In 2009, Cardiff City moved into their new home, Cardiff City stadium. One reminder of their former home is pictured above, the gates of Ninian Park, home for Cardiff City from 1910 until the ground’s demolition in 2009. We looked at Ninian Park’s demolition in pictures a couple of years ago.

Ninian Park’s historic gates were saved and installed at the new stadium. Apparently, one of the bluebirds on the gates had been stolen during Ninian Park’s final days, but a replica was made from the remaining bluebird.

Photo credit: Phil Tilter on Flickr

While to fans of MLS it may seem normal for a league to span two countries, the existence of Swansea in the Premier League, Cardiff City in the Football League and Newport County, Wrexham, Merthyr Town and Colwyn Bay further down in the English system remains a subject of some controversy to UEFA and within Welsh and English football. A potted history of Welsh football is in order to explain this anomaly.

The Welsh national association is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1876, 13 years after the English FA and three years after the Scottish FA. Its original hotspot was in North Wales, mainly around Wrexham, where the sport had crossed the border from Cheshire in England. In south Wales though, rather than Association Football taking hold, it was Rugby Football that became the most popular organised game in the country in the late nineteenth century.

This distinction can be seen in the contrast between the country’s biggest professional clubs – Wrexham in the north date back to 1872, while in the south of the country Cardiff were founded in 1899 and Swansea in 1913. This delayed national development provided an immediate impediment to a strong Welsh league developing in the crucial early decades of organised football in Great Britain, and was unlike the story in Scotland, to contrast to another English neighbour. Challenging issues of north-south transit in Wales also proved to be a challenge to national play in the country.

Welsh participation in the English league system thus dates back to the country’s oldest club, Wrexham. Located close to the border with England adjacent to the Northwest hub of English football, it actually proved to be more profitable for the club to play in the English Combination minor league that ran from 1890 to 1911 than in the nascent Welsh League, with the inferior competition in Wales dettering spectators and players alike (Wrexham briefly played in the Welsh league from 1894-1896, easily winning it both seasons they participated in). Wrexham eventually rose up the English system to the Football League, and the newer professional Welsh clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff followed them across the border in the early twentieth century.

Cardiff had the strongest run of success in English competition in the twentieth century, winning the FA Cup in 1927, three years after finishing as runners-up in the Football League’s top division. Swansea themselves rose to the top flight in 1981 after three successive promotions from the basement division under John Toshack. They finished in sixth place in the 1981-82 season, but just as quickly fell back to the bottom tier by 1986.

Meantime, the Welsh teams playing in the English league system were still allowed to compete in the Welsh Cup, of course dominating it. This provided Welsh clubs with a route to European competition. This issue has proven to be controversial: in the early 1990s, a national Welsh Premier League was established, featuring both professional and semi-pro clubs, with all Welsh clubs invited to join it. The professional clubs from four of Wales’ biggest conurbations – Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and Wrexham – all refused to join, remaining in the English system. Clubs playing in the English league system were thus banned from participating in the Welsh Cup in 1995, removing that route to European competition for clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff – though that may be about to change.

The Welsh Premier League even had considerable trouble attracting the smaller Welsh teams, issuing sanctions that forced clubs such as Merthyr Tydfil (now Merthyr Town) to take court action to be able to play their home games in the English system within Welsh borders. The Welsh Premier League struggles due to the absence of clubs such as Swansea, though it does allow for some glorious moments for some very small clubs in European competition – the champions of the league qualify for the UEFA Champions League, with Barry Town beating an admittedly weakened FC Porto team 3-1 at Jenner Park in Wales in 2001 (they still lost 9-3 on aggregate, though!).

All that said, Swansea City’s promotion to the Premier League is a fantastic achievement, and brings a touch of Welsh exotica to the league – along with a welcome commitment to continue playing attractive soccer from their manager Brendan Rodgers.

Cardiff City vs. Leicester City, Championship Playoff 2nd Leg, Cardiff City Stadium, Cardiff, Wales.  Cardiff won on penalties to go through to the Championship Playoff Final. 12 May, 2010.

Photo credit: joncandy on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Continuing our look at the redevelopment of Ninian Park, former home of Cardiff City FC.

Photo credit: joncandy on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Cardiff City fans protest against chairman Peter Ridsdale. Over two thousand Cardiff City fans took to the streets this weekend ahead of their game against Middlesbrough, after the club was taken to court over unpaid taxes, amidst a myriad of other concerns about a man who seems to be trying to set a world record for alienating fans of the most clubs possible.

Photo credit: joncandy on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

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Portsmouth have seven more days to breathe after a stay of execution was given to them in the High Court over £11.5 million that they owe the taxman, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

Meanwhile, Cardiff City were also in court today, receiving a 28 day adjournment on they £2.7million they owe HMRC.

And Southend United also procured an adjournment from the court over the £200,000 debt they have to HMRC.

Noticing a theme?  David Conn at the Guardian sums it all up:

Yet the very appearance of two of football’s bigger clubs – and Southend United – who continue to receive millions of pounds in TV and other income, in a court where scores of small, hard-hit businesses will be wound up today, has concentrated minds again on the game’s inability to balance the books, even in this boom time.

