get involved because administration's a product of mismanagement, and mismanagement affects on-field matters as well as off-field matters, from having to give the club special dispensation over certain things to having to sort out player and manager situations. It's not really fair to confer those benefits on one club and not another. Why should a club which has tried its best within its means be treated the same as one which broke the bank, gambled and pretty much behaved irresponsibly? I take your point and am just playing devil's advocate, but I'm not completely sure I buy the separate worlds theory.

As I understand it, all the big clubs are in debt, all of the time (kind of like consumers). Leeds' trouble was that their debt hit £100M and, as I understand it, going over fifty or sixty is considered a big No-No. Newcastle are up to about £70M, I think, Man City are around £63M. Even clubs like Real Madrid are, in net terms, in debt. There was a period during the Peres administration when the lesser players weren't getting paid and the top ones were being topped-up from Peres personal funds.

It's the biggest myth in the world that clubs are rich: they're not; well, they are actually; but they're not really. It's complicated. Their value is based on many things, but mostly the land they own and especially projected future earnings. That doesn't change the fact that they still owe shedloads of money.

It's kinda like permanently having a credit card debt at £2,000; if you can afford the interest payments the debt stays the same; if you can pay off a bit more than that, the debt slowly comes down; if you can't quite afford it, it goes up (along with the interest). If you're clocking £2,000 a month, you can probably just about still afford the ~£400-a-month interest hit as well as other expenses, but it can very quickly hit a level where you're in trouble and it might catch you out.

Same with football. If you're clocking £50M a year, debts of £50M are just about handleable on top of other expenses. How much money you get depends on where you come, though; so you have to do as well as, or exceed, your own guesses in order to stay still or make money. Leeds gambled on the fact that they'd make the Champion's League again and didn't (albeit with a good side). If you've gotten to the point where you're banking on Champion's League football to cover the costs, there's a strong argument to say that you've seriously over-stretched yourself. Having said that, most of the top four are in precisely that position; if Arsenal had been beaten to fourth spot, they'd be in serious trouble right now; not as much as Leeds (because they haven't overstretched themselves as much), and could probably weather it for a season or two, but still; they're all flying very close to the sun.

Selling Wayne Rooney pulled Everton's goolies out of the fire; the ~£30M they got from that has buffered them nicely for the last few years (debts came down, therefore interest came down, TV cash went up) so they could afford the likes of Johnson and Lescott. A few bad seasons, though, and they're in deep crap.

I have a lot of sympathy for chairmen like Simon Jordan, Doug Ellis and Jeremy Peace (all often hated by their supporters), who say they won't bankrupt the club to risk success; it's really the only wise way, but supporters don't want to hear it. Even their clubs are in debt; it's a question of how much they can stomach. The idea of running a club that operates entirely in the black died a few decades ago. It's still alive in the lower leagues.

The interesting thing is the corrupting nature of the debt. The big leagues don't want the Champions' League places reduced as the finances of their most money-spinning teams depend on them. Everyone bent over backwards to cut Leeds some slack (if they'd been a normal company, they'd have disappeared). Governments and organisational bodies now find it in their interest to support their clubs' debt. Perhaps it's going to take a crash to solve it. The trouble is that the global market isn't yet saturated, so SKY can continue to up the money based on projected growths in earnings. When the market is fully saturated, or the debt outstrips the rate of increase, many clubs could come tumbling down.