by Ten Bobsworth »
20 Dec 2023 23:59
Ten Bobsworth tmesis Ten Bobsworth
A lot of opinions are worth as much as last week's newspapers as are quite a lot of rumours.
Eddie Davies handed over Bolton for £1 after spending years trying to find a suitable buyer. At that time BWFC owned the Reebok Stadium, the integral 4*hotel, conference facilities, two training grounds, one of them Premiership standard and state of the art, and other land with development value around the stadium and around one of the two training grounds.
It avoided Administration for three years but only for three years. The company that owned Bolton Wanderers since 1895 is presently in the final stages of liquidation.
Generally those £1 sales involve a fair chunk of debt pay-off, so it costs rather more than £1 to buy the club.
You are right that the devil is invariably in the detail. In this case the detail and the substance were persistently misrepresented by the local media out of what seemed to be a combination of ignorance and a long-standing prejudice against Eddie Davies and Phil Gartside.
Davies had always shunned the media until shortly before he retired when he struck up a friendship with a journo at the Financial Times also granting a quite interesting interview to the Isle of Man Examiner around the same time. Meanwhile Phil Gartside was always left to deal with the media. The relationship with the Bolton News was particularly bad and had been for years.
The Sports Shield consortium was the flimsiest of thin veils. It consisted of two recently formed companies with a total share capital of £2 with Holdsworth's sole contribution landing the club with another £4m of debt at an interest of 24%. Holdsworth was heralded by the local media (and fans) as the great saviour and after he had walked away with a large amount of money in return for his 50P 'investment' was later granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Bolton. You simply could not make it up.
Last edited by
Ten Bobsworth on 21 Dec 2023 08:47, edited 1 time in total.