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Harwood Bull contrasts the philosophies of Graham Turner and David Keyte.
Any money brought in by the FA Cup results will be vital
in getting through the current crisis. It’s not enough to keep the club alive
in the long term. Recent interviews with Keyte & Graham Turner show their
very different financial philosophies. Turner thought it best to keep plenty of
cash in the bank and consider the debt a long term problem, Keyte felt that the
club wasn’t going to be able to move on and take advantage of development
opportunities until the debt was settled and the leases regained. With the
benefit of hindsight, Turner appears to have had a point. Right now we seem to
be in the position of someone who has succeeded in paying off a massive
mortgage and now can’t afford to eat.
There was a lot of speculation about how much it had
cost to clear the debts, Recently David
Keyte was talking to BBC Hereford & Worcester's Howard Bentham, and said
(quoted on BBC sport website) "In financial terms Graham left
£450,000 in the bank account “ and “…. I can assure you the £450,000
that went into buying the leases would be a small figure compared to what we
get in return." Does that mean that he spent everything in the bank
account to clear the debt? If so that was reckless in the extreme.
Graham Turner has expressed displeasure at being blamed
for the VAT bill (quoted in same BBC website article), but it happened on his
watch, so it’s hard to see how he can duck that one. Having said that he had
overseen the Bulls during a long period when they had been to the edge
financially and come through it, and he left the club much stronger than when
he first joined.
Turner was a football man who learned to deal with all
the other stuff and by and large did it fairly well. By contrast Keyte is a
business man who has had to learn about the realities of football very quickly
through some harsh lessons. However I don’t remember too many people
criticising him for paying off the debts at the time, we probably believed that
as a financial man he’d achieved something that GT had made to sound difficult
if not impossible. It now looks like a great part of our cash reserves were
burnt up doing it, leaving nothing to fall back on when things went pear shaped
on the field.
My feeling is that there has been far too much optimism
in planning the club’s finances. I don’t doubt that David Keyte is a man of
integrity and financial experience who has the interests of the club at heart.
But even in the run up to Saturday’s game he was talking about a sellout, which
was never going to happen. We have gone from what looked like a rosy(ish) view
of the future a couple of years ago to wondering whether we have a future at
all.
In the dream scenario we get past Cheltenham and have a
day out in the third round at a premiership club and pocket a load of money to
keep us alive for a while longer. If that happens then we must use that
lifeline to plan for the future that recognises the facts: we are a modest club
with a scruffy little ground, in a city where change and developments happen very
slowly. We can survive, rebuild and come back stronger but we shouldn’t kid
ourselves that everything would be wonderful if Mr Keyte stepped aside and
someone else took over. Who’d want it?