Your talking point for the weekend...

...is this the last we'll see of Portsmouth Football Club?

Despite all of the huge problems they have, you still, deep down, have to say that it’s unlikely. Why? The club may be teetering on the very brink of possible extinction, but if there is one thing that has characterised football clubs over the last few years, it’s been their remarkable, if slightly underhand ways of surviving even the bleakest of financial crises. The words ‘Leeds’ and ‘United’ are often banded about here. What we’ve seen is that many clubs have seemingly been able to come out the other side of a fiscal meltdown just when it looked like they were near certainties to go out of business.

To summarise the many travails of Portsmouth these last couple of years would take one a significant amount of time and besides if you want to know what’s really going on (well as far as anyone really knows what’s going on at Portsmouth), it’s better to let the real experts speak and direct you to the fine work of David Conn of The Guardian in this area (find his name in the ‘Links’ section of the site). But as I mentioned, through various dodgy creditor payback schemes, the complexities of administration and the fact that there always seem to be someone crazy enough with some money (although clearly, actually having money doesn’t seem to be the prerequisite it used to be) coming over the hill, football clubs in the professional leagues always seem to have survived, all be it by the biggest of hooks and crooks (an apt description when one considers those involved down at Fratton Park).

So will there soon be no more Pompey, not to mention any more delightful man with a large bell? They’re facing a winding up order, they owe millions in unpaid debts to various creditors and the club is rock bottom of the Premier League, however the very fact that they are still currently, although probably for not much longer, playing in the Premier League may end up being their salvation. Simply put, you have to believe that Richard Scudamore and everyone connected to the cash cow and marketing behemoth that is the Premier League will do everything in their power to make sure the club doesn’t go out of existence. Not because of some newly found social conscience on their part, but more because Portsmouth dying on the Premier Leagues watch threatens the very existence of what we’ve been told along; that under the Premier League model things like this couldn’t happen.

Reports this morning have surfaced which reveal that Scudamore and the League are currently canvassing the opinions of the other 19 clubs that make up England’s top flight to see if they would be willing to back a plan where Portsmouth would be given the £11 million in parachute payments that they would get at the end of the season in the event of relegation. This instant income it is argued would be enough to pay off the debt to the taxman and allow them to keep afloat until at least the end of the season. Apparently the league is also worried that if Portsmouth were to cease trading, they would have to withdraw from the league and their fixtures would become void, thus skewing the results of so far. Nice to know they care.

The fact that Pompey’s potential final act could come against bitter local rivals Southampton is an interesting sub-plot to the story, however the fact that the two will meet this weekend for a place in the FA Cup quarter finals has been somewhat overshadowed. Portsmouth can though, look to their great foes as a potential source of inspiration, given the Saints recent financial problems themselves. At the end of last season, following relegation to League One, and amidst points deductions and crippling debts, Southampton also looked like they were *this close* to extinction, yet they were able to find salvation in the form of Markus Liebherr, a Swiss-German businessman who took them over this summer. Liebherr bought the club 98 days after Southampton Leisure Holdings, the former holding company, had been placed in administration for a price believed to be between £13m and £15m. As is often the case, Portsmouth, like others before them and no doubt others in the future will hope the debts and sins of the past can be overcome by a white night riding to the rescue. Then again, haven’t Portsmouth already had about four of them already?

It appears to be very much ‘watch this space’, but it’s also abundantly clear that Portsmouth are very close, if some dramatic instant solutions aren’t found, to going bust. How a club getting hold of such huge sums of television money every year has got into this mess could fill another 100 articles, but at the moment, the ‘her and now’ is all that’s important to Pompey. Football clubs have shown a remarkable durability to claw onto their survival in recent times, however this time round, saving Portsmouth may be just a step too far.