One of my favourite facts in Soccernomics is that 85 of the clubs that played in the four English professional divisions in 1923 still existed in 2008, and 75 of them still played in the top 4 divisions. That’s stability for you.
I’ve just carried out a similar exercise at the European level, looking at the 74 clubs that played in the top divisions in England, France. Italy and Spain in 1949/50 (I didn’t include Germany since the league was not officially professional until 1963).The data suggests the same story. Of the 74 clubs, 46 (62%) were competing in their top division in 2012/13, while 13 were playing in the second tier. Of the remaining fifteen, all but three were still competing in professional leagues. The three remaining cases are all French; Stade Francais de Paris returned to amateur status and still competes, while FC Nancy was disbanded in 1965 and Roubaix Tourcoing in 1970.
I don’t know exactly how many of these clubs have undergone a financial crisis at some point since 1950, but my guess would be well over half. As I never tire of telling people, football clubs survive even if the businesses that own them are liquidated.
If you ask people why insolvency in football is such a terrible thing they almost always tell you that it would be a tragedy if the club were shut down. So why are people afraid of something that is almost guaranteed not to happen? Maybe it’s just that they don’t know their football history- after all, in the midst of a crisis it’s often hard to keep a level head. Or maybe even a very tiny amount of risk is too much to bear (a bit like flying – we apparently want it to be far less risky than crossing the road). Journalists don’t help either- naturally their job is to sell papers or advertising space, and so sensationalism generally works better than cold facts. And some people have an agenda- they want to use a financial crisis as soap-box to agitate for tighter regulation.
There are other reasons for saying insolvency is a bad thing:
1. creditors often lose money – sure, but that has always been an accepted part of the capitalist system, and the football losses are usually small. If you want to advance this argument you really have to engage in a more detailed debate about alternatives- regulation has a downside too- corruption and nepotism tend to increase. I don’t see subtle debates like this taking place very often.
2. it poses a systemic risk to football system – in theory this is right. football is like banking in the sense that debts are often interdependent. But in reality no significant football league that I know of has been brought down by this (I’d welcome examples, I’m sure there must be some at the very lowest levels)
If anyone out there has some spare time or knows where the data is hidden, I’d be interested to see a list of defunct professional football clubs across Europe for, say, the last 50 years. There was a great series of books published on English football a few years ago with titles like “Denied FC” and “Rejected FC” telling the history of the small number of cases of clubs that vanished. But something more up to date and international would be very useful- especially for journalists 🙂
Former Scottish club Rangers FC liquidated last year, although the Scottish FA dispensed with its own rules to allow a Newco (which purchased OldCo’s assets) to continue trading as the now defunct club, same badge, IP & name. You can therefore imagine the anger from opposition fans that this new club can continue to exist wearing the hallmarks of the old one. If this “walking away” from your debts & creditors were to be repeated across Europe then we are heading for a moral bankruptcy of the beautiful game.
sorry, you obviously don’t realise this has been going on for decades:
Bristol City Ltd was wound up in 1982 and the club taken over by Bristol City (1982) Ltd
Wolves did the same thing 1984 and 1986
Of the 67 Football League insolvencies since 1982 almost every one has written off debt and clubs have frequently been transferred to new companies.
And this has been going on around the world for decades too!
Maybe you think the game has been morally bankrupt for decades too, but don’t imagine this is anything new!
Yeah, I would just like to comment on what Taxlawplebeian had said about Rangers being a new club with all there history wiped as some Celtic fans think. Obviously that isn’t the case due to the Chief Executive of the SFA Stewart Regan saying that Rangers were still the same football club. The evidence is on Youtube for all to see under the name of, Stewart Regan confirms Rangers are the same club. Hope this clears things up including the fact we celebrated our 140 years of Rangers in December in which 49,913 turned up. People thought this club had died. Look around you, don’t you believe it.
I might also want to point out that Celtic fans clearly want Rangers to have died. But guess what. We were never dissolved eg what happened to Gretna and the Airdrieonians and secondly we were never given a winding up order. So there’s some facts. Also it is very clear why Celtic wanted us gone due to us winning far more League Championships and Scottish Cups making Rangers the most superior team in Scotland and most superior team in the world in terms of having broken a world record of winning the most League Championships in any country. An amazing 54 titles.
Yes clubs are liquidated and then their assets are bought and used to set up a NEW club.
Same fans same assets but a different football club.
yeah, well pddling a lie does not make it a truth.
in scotland, the new entity started life as sevco [sevco 5088 say some and sevco scotland say others]
the fact is, rangers went out of business, lost the licence and lost the membership of the SPL.
the sevco [franchise] who later changed their name to a similar trading name to the “old” football club which played at ibrox, changed their name, because they know that there are a good number of people who they can con, by pretending that sevco and the “old” team are one and the same, when in actual fact they are not.
this was a money making exercise on the back of so many ignorant and ill-educated people. who will continue to believe or refuse to believe, that rangers were liquidated***
what does liquidation mean – that is the crux.
it is a rediculous scandal that the “new owners” are allowed to trade using the same logo. website etc, as the liquidated company. this encourages the ignoramous’s to believe that it is still the same club, when clearly it is not.
the law needs to be tightened to stop these charlatans from using the name, logo’ and website.
[***termination of a business operation by using its assets to discharge its liabilities.
OK, fair warning- I’m not going to approve any more comments about the Rangers debacle if this is going to descend into mud slinging
Clearly the majority of Rangers fans consider the club now playing at their ground to be “Rangers” – if football means more than mere business it is because it represents a community, and there exists a “Rangers” community. This does not mean that the management of the old business that went under that name was not at fault, or that the new company should have been allowed automatically to take the place of Rangers in the SPL (I blogged about that before, but logically that is a separate issue).
If your view is simply that no one should be allowed to play under the Rangers name any more then I think we’re outwith the compass of sporting discourse and more about sectarianism – I’m sure there are plenty of other website on which to air those views.
For the record I’m a sassenach, and don’t consider myself to be on one side or the other.
good piece –
If the below comes across as mudslinging please excuse it, its not intended.
…
I find it most notable that its the national associations that seem to be the arbiters of this same/club new club issue, with FIFA or UEFA probably content for it to be that way.
For a number of reasons, I think that the current Rangers is not the same club ( though it very much depends on what one means by the word ‘club’), but I’m not preaching. I’m content that the Rangers fans want to consider it the same club – and I suppose any club is what its fans make it. It carries on the tradition, spirit, ethos etc of the previous club and aims for back at the head of the Scottish game – whatever travails it might be now face. The fans seem to be sticking by it. I think the ‘true’ death of a club is when fans go elsewhere.
So, I can’t have it that Rangers are ‘dead’ (i find the term is used by wind-up merchants, generally, with varying degrees of venom), but neither can I accept that they remain fully or wholly the same club.
the voice of sanity.
its hardly sectarian to argue that rangers should not be using that name.if joe bloggs plumbers goes bust and someone buys the assets can they use the same vans,logos and pretend they are the original plumbing business and say established since 1922 or whatever?
yes, actually it is sectarian. In the real world businesses buy up the assets of insolvent companies and use their names, logos, etc all the time. As I mentioned before, it happens all the time in football too- here are some clubs that would have had to change their names if what you say was really true: Swansea City, Bristol City, Wolves, Hereford United, Portsmouth, Leeds United, Rotherham, Crystal Palace, St Etienne, Bordeaux, Marseille and pretty much every Spanish club (except Barca, Real Madrid and Athletic Bilbao). Outside of the pressure cooker of Scottish football most people probably wouldn’t even understand what you are talking about. Nobody really thinks that a football club is a mere a legal corporation.