Brian Clough

About a year ago I was accused of being a 'loose cannon'. The accusation came from a person that was a public sector employee and knew nothing other than doing things by the book.

I took the accusation as a badge of honour.

I've been my own man for a long time. 15 years running your own business makes you a little single minded and gives you strong opinions on doing things that you have a track record of.

'We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right.'

Brian Clough died 12 years ago this week. He was the best manager England never had, and the man that made the unfashionable clubs of Nottm Forest and Derby County not only the best club in England but European Champions to boot - long before Leicester City managed half that feat some 35 years later.

'They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but I wasn't on that particular job.'

Clough was a true maverick, he did things in his own style, and didn't mess around with idiots outside of the TV studio. Some would say he was controversial. Back in the 70's there wasn't much actual controversy about Clough's comments. He was honest. He truly believed he was good, and he proved it was the case time and time again at the City and Baseball Grounds.

At a time that England has ended up with Sam Allardyce, Cloughie is sorely missed. One of the few men to have been a prolific player - netting 267 times as a forward in 296 games - as well as a prolific manager, his self belief - or arrogance as some saw it - was the only thing that ultimately prevented him from taking the England job.

Don Revie hated him, the FA disliked him, and he was on a hiding to nothing every time the job came up.

'I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.'

When they wanted to build a statue to Clough, I contributed. The small cast figure I received for my money sits above my TV right now. Two biographies sit on the bookshelf, and a picture of the great man is in my kitchen.

'That Sinatra, he's met me, you know'

Ol' Blue Eyes was a lucky bugger...

Who Would Live In A House Like This?

Torquay United are up for sale, still, and are apparently a bargain.

Chairman David Phillips has told the press (http://www.thenonleaguefootballpaper.com/latest-news/conference-premier-step-one/17044/torquay-united-up-for-sale-for-bargain-price-says-chairman-david-phillips/) the club is available for less than the price of a “big detached house”.

This past weekend, Torquay had to make the decision between paying for a hotel and a coach to Boreham Wood as they couldn't afford both. Players eventually drove to their hotel, with manager Kevin Nicholson having acted as the minibus driver on several occasions last season.

A football club that is barely keeping its head above water, constantly generating headlines about its cash-strapped nature, simply isn't going to attract a bidder with the right intentions - especially with a price tag that can be termed in the size of house it can buy.

Torquay had been, for years, a reasonably well run club. Former chairman Mike Bateson wasn't necessarily popular among supporters, but the wheels kept on turning at a club that was fairly financially prudent during his lengthy ownership. When Bateson chose to leave, even he would probably admit making a mistake in selling the club to a consortium led by Chris Roberts. A mistake it was, with Roberts backing out of the deal just six months later after attendances crumbled and he was unable to raise the funds to complete the deal.

Bateson stepped back in, steadied the ship once more, but was still looking at the exit. Along came Paul Bristow, a £15million Lottery winner who eventually brought in both his wife and son onto the Board. Bristow's generosity - and, indeed, the entire family's - kept the club running for eight years, even through his death and the passing of the Chairmanship to wife Thea Bristow.

When she elected to leave, a year after losing their Football League status, the club noted her 'incredible generosity' in leaving the Gulls in a good financial position, with a new grandstand named after her husband to boot. However the hunt for new owners with financial clout proved fruitless time and again.

By Phillips' own admission, the Bristows had been subsidising losses at the club of up to £500,000 a year. Without the lottery money, cuts had to be made to prevent a meltdown.

First to go at Plainmoor was the youth setup, then the training ground was surrendered. Staff followed, leaving those remaining to take on multiple roles, and the first team squad was reduced to bare bones with players brought in non-contract to boost numbers. A series of vague statements hinted at takeovers being close, negotiations progressing, but never quite completing with last minute hurdles always seeming to get in the way, leading to numerous apologies to supporters from the board for the lack of information.

The most recent takeover proposal by Gaming International, an operator of greyhound and speedway tracks in Poole and Swindon, fell apart over the ownership of the Plainmoor stadium, with the local Council refusing to relinquish ownership of a prime piece of development land for the potential bidders to develop a new stadium on the back of a development of the Plainmoor site. The club say the ownership of Plainmoor was never part of the agreement they had with the Swindon based outfit.

Phillips' asking price for the club, whatever he terms a "big detached house" to be worth (Rightmove indicates a 4 bed detached property in Torquay starts at £250,000) is excessive for a club that needs immediate inward investment and has few assets of its own.

The club has 1100 reported season ticket holders, most paying just £200 - less than £9 a game when the main stand is £19 per match - for National League football. Average attendances have seen only around 1000 additional paying supporters for each game this season - a figure that is hardly going to justify a six-figure price tag when a similar sum would be needed to sustain the club for the remainder of the season and into the lean summer months - let alone challenge for a place back in the Football League.

Maybe Phillips meant to say the club was for sale for one months rent of a "big detached house".

David, it's over to you...

Supporters Direct In Crisis

An article in the Belfast Telegraph (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/cashstrapped-fans-group-supporters-direct-faces-merger-threat-35065109.html) says Supporters Direct (SD) is facing a funding crisis and is facing a potential at least partial merger with other groups funded by the Premier League.

