Glad to see you are keeping up your utter bollox spouting standard, but nowhere have I tried to "excuse Bradford's self destruction".

You just want to pretend that nobody else and nothing else was in any way involved, though. In the actual real world, the collapse was, factually, the result of many factors. It is reasonable to discuss them. You introduced the emotive "blame".


I'm sure you would, but that's just the sort of pointless purely academic "bet" that adds literally nothing to any discussion.

its an additional £100k loss. It is an added deterrent.

There is no potential gain if you are in admin.

it wouldnt really matter, once in admin, the club and all of its assets is gone. You dont own it any longer, anything you do to it will be irrelevant.

Sorry Smokey, I haven't articulated my last post sufficiently.

Ok the 100k may act as a deterrent, however we both know that people with serious cash can usually find some way around stumping up cash (unless this is a bond given in advance).

The potential gain I mentioned would be for clubs striving for promotion, which we have seen both in RL (pre SL) and in other sports, chasing the rainbow etc.

Finally, what happens to the golden ticket when a club enters admin, are you suggesting that it should be revoked, or passed on to any new owner that may but "the club" from an administrator.

In most circumstances, outside of pre-packs, we should treat the new owners with a clean slate. They are, after all, people risking their money to try and save one of our struggling clubs. The least we cn do is not deliberately make that more difficult for them. So yes, i would pass on anything to the new owners.

I would question why a person with 'serious money' was putting a club in to admin. The debts we see take down most of our clubs arent huge, they arent Enron levels. They are generally in the hundreds of thousands - £2m range. Which already isnt a huge hit for those with 'serious money'.

With regards to what you mention about P+R, as I said this simply highlights a failing of P+R and what a dumb idea it was to return to it, even dumber to return in this format. But anyway, it leaves us in no different position to now. Last season London and Salford would have been relegated, not Bradford. Not deducting points later doesn’t affect that. Those without serious money would be pretty upset at needing to pay £100k of their own money to put a club into admin .

The clean slate is a problem in the sporting arena, as many people would perceive that the "old" club could gain substantial advantage by going pop and "starting again" with a clean slate.
Lets say that one of the Championship clubs borrowed heavily and over paid its players, in order to gain promotion to the top flight and then, having gone into admin (albeit with a different owner), began life in SL.
They would have a serious cash advantage over, both their promotion rivals AND the incumbent SL clubs and equally likely, they would have been promoted in place of a "better run" solvent club.

Equally, a SL club whose slate is wiped clean, would have a serious cash advantage over it's SL rivals, either at the top end, or lower end of the division, Hence a points deduction seems a perfectly reasonable "punishment".
Why should going into admin allow ANY sporting advantage, it's just plain wrong.

No they dont. The only cash the new company has is the cash the new owner is prepared to put in. There is no advantage to this conveyed by having been in administration

You seem to assume that admin is some painless way of clearing debts. It isn’t. It is the final option that no-one would want to take.

There seems to be this pernicious idea within the arguments for a points deduction that the new and old owner would somehow be working together. There are laws against that kind of thing, its not something RL needs to worry about, the justice system already does it for us.

Is there anyone at all who thinks Bradford started this season at an advantage because of admin? If so, they are clearly nuts.

You also seem to be suggesting that clubs would take the risk to get promoted, get promoted, but then immediately go bust anyway. Why is someone going to do that?

The alternative is that in your example, the owner of the club has willingly flushed his money down the toilet to get his team promoted in the hope that someone else will come in and take it on debt free afterwards. That again seems crazy.

I agree the RFL should rightly be concerned about HMRC being shafted by RL clubs, but so should the clubs themselves. Part of the reason for the Bulls' failure was the distribution penalty, and the clubs took part of this cash for themselves. Are they still banking the cheques, while the HMRC whistles? I suggest so.

We now hear that the RFL are pursuing Omar Khan personally for full repayment of ALL distribution ever paid to OK Bulls. I didn't see any report that if they got it, they would pay it straight to HMRC / creditors and on past form fully expect that any money so recovered would just be divvied again between the rest of the clubs, while they berate the Bulls for shafting creditors they will blatantly be keeping money that should clearly otherwise have gone to creditors.

