Don't forget the small print.
It struck me whilst pinching myself this week that Pompey never did buy any players after Mandaric left, we just rented them.
Despite all the PR bull coming out of the Park, it would seem that nobody actually signed for us over the past few years. Each and every player no more than an HP agreement with more sauce than substance and all of them 'gracing' the team only because funny money had effectively bribed them to come to Pompey to strut their stuff. Condiments in Redknapp's bad for our health fry-up.
And at the end of the dream we sold them all, and didn't even clear the outstanding payments. HP, hire purchase, call it what you will, but I prefer to think of it as a bottle full of the brown stuff.
Despite the weekly revelations that Peter never paid Paul, or John, or Sid, or Carlo or..., Fratton Park would still have you believe we spent tens of millions on players. But we now know that all those headline figures were just notional values with a deposit paid and promises of more payments in the future.
That's not to say of course that we didn't fork out £5m a month in cash on wages. As troubling as it sounded then, it sounds even more ludicrous now. I ask you, who in their right mind thinks burning through a year's worth of gate receipts every 2 months is sound business? It does have you questioning the sanity of those decisions, more so now it's rumoured that the execs scour the terraces at the end of each game looking for dropped coins and pay particular attention to mislaid lottery tickets.
And so they should given the rate in which we made people rich. I won't bore you with the numbers, but when you take into account wages and down payments, a player like Crouch was probably costing us at least £20,000 a week in interest alone and that's before we paid off the loan itself. And remember Crouch was one of many and most of them it has to be said, failing to give anything like value for money.
Loyalty bonus any one?
Which when you consider it, probably explains why Pompey's transfers were always shrouded in mystery. The closest we got to understanding what was going on was being told that the Chief Exec was in some faraway place and from that we assumed that a deal was in the offing. But what we never found out was what had been paid for a player's services and when they were sold on, the whole process started again. Agents and players, the only real winners.
But should we be critical of this process? After all, it could argued that had some greedy little red braced banker not mucked up, we would still be flying high. More money coming in than even Peter Storrie could spend.
Or should we be looking at this for what it probably was. Persistent lack of judgement regularly involving sums larger than the organic, non TV money, turnover of Fratton Park. Somebody at PFC was gambling big time with our Club and now it hasn't paid off, it's the supporters who are left to pick up the pieces.
What to do? March, protest, pitch invasion or should we expect the board to admit liability? Resignations? You would have thought so, but that requires dignity and I am not so sure there's much of that left at Fratton Park these days.
Posted
Sun, Jan 24 2010 11:07 AM
by
c h r i s