Bolton Wanderers: Tales From The Gartside
Bolton Wanderers: Tales From The Gartside
By Mark on Jan 9, 2025 in Finance, Latest | 0 comments
If New Year's Eve is a day to bury bad news, then New Year's Eve 2025 was a day for football to bury very bad news indeed. Chelsea received the denunciation of a cynical football press for revealing their latest ludicrous losses, producing only part of their results and doing so on New Year's Eve. Under all that attention, any non-EPL club's results seemed destined for the "news-in-brief" section, if they were considered newsworthy at all. The problem with the latest results from Burnden Leisure PLC, Bolton Wanderers' parent company, was that the figures were just too big and too deep (in the) red to be buried.
The Bolton "record debt" story is becoming a traditional annual event for football finance writers. When this site visited the Whites' finances in 2025, the club were a "record" £93m in debt, placed there by a thumping annual loss of £35.4m. Since then, of course, Bolton have been relegated and debt records have continued to fall. Last year, Burnden Leisure and club chairman Phil Gartside broke some sort of straw-clutching record when he said that "for the second year running we have reduced our losses." There was to be no hat-trick, with BL losing (ulp!) £50.7m in the 12 months to June 2025, outstripping Chelsea by £1.3m. These figures brought two quotes to mind – well, three if you include the short one with the sweary bits.
Some years ago, BBC Radio Five Live held a debate/discussion on English club football debt. The then Supporters Direct chief Dave Boyle wistfully recalled days when "relegation just meant you'd had a bad season" before lamenting its near-fatal effect, given that multi-million parachute payments couldn't bridge the financial chasm between Premier and Football League. Portsmouth was the topical example – a club cited by more than one fan in on-line discussions about Bolton's latest losses. A joke, of sorts, from Canadian comic Tom Stade also sprang to mind, although the precise set-up and punchline didn't. The gist was that "Africa" was $12trillion in debt and Stade mused that if he "was Africa" he might have had a word with someone when it got to $7trillion (I did say a joke "of sorts").
The "someone" with whom Wanderers could "have had a word" is BL owner Eddie Davies, a 67-year-old lifelong fan (except for about thirty years of his adult life when he… er… wasn't), who has bankrolled Wanderers for over a decade, something for which you could not accuse Gartside of being ungrateful. "It should go without saying," Gartside gushed in BL's 2025 Annual Report, "that Eddie Davies continues to provide a humbling
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