Dumbarton FC join Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC in administration

Scottish football fans everywhere will no doubt have seen that Dumbarton FC have this week become the second club this season to enter administration. Despite many years without an insolvency event in senior Scottish football, the last four weeks have been exactly what we feared may await us post-pandemic, and we have offered our support to the Sons Trust in the weeks and months ahead, as we did with the ICT Supporters Trust in October.

Football club finances can be fragile and challenging at the best of times. While we have observed in the past that the steps up and down the divisions in Scotland are much less steep than elsewhere, successive relegations clearly took an incredibly severe toll on the business model at ICT. And while the Sons may have seemed to be in reasonably good shape, the financial distribution model in Scottish football meant that – just like every club in the lower divisions – there were few crumbs falling from the table. We have questioned the ownership model at Dumbarton for several years (in our SDS Index they have long been one of the clubs with an opaque ownership structure) and the questions asked by the Sons Trust over the years about this structure and the owners’ intentions regarding the stadium and the land it is built on, and reiterated in their statement today, were pertinent, vital, and received few satisfactory answers.

Fan engagement builds the foundations for success both off-field and on-field, and there are lessons to be learned for all football clubs in the recent developments in Inverness and Dumbarton. Transparency of ownership is important if owners are to maintain high levels of trust and respect with their supporters; and trust and respect underpin any efforts for owners, shareholders, supporters and communities to pull together in building successful football clubs. We’re all in it together, and if Scottish football is to thrive we should see the current problems at these two clubs as a demonstration of the challenges facing clubs at every level of our football pyramid. We can do better, and we need the whole of Scottish football to show leadership to make things better.

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