The penalty no team wants

Now the club has announced that it is financially secure until at least the end of the season.

But why was it so keen to avoid going into administration and what would it have meant? Assistant News Editor Adrian Worsley reports.

GIFTED, temperamental, lovely hair -- Benito Carbone was not your typical Bradford City player.

But then again, the Bantams weren't living in typical times.

Drunk on the oxygen of Premiership exposure, flush with TV money and enjoying expanding gate receipts, the signing of the talented Italian wasn't the mismatch it would have been a few years earlier.

But at a reported £40,000 a week -- and with other high profile signings like Stan Collymore and Dan Petrescu jumping on the gravy train -- a quick look at the club's accounts would have revealed the West Yorkshire club was living well beyond its means.

The collapse of the ITV digital, dwindling match day crowds and a commercial image that would never bring in a fortune from outside investors, and it was only a matter of time before the money men descended on Valley Parade.

So in the summer of 2002, out went big money signings and in came men with clipboards and calculators.

It's 18 months since Bradford was taken into administration, and according to club managing director Shaun Harvey, it's been much longer than that since he could talk football.

"It would be great not talking to accountants and lawyers for once," said Shaun, who at 33 is one of the youngest club MDs in the Football League.

Hacked down from an over-ambitious £14.1 million to a much more manageable £2.2 million a year, Bradford's wage bill has now become the model for other administration-threatened clubs, including Burnley.

One of the administrators first tasks was to sack first team players, only allowing them to return on re-negotiated contracts.

Bradford's experience -- as the first English club taken into administration after the collapse of the ITV digital deal in 2002 -- has acted as part template, part cautionary tale for other clubs.

Shaun added: "Going into administration wasn't a wheeze or something you do lightly to avoid going further into debt. I always liken it to being robbed.

"You have complete strangers coming into your home, forcing you to get rid of some people and telling you how to run your business. It is very costly and very humiliating.

"One of the worst thing I remember was having to make 38 of our 86 staff redundant. That's something you don't forget. Everyone was affected, from the cleaner to the communications manager, and someone had to make cold, hard decisions on whether someone was necessary or not.

"The whole thing is very degrading on a personal level."

Now struggling on the pitch -- they are currently second to bottom in Nationwide League Division One -- the club is at least concentrating on football once again, albeit facing the ignamy of relegation to Division Two.

Silencing the nagging cries of the creditors in one foul swoop can, on the face of it, appear an attractive option.

To have administrators come in and run your affairs as a going concern is seen as better than than the alternative -- liquidation or receivership.

But last season Leicester City famously managed to negotiate themselves out of a hole and got creditors to agree to pay just 10p in the pound, compared to 60p in the pound at York City when they went under.

And to many onlookers it wasn't the administrator's thriftiness which was cause for concern. It was the fact Leicester managed to build a new stadium, keep hold of its players and eventually gain promotion after being bought out by a high-profile consortium led by ex-England star Gary Lineker.

Gary Sherrard, head of sport on the Leicester Mercury newspaper, said: "The national papers have said Leicester got off lightly, but that is not the case. Players had to defer wages and they had to make more than 20 people at Filbert Street redundant. The club had to get rid of its press officer, operations manager and practically its entire scouting system.

"Yes, the team gained promotion, but that was chiefly down to the manager Micky Adams, who turned the criticism into a siege mentality. He couldn't buy any players or even take any on a non-contract loan basis."

New Football League legislation means that, in the future, clubs won't be able to 'do a Leicester'. Clubs going into administration will be automatically fined 10 points from May 10 this year, effectively consigning some clubs to relegation.

Peter Sharkey, sports business writer for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and the Times, is under no illusions what administration does to a club. He said: "If you look at all 92 league clubs, only about 12 are solvent.

"When administrators come in they immediately look at paying off creditors -- and that could involve selling off assets which could include players and even the ground. As if that threat wasn't bad enough, some clubs have seen the process as a quick way to wipe out debt."

But with the 10 point rule not kicking in for another three months, why wasn't Burnley tempted to throw open its doors to administrators? After all, if the Sword of Damocles drops, why not let it puncture all the club's debts in one go?

Because, according to club chief executive Dave Edmundson, that is not the Burnley way.

"Going into administration has always been an option, but at this stage we are extremely optimistic of avoiding that," he explained.

"The Football League have imposed this 10 point penalty which means if we wanted to go into administration we would have to do it before May 10.

"The fact that we went public with our problems very early shows our determination to get out of jail. Yes, we are in a perilous situation but our survival plan is coming together nicely.

"One good sign is that the phones in our commercial department haven't stopped ringing. That means our creditors and potential commercial partners are still talking to us."

Officials now have the money to finance the club until the re-negotiation of top players' contracts will allow it regain control of its finances in the summer.

Clarets fans share the chief executive's take on avoiding administration.

Tony Scholes, of Clarets Independent Supporters Association, fears the money men wouldn't be able to resist that most dreaded of money-making schemes - asset stripping.

He said: "The first thing administrators do is sell the assets to pay the creditors and that means players, the ground or the whole club. I would be frightened to death if that happened to Burnley. "