Since 1992, the year the Football League’s First Division clubs broke away to form the Premier League, and therefore not share their TV rights bonanza with the other three divisions, Football League clubs have fallen into insolvency a staggering 53 times.

For three of them – Aldershot, Maidstone and, later, Scarborough – the histories of the original clubs did truly end, in liquidation before subsequently being re-established. For others, administration meant they could be bought by new owners, who paid a fraction of the debts that were owed – except at Southampton, where last year Markus Liebherr paid Saints’ debts in full. Since 2002, when ITV Digital’s collapse helped push 10 clubs over the edge, an estimated £200m due to creditors has been left unpaid, including sums owed to the police, local ­councils, hospitals, universities and other public bodies, a Yellow Pages-worth of small businesses and, most unforgivably, St John Ambulance.

Appallingly, as Conn mentions, St John Ambulance, whose volunteers tend to the sick and injured at football stadiums, are often left unpaid as the Premier League and Football League’s rules ensure footballing creditors (other clubs, players) are paid first.  HMRC have been unhappy about this for themselves for some time, and have this past year stepped up their efforts to get paid for debt owed to them, with King’s Lynn already wound-up.

Two Hundred Percent, a month ago, foresaw today’s events, with three clubs now facing a final chance to pay the taxman or go under:

All of this brings us back to the question of whether it is right that HMRC should pursue football clubs this aggresivlely, and the answer to this is, of course, “yes”. Football seems to continue to exist in a world in which all that ever matters is what happens on the pitch. Even now, clubs seem fundamentally immoral in their financial dealings. Why should Portsmouth pay hundreds of thousands of pounds per week on players’ wages and not settle their tax bill? Why should Cardiff do the same? And the ultimate responsibility for this sort of fiasco lies with the authorities that run the game. They have it within their power to make it compulsary that all clubs settle all of their debts in full each month before they even start thinking about signing new players or even starting to pay the ones that they already have. It’s their choice. The fact of the matter remains a stark one: one of these days, HMRC will catch up with another Kings Lynn, who can’t settle their bill in full, and that club will close. Just like that. In the middle of the season. And everyone will be shocked that it has happened, when the bitter truth of the matter is that the biggest surprise of all is that it hasn’t happened already.

What to make of all this? Supporters Direct says there is no “magic bullet” to sort football out, but that it’s time to look at “solutions; they may be salary caps, luxury taxes, loss caps, a more comprehensive, single Fit and Proper Test, built in supporter-representation at clubs to ensure protection against grounds like Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park being split from the club, or the countless number of small London clubs seeing their homes sold to pay for wreckless spending (in some cases, something a little more sinister at play by property developers).”

Quick Hits

• A very impressive football archive is on the Daily Mirror’s site, including a timely look at the 1957 clash between Manchester United and Aston Villa in the FA Cup final.
• The Seattle Sounders have made an interesting choice for their new commentator, with the BBC’s Arlo White taking over.
• The latest on Subrata Roy’s interest in Liverpool, with the Times’ Tony Evans offering vague confirmation that the Indian billionaire is in the early stages of planning a takeover.
• And EPL Talk tells us ESPN will be showing much more Premier League football in the United States from next season.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

From last October, the grandstand of Ninian Park, Cardiff City's former home, collapses under demolition.

Photo credit: joncandy on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

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Sometimes Wikipedia, despite often lacking the neutral tone of your average encyclopedia, does describe things best — in fact, precisely because of that. Witness the entry on Peter Ridsdale, former chairman of Leeds United.

Ridsdale became chairman of hometown club Leeds United in 1997 and enjoyed success in the first four years of tenure as Leeds reached the UEFA Cup semi-final in 1999–2000 and the UEFA Champions League semi-finals in 2000–01. During this time he enjoyed a good relationship with the Leeds fans.[1] However, once the full extent of what Ridsdale and his board had done at Elland Road was discovered by the fans this relationship vanished and he is now best remembered by Leeds supporters for the financial nightmare that the club found themselves in.

Under Ridsdale’s stewardship the club borrowed £60m against future gate receipts, effectively gambling on Leeds qualifying for the Champions League in successive seasons, which they failed to do. Ridsdale has repeatedly denied any blame with regard to the later situation of the club[2] but has also conflictingly admitted it was a mistake to allow David O’Leary to spend so lavishly on players.[3] Ridsdale also claimed that he would have saved Leeds from subsequent relegations to the third tier of English football and the debt his board had incurred in the name of the club.[4] The fact remained however that by the time Ridsdale stepped down in March 2003, Leeds were £103 million in debt and failing on the field.[5]

So Ridsdale left and went on to Barnsley, where he showed considerable improvement in his club management skills, this time taking only a little over a year to run the club into the ground and get the hell out of there.

And then he showed up at Cardiff City; this time, he’s managed to make himself perhaps even more unpopular than ever before — quite an achievement.  His latest bout of unpopularity comes after he convinced thousands of fans to buy 2011 season tickets at the end of last year to bring in revenue to be used on bringing in new players in the transfer window, only to then announce the money would be used to pay off unpaid tax bills and that new players would not be brought in. The fans are furious, and are calling for an Emergency General Meeting of the club.

