Ridiculous ground, poor fans.

It's often right about now, as the season ticks past it's halfway point and the harsh realities of constantly losing money kick in, that all the financial crisis stories pick up pace in England.  Kidderminster Harriers, Plymouth Argyle and Sheffield Wednesday seem to be this years main crisis clubs, and now, on a much closer personal level for me, it's once again Darlington's turn.

For the vast majority of it's existence Darlington has been a typical lower league team, struggling along from year to year, with some ups and lots of downs, including nearly going out of business in 1983, their centenary year.  Chairmen, directors and investors came and went over the years, generally local businessmen who couldn't afford to be losing too much money for too long, and the club kept going at a commensurately modest level, much to the occasional chagrin of more ambitious supporters.

That changed in 1997 when desperate owners actually found someone with proper riches to take over, George Reynolds.  He invested heavily in the team, with talk of the Premier League, bringing in players like Marco Gabbiadini, but it didn't quite work out that way, the loss to Peterborough in the 2000 playoff final saw the momentum really disappear and never really come back.  He eventually left in disgrace in 2004 and if he'd just come and gone like so many others, it wouldn't be so bad, but his lasting legacy is the big part of his undeniably well meaning but foolish ambitions, The Reynolds Arena (also known in it's 8 years of existence as The New Stadium, The Williamson Motors Stadium, The Darlington Arena, The 96.6 TFM Darlington Arena, The Balfour Webnet Darlington Arena and now The Northern Echo Darlington Arena).

A ridiculous 25,000 capacity stadium on the edge of town, whose construction costs sucked all the money out of the Reynolds era, sending Darlington into administration in 2003, and whose ongoing maintenance costs have bogged the club down ever since, leading to administration again in 2009, it's the ultimate white elephant, and is very much at the centre of the current troubles.

The initial article in the Northen Echo can be read here, and a good summing up of the situation can be read here, but it's the common issue of the team not fully owning it's own stadium that is the root of the problem.  The current Chairman Raj Singh, and the former Chariman George Houghton own the stadium and surrounding land, through a holding company, but that holding company took out a loan of 1.7m pounds before Darlington's previous administration journey, before Singh was involved. 

The people who made that loan, Philip Scott and Graham Sizer, former senior executives with the Darlington-based care home company Southern Cross Healthcare, have now called in receivers to recover the debt.  Singh says an agreement was in place that Houghton would cover the debt, which hasn't happened, and which Houghton denies, and now Singh has made an offer to buy the stadium at a much lower price than the original loan, which has been turned down.

If the receivers can't find a buyer, ownership would revert to Scott and Sizer, who don't seem interested in running the club, but would let the club continue renting the stadium for a quite reasonable 10,000 pounds a year.  Without ownership of the stadium though, Singh doesn't want to keep running the club out of his own pocket and says he is prepared to walk away.  Whether there's a new owner waiting in the wings prepared to take on the club remains to be seen but is probably doubtful.

At this stage it seems more like public posturing and negotiating through the media than a real imminent crisis, so hopefully a compromise can be found and things can keep going, but unless stadium issues get resolved, the club will always be on the verge of disaster.  Ownership is obviously the main issue, and a problem common to many clubs, but the sheer inappropriate hugeness of it, and associated costs involved mean that even if that gets 100% resolved, money problems will keep cropping up as long as the crowds stay at their traditional level. 

Proposals to make things work better include building an attached hotel/conference centre with restaurants and other sources of revenue that could subsidise the football team, but the local council seems hostile to pretty much everything that gets proposed for the site, and where's the money going to come from to do that?  Another solution being thrown around on forums would be to sell it off to someone else, likely a supermarket chain, and build a smaller ground at a different location. 

Even though it's been over 7 years since he left the club, Reynolds ego and grandiose plan are still dragging the club down to the degree that the bleak alternative of seeing the club fold and having to start again from scratch is starting to get discussion as the best way forward.