Cod Almighty | Diary
Boo to the business world
31 July 2014
Some years ago Grimsby Town fans were shocked to discover that the club received no fee from Crystal Palace for the transfer of Danny Butterfield because nobody at the club understood how the Bosman ruling worked. Had Butterfield been offered a new contract of at least equal value to his previous deal, a fee would have been payable and, if not agreed on by the clubs, would have been set and enforced by a tribunal. Given the years spent by Butterfield in the Mariners' youth system and the player's potential to achieve at the highest level, any such fee might have been sizeable. As it turned out, however, no contract offer was made which would have triggered such a stipulation, and Butterfield moved on to his career with Palace in the upper echelons of English football for with precisely bugger all payable to Town.
Your original/regular Diary is reminded of this again by a revelation today about Scott Neilson's suspension. Town's dainty winger was, of course, controversially sent off in the second leg of the play-off semi-final against Gateshead back in May, and Paul Hurst has explained why the club didn't appeal. "Um, er, dunno really, I just forgot or something," says the manager, in not so many words.
Of course, when Butterfield did one and Town got no money, we were still in the Football League – and not even the bottom end of it. But the rot had already begun.
This is a time when Mariners fans are hoping the club can start the new season strongly, boss the Conference and ultimately return to the League next May after several years in the football wilderness.
Of course, when we tweeted this three weeks ago, we had no idea who had posted it. #gtfc #safehands pic.twitter.com/Hj0pRW1Ce1
— Cod Almighty (@codalmighty) July 27, 2014
This is also a week when the club's major shareholder has surprised everyone by finding yet another way to make an epic pillock of himself. It's not so much that he's posted on the Fishy messageboard – some people can do that without being pillocks – but that, as the remarkable posting above suggests, he seems to know so little about the club he's running.
So exactly how justified is the optimism about returning to the top 92 very soon when virtually everything about the way the club is run still seems to scream non-League?