Inverness Caley Thistle’s liquidation threat is examined by football finance expert Kevin Maguire, author of bestseller The Price of Football, with comparisons to events at Glasgow Rangers, Bury and Macclesfield Town

A leading UK authority on football finance believes a liquidated Inverness Caledonian Thistle could be reborn as Glasgow Rangers were - but only after a process fraught with difficulty.

Kieran Maguire, author of The Price of Football, warned that any ‘phoenix club’ successor to the 30-year-old outfit would face greater challenges than the Old Firm giants did in preserving identity and SPFL status.

The threat of what club legend Charlie Christie called “the unthinkable” this week seemed to recede on Wednesday evening as major shareholders agreed in principle to remove barriers to the club’s sale.

But the fact remains that a buyer approved by joint administrators BDO must come forward within six weeks to avoid the club facing that nightmare scenario.

Maguire also made it clear that, in liquidation, anyone wishing to purchase the Caledonian Stadium for football purposes could be hampered by the club’s modest supporter base.

Despite Rangers Football Club plc being liquidated in October 2012 while owing substantial debts to HM Revenue and Customs, Ibrox retained the allure of a guaranteed 50,000 paying customers.

That ensured administrators - not the liquidators - were able sell the Govan ground as a football asset, rather than for non-footballing purposes.

Maguire, who is also a podcaster and lecturer on football finance at the University of Liverpool, warned that unlike administrators, liquidators had “no moral obligation” to preserve a football club.

Caledonian Stadium, with relatively low season ticket numbers and average attendances, might be considered more valuable for sale on the open market for redevelopment.

It is understood the Inverness Common Good Fund owns the land the pitch, stadium and car parks stand on.

Caley Thistle owns the lease of the pitch and stadium land for another 68 years, but not the lease of land surrounding the stadium, although those leases would almost certainly have a value.

Speaking exclusively to the Inverness Courier, Maguire pointed to the experiences of two reborn English clubs, Bury and Macclesfield, as beacons of hope for Caley Jags supporters.

He believes supporter power would ultimately be crucial in ensuring Caley Thistle survive in some shape or form should the nightmare of liquidation happen.

“In administration, the administrators effectively take over the day-to-day running of the club, replacing a set of directors with a set of business professionals,” Maguire stressed.

“In the case of BDO, they will only take on that job if someone has agreed to pay their fees. In this instance, that someone is Alan Savage.

“Alan Savage would have said he will do it for however many months, but with limits.

“If the club goes into liquidation, everything changes. All of the employment contracts are terminated.

“The job of the liquidator is to sell the individual assets of the company, as opposed to the administrators trying to sell the business.

“A business, in football, is usually worth far more as a going concern because you have fans who already buy season tickets, with broader goodwill issues. You have players who are assets while under contract.

“If it goes into liquidation, the liquidator has no loyalty towards football.

“If it is worth more as a site for industrial units, or retail, then any property assets will be sold off.

“From what I understand, those property assets are complex at Caley Thistle.

“The liquidators will simply list out what they consider to be the assets and put those up for sale on an individual basis or grouped together.

“Put plainly, the club, then, is dead.

“In terms of a ‘phoenix club’ emerging, if Caley Thistle do indeed own the rights to it, you might find someone willing to buy the stadium and retain it for football purposes.

“If we take a look south of the border, when Macclesfield Town went into liquidation a new club - Macclesfield FC - was set up.

“They bought the stadium and Robbie Savage is now one of the people in charge.

“It can result in a new entity taking over and carrying on the football tradition. Equally, if nobody comes up with a decent enough offer, the liquidator is under no ethical or moral obligation to preserve it as a football venue.

“Their responsibility is towards the creditors and to maximising any potential pay-out to the people owed money.

“Liquidation is normally as bad as it gets.”

Rangers became only the fourth club in the history of Scottish football to be liquidated, following Third Lanark, Airdrie and Gretna.

Clydebank, often mistakenly cited as another, were taken over and renamed Airdrie United who assumed their place in the Scottish leagues.

Rangers, as punishment, were relegated to the fourth tier of Scottish football after Charles Green’s Sevco Scotland Ltd bought their football assets.

Maguire believes a phoenix Caley Thistle operation would face a battle to persuade the SFA and SPFL to re-admit them to the SPFL.

The alternative would be to grasp a place in the Highland or even the North Caledonian League.

Bury, despite their successful rebirth, put supporters through a barren two years without football action before completing their return.

A phoenix Caley Thistle, in short, might need to find a new ground – although financier Alan Savage has already said a move might be desireable to cut costs – and would likely start all over again without a squad.

“The closer analogy for ICT than Rangers would be Bury FC (expelled from the English Football League in 2019) and Macclesfield Town (relegated to the National League in 2020),” Maguire explained.

“Bury basically came back as a glorified parks team (before a merger that took them back to 12,000 capacity Gigg Lane, their home since 1885).

“It doesn’t tend to be the case that you lose the club altogether, but that is very much at the mercy of supporters.

“In the case of Rangers, the liquidators were in a position to know that Ibrox was worth more as a football stadium than anything else.

“Anything up to 50,000 Rangers fans will turn up regardless of the division they are in.

“Anybody acquiring the property asset knew they could make a lot of money through it remaining a football venue.

“You could generate revenues from running it as a football club, more than for any other purposes.

“They had that as a positive. That’s not necessarily something that Caley Thistle has.

“I don’t claim to know exactly their attendances these days, but I suspect they have fallen somewhat from their Premier League days.

“In liquidation, there will be issues related to losing their licence to play in the SPFL. That would have to be negotiated.

“As for where Caley Thistle would play, I think it would be at the discretion of the SFA, possibly in conjunction with the SPFL.

“We would be entering the realms of the unknown where we don’t know what might happen. It would be a very uncertain period.”

The good news is Maguire, a passionate Brighton fan, couldn’t think of a recent example of a club that has simply disappeared.

“In rugby, yes, but not in football,” he said.

“Football has this magic that surrounds it. It means so much to people that some form of phoenix club tends to emerge.

“It’s the will, the insanity of football fans. A football club is so precious and so much part of your identity that fans will somehow have something to support.

“I don’t think British football has lost anybody, certainly not as senior in status as ICT or the clubs I’ve just mentioned.

“Even though they have come back in a different form and at a different tier of football, you still have that muscle memory, for want of a better phrase.

“What do I do on a Saturday? As my wife says to me, I don’t know why you do it because for the last few decades I’ve gone to the same pub, talked to the same blokes, about the same nonsense and the same matches that I’ve seen in the last 30 years.

“But my wife also says that it is actually very good for me. Without it, I’d lose a part of myself. I think it is that which fans will try to preserve, more than anything else..

“Without it, it is horrible. When Bury first went bust, friends who were fans had nothing for a couple of seasons.

“One said to me, ‘You know what it is like on an international break weekend with no football? You’re wandering around, slightly lost. Imagine that, for 52 weeks of the year.’

“It just doesn’t bear thinking about as a football fan and that’s why football fans, ultimately, hold the key.

“If the worst happens, that will very much be the case for Caley Thistle I suspect.”

---

Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.

---