Money, money, money...

So Portsmouth have finally bowed to the inevitable and gone into administration. But far more worrying is the possibility that the Premiership as a whole may well be bankrupt - that is to say its debts exceed its assets. Certainly at the last assessment it was a close-run thing, and things have almost certainly got worse since then. It's difficult to be precise about all this because, firstly, it's not easy to assess just what its assets are - much depends on the notional value of players, which goes up and down as their performance varies, and then some clubs have super-rich owners with bottomless pockets, but just how much of their wealth they would be prepared to expend on their club is not clear, and then on the other side of the balance sheet, much of the money some clubs owe has been lent to them by die-hard fans who wouldn't dream of ever actually calling the debt in. There's little doubt however that if the Premiership was an ordinary commercial concern they would be under close scrutiny to see whether they were breaking the law by trading whilst insolvent.