Codarmysaint wrote:
They went bust. Fleetwood wont.
Unlucky.
The problem was that the basis that Gretna were run on sounds eerily similar to the way that Fleetwood are being run under Andy Piley.
Gretna's survival was based entirely on Brooks Mileson being able to underwrite the club's expenses. He had a family who had no interest in football and there was no plan B, or at least, not one sufficient enough to underwrite the club's eye watering cost base. There was a plan to make the club self sufficient in the long term, but that long term didn't factor in the unexpected. If, hypothetically, Mileson left his front door one morning and was hit by a bus, the club was finished.
In the end, that is effectively what happened. Mileson became extremely ill and his family had no interest in bankrolling the club. It had nothing to do with Mileson's fortune.
It's no bad thing that Fleetwood are investing, in fact it's encouraging. The concern is where the pay-back comes into it. It was the same problem that Farsley had - running up costs in the belief that those costs could be recouped from asset sales and investments that would make the business more profitable. Those asset sales never happened and the rest, as they say, is history.
Things may well come off for Fleetwood but it's a scenario that is all too common in non league football. If I were a fan, I'd be crossing everything I had that Andy Pilley looks both ways before crossing the road.
