Vital Pompey Members Corner

TO ALL THOSE WHO KEEP CALLING POMPEY CHEATS. .

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Image for TO ALL THOSE WHO KEEP CALLING POMPEY CHEATS. .

A message is spelt out by tracyc for, well I will leave it to her to explain.

Quite frankly, I’m sick of hearing it.

What has happened at Portsmouth? Well nobody actually knows, that’s why the team of Administrators have started to investigate.

Yes, there was a stage when the club were spending more money on players than they were getting in income. Are they the only club to do this? Hardly!

Yes, they have notched up huge debts. Need I ask if they’re the only club to do this?

In 2008 when Pompey won the FA Cup they had a wealthy benefactor in Sacha Gaydamak who was footing the bills. There are a lot of other football clubs currently in this situation. Then something changed, Gaydamak stopped funding the club and said that he wanted his money back, which he had been chalking up as the club’s debts as he spent it. Could this happen to other clubs? Of course it could.

I don’t know exactly what happened with Gaydamak’s money. I do know that the Standard Bank foreclosed on the loan. That could happen to other clubs too. As for anything else to do with the Gaydamak family’s financial situation, I wouldn’t like to start to speculate on that.

Since Gaydamak left the club, it was initially sold to Al Fahim, who came in with promises of billions and a bright future for the club. He didn’t put a penny in, put the club in a position all summer where ‘due diligence’ was going on and so there was no transfer activity possible until 2 days before the window shut. This was because his hand was forced to actually buy the club because another consortium was also interested. There were a lot of promises, including on of £50 million investment, but nothing actually happened.

After a short period of time, when the club had floundered from bad to worse under Al Fahim’s stewardship, it was sold to that other consortium, headed by the mysterious Al-Faraj, who may or may not actually exist. I have heard that they did have £35 million investment at the time Al Fahim took over but by the time they did take over it had gone. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Chief Executive Peter Storrie, who introduced the Al-Faraj consortium told us they had a lot of money and would take the club to ‘another level’. In Al-Faraj’s time he brought in his own people, including spurs fan Mark Jacob and convicted fraudster and asset stripper Daniel Azougy. The players and staff went unpaid, the club went perilously close to a winding up order and eventually one of the club’s creditors, Chainrai, took over to protect his investment.

Of course both Al-Fahim and Al-Faraj had passed the Premier League’s ‘Fit and Proper Person Test’.

Since seizing control, Chainrai has done the only thing he could do by, sadly, making this proud old club the first premier league one to go into administration, but thereby rescuing it from annihilation by HRMC. The administrators he appointed are trying to investigate what has gone on at Pompey.

So, to those who keep trotting out the over-simplistic view that Pompey cheated in 2008 by overspending, if you really have such a good understanding of what has gone on at Pompey, please tell the administrators, because they really need to know. If you don’t really know, then SHUT UP!

And as for Pompey deserving what has been happening because they got themselves into this mess, then please clarify exactly who it is that is still involved with the football club, who got the club into the mess. Or, again, shut up. And don’t even think of trying to tell me that by wanting success, the fans were to blame. What football fans don’t want their club to have success? That’s what football fans do.

Pompey fans have been through hell this season, it wouldn’t surprise me if the local health authority sees an increase in stress-related illnesses (I am completely serious) but we have had a glimmer of success in the FA cup this season. Including going to our local rivals and giving them a sweet thrashing. This is something to smile about at last, and it has been achieved by pure ‘backs against the wall’ never say die Pompey spirit, by the fans, the manager and our rag tag band of loans and free signings on the field all pulling together against adversity. And now we’ve got a day out at Wembley to look forward to. So its time the general media stopped having a go, and applauded our spirit – because that’s what football is really about.

All the time people are writing that Pompey were cheating, or deserve what is happening, they are ignoring the important message. Football is in a mess and this could happen to your club too! Lets wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.

Written by tracyc.

The views within this article are the views of the individual who wrote and submitted this piece, sometimes solely theirs. They are not necessarily shared by the Vital Pompey Site Journalists.


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