Morecambe face expulsion from English football’s league pyramid after the fifth-tier National League suspended the Lancashire-based club with immediate effect because of their dire financial position.
In a short statement, the league said its Compliance and
Licensing Committee had met on Monday afternoon to debate Morecambe’s ability
to start the season.
The club have been in football’s Emergency Room for years
but the crisis has deepened in recent weeks after a protracted takeover by
London-based sports investment company Panjab Warriors stalled and a new
potential buyer emerged.
With Morecambe already under a transfer embargo, the
National League announced on Friday that it was effectively giving current
owner Bond Group Investments until noon to sell the club.
But that deadline came and went, giving the league no option
but to suspend the club until August 20, which means their first three fixtures
of the new season — away at Boston United, home to Brackley Town and away at
Scunthorpe — are postponed. Whether they will ever be rescheduled is now up to
Bond Group Investments owner Jason Whittingham.
“The club will also remain under embargo ahead of the new
season,” the National League statement added. “Morecambe will also be removed
from the National League Cup for the forthcoming season.
“The committee will meet again on Wednesday, August 20, to
determine if outstanding items have been satisfied, and to decide the club’s
ability to retain membership in the competition.”
That last sentence is particularly ominous as it is the same
threat Bury FC received from the English Football League (EFL) when they were
prevented from starting the 2019-20 season in League One. They were expelled
from the EFL on August 27, 2019, becoming their first team to suffer that fate
since Maidstone Town in 1992.
Bury went into administration a year later, with some fans
forming a phoenix club. However, the original club was revived in 2023, after a
merger with the new team, and they are now back in the seventh tier of English
football.
The fate of Macclesfield Town is another worrying precedent
for Morecambe fans, as the Cheshire-based club were relegated from League Two
in 2020 in the same state of financial disarray as Morecambe have been in but
were not allowed to start the National League season and soon collapsed. A
local businessman bought the assets later that year and restarted the club as
Macclesfield FC in the ninth tier in 2021. They have now climbed back to the
sixth tier.
Bond Group Investments bought the club in 2018 but has been
missing payments to players and the taxman ever since 2023, which was a year
after their rugby union club Worcester Warriors went bankrupt.
Whittingham has repeatedly said that he wants to sell the
loss-making club but spent almost a year trying to sell it to a
Birmingham-based businessman called Sarbjot Johal, before moving on to Panjab
Warriors.
Unlike Johal, they were approved by the EFL in June and have
been funding the club via loans for most of this year.
But, having missed several deadlines to complete the
takeover, Whittingham reneged on the deal. Panjab immediately announced it was
taking legal action against him and both sides appear to be dug in for a long
fight.
In the meantime, Whittingham announced that he was in talks
with a new group led by a British businessman called Jonny Cato. The
Athletic has attempted to find out more details about this individual
with no success.
However, it now seems that even Cato has got cold feet, as
Whittingham issued a statement via the club to say that he cannot get in
contact with Panjab Warriors and adverse publicity has scared Cato’s group off.
If the new regulator had been in place, would they have made a difference. Perhaps we need a trust fund to enable clubs to survive while a solution to problems of this kind is found.
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