APART from the fans of Norwich City and Watford, who played last night – for the benefit of television, natch – the domestic 2010/11 campaign has not even started.

Yet football stands in disgrace and in the dock.

The hapless attempt by the tax authorities to block the Company Voluntary Arrangement sought by debt-ridden Portsmouth as salvation from liquidation has doubtless left many of the game’s fans, and no doubt all onlookers, perplexed if not downright angry.

Obviously, Pompey fans will be utterly relieved as their club, which has lurched from one cash crisis to a larger one like a snowball tumbling in an Alpine avalanche, can now try to get on its feet to fight again. And for non-Portsmouth supporters few will have wanted to see a club forced into oblivion, largely I suspect, because of the saying “there, but for the grace of God go...”.

From the top to the bottom, the Premiership to League One, there are enough clubs in hock to keep the International Monetary Fund in grant applications for centuries.

Some – the wise, the prudent – trim their cloth accordingly. Even now amid cash-straitened times, others opt for largesse and excess.

But the sentiment that, as part of the football family no one would like to see a fellow club fall, holds a particularly hollow ring given the judgment made from court-room number 52 at the High Court.

Just what does it take to halt football’s freefall over the financial precipice? Unlike other commercial operations it seems business principles and sense no longer exist when applied to football.

Justice Mann threw out the move by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the game’s ever-fraying reputation suffered another carve-up.

The tax authorities said it was owed several million more than they were originally led to believe.

However, the enforcement of the CVA would see HMRC recoup but a fraction of what was due.

Other creditors, those of nonfootball status, would also be paid less than full recompense.

However, other clubs, say those owed transfer fees, and players, including those no longer employed by the Fratton Park outfit, would get every single penny of the money they were owed. Nonfootball creditors could expect a paltry five pence in the pound.

Radio 5 illustrated succinctly the sheer folly of the situation by revealing how former Portsmouth players such as Glen Johnson, now at Liverpool, and Peter Crouch, currently at Tottenham, would be recompensed many tens of thousands of pounds from image rights.

A local builder, who was owed more than £50,000 for work deemed essential by the Premier League to dressing-rooms at Fratton Park, can now expect to receive just a 20th of that figure.

It’s already been documented how organisations such as the St John Ambulance were not entitled to everything due to them.

Farcical? Shameful, more like.

Equally outrageous was the prospect of a potential buyer of Liverpool FC fronting a consortium backed by money from the Chinese government. That rumour has since been denied by the suitor Kenny Huang, but it’s a horrendous scenario that such a punitive regime as that of China should be behind any bid for British football’s most successful club.

It’s like nothing is sacred any more.

Cynics might declare nothing ever was, but there surely has never been as grasping and short-termed an avarice, or at least an obsession with lucre, that is presently infecting the heart of the English elite?

After all, this was also the week in which Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s chief executive, said he saw little inherent problems in our top clubs being in the possession of foreign owners.

Try telling that to legions of exasperated fans of both Liverpool and Manchester United, whose clubs are, at this very minute, drenched in debilitating and potentially deadly debts of £350 million and £800 million respectively thanks to the business acumen of their American owners.

As the new season unfolds like so many crumpled fivers, the next nine months would be all the more memorable if the following five words were re-arranged and acted upon: your order getting in house.


FROM nine months to just next week, England’s national team returns to action against Hungary for the first time after this summer’s South Africa shambles.

What joy it would be to see a starting XI from this dozen of players: Joe Hart, James Milner, Phil Jagielka, Michael Dawson, Leighton Baines, Theo Walcott, Lee Catermole, Jack Rodwell, Jack Wilshere, Adam Johnson, Joe Cole, Wayne Rooney.