BILLY BREMNER MEMORIAL JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN
Date: 24th November 2024
DUMBARTON (AND SCOTTISH FOOTBALL) MUST RISE AGAIN
Another of Scotland’s historic clubs has fallen into administration. Fans have rallied once more. The future of Dumbarton FC, the first outright winners of the Scottish League, hangs in the balance. Here is a further, clear example of the need for independent scrutiny and regulation of finance, governance and conduct across football in our nation. How many more before those in charge act?
Whenever a club faces administration or worse, it is a tragedy. This one is personal for me. I have supported Dumbarton through thick and (a bit more often) thin since 1969. After moving to Scotland in 2010 I became heavily involved in the Sonstrust, and ended up negotiating on its behalf with previous owners Brabco. I later became the club’s (unpaid) press and media officer, and spent 18 months on the board as an associate director before stepping outside altogether to galvanise a group of people committed to looking at how to bring the Sons under community-friendly ownership.
Back in the Brabco days, we had one bid rejected. Now we are having to look at the options for coming out of administration and rising again as a club which belongs to the people, not to chancers and speculators.
One thing should be absolutely clear. After years of living hand-to-mouth following the takeover by Cognitive Capital in 2021, the local directors at Dumbarton, who had been left holding the baby with no effective support and loaded debt that became unpayable, administration was the only option. Supporters may have questions to ask about what happened, when and why, but this is not the time to litigate all that. This is the time to stand fully behind the club, its local directors, its staff and its players.
That is already happening in spectacular style. Over 900 people have contributed £67,000 to a £100,000 appeal in a few days. The Sonstrust, affiliated to SFSA, has put in £10,000. The money is a big chunk of what is needed to keep the club on the pitch for the rest of the season. There is more to come while the administrators try to refloat it financially and achieve stability. That has to include, from the point of view of those who love the club, and purely in good governance terms, a change of ownership. Allies will do everything they can to ensure that there is a strong community stake and safeguards in place moving forward.
How did the Sons get into this situation? It is a tortuously complex story, and one which currently involves an investigation and police enquiries revolving around “the non-receipt of significant funds that were owed to the club from the sale of development land in 2021 [and] the circumstances surrounding this transaction”, to quote administrators Quantuma.
There is a huge amount that cannot be said right now. Fans asking why they weren’t told about the threat of administration should understand that the way everything has been handled has been designed not only to ensure that the local directors were acting with due fiduciary responsibility, but also that the club and the asset was not further imperilled. Likewise, raising money ahead of administration would not have prevented it, and could well have ended up in the wrong place.
The larger story is one of another small football club getting into the hands of owners whose chief interest is not football and community, but land, housing and asset deals to make money. Then there are the broken promises, the loan piles, the pie-in-the-sky thinking, the neglect and the self-interest which seems to accompany all these pitiful narratives.
In the case of Dumbarton, Inverness Caley and other clubs that may be too near the brink, the solution is specific, local and community-focused. It is about ensuring that football clubs are run as effective small businesses with good community and customer relations at their heart – not as a magnate for speculators, chancers and accumulators.
The larger picture is the issue of systemic change which the SFSA has highlighted strongly in its 2023 fan-lead review, Rebuilding Scottish Football, which I was proud to contribute to and edit. Following a parliamentary debate earlier this year, we now have a Roundtable to look at the development of the game hosted by the Scottish Government.
It is vital that the issue of who owns our game, how it is financed, how it is governed and conduct within it is central to those conversations. Independent scrutiny of these issues has been vital for some time. Now it is urgent. The backstop is the kind of regulation being developed down south. If that is to be avoided (as the football authorities want), then appropriate independent, demonstrably effective scrutiny and safeguarding needs to be put in place to make it unnecessary. There should be no hiding place from those requirements if Scottish football is to prosper.
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Simon Barrow is co-founder of the SFSA, a writer and a public policy specialist
Posted in: Latest News
Tags: Dumbarton, Football, Scotland, Scottish fans, SFA, SFSA, SPFL