Torquay United v Port Vale.22/04/59.

I must confess I haven’t really experienced the argument which says everything was hunky-dory until Mike Bateson arrived. Instead I’ve always been of the mind the finances were pretty stable from 1945 to 1970 and periodically ropey thereafter. But now Jon is correct in highlighting that things might not have been so good during the late 1950s.

It makes you wonder about a couple of things. Firstly, were some of these financial crises as real as they sound? Or did a “we are strugglers” mindset develop pretty quickly at Plainmoor after 1927? To answer this, it would be fascinating to look at general football finances in, say, the 1950s and see how we compared. My guess is that it was a different world where debt was barely tolerated; most of the income came through the turnstiles and directors – by modern standards – subsidised clubs to a far lesser extent. In that way you can appreciate how Torquay United, as one of the poorest-supported teams, could easily see itself as a struggler. And I wonder how the club’s bank manager felt?

Secondly, taking these things into account, I’ve also thought the club pitched slightly above its weight for many years. We’re pretty proud of the eighty years we spent in the Football League between 1927 and 2007. But we’ve got to remember that, for the first sixty of these years, we operated within a system where there wasn’t automatic relegation to a lower level outside of the Football League. Consequently, you could argue that a measure of our relative success was that we didn’t have to apply for re-election between 1928 and 1985 (okay, let’s not get too excited about that but…).

Yet you wonder what it was like at the foot of Division 3 (S) and Division 4 in those days. By the late 1950s, for example, clubs had been routinely re-elected to the league for many years. It wasn’t nice to seek re-election but the chances of getting booted out were pretty small (explaining why Gateshead’s failure to be re-elected in 1960 caused such a furore). And, again, by today’s standards – with automatic relegation and play-offs having such an effect – you want to ask how many “dead rubbers” clubs played after Christmas. Players would have been fighting for contracts - in time-honoured fashion - but were many real “pressure games” played? We talked about the Carsley match recently - I wonder how big a game that was in reality? Did some clubs – knowing there was little real danger of dropping out of the league - take it easy for a season or two to save money?

Who knows? And who knows what the effect might have been had automatic relegation from the Football League existed throughout our first sixty years? Would we have gone straight down in 1928? Or splashed the cash to survive? Would other seasons have turned out differently with greater pressure, bigger matches, more managerial changes and clubs generally taking desperate measures? Hmm..