I've started wondering about the 10 day deadline (I assume that it's working days which makes it a fortnight today) as the club apparently pays its staff on the 14th. of the month. What's due on the 10th, which would be deadline day?

If salaries hit accounts on the 14th, the club need to push the button on payroll a few days before that if they pay by BACS.

Not now. BACS is history. Can pay for value same day if you have to thru faster payments (in my case, it costs us £3.00 a same-day payment, mind, compared with 33p for next-day payment).

14 July is a Saturday, so there would have to be cleared funds in the account on Friday 13th. Date of ill-omen or what?



That is outside the 10-day timeframe, so unless Caisley and/or his "investors" miraculously appear with either a bid or funding, it seems unlikely to last till then anyway?

Hello GB, and no surprise you chose today to post some pertinent points. one question of fact: you give a wage bill of £300k, I assume you mean per month. 2010 accounts show £2.4m staff costs which should include NIC etc and out of which paye etc would be deducted to pay over to HMRC so £200k per month. I would expect a bit of an increase, but not 50% more than 2 years ago. anyway, my favoured cost cutting priorities would be Odsal, anything left in admin costs, then the team. The footballing review presumably included who to "keep" in this eventuality, on the pareto principle, so in a phoenix situation we should end up with a young injury free squad, tho not necessarily the young ones we want.

general question - what happens to the franchise itself, can it be sold/bought or does it revert to the RFL upon admin/liquidation?

Some people still process payroll through BACS. Not sure who the Bulls bank with but not all banks offer batch faster payments (where you can upload a csv file with payment details). There are still lots of companies that use BACS for payroll.

I agree it can be overcome, but it may well be the "usual" day for payroll processing at the club.

They bank with Yorkshire (NBA) now. Used to be Natwest. You would hope that they would recognise/take advantage of the benefits of a later date for funds check?

That said, they still seemed to think PAYE was due on the 19th - not the 22nd if paying electronically - so maybe not?

But its all so many deckchairs on the Titanic for rearrangement now anyway.

Adey - read a lot of your posts and I sense you have some financial acumen (Which is more than can be said for the BoD). What's your confidence level that a buyer can be found and the club saved?

Well I don't know about Adey but uncomfirmed reports are showing that Jack Tordoff is meeting with that administrator who was in the paper. If true it shows someone is very interested but it ends speculation that Morrison will invest.

Bad times for the Bulls, hope you pull through. As a Wakefield fan it is all too vivid a memory. I guess a few players will shortly depart but i've a feeling something will turn up and you will carry on, albeit expectation may well have to be lowered along with the wage bill. Still that is better than having no club at all. Good luck.

I ought to have a bit by now given what I have been doing for a living for more years than I care to remember!

Its not an objective financial question, though. I guess one of:

1 - Has Caisley been "waiting" for this situation to come in with a bid, with or without co-investors?

2 - Has anyone else been waiting for this situation to come in with either a bid or a proposal for investment in some form, again with or without co-investors?

3 - Will Ken Morrison decide to put something back into the city that started him on his road to fortune?

4 - Will someone like Jack Tordoff, or a Euromillions winner, decide to have a shot at it? JT may be our best hope, I suspect.

5 - Will the Council seek to get involved?

6 - Will thousands of fans be prepared to dob in hundreds of pounds each, or hundreds of fans be prepared to dob in a few thousand each

And regarding whether one of those scenarios will eventuate: I really have no idea.

1. 60/40
2. 10/90
3. 0
4. 50/50 (remember one rumour he already offered to buy it for a nominal sum but was rejected, dunno if any mileage)
5. -1000
6. No, but if they did, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough.

I would be surprised if we staged the Broncos game if we didnt have a definite buyer.

Fingers crossed, one of these comes good for you. I guess it's inevitable that in order to make any new venture sustainable the wage bill will have to be slashed, players sold etc and you will experience a fair bit of pain. I guess the important thing now is that the club survives in some shape or form whatever the cost. Good luck to you all.

For sure

Terrible news - It'll be an absolute disaster for the whole of RL if Bradford disappear. My football club disappeared a year ago so I know exactly what a nightmare it is to have to go through. RL needs Bradford.

Debt free???

I'll bow to higher powers, but admin does not disappear the debt?

If players are bought by other clubs and loaned back to Bradford, who would pay the wages? The administrators have already said that they need 300k for to pay wages by next week to stave off liquidation.
Would/could we have a situation where said players bought would not count on this years salary cap? Didn't this happen when Crusaders pulled out of SL or was it just the quota rule that was relaxed?

The more you put in little comments to place the blame at Hood's door, the more and more I find myself thinking that this is Caisley's fault.

Newco are debt free, although if it involves anyone who took the club down or into admin there would be some issues to address with both the RFL and HMRC.
I still cannot for the life of me see how the RFL weren't complicit in all this, these problems must have been visible to the RFLs auditors?!?!

No way the council will do anything in the current economic climate.

But while several posters have said bad for RL if no Bradford - equally - if not more so - bad for Bradford if no RL. Admittedly not in the last few year's but the Bulls have been one of the few local success stories for the city in the last decade.

In the circumstances if any newco can be formed from this disaster you would hope they would be open to any ways of creating a stronger a wider capital base?

It continues to amaze me how few people can see the elephant in the room.

Hood said, a year or more ago, that the whole competition was built on foundations of sand.

He was surely correct?

IMO Bulls are just the tip of the iceberg. There is far too little money in the game, and too many clubs surviving only because of the largesse of their wealthy owners.

Do you think the RFL are not very much aware of all this? How many more clubs are teetering, just under the radar, that the RFL are fully aware of and supporting or at least turning a blind eye to? If the RFL was to come down heavy on one club for its financial basis, how many other dominoes would that topple?

I have been ploughing this lonely furrow for years, frequently derided.

Bulls will not be the last, IMO. Watch this space.

I would take the stance that average players are on salaries which are too large and the sport can not afford.

For the Bulls to have signed Matt Orford on a three year deal while the finances of the club were in shambles is the perfect microcosm of the insanity within the game.

FWIW I agree with you. Any business model which requires an injection of £250-£500k per annum to continue trading is fundamentally flawed. I also believe the image rights issue has caught a lot of clubs out. The whole system needs an overhaul - lower the salary cap, better financial governance, mergers of clubs in the same area.

People are asking for a utopia which does not exist. Namely big sport, big clubs, big players, but all paid for by some brilliant business models that bring all the money in.

Whereas in reality big backers are the only way for a club to be in the top echelons of sport. Any sport.

All the guff about some new business model that will operate in profit is just so much piffle, there is no such league. The reason is that to compete at the top end, you need to be able to pay top-end wages to some of your players, and those are always out of kilter with what the sport, as a whole, can afford.

The reason for that is because the big backers of the leading clubs set the market for the top players and the rest of the wage structure of a league trickles down from that. And there is nothing you can do about it, as the biggest clubs always have poached the best players with big money offers, financed by backers who are most certainly not in it for a profit, and always will. To keep a top-class squad, at your level, you will always need more money than you will generate from activities. The odd club that occasionally turns a small paper profit only does so because it has a big backer of one sort or another. If you want a top two club in SL that is purely self-financed, with no backer, like the Bulls, it simply can't be done.

You might not like it, but it is a reality. Without "investors" (what a euphemism!) it simply cannot be done.

Hood OUT!