David Conn Whisper it amid the current furore: top-level football is not savagely debt-ridden and it is unlikely to implode. The clubs generally look able to ride the economic downturn because, unlike other industries worrying if their customers will disappear tomorrow, they have the cushion of the Premier League's £2.7bn television deal until the end of the 2009-10 season. Global popularity is growing and at home, for all the dissatisfaction about high prices, erratic kick-off times, overpaid players and commercial overkill, fans are turning up - and paying up - in huge numbers.
As an uncertain future comes into view, however, we must qualify that sunny picture. If we have a serious recession in which hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs, many will be football fans and they will no longer be able to fork out for boomtime-priced tickets or multiple pay-TV subscriptions. If that happens, the clubs will be more vulnerable, as will every industry. Football fans are unlikely to give up match-going first, but perhaps more clubs will finally have to think sensitively about ticket prices, after years of merciless inflation.
The Football Association's chairman, Lord Triesman, warned a fortnight ago that the Premier League clubs' £3bn total debts are "high risk". Yet the clubs look more robust than several years ago.
True, a majority rely on owners to augment earnings with cash or "soft" loans. The most recently published accounts, which mostly date as far back as May or June 2007, show that 12 of the 20 clubs - Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Chelsea, Fulham, Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United, Stoke City, Sunderland, West Ham United and Wigan Athletic - relied on owners putting in cash or loans or guaranteeing borrowings. A large chunk of that headline £3bn debt is accounted for by interest-free loans from owners: Roman Abramovich (£578m to Chelsea); Mohamed Al Fayed (£165m to Fulham); and Dave Whelan (£31m to Wigan).
It is legitimate, certainly, to question how sustainable this is, although all the owners are very wealthy individuals under no evident pressure - Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, West Ham's owner, says he is unscathed by Landsbanki's meltdown in Iceland. Manchester City's new owner, Sheikh Mansour, is as gold-plated as possible; Villa's Randy Lerner is a billionaire from selling the MBNA credit card company; and Whelan and Newcastle's Mike Ashley pocketed hundreds of millions when they sold their respective sports retail chains.
Middlesbrough's Steve Gibson has an industrial fortune - according to its latest accounts his container company turned over £196m, and made £15m profit, after absorbing Middlesbrough's losses. A downturn would have to be vicious to seriously affect his ability to support the club. Less is known about Edwin Davies, Bolton's owner, who made his money in the kettle components company Strix. So far he has funded survival at the Reebok.
Everton and Portsmouth, the clubs who are struggling to keep up, are publicly seeking buyers. Money is tight, but there is no equivalent of the Leeds of 2001-02, "living the dream" on the high wire of foreseeable collapse, or of any recently promoted clubs spending like Bradford City did in the "six weeks of madness" in 2000 which resulted in double administration and relegation to League Two. Broadly, clubs have wrestled their wage bills into order, albeit with a reliance on owners' money.
The gap between the Premier and Football leagues means relegation can still be catastrophic, especially to a big club. But the real squeeze is likely to be felt lower down, where there are no big TV deals, where the banks are reluctant to lend and where crowds, corporate entertaining and sponsorship are more difficult to sustain.
In the Premier League, Arsenal are the only club carrying large borrowings from a major building project. The debts of Manchester United and Liverpool, loaded on by the clubs' owners, stand out as exceptional and wasteful. In a league which has many clubs genuinely supported by benefactors, these North American owners are extracting huge sums from their clubs just to finance buying them in the first place.
The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, asked last week for greater transparency. This is not a big problem. Published accounts reveal who the owners are. More legitimate is to question those owners' conduct and motives, and, as Burnham implicitly did, query the debts which the Glazer family and Tom Hicks and George Gillett brought to Old Trafford and Anfield.
The ownership picture illustrates how odd it is that more forceful complaints are not made about wealthy people locating their assets in tax havens. The Premier League provides an offshore tour, from the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Nevada and Delaware to Jersey and the Isle of Man. Mike Ashley might feel hard done by: he is UK-resident, owns Newcastle via a British-based company and has put millions into the club, yet after a couple of poor appointments and four defeats, the fans want to run him out of Toon.
I think he comes to much the same idea as me - Premier league is relatively safe, it is lower down the leagues where we'll see clubs start to suffer. One was mentioned this week - sponsor went bust?
