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THE LONG VIEW - DON'T EVER EVER EVER SELL THE BORO 5-11-07
Steve Morley
"A point is a point" will probably become the new Boro mantra as we attempt to carve out a position of safety.
The game against Spurs, with moments of good football flanked by flakiness and a clear lack of confidence, reminded me of several weeks ago as the clouds of gloom began to form over the Riverside (did they ever really go away?).
At the time I began casting around for a ray of light to leaven the foreboding sense of doom. And it was right in front of my eyes - though it took me a day to recognize it. It was a newspaper interview with the Gooner's chairman Peter Hill-Wood.
Apart from the usual pontificating he was talking about Alisher Usmanov's 14.5 per cent shareholding in the club and how characters with questionable backgrounds and unclear motives, like the Uzbek, were not wanted at Arsenal. Then the very next day Usmanov upped his stake to 21 per cent, second only to majority shareholder Danny Fiszman.
I nearly wet myself laughing. Now this column is not one to resort to glib platitudes but in this case will gleefully do so, namely 'never judge a book by its cover' and 'first impressions are lasting impressions'.
First, take a look at pictures of Usmanov. That man appears to have no DNA. The blueprint for his being seem to be the seven deadly sins. In fact, I'd bet each cell in his body positively pulsates with greed, lust and avarice. Have you ever seen such drooping bulldog jowls, tiny pin eyes squinting out of a heaving mountain of rubbery flesh and huge murderous meaty hands other than those not behind bars?
This scientific conclusion is based on solid objective evidence. That is, I once spent a couple of hours in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and I can unreservedly state that it's a gangster state. The officials that I had the er. interesting fortune of meeting wore black leather jackets, thick gold chains hung off their necks and their fingers were braced with even more gold.
And check the president Islam Karimov. This is a man who dismisses the quaint notion of rule of law. Ask Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned his post after speaking out about 'corruption and state-sponsored brutality'.
Hill-Wood clearly flew into a panic when it became apparent that Usmanov was bearing down on Arsenal like a ravenously hungry King Kong. A little later the Gooners introduced a rule that forbade directors, who hold the majority of shares, from selling their stakes without approval from fellow directors until 2009. So the gates have been slammed shut on the Uzbek - for now.
The Uzbeki gargantuan one was put out at the character assassination that had been taking place, and in an attempted bit of PR spin did an interview with The Times to exonerate his noble and elevated self. He claimed that the six years he served inside, convicted of fraud, corruption and theft of state property, were politically motivated. Yeah, right, and I'm George Boateng and can string together more than three passes in a row.
But what's this go to do with the Boro? Well just about everything. As crap as we may be at the moment and with the R word looming large, we may turn it around and start climbing the table (remember Everton a few seasons back).
Now if we were a club listed on the stock exchange you can bet your kid's Christmas presents that some congenitally greedy business type would start snooping around, attracted by the heady scent of TV revenues and potential profits.
In fact the Premiership is your veritable cash cow these days - that's why they're queuing up to buy out clubs. But you've got to remember these are not fans. The Glazer's are not fans, Usmanov's not a fan, Abramovich is not a fan - first and foremost they are businessmen. David Dein once made a big thing of being an Arsenal fan. He's the one who offloaded his shares to Usmanov for £75 million.
And Hell, the Glazers once refered to Manure as a franchise. That would be the ultimate taunt: "You're nothing but a franchise."
Gibbo's an exception, he's a fan and a businessman and when he refused to join the rush to go public by listing on the stock exchange a few years back, I breathed a sigh of relief.
When you float your company (read football team) you raise capital to splash around on overpriced players, stadium, whatever, but and this is a massive BUT, you effectively hand over ownership. Though you may retain a majority holding, as is the case with Manure, you can get saddled with enormous debt.
The Glazer's borrowed a huge amount to finance their purchase and the club itself is the security for those loans. The repayments come from the club's profits.
But what if revenues start dipping, the repayments start becoming increasingly difficult to meet and the banks start clamouring for their money back? Well, somebody will just have to sell some assets. Not good.
At some point somebody's going to come along and gobble up shares. It's the nature of the Usmanov. You may even end being owned by a hedge fund. And their maxim is buy low, sell high, minimise risk, maximise profit.
They're money making machines that deal in huge amounts. In itself that's no bad thing but would you want it happening to your club?
Being listed also brings further perils. One of the most potentially devastating for a football club is that you are beholden by law to increase your shareholders' profit. That's right, not the tea lady, not the players or the manager and certainly not the fans - but by law, the shareholders.
It's not hard to see a situation in the not so distant future where someone will really stitch a club up because they want to offload their shares for a quick profit and they don't care who to or what the consequences could be.
It'll happen for sure and I'm sure Hill-Wood sensed something unpleasant in the wind when Usmanov came in with his bid.
It could have even been the resurgence of the practice that became relatively common in Margaret Thatcher's era - somebody buys a whopping big stake in an organisation and then essentially bullies the hapless owners into buying it back at an inflated price in order to avoid a hostile take over. The effect on the owners can be, and has been, absolutely ruinous.
The game is already slipping away from ordinary fans. Just take a look at the Emirates stadium - it seems to have been built for one purpose - to make money on an industrial scale. That's why I could afford to wet myself laughing at Hill-Wood's flapping - a so called big club nearly shoots itself in the foot, big time.
At the moment Boro may be vying for the most wobbliest, most lacking in confidence team in the Premiership but in Gibbo's hands at least it's our club. How many other fans, as they look up the sky and see the shadows of circling vultures, can say that?
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