The Premier League puts £3.5million a year into fans groups - a paltry sum for the financial behemoth - with less than 10% of it offered to SD in the current funding round.

There is no doubt that Supporters Direct has done good work in its time. In the last 16 years it has been instrumental in helping to save or restart clubs across the country. However it seemed to lose focus, key staff, and ultimately appears to have over-reached itself putting its own future in peril.

Moving on from football clubs, it encompassed Rugby League and other sports - even branching out into Europe. The more it tried to do, the more it got stretched with a small staff and limited resources. It probably reached breaking point when a key member of staff was shuffled out of the door in an 'internal restructure' 18 months ago, having been apparently slowly pushed aside in the months beforehand, and SD has struggled to be quite the same force since.

Clubs that have struggled since have found a less proactive SD that hasn't quite had the bite to get the job done in many cases. It still had the same funding, but with a far less effective staff member in place that did little in inspire people to get involved in their Trust.

By staff member, I do mean one person. For all of SD's profile, their departments have often been single people. The "Head of xxxxx" is usually the only person doing that job, at least on a full time basis. That they've done the work they have over the years on the resources they've had is often remarkable - but their small size is a massive weakness as a single key appointment botched can lead to the organisation floundering as a whole.

I watched one SD presentation to the fans of a struggling club live on Youtube. The Trust in question had been going for the best part of 10 years but had a small membership and needed a thrust to make itself a viable bidder for the deeply troubled club in a time of crisis. Thrust was sadly lacking in the presentation, a potential fundraising drive failed miserably, and the club continues to teeter on the brink some 18 months later with the Trust a little larger in terms of membership but nowhere near the entity it needs to be to become a viable bidder.

That lack of thrust, and a rather inept presentation by a SD representative to the then Hereford United Supporters Trust (HUST) Board, was one of the reasons the new Hereford FC (HFC) never followed the SD model for a club. Despite having a potential 50% fan ownership - more than Portsmouth's much publicised fan takeover now holds - you won't see the HFC crest on SD's list of achievements, even if they were massively instrumental in the process. Yet Portsmouth, whose fan ownership eroded from the initial 51% in less than two years due to the financial demands of a football club, remains a 'case study' for SD's achievements on their website and is front and centre when any media article appears on fan ownership.

The newspaper article touches on news that SD has been 'unable to meet its financial obligations to a seriously ill member of staff'. Jacqui Forster was one of two people at Supporters Direct that assisted the rebirth of Hereford FC that I truly rated, and she has been ill for some time but continued working.

I first had contact with her over the writing of the constitution of what became HUST. She spent hours poring over the various drafts in her role as Head of Casework & Constitutional Affairs. She's worked for SD for 13 years but now appears to have been abandoned by the organisation. While SD deny the claims, refusing to comment further, friends of Jacqui have opened a crowdfunding page to raise money for her at https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/justice4jac

SD's money troubles have been there ever since I got involved in the embryonic HUST in late 2012. It was clear that SD was there for expert advice, but it didn't do much more beyond that. And once the experts started to leave it became less relevant in the day to day running of a Trust.

I turned up for a Board Member training course on a hot Saturday in June 2013 in Birmingham to find Jacqui, an Altrincham fan who had previously volunteered in their Trust, with limited resources. Pens were handed out and collected at the end of the day 'can't afford to replace them', pamphlets were for display purposes 'please don't take them, we haven't got the money to print more' - everything was downloadable from the website should we need to read something later.

Speaking to her after the event, the money issues at SD had only just started to bite. Budgets had been cut across the board as SD found itself hunting for cash handouts in an increasingly crowded marketplace for fans groups.

Through my time with HUST, SD charged just £100 a year for membership - £83.33 after VAT. For that you got their expertise, and access to their solicitors for any queries. Each year SD would send Trusts a breakdown of the resources they had used, and the costs of each resource, yet the fee remained £100 - with a polite request for an additional donation if a Trust wished to make further contribution.

The idea of a request for contribution is fine in theory - the problem is that a large number of Trusts are formed in times of crisis for their clubs and are more concerned in meeting the demands of their members rather than funding a group that often becomes increasingly irrelevant to them as time passes.

At HUST, we probably used £5,000 of Supporters Direct time and resources while we set up and got through the first year and the ultimate demise of Hereford United. However, rather than paying for that time, those funds we generated went into paying the unpaid staff of the old club and helping to start the new one. It was a matter of priorities, dictated by the membership.

SD have announced the formation of a 'Financial Restructuring Task Force' in it's latest statement - http://www.supporters-direct.org/news-article/message-to-members - while the European arm of the operation is set to be spun off into a separate entity. The leaders of SD will have to made difficult decisions over the coming months to bring the group back into the black and remain relevant for the future.

SD have a funding crisis yet, having set up reportedly 200 Trusts with 350,000 members, it gathers just a small percentage of its financial needs from membership fees. Just about every Trust charges for membership, usually £10 or so, and maybe it's time for SD to charge per member of a Trust rather than the small flat fee.

Maybe, then, in future they will be able to keep the people that excel in their roles, and honour their obligations going forward.