But I'm sure that HMRC will be heartened by the PG the RFL got out of Khan to repay all distribution moneys, despite HMRC not seeing a penny of it. Kudos to the RFL for looking after the important people.

Although I may be "completely nuts", any business bought from an administrator, is bought at a "reduced rate" and it would certainly be cheaper to buy Bradford from the administrator, than it would to start over, so there clearly is some sort of advantage.

Of course no club is going to deliberately try and go bust, just to start again with a clean slate but, back in the real world, it happens and when a club/member is in the top flight, unless there was some kind of expulsion clause in the constitution of the sport, the new owner "gains advantage", if only the advantage of "the golden ticket" ??

it isnt bought at a reduced rate, its bought at its market value. It is only in certain circumstances that buying a business out of admin is cheaper than buying it outright. The only reason a business in admin would be cheaper is if the assets are valued much less than the liabilities. Which is only right.

If the assets have a decent value then it may be in the best interests of the creditors to liquidate.

and again, the new owner doesnt 'gain advantage' they buy what they buy, if thats an SL club, its an SL club, if its not its not. A new owner is likely to pay MORE for an SL club than if it was a championship one, the main beneficiaries of such a situation would be the creditors.

The market rate that is paid is usually massively less than the assets are valued at on the balance sheet.
It maybe "market rate" but, the businesses that I've seen bought and sold by administrators are certainly "good value".
Of course anything up for sale is only worth what somebody is willing to pay and admin situations usually have severe time constraints, and their sale price reflects this.

Far from being a "reduced rate", isn't the buying of a business from an administrator pretty much the perfect test of real market value?

I think a better argument would be that buying from the administrator is cheaper than buying the whole club and company including taking on all of its liabilities.

What seems to have been forgotten by many is that's precisely what originally did happen, MM/RW/BB2014 agreed to buy OKB for £300K. It remains a legal wrangle as to whether they did or they didn't, but if they had done, let's not forget that that would have been a purchase of the whole business/company as an ongoing concern, and we also know the RFL accepted BB2014 as new owners/members etc. so had BB2014 not withdrawn their bid as a result of the sanctions proposed against them, they would have taken on everything, lock, stock and barrel, including the entirety of all creditors. And if they had been able to make the business work, then neither HMRC nor any creditor would have been a penny worse off.

If that were the case the administrator would not sell. A distressed asset is always likely to cost less than one which isn’t. That’s obvious.

But its simply not the case that buying a company in admin gives you opportunity to just buy a ton of undervalued assets. The administrators job is to get the best price for the creditors. If he can get more by liquidating the assets that’s what he will do, and is in fact what they have done. That’s what Marc Green did, bought the assets of OKBulls, which is now being liquidated.

In reality those assets consist of a bit of stock, RFL membership, some intangible assets like the brand, he is hoping the fanbase and history are still there, and a boatload of liabilities. In isolation these are in no way a good deal. The only way there is any value whatsoever in anything Marc Green has bought is if he can make the business work. If he were to sell the assets he would get a hell of a lot less than he paid for them. The name Bradford Bulls and the fanbase are worthless without an RL team, the stock would lose value if the team became defunct and the RFL membership would be revoked. The lease would become a big liability with no income from the RL team. What Marc Green has bought is essentially worthless, in reality the only thing he has bought is the chance to make it work. He certainly hasn’t got a load of assets at a bargain basement price.

rlJust to add a completely different anglerl

Bradford Bulls more than any club deserved the 6 points deduction. Second Administration in next to no time. The punishment is for spending more than you can afford on players - therefore cheating other clubs and their players and their supporters by getting some wins unfairly.

Not paying HMRC the tax, national insurance and VAT owed for 6 month's running is no way to responsibly run any club.

The owner was in effect also punished as it meant he had no chance of getting his money back. - The new owners have benefitted as the Bradford Bulls Club with a 6 point deduction cost them less than it would have done without the 6 point deduction.

If the new owner runs things responsibly within its means from now on, the Club will have stopped cheating and he might have half a chance of getting his money back as well.

It just keeps getting better doesn't it ?