BLAIR Nimmo was involved in more football club administrations during his long career as an insolvency practitioner in Scotland than Inverness Caledonian Thistle are set to be deducted points by the SPFL in the coming days.
Nimmo oversaw that painful process when Airdrieonians were waging what ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful battle to stay afloat back in the early 2000s when he was head of corporate recovery with leading accountancy firm KPMG.
However, he was also actively engaged behind the scenes when both Hearts and Rangers, to give just two high-profile examples, were embroiled in existential crises due to their perilous financial predicaments.
So he is well placed to offer an expert opinion on the chances of Caledonian Thistle, who last week signed a notice of intention to appoint administrators after failing to reach an agreement with a potential buyer, local IT entrepreneur David Anderson, emerging from their current troubles.
Will Super Caley, like Queen’s Park, Morton, Dundee, Motherwell, Livingston, Dunfermline and Hearts in the past, survive and go ballistic once more?
Or are they doomed to suffer the same sorry fate as Clydebank, Airdrie, Gretna and Rangers, go out of business or be forced to start over again?
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The future does not look particularly bright for the stricken Highland outfit, who are set to be hit with a 15 point deduction and drop to the bottom of the League 1 table, at the moment even though their concerned fans have raised £84,000 through a crowdfunding campaign.
They have outstanding debts of between £3m and £4m. Their manager Duncan Ferguson is working for free. They are embroiled in a very public war of words with former chief executive Scot Gardiner and have been threatened with legal action.
He is encouraged that his old associate Bryan Jackson has, at the behest of former Caledonian Thistle chairman and current consultant Alan Savage, assigned respected company BDO to handle their affairs. He is also heartened by the distinct absence of any unrest in the stands.
“Administration at a football club is never a pleasant experience for anyone who is caught up in it,” he said. “In the course of the last 30 years I have been involved in many of them and they are always difficult. But quite often you can get a good outcome from it.
“There haven’t been too many in recent years. Banks no longer bankroll clubs, they have to be self-financed. Most clubs have been able to live within their own resources. But it does seem the losses at Inverness are huge for such a small club.
“The most interesting aspect for me at the moment is the positive spin they are putting on things by saying, ‘Look, this is just administration, it is not liquidation’. But it still requires someone who is going to spend money and buy the club – and buy the club in the full knowledge that it is going to make losses in the short-term.
“The club is going to continue to trade and put a team on the park. But the big question for me at the moment is, ‘How is that going to be funded?’ The administrators have to run the club, pay the staff, cover various other costs. Where is the funding for that coming from? The fact they are going into administration shows they are running out of money.
“I imagine what is happening at the moment is the prospective administrator is sitting down with the club to discuss how they fund things for a period of, say, six to eight weeks while they are advertising it for sale and then concluding a deal. That is not a fixed timescale, it is just an estimate.
“But the critical question is, ‘How do they fund that?’ There will be efforts being made at the moment to see how much funding they have got and how they can reduce the cost base to allow them as long a runway as possible. Players may be asked to accept wage cuts, that has happened in the past.
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“They will ask prospective buyers to sign a NDA [non-disclosure agreement] and then give them access to financial information about players’ wages and so on. They will hope they can get someone involved and come out the other end through a CVA [company voluntary arrangement].
“They will tell interested parties that hopefully they won’t have to take on board all the baggage, all the existing contracts, all the debt. They can come in and, through a deal with the creditors, wipe that clean. What they are saying sounds very sensible to me. It is properly considered. It is well organised.
Ketan Makwana, the hitherto unheard of executive chairman of sports, leisure and entertainment group Seventy7 Ventures, was heralded as the saviour of Caledonian Thistle back in July. However, that takeover fell through the following month. Nimmo expects BDO to carry out proper due diligence on any prospective buyer.
“They may have one or two people who have intimated an interest,” he said. “But in football it is easy to come out and talk a good game in the papers while not, behind the scenes, having the financial wherewithal to complete the transaction.
“The administrators’ job is to identify those who, while maybe well-meaning, might not know what they are getting themselves into. If you have never been involved in football before, it is a fair challenge. At the same time, if you have been a fan all your days, why wouldn’t you?
“BDO did the liquidation of Rangers, but it was Duff and Phelps who did the administration. The liquidation, which is effectively just an administrative tidy up, is not the same as running the club. It is a different game altogether.
“But BDO are a good firm and will have someone who can do that who has been involved in sport. It is very different from any other insolvency and the emotion that comes out. But BDO are well skilled.”
Nimmo can personally testify how heated football supporters can become in these circumstances. He received death threats and was advised by police not to drive his own car while he was attempting to save Airdrie. But he has not sensed any of that ill-feeling at Caledonian Thistle in recent weeks.
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“It sounds consensual, like everyone is on the same page, which is good,” he said. “They are not starting from a position of animosity, which is quite common in football. It sounds like everyone has tried their best and is approaching this in a professional manner. Get it on the market, see who turns up.
“The administrators’ job is to get the best outcome they can for the creditors of the club. Invariably in football, that is quite complex. Having been involved in the process myself a number of times, there is a lot of mischievous nonsense played out in the media, particularly on the back pages. That stokes up feelings and it can be quite hard to manage that. Emotion is a great part of football – but emotion can be the downside of it as well.
“The money the fans have raised might turn out to be quite important. They can hand that to the administrator and say, ‘Look, this will allow you to trade’. The administrator will look to reduce costs and make it last for as long as possible.
“It can move fairly quickly. As I say, I would expect it to take between six and eight weeks. That would be a cracking result. It could take longer. But if a party comes in with the cash and credibility it can be done much quicker. It will be driven purely by funding.”
Nimmo suspects that, whatever transpires in Inverness in the coming weeks, Caledonian Thistle will continue in some capacity in future.
“You really can’t predict what will happen,” he said. “But virtually every club to go into administration in the past 20 years has survived in one form or another. Over the years, Rangers, Hibs, Hearts, Falkirk and Airdrie have all been bust. But Gretna is probably the only one that didn’t come back.
“They were a bit of a peculiarity because their owner Brooks Mileson took them from nowhere to the top flight. They weren’t a club of any great status until he got involved and pumped a bucketload of cash into it. When he passed away, they reverted back to where they came from.
“But almost all of the clubs which have gone down have survived in one form or another. Rangers had to go all the way down to the bottom of the leagues. The others came out through CVAs.
“What are the chances of Inverness coming out of it? Probably fairly good based on historic precedence. The others all have. Will it be an uncertain time? Yes. Inverness are a super club, but they are not a Rangers, a Hearts, a Hibs. But they are not unlike Airdrie and Falkirk and they have survived.”
