Are we already dead?

But we just don't know it yet, like Bruce Willis in that film?

The latest piece in today's BN is Holdsworth speaking on 5Live saying that "Somebody will buy the club."

Great, fabulous, etc.

But........

As I've been banging on about for weeks and weeks, I honestly can't see any outcome from all this that is in any way, shape or form good for BWFC because Eddie Davies has left it far too late in my opinion.

We are (and have been) technically insolvent for months.

If BWFC was a chippy, the fryers would have been turned off for the last time a while ago and the shutters would be firmly in place.

We owe the tax man over two million quid and he wants it back.

The court has basically said we've got until 22nd Feb to sort it out, ie pay the bill and prove we are a going concern or sell up to someone who can, otherwise it's Goodnight (Lion of) Vienna.

This stay of execution was achieved by demonstrating that (A) people are interested in buying the club and (B) showing that we are already flogging off the family jewels to keep paying day to day operating costs.

But those jewels are finite, so for the club to survive, it obviously has to be sold. And quickly.

But.....

We are so far in the hole because of the delay in properly putting the club up for sale which has resulted in the debts and unpaid bills to continue accumulating to unsustainable levels, who on earth would want to buy BWFC?

It's a money pit of epic proportions.

And it's not simply down to having players on daft contracts - the entire set-up is still geared up along lines more suited to operating in the Premier League, rather than League One (where we'll be next season, if we survive.)

Put simply, aside from flogging off any fixed assets to make a quick buck, there is no value in owning BWFC.

So why would anyone be interested in buying the club, if not for nefarious, self-serving and very short-term reasons?

And anyway, even if we did suddenly pop up on the radar of some Arab sheikh with billions to splash, FFP rules now mean that he could no longer throw money at the problem, so that's a non-starter.

I honestly now think our goose is well and truly cooked and if we have still got a club to support in 12 months' time, it will bear little or no resemblance to the one we all know and love.

Sorry if that sounds a bit negative but I really do think we're already dead and the best we can hope for is that at some point in the future, somebody (the magical Supporters' Trust?) acquires the naming rights and sets up a new BWFC which will start off like FC United did in the non-leagues.

Yes, I think it's that serious.

I always believed that a 'big' name in football would go to the wall sooner or later and my suspicions that it might be us looks like they won't be far off. I think Gartside knew how much shit we were in a long time ago - anyone remember his laughable suggestion of 'no promtion to or from the premier? or two division premiership? The bastard knew exactly what was coming and decided bluff and bullshit would buy him enough time long enough to allow him to jump ship - FAR FAR too convenient this 'gravelly ill' shite for me to give it any creedence. Both him and Davies are culpable for the shite we are in at the moment and I really hope he gets 'well' long enough for him to end up in court, because when th truth does come out - and it will eventually - the brown and smelly will truly hit the fan for him.

It was that serious months ago when Gartside was sidelined - a real indicator of the true depth of the problems we face. If he didn't have a stroke it must have been some coup.

At that time I thought our only option would be to close down the club.

But then ED offered to write off the bulk of the debt, some people showed an interest in buying the club and somehow we've muddled along propping up cashflow ever since.

We are a helluva long way from survival but from a position of seeming dead in the water there is now some hope.

Sure we might get asset-stripped, mugged, raped and pillaged in the process but there is still a chance that we could be still alive at the end of it. Pretty much guaranteed we'll be a lot worse off at the end of it but still around.

And for months I've failed to understand the bickering about the "quality" of the bidders and the slagging off of ED when the alternative is death as you put it.

It's like giving a starving child a piece of bread and them complaining that it's not lobster thermidor with chips on the side.

He should have done this over 12 months ago whilst we still had "external revenue streams" available and didn't owe HMRC £2m if he was serious about passing the club on as a going concern - that's my main point.

It's too late now and we're fucked as a direct result but if Saint Eddie really was the genuine Bolton fan he's always been painted as, he'd have made public his commitment to wipe the debt and flog everything long before the club was on its knees and dying the death of a thousand cuts.

a lot of this confusion around bidders could be cleared up if the club and Saint Eddie in particular actually clarified what is going on.

