How Swansea City Football Club runs itself profitably

I'm a little skeptical.  I can remember similar articles being written about Bolton or Plymouth for that matter - then it all went wrong.  We'll see whether Swansea have cracked it or whether they're the latest to achieve some short term success only to be crushed when it becomes unsustainable.  The key to successful club is not what it looks like when it's doing well but what it looks like when it comes across adversity.  So let's see what happens if and when Swansea get relegated or whether they get a little too comfortable on Premiership money and get into trouble when they slip down like so many have before.  Stoke would be another club that would fit this bracket I think - also held up as an example of a well run club although less heralded because people seem to irrationally hate them.

Fair enough - I know a few with that attitude.  There is a lot of evidence that we are both badly run and crap.  It would at least be nice to be badly run and have a bit of success a la Portsmouth etc.  I was burnt with Plymouth though - for years and years I banged on about how Plymouth was a good example of how to build an underachieving medium sized club up from the bottom in a sustainable way.  Turned out I was completely wrong and their approach was built on just as much sand as everybody elses.

The ultimate problem is football's incentive structure which encourages short-termism.  A guy can come in, act like Mr Big, drive a club forward and rake in the cash when they hit the top point and bask in the glory of being a local hero (like Ridsdale and Garside did for a while and Mandaric has done several times).  Then he can scarper when the s**t hits the fan and the whole house of cards collapses leaving fans to pick up the pieces and local businesses to shoulder the debts.  I suspect that behind Swansea is one these people or groups of people - maybe I'll be proved wrong though but like I said we're too quick to praise clubs like this when everything is going swimmingly - the true test is if they are stukk sustainable after they take their first backward step.  I'm skeptical because of the number of these type of articles I've read before about club like Ipswich, Boltion, Southampton (under Ruper Lowe), Portsmouth under Mandaric, Blackburn, Leicester (in O'Neil's reign) etc.  All turned out to be unsustainable, basically went out of business and it was fans who paid for it.

Just now on Sunday Supplement (Sky Sports) the discussion seemed to imply an imminent sale of Swansea City to American "investors" so the story continues....

But we already are following that example we just haven't gotten to that stage yet.  As soon as a football club becomes nothing more than an asset for the people that own it (as it has been made quite clear is the case for Rovers) then it is only a matter of time before they sell up to someone else who probably has no interest or long term connection with the club.  You can't go halfway down that road; it's not possible.  Either there are controls in place that have fans owning some of the club or the community owning some of it etc or you don't.  At some point Bristol Rovers will be owned by somebody like that irrespective of who owns them at the moment - maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year but certainly in my lifetime; I think it's pretty much a certainty.  There's certainly no safeguards in place to stop it happening at Rovers - there's nothing our current board have done to stop this from happening in the future all they've done is not sold up yet.