Tax & spend - football's deadly addiction

Portsmouth will begin the new season with a deduction of 10 points. Rangers will begin it in the fourth tier of Scottish football. Other clubs are, you can be certain, saying a silent prayer and admitting, if only to themselves, that “there but for the grace of God go we”.

This is not an attack on those two clubs in particular, nor on the others that could, and surely will, follow in their wake. But it is an attack on the way football is run, the ludicrous “fit and proper person tests”, the way in which it has been allowed to run up a bar tab that would shame a brewery, and on those that have presided over a period of unprecedented wealth in the game that has left it with nothing but monumental debt that can never be repaid.

And that is the real crux – those debts never will have to be repaid, at least not the non-footballing ones. If you are owed money for supplying the grass seed, for selling the milk that goes in the players’ tea, for providing Lucozade (other sports drinks are available), bandages, newspapers, electricity, even if you are the HMRC who are owed millions in back taxes, you will see only a fraction of the money you are owed.

I’ve spent the last 30 years paying taxes and national insurance, for services that I was promised and which, it seems clear, I will never get – public health, proper pension, dignity in retirement (which was supposed to come at 65 when I started work by the way). All that money I’ve paid is but a drop in the ocean compared with the tax that’s getting written off against the names of Portsmouth and Rangers – and plenty others before them.  

I’m pretty pissed off with that. I’d quite like to never bother paying any tax and yet be allowed to carry on my business as normal. Does it not seem weird to anybody else that a company that owes millions can continue to trade simply by popping up as a “newco”? Isn’t there something obscene in these straitened economic times that such huge tranches of cash can be written off by the Exchequer while this newco can carry on utilising a nice piece of real estate such as Ibrox Park, a site on which you could, for example, build a new retail park or umpteen houses, bringing in a very hefty wodge of cash that would help pay those creditors?

While I’m happy to see Rangers and Portsmouth continue, if they are indeed new companies, shouldn’t we have all their old assets off them first?