It gets harder and harder with each passing day to believe Saint Eddie has our best interest at heart

Can see why silence is golden in this, club won't want to compromise any bidders by outing them, and in all honesty can't blame them, we as supporters do have form for stereotyping, and so to avoid 1000s of toothless serfs tipping up with pitchforks and burning effigies, best to keep schtum

club has just released a statement to say it can not re assure staff they will be paid in January, or commit that if they are, it will be on due date. If this isn't trading whilst insolvent, I am not sure what is....

MartinBWFC wrote:Can see why silence is golden in this, club won't want to compromise any bidders by outing them, and in all honesty can't blame them, we as supporters do have form for stereotyping, and so to avoid 1000s of toothless serfs tipping up with pitchforks and burning effigies, best to keep schtum

 i can understand it from that point of view but surely they could at least supply some information, it's the same old story, keep the fans in the dark they don't need to know. This is why a supporters trust will be important

Chairmanda wrote:club has just released a statement to say it can not re assure staff they will be paid in January, or commit that if they are, it will be on due date. If this isn't trading whilst insolvent, I am not sure what is....

Probably unfair to ask you this but you obviously know more about this stuff than the majority on here, Mand:

Could the club be recalled to the Court before Feb 22nd if they appear to be in breach of the terms of the adjournment, ie not fulfilling the commitments upon which it was granted and failing to honour its terms?

Breadman wrote:He should have done this over 12 months ago whilst we still had "external revenue streams" available and didn't owe HMRC £2m if he was serious about passing the club on as a going concern - that's my main point.

It's too late now and we're fucked as a direct result but if Saint Eddie really was the genuine Bolton fan he's always been painted as, he'd have made public his commitment to wipe the debt and flog everything long before the club was on its knees and dying the death of a thousand cuts.

Correct you are sir .....  I have been saying this club needs to be sold for years and received the abuse for my troubles. Any negative suggestion about our lord and master king Eddie was considered blasphemy..... well anyhow here we are knee deep in it.
I still cannot figure out what new owners will do with the club. If we strip off all the decent assets....what's left exactly? You would think new owners would want the hotel, parking, training ground...the whole thing to make a going concern of it all......I'm baffled at the moment.

The way I see it is somewhat differently to that.

The clubs problem is not that it hasn't the money to pay the bills but that it hasn't the CASH flow to do it on time.  Even todays announcement more or less says we DO have the money to pay your wages BUT not on time.

Why else would the likes of Holdsworth and Disley be sniffing about if the club was truly broke?

They see a profit in it for then.

What I can't see though is how anyone can change the current business model of the club until the major costs of many of the players contracts expire at the end of July.  That to my mind means either the club continues selling off the car park, training ground, hotel, etc until they are able to restructure or Holdsworth, Disley or someone else takes over and does the same.

I would have thought buying the club from Admin would have been the most financially beneficial way for Holdworth and the rest to go when it looked as though Davies wanted something like £15 million to sell but maybe that is no longer the case since he dropped that to just £1.

Either way I look at it, the club will not go into Administration unless Davies wants it too, as it now clearly looks since Birch came on the scene that assets are quickly being sold off and cash flow raised to carry on trading.

If Davies simply only wanted a £1 to exit the club and write off the £180 million or so, he could have saved himself a load of hassle and quit the scene some weeks back now, so why didn't he?

Maybe Davies does want to be seen as a benevolent benefactor to the club and therefore doesn't want obvious asset stripers to have it (make a quick profit on it then fuck off leaving it more in the shit?).

If so then this would explain him running the club down to pay the bills and perhaps the sudden arrival on the scene of the newly established Supporters Trust?

Either way in my view (either through Davis or the Holdsworth etc) the club will be shorn of asetts to meet the estimated running costs of some £15 million until the end of July.  If there is still enough left to interest Holdsworth etc, they will stick around, if not Davies now has in place the safety net of the ST to hand it on to.

If he's selling it just for £1 and the Holdsworth's are still sniffing, then as long as the ST could attract enough people and business's to financially keep the club afloat - then I think that Davies would sell to them.

If this did happen I am sure the vast majority of Bolton fans would be absolutely delighted to become in effect a part owner of the club - a community club - but not me.

