Whose Word isn’t their Bond?

Morecambe Football Club made the following stark announcement on their website yesterday, 23^rd January 2025:

A statement from the Board of Directors.

Morecambe Football Club is currently prevented from making further signings in the January transfer window, despite recent cup successes and capital injections, because written assurances from Bond Group that the Club will be funded to the end of the season have not been supported by sufficient proof of source and sufficiency of funding. 

The Club must demonstrate it has adequate funds to operate until the end of May, its fiscal year-end. Only once these long-standing cash requirements are met can recruitment be considered. Bond Group had assured the Club that it would meet these requirements and support additional player recruitment in January, but when proof of funding was requested, it failed to provide it.

Bond Group has informed the Club today that it is working on sourcing additional funds, but there is no guarantee that these will land in time to impact the rest of the transfer window.

The Board wishes to place on record that once again the Club has been let down by its owner, undermining the efforts and hard work of the manager, staff, and directors at this critical time.

The Board of Directors is carefully evaluating the situation and will make a further statement in due course.

Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors, Rod Taylor, wasted no time in making a further statement to the media. Seated alongside Morecambe Manager Derek Adams, he gave an interview to Radio Lancashire Sport later in the day in order to clarify exactly what the statement by his Board meant for the club, the team, the Manager and the supporters. You can see it via the club’s website

https://www.morecambefc.com/news/2025/january/23/rod-taylor-and-derek-adams-discuss-club-statement/

or activate the following link to see the press conference in full:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0klmbsb

The current situation is depressingly familiar. Two years ago, Derek Adams was promised `a substantial’ amount of money to strengthen his League One squad. But the funds were never made available by owner Jason Whittingham until after the Transfer Window had shut – and even then, only a fraction of the `substantial’ amount was offered. As a result, Morecambe – deprived of the funds Derek Adams needed to keep the club in the division by signing a couple of key players – were relegated for the first time in their history – by just one point. In effect, the same thing could happen this time around as well. The EFL has effectively slapped another embargo on the club unless – and until – Whittingham provides evidence to them that he has sufficient funds to meet the club’s financial needs until the end of the season. If that ever happens, what are the chances that the Transfer Window will still be open?

My own view of this – for what it’s worth – is that the EFL’s is an absurd response. The English Football League are responsible – as the game’s supposed governing body – for allowing Whittingham to take over our club in the first place. They should take responsibility for their obvious failure in due diligence to allow a man like this to go within a million miles of any EFL member.To slap an embargo on the club itself because of their own failings in this matter is both unjust and completely unfair: they should accept the blame for their failure to vet Whittingham and his crew properly when he first bought Morecambe FC. They should also do something positive to remedy things in such a way that the club doesn’t take all the consequences of an outcome that the EFL have demonstrably been directly instrumental in allowing to happen in the first place.

The EFL is awash with money. Instead of sitting by and effectively preventing the Board and the Manager at Morecambe to use their own resources to dig themselves out of a predicament not of their own making, they should act as a guarantor that the club does not default on its other financial commitments until the end of the season. In the meantime, they should disbar Jason Whittingham as a fit or proper person to be involved with any EFL club in the foreseeable future. This action in itself would force our reluctant owner to immediately sell the club to the highest bidder whether he wants to or not. Failing this, the EFL should make an independent valuation of the club and buy him out, holding on to the ownership unless and until a truly `fit and proper’ person – or persons – comes along to buy it back from them.

But the EFL won’t do this. They will bleat that they don’t have the powers or the legal authority to do either of these things. But that is palpably not true: they are a law unto themselves in the little world they are in charge of: they can effectively do whatever they like, given the determination to do so. But that determination – proved time and time again by the actions they took to virtually ensure the demise of clubs like Darlington, Macclesfield Town and Bury in recent years alone – does not exist. It’s easier for these overpaid sinecures to just twiddle their thumbs as usual and see clubs sink beneath the waves under the weight of the restrictions they have imposed on them rather than tackling the painfully obvious cause of the difficulties these clubs have found themselves in due to the actions of owners who are clearly not Fit For Purpose – and never have been. The Quakers, Silkmen and the Shakers were all undermined by unscrupulous owners, every one of whom (even the convicted safebreaker at Darlington, for goodness sake) had passed the obviously derisory `Fit and Proper Ownership’ test applied by the EFL.  It stinks. The EFL – the bastion of the Closed Shop which deliberately kept clubs like ours out of their cosy little fiefdom for decades on end – stinks. It is high time it was either reformed by government intervention – or preferably scrapped altogether. If Morecambe FC follows in the path of Darlington, Macclesfield Town and Bury, the person primarily responsible for this will be Jason Whittingham and his Bond Group. But an equal share of the blame can be laid at the door of the EFL itself for their absurd response to Morecambe’s latest problems, which they have made potentially catastrophically worse.