By Albatross
January 18 2006

Hartlepool United's approach to the Council to buy the lease of Victoria Park has been turned down. The Club's Statement makes it clear they're unhappy about it - so what happens next? The decision by the Council isn't the one that IOR wanted by a long way, and the big question is what will they do now. We can only wait and see what the answer is. The statement on the Club's website indicates that they are still looking to take back the lease, but also makes it clear that further ground developments at the Vic are highly unlikely if the current state of affairs remains.

The whole issue of ground ownership is one that is a hot potato within football - and in some ways having a Council Landlord is not necessarily a bad thing. Councils tend not to turn clubs out of stadia or charge extortionate rents and that can allow a measure of stability that isn't always the case elsewhere. In one extreme case (Hull) the local council has provided the club with a top-class facility that they would surely never have been able to afford themselves - although that is a case without precedent and only the windfall generated by their share of Kingston Communications made it possible.

The ownership of the ground by the club is sometimes seen as the ideal state of affairs, but then again there are plenty of examples where it's almost been the death of a club. The last few years have seen several cases where an attempt has been made to seperate the ownership of the ground and the club by an owner who then can potentially walk away from the club while retaining their prize asset; York City is one example close to home that threatened to destroy the club completely, while there have also been situations at clubs such as Wrexham, Kingstonian (who now essentially are tenants in their own ground, albeit on benevolent terms, only because AFC Wimbledon were able to purchase it from their former owner), and even Crystal Palace. Meanwhile in many ways much of the sorry tale of how Wimbledon were franchised to Milton Keynes starts from the sale of Plough Lane by Sam Hamman.

One argument for a club owning it's own ground is of course being able to raise loans on it, but that too is not without it's difficulties - if things go wrong, it can lead to a club being saddled with huge debts and facing the prospect of selling off the ground. Leeds and Bournemouth have both gone for a Sale and Leaseback of their grounds purely to pay off other debts - but land themselves with the cost of rent and that avenue of funding now blocked. How it will work out for them remains to be seen. Meanwhile the Sterling Consortium made quite a bit of money by becoming the lenders of last resort for struggling clubs, offering secured loans to them at high rates - and while they have to be fair done right by Darlington since their unexpectated takeover, fans at Barnsley, Chesterfield and others don't have happy memories of their dealings with them.

In many ways the problem is bound up in what IOR's intentions towards Pools are - and despite being in charge for several years now there's still an air of mystery surrounding their ownership of the club. A football club is not a normal purchase for a company involved in the Oil Industry; and although there are a number of theories no-one knows for sure what motivates their continued support of Pools. While it can't be denied that IOR have provided plenty of financial backing to the the club their long-term plans remain unknown. In some eyes it may be no bad thing that the council retain ownership of the lease, although by the sounds of it there are a number of restrictions making it much less attractive to any property speculator that may want to get involved for nefarious reasons.

Fans are also concerned not just about the current situation on the pitch, but how the club is responding to them. Saturday did little to dispell those misgivings - stewards were extremely quick to remove banners with anti-Scott messages, and it seemed that peaceful protests were regarded as dangerously seditious. There is now a real air of suspicion amongst fans about the club's management - and I'm not necessarily referring to Martin Scott and Steve Agnew here. There are rumours that people from the club are keeping a rather closer eye on messageboards than normal - and rumours that action has been taken against at least one person whose name appeared on an on-line petition. A couple of years ago very few would have taken such stories seriously - now they spread like wildfire and are taken as truth by many whether there's evidence or not. Relations between club and fans are surely at their lowest point since IOR took over from Harold Hornsey.