As a businessman myself one of the worst thing that can happen is not having clear leadership and direction.  A coalition of people pulling together may be all well and good when times are bad but you need individuals with vision who are not afraid to take risks and step on a few toes to break out and go forward.  Too many people with fingers in the pie means too many people with vested interests, own agendas and internal fighting.

The Ebbsfleet experiment that failed so badly after all the initial euphoria showed this.

I fear for a future of limited ambition, curtailed desire and non achievable dreams.  Do people really want us to become another Bury or Rochdale scraping out a meagre existence on the cusp of falling into to non league  system?

That I fear is going to be our future and I for one think it is the wrong way to go.

I do however still see a future beyond the ST as I think it will fail through lack of ambition and the resources to back it up.  I think that all but the hard core will want to watch Bolton struggle in the lower divisions, that the financial backers to the ST will then pull out and the ST will eventually be forced to sell the club or go into Administration themselves.

ST's are all about small, local, community clubs whilst football is about having the dream and one day living it - the two are simply not compatible in these days of the mega millions of Sky money as you need to spend money to make money.

That's what I think if anybody is at all interested.

So you basically agree then: No good outcome and we're fucked?

I still don't understand, and Sluffy you've hit on it exactly, is how much money do they expect to raise if this ST gets off the ground?

There's a need for £15M just to get us to the end of the season. With 4000 fans, (and 4000 different opinions on how to do things), each would need to fork out £3750.
Without having a sizeable input from each, how can they be expected to have any say in what goes on. What company is going to buy the club for that money, and then let a bunch of supporters try to run it. Just doesn't make sense to me.

The ST will never be able to raise the money needed to buy and run the club even if I trusted them to do it. Frankly the truth is that BWFC are sat in the worst geographic location for a professional club anywhere in England. There are simply too many North West clubs all scrabbling desperately to attract a limited number of fans. If that wasn't bad enough we're in the shadow of two of Football's biggest names worldwide let alone nationally in Man Utd and Man City. I've suspected for twenty years or so that one or more of BWFC, BRFC, Burnley, PNE, Accrington Stanley, Wigan, Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and a few others would either go belly up or wind up having to merge in order to survive. 

The fact is that the people of Bolton may say they care about the club but they've never really shown that in most of my lifetime with crowds. Even in the Prem we struggled to fill a 30K stadium unless we were playing Utd and the sad fact is the advent of Sky and the horrid expense of attending a match in person compared to other forms of entertainment put people off. It's not just us, it's every club in this area. The difference is we've been woefully mismanaged by a moron overseen by a cretin (PG and ED) for more than a decade.

Sluffy wrote:
I would have thought buying the club from Admin would have been the most financially beneficial way for Holdworth and the rest to go when it looked as though Davies wanted something like £15 million to sell but maybe that is no longer the case since he dropped that to just £1.

Either way I look at it, the club will not go into Administration unless Davies wants it too, as it now clearly looks since Birch came on the scene that assets are quickly being sold off and cash flow raised to carry on trading.

If Davies simply only wanted a £1 to exit the club and write off the £180 million or so, he could have saved himself a load of hassle and quit the scene some weeks back now, so why didn't he?

Maybe Davies does want to be seen as a benevolent benefactor to the club and therefore doesn't want obvious asset stripers to have it (make a quick profit on it then fuck off leaving it more in the shit?).

If so then this would explain him running the club down to pay the bills and perhaps the sudden arrival on the scene of the newly established Supporters Trust?

Either way in my view (either through Davis or the Holdsworth etc) the club will be shorn of asetts to meet the estimated running costs of some £15 million until the end of July.  If there is still enough left to interest Holdsworth etc, they will stick around, if not Davies now has in place the safety net of the ST to hand it on to.

Not sure about the ST bit - although that could be right - but definitely agree that ED has applied some criteria that would give reassurances about the intentions of potential buyers. He could have cashed in ages ago if he just wanted the money. Trouble is if ED is too picky, nobody will buy the club.

And of course we'll not have a pot to pee in when the dust settles - we're skint. This is about survival - everything else is secondary.

No not exactly.

I don't think for a moment we will go out of business, just that for the foreseeable future we have nothing but utter mundaneness to look forward too.

