It's been a very dispiriting week for football with Bury's expulsion from the Football League in ignominious circumstances, a last-minute takeover of the Shakers not going through because of the sheer scale and complexity of the financial crisis at Gigg Lane.
Previous owners clearly spent money they didn’t have and the myriad ways in which that money was raised, documented superbly by David Conn in the Guardian, brought the club to the point of no return but the EFL have been dicing with this kind of situation for so long, either a last-gasp saviour staving off the threat of financial doom or the problem being put into the long grass (as with my club Coventry City) in the hope that the sheer passage of time will make it go away.
Times were always hard, of course, for clubs such as Bury and in the 1980's, when I first started watching football, the threat of the official receiver was often close at hand as crowds at all levels of the game fell and the possibility of rogue owners eyeing up the stadium or the land it sat on was very real.
But there was still a sense back then that those clubs were equal members of the Football League, smaller than Liverpool or Manchester United but forged in similar circumstances, part of their community and important development grounds for local talent.
Television money was distributed more evenly and a portion of gate receipts from every game went to the visiting club.
Those ties were gradually loosened and then blown away completely by the formation of the Premier League but I'm not going to go down the route of simply blaming the top-flight, as difficult as it is to see the disparity of wealth that now exists.
The EFL have tried to present themselves both as the home of 'real' football but also (with the Championship) as one of the most commercially successful leagues in the world yet they have failed time and time again, from a position of financial strength, to toughen the rules around who can take over a club but also to continually monitor and regulate the finances of each and every club under their jurisdiction.
In the absence of that then I can't see any improvement in the current system whereby Championship clubs, gambling on reaching the top-flight, will want more and more of the EFL cake and, in effect, create a Premier League second division in all but name while those below are left at the mercy of investment vehicles, equity funds, offshore accounts and more.
But the game goes on and its spirit is still there even if becomes harder to find at the higher levels.
It's in the FA Vase which gets underway this weekend (free admission to Bury supporters wearing their shirts at Worsbrough Bridge AFC on Sunday), in the next qualifying round of the Women’s FA Cup (lots of free admission football including Dartford FC versus Hackney Ladies at 2pm on Sunday) and in the Scottish Cup where fourteen clubs are battling it out for a place in the first round proper (£6/£3 admission for Lochee United against Lothian Thistle Hutchison Vale).
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