Cardiff City supporters have called for an extraordinary general meeting so the club can explain why they will not be using fans’ money to buy new players.
Fans had expected an estimated £3m raised by advance season ticket sales to be used to finance transfers.

But Cardiff’s decision not to buy players is because of a cash crisis. ”They have made a big mistake by over-budgeting. An EGM is what we need now,” demanded Paul Corkery, chair of Cardiff City Supporters Trust.

More than 10,000 fans invested in deals for season tickets for 2010/11, cash that manager Dave Jones said he expected to be used to buy new players.
And if Cardiff won promotion to the Premier League the fans were promised that money would be paid back to them in a scheme called “Golden Ticket”.

In response, Ridsdale said “I have two choices. I either run away or I apologise.” Unfortunately for Cardiff City fans, he decided to take the former option: “I won’t run away.”

Worldwide News

• Portsmouth FC’s website went down earlier today (it’s back up) due to an unpaid bill — hardly surprising, if a little sad. Portsmouth’s supporters’ trust rushed to help out, hosting ticket information at their site in the meantime. Portsmouth have also cut funding for a development scheme in Guernsey, saving a mere £2,000. And they’ve just now warned staff their wages may not be paid tomorrow.
• Despite a considerable increase in the club’s spending, Barcelona managed to turn a profit in 2009.
• Sky Sports are claiming that their broadcast of Arsenal vs. Manchester United is the first to be aired to a public audience in 3-d. Maybe in the UK — the piece doesn’t specify – but this isn’t the case, as this was tried in Mexico many months ago.
• The Houston Dynamo apparently have an interesting new stadium option.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story
One shock result and all is well once again with the FA Cup, according to Sam Wallace in the Independent, who says “Here’s a radical theory: the FA Cup is actually in relatively decent shape.” Wallace’s argument is mainly that it’s a myth that the FA Cup used to be less predictable in the first place:

Despite all their other priorities, attitudes towards the FA Cup among clubs and fans are healthy particularly in light of the fact that winning it has always been the preserve of the big teams, give or take the occasional anomaly. These days it is ever more restricted to the big four – who have won 16 FA Cups out of the last 18 – but it was not that much more egalitarian in football’s golden age.

In the 1960s, when football was much less divided by wealth, the FA Cup was won by teams finishing in the top eight for six out of the 10 years between 1960 and 1969. The lowest ranked club to win it in that decade were Manchester United, who finished 19th when they won the Cup in 1963. They won the league title two years later with much the same team.

This is an incomplete argument. Since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, only six different teams have won the trophy. In the two decades prior to that, 13 different teams won the trophy. Even in the decade that Wallace cherrypicks as his example, the 1960s, eight different teams were victorious.

What Wallace’s numbers show is that the FA Cup is a reflection of English football as a whole, and English football as a whole has become much more predictable because of the dominance of the same big clubs — ie, the variety of the clubs finishing in the top eight Wallace mentions has been reduced substantially. In the post-war period up until the start of the Premier League, many, many different teams finished at or within touching distance of the top of the league. “Big” teams did not dominate for as long (exceptions such as Liverpool aside, but for some reason their dominance elsewhere was not reflected in the FA Cup), so different teams more often won trophies, especially the FA Cup for those just outside the title race itself.

What has changed is not that the the top eight or so best clubs are winning the trophy more often (the best clubs usually will), it’s that the top of English football itself has become much more predictable, and the top few within that elite ever more dominant over the past two decades. This is reflected in the big four’s dominance of the FA Cup, and the reaction to the Leeds result yesterday only shows how much many would want that to change.

Worldwide News

• Fans of Cardiff City are dismayed that a season ticket drive for next season they believed was planned to fund investment in the team during the January transfer window will instead go to pay an outstanding tax bill, as the Sunday newspapers revealed.  The Cardiff City Supporters’ Trust released a statement today expressing their concern that this is the latest in an ongoing series of episodes of financial mismanagement and the truth being hidden from fans. The club have responded by saying that “Cardiff City Football Club are concerned at an article in one of today’s national newspapers. Some of the information contained within this article can only have come from documents which have been stolen from officials at the Club and are currently the subject of a police investigation.”
• Meanwhile, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST) has also released a statement about a Sunday newspaper report that the Glazers are unsuccessfully trying to refinance their debt. MUST asks: “The Glazers have taken us from being a club that were the richest in the sporting world to now the most indebted. In the four years before the Glazers’ takeover the Manchester United invested over £80 million in the form of players like Rooney and Ronaldo. In the four years since the Glazer takeover the turnover has doubled but, despite protestations to the contrary, independently published figures suggest the net transfer spend is now negative. We have to be thankful for the magnificent job the manager and his squad have done. Where would we be now without the success Sir Alex has managed to maintain on the pitch?”
• There is a curious piece in the Guardian on South Africa and the World Cup, as low key New Year’s celebrations are suggested as a warning the World Cup itself could be lacklustre. The correlation between the two seems pretty shaky to me.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

The former home of Cardiff City, Ninian Park, demolished this year.

Photo credit: Simon J Jones on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.