I do think we will have a load of bitter, self righteous people banging on about the ST and a number of thousand people flocking like sheep to join them and it but when the reality of what they can ultimately achieve finally dawns on them, they will drift away from both watching the club and paying their ST subs.

When the point comes no doubt somebody will want to buy the club (maybe a Gary Madine fronted bid - only joking) and then hopefully we can start to dream again about moving up the leagues.

My only worry though is how much peoples lives will change in the meantime. What I mean is will the youth's of today become the types of people we have become - following the club for a lifetime through thick or thin or will they no longer see BWFC as a core building bloke in their lifes?

I can't see future generations wanting the hassle of going to see the team play shite in the lower leagues like many of us grew up on. They have more alternative things to do and different ways to interact with each other than we did.

Going to the match to see your mates and having a pint with them before or after it was more enjoyable than actually watching the football most of the time for me - so if they don't go out to the pubs (look how many of them have now closed) and can see and speak to their mates on social media, then why follow a shitty little club that is going nowhere when they can follow their Premier League team online at almost anytime they want?

We are not dead but the future to me is not very bright.

Escept for one thing sluffy. he's not running the club down to pay the bills, they're not being paid. No one wants to buy the players because they know they'll all be free agents in a few weeks anyway and not many of them are worth a fee even if they weren't. No one wants to buy the car park land because it's good for nothing, you won't get planning permission to change its use so why spend millions on a patch of concrete with lines painted on it? 

The "interested parties" all know they don't need to prove they have the money now, admin is inevitable and has been for months so all they need to do is wait for that. When it happens ED no longer gets a say in who it's sold to and TB will be obliged to sell it for whatever he can get. If the footballing debts aren't cleared in full then it won't matter, the club will cease to exist and that's all she wrote so either way Eddie's not getting his 160million plus back. 

The truth is we were dead the moment we got relegated and didn't change our spending to suit.

I drove past the Macron on the M61 yesterday and my stomach actually churned and I gritted my teeth.

BWFC circa 2016 bears absolutely no resemblance to BWFC circa 1986 other that it shares a name.

I'm honestly tired of the whole thing and there's a part of me that has actually started to think that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the club did go belly up and had to start again.

No more Eddie Davies.

No more Gartside.

No more being beholden to Sky TV for handouts.

No more paying £35 a ticket to support the likes of Madine and his useless mates as they drive round in their Lambo's and Ferraris (I'll never forget seeing Nicky fucking Hunt behind the wheel of a Ferrari - should've known we were screwed right then and there.)

No more hype, spin, lies, misinformation and general bollocks.

No more pointless "We can get out of this mess" interviews with Iles.

I used to moan about how Sky were killing English football back on 606 over ten years ago and I've had enough.

I would honestly rather see BWFC playing at a ground like Victory Park in front of 500 proper fans than put up with any more of this bullshit.

No more debt and spin, just good, honest football played by players who give a shit for a team owned by someone who isn't there to try and milk as much out as they can for themselves.

Honestly, I'm deadly serious.

Can someone explain to me why you lot are so dead against a ST. I know from contacts in Germany how well they work over there.

I'm interested to hear your reasons, but when you do cite your reasons (this will confuse you but do it anyway) please can you imagine a line with the word 'Love' at one end and the word 'Fear' at the other and try to get the reasons you have to sit in between the two.

For example, a response like "a St will rip the heart out ofthe club", is based on fear. The club is pretty fucked at the moment anyway eh! At the same time don't do the opposite. Many of the reasons I have read against a ST are based on the Fear end of our line. Fear, of the unknown possibly who knows? I wanted to be sure there are decent reasons to not do it and maintain what we have, other than ignorance of something different.

I work in the city and see billions of pounds raised by Open Ended Investment Companies. These organisations work pretty well. The share holders purchase units in the business. They can have voting rights and can elect the board of directors. Think a set up like that could work for us. It's s shame people use that failed experiment as a reason not to have a supporters trust when set up correctly it is proven to work so well in Germany.

Bottom line is beggars can't be choosers and we are fresh out of time and money. I worry that some of you would rather sell to a fraudster that will destroy the club than entertain working alongside othe supporters of the same club.