managers and look beyond the January transfer window as to how and why they would spend their money.

It would take power away from the Sultan of "Make Believe Land" and bring the art of long term planning back to the game, giving true football men such as Kenny Dalglish and Bill Kenwright the chance to shine and make the game better for everyone. The so called "big four" monopoly on everything would soon disappear as teams would no longer be able to afford having World Cup winners on the bench.

Talented players who have chosen to spend their career sitting on the bench at a Premiership team rather than getting stuck in at a lower level would soon be forced to re-assess their situation.

However where the value of this concept would truly be seen would be in the hearts and minds of the fans.

Not only would the fans be able to go to work every day safe in the knowledge that they will have a game to go to at the weekend, but they would be able to relate to their managers and players again knowing that their heroes are under the same pressures that they are under.