Fiasco at Upton Park reminds Mike Ashley he had better find a buyer quick

This could be a watershed week for Premier League football, as clubs start to deal with the consquences of global economic catastrophe. Leading the suffering is West Ham, £142 million in debt according to the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance 2008, and whose owner Bjogolfur Gudmundsson has lost his wallet in the meltdown. One Sunday paper claimed that West Ham were just a month away from administration if they fail to find a buyer.

Who knew things were quite so grim when on the last weekend of August, just before the transfer window closed on the Monday, Alan Curbishley walked out? He claimed it was because the club’s owners had gone against his wishes and sold George McCartney to Sunderland. At the time, it just looked like a shabby piece of business, with the club feebly claiming McCartney had asked to go. West Ham fans could only assume it was a cost-cutting measure, but thought it was perhaps in preparation for the verdict in the Tevez/Sheffield United tribunal going against them.

In hindsight, the disposal of McCartney was a desperate piece of last minute fund-raising, as the club’s owners either knew or anticipated that they were heading into a period of extreme cash scarcity.

If the McCartney transfer, then, was the canary in the mine that warned of imminent financial hell at West Ham, what are we to make of Mike Ashley’s behaviour durning the same period, when he put the entire Newcastle first team up for sale? In the light of the gravity of West Ham’s subsequent difficulties, was Mr Ashley’s attempted fire sale a futile attempt to stave off collapse? They’ve hardly covered themselves in glory but that’s no reason to flog the lot of them.

As Newcastle under Mr Ashley’s control have not been a particularly communicative organisation, fans will just have to guess for themselves how dire the club’s financial situation is. As always though, there’s a silver lining. All those years of suffering for supporters on Tyneside will turn out to have been excellent preparation for the torment that lies ahead.

* And don’t forget the news in last week’s Evening Standard: “Mr Ashley is the fourth biggest loser from the crunch and has seen the value of his stake in Sports Direct, the retail giant he set up and floated on the London market, dive from £1.17 billion in February last year to just £168 million today. That is a loss of £1 billion.” So far.