Sutcliffe: Wake-up call for Pompey

Pompey became the first Premier League side to enter administration on Friday morning after failing in their quest to find a buyer for the club, who are believed to be £70million in debt. West Ham came perilously close to being forced into administration before being taken over last month but several Football League clubs have not been so fortunate. The Premier League's "fit and proper persons test" is designed to assess whether prospective buyers have the finances to run a club, yet Portsmouth have had four owners so far this season - all of whom have had troubles financing the day-to-day operations of the south-coast club. Sports Minister Sutcliffe has always been an advocate of tightening the rules regarding who can buy clubs and he hopes that Pompey's misfortune will make the football authorities introduce stricter tests for prospective buyers. "Hopefully all the problems at Portsmouth will be a massive wake up call to all involved," Sutcliffe said. "It's very sad for the club and the supporters. It's a club who just a few years ago who were in the FA Cup final." Sutcliffe is concerned about the number of top-flight sides currently saddled with debt. The 56-year-old stopped short of saying the government will intervene to regulate expenditure in football, but admits the Portsmouth fiasco does not reflect well on the English game. "We have been concerned by this for some time," said Sutcliffe, who is in Canada to assess Vancouver's co-ordination of the Winter Olympics ahead of the 2012 London Games. "It's not the government's job to run football but as a critical friend and as a funder of football we think it's important that they should tighten up their rules. "We are pleased that the Premier League have improved their rules, as has the Football League, but the Pompey situation means that clearly we need to go a step further and we have set that challenge to the Premier League and the other leagues to look at this because we can't afford to keep having clubs going into administration. "It's bad for the league, it's bad for them as businesses, it's bad for the supporters and it's bad for the game of football. it's detrimental to the fans, to the clubs, to the status of the league." The Labour MP for Bradford South hopes greater supporter representation at board level could help clubs avoid being plunged into financial meltdown. "We fund supporters' trusts, supporters direct and we like the idea of having a supporter on every board through the supporters' trust movement," he added. "That might not be the ideal situation but we have got to have to look at different models of running clubs to make sure we avoid situations like the one we're in today."