Rock bottom to flooded basement: it’s sink or swim for Torquay United

Every Wednesday in the Herald Express, our Torquay United correspondent Richard Hughes takes a sideways look at what's going on in the world of the Gulls. This week, he wonders whether Torquay United have hit rock bottom and if new proposed Government legislation would have helped them out

Rock bottom appears to have a basement – that was how former Torquay United striker Martin Gritton summed up last week’s events that saw the club docked 10 points and drop like a stone to 17th in the National League South table. Gritton was Harry Salvidge’s summariser on the Radio Devon commentary of Torquay’s game at Tonbridge Angels, and they were discussing the crisis that the club currently finds itself in.

After the game, Salvidge quipped: “Rock bottom appears to have a basement, and the basement is flooding.” It’s no laughing matter, of course, but the words of Gritts & Salvidge (idea for a podcast?) do sum up the terrible time that the club is going through.

And after Torquay had gone 4-0 down at Tonbridge, with the commentary position right in front of where the directors were sitting at the Longmead Stadium, Radio Devon listeners were ‘treated’ to an exchange of words between some pretty angry fans and the Torquay officials sitting close by. It was all quite unedifying, and bar cutting the sound altogether there wasn’t much Radio Devon could do about it.

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The fact is fans are extremely frustrated. As we wait for more news to come out of the club about a bid being accepted by Clarke Osborne, fans are wondering why he didn’t just put the club up for sale. That way, Clarke or his Gaming International company would still be paying the players’ wages and the club’s day-to-day running costs.

And the club wouldn’t be asking you, the fan, to stump up your hard-earned cash right now – more than you normally do already when you go to games, buy shirts, buy a beer in Boots & Laces, buy a programme, a 50-50 ticket.

While Osborne still owns the club, I am seriously disappointed that GI aren’t still funding things. If I decided to sell my house, I wouldn’t be able to suddenly stop paying the mortgage and ask my fans to do it instead – even if the basement was flooding.

Torquay’s problems are not unique in football – but being in the National League South, they are now below the level where new government legislation might have helped them out. The Government has long warned the football authorities the regulator would have ‘backstop powers’ to intervene and those powers were confirmed on Tuesday when the Football Governance Bill was introduced to Parliament.

“These powers mean that if the leagues fail to agree on a new deal on financial distributions, then the backstop can be triggered to ensure a settlement is reached,” a Government announcement on the Bill said.

Precise details over the point at which the powers would be triggered – and what those powers would look like – have not yet been confirmed but the Government said in a consultation response last September that one option it was considering was binding final offer arbitration. Under that system, the two leagues would each submit their proposal, the regulator would assess them against predetermined criteria, and then would choose and impose one as the binding arrangement.

There had been hope that the Premier League’s clubs would make a formal offer to the EFL at a meeting last Monday, but none was forthcoming and instead the Premier League said its clubs were focused on first agreeing new financial rules for the top flight.

In a sport where one player’s wages for a month would finance a club like Torquay for a year or even longer, it’s an ugly truth that clubs can be in trouble at all. Imagine a world where the top earners in the Premiership get together to each help a club? How popular would that make them?

How about a campaign – Pay For Fair Play! – where fans put pressure on the top players to give up a week’s wages every year to help football at the lower levels?

But I am probably being naive – do footballing sharks at the top levels really care about the minnows? Probably not. It’s just a shame that at least some of the money can’t be diverted to a fund for clearing up flooded basements.

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