On Friday, Gerald Puttock carried his quarrel with Ostend Harbour Athletic into the Ypres Commercial Court. By Monday’s injunction hearing on Vandenpeereboomplein, the filings did one plain thing: they showed the club has roughly six weeks’ cash. That is the margin before overtime for matchday police falls further behind, small jobs at the Mercator Ground are skipped, and the League at Menin Gate House starts to act on its warning.
Enough of brinkmanship by affidavit. Put a court‑appointed receiver in now, with the major unsecured creditors agreeing to hold off while the books are opened and one elected supporters’ director is given the same papers as the board. Any rent holiday at the Mercator Ground should only come under those terms. If Mr Puttock and Salient Sports Group refuse a write‑down in that setting, let the receiver do his work and spare the ratepayer a dip into the purse.
Mr Puttock is within his contractual rights to call a bridge loan advanced when the share issue stalled in December. He wants £780,000 back on that loan and £62,000 in fees for his time as a director. Salient Sports Group walked into a thin winter, stretched suppliers and hoped for a cup run. The Borough Constabulary is bound to collect its levy. The Council’s Parks & Properties must mind the lease. The Salient Football League has, since 1982, an embargo rule when a club falls materially into arrears to public bodies or players. Everyone kept to their post and the gears have locked.
A receiver can knock them apart without picking favourites. Two independent hands can run the cash, make the fixtures safe, and start honest talk with every class of creditor. No more private side‑letters and no more ghost fees treated as sacred while the turnstiles seize. With a supporters’ seat in the room, the people who queue on wet Saturdays will see the numbers that matter.
A receiver‑led standstill before the 4 May derby would settle the policing bill and avoid a Borough rent write‑off at the Mercator Ground.
That six‑week figure matters because the next fortnight is cruel. The home derby on 4 May carries a high policing band, and arrears already sit unpaid. If the League tightens its threat, registrations will be frozen, and the manager cannot register reinforcements or upgrade youth amateurs to senior forms. The Mercator Ground needs work the lease says is the club’s to do, and nobody has squared who pays. Nothing here is wicked. It is simply insolvent in slow motion.
The Borough can help, but only on terms that change conduct. A quarter’s rent holiday is defensible if the club opens its ledgers to the Council each month and seats a supporters’ director with full access. Lock those conditions for five years as covenants of lease and management. Then require one practical act: post a simple statement on the main gate after each home match showing takings, police costs, and payments made that week. That is how a rent concession buys discipline, not drift.
There is also money on the pavements. Seek SFL consent for a temporary switch to Poperinge Recreation Ground, subject to ground certification and Constabulary clearance, for three spring fixtures. The policing band there is lower, the force can deploy without overtime, and the Poperinge traders will turn those Saturdays into takings. Buses can be rostered, the pie stall can travel, and the till will breathe for a month.
You can freeze interest and change boards, but don’t take the team off the water. The crest belongs by the sea. Moving to Poperinge is packing up the harbour.
I hear Elise, and many in Ostend will cheer her line. Sentiment has kept terraces warm longer than any balance sheet. But Monday’s affidavits were not poetry. They described a business that cannot afford its own matchday police, and the Borough is not a fairy godmother with a blue lamp. If three away‑days in our own district buy time without touching the rates, a serious board, and for a time that will mean a receiver and an elected supporters’ voice, takes the deal.
The League’s part in this is where I expect letters. Secretary Colin Wraxall runs a tidy ship at Menin Gate House, and no district that remembers 1940 lightly dismisses order. But the embargo threat is a bludgeon. If the court installs a receiver, the League should suspend any embargo while the plan is executed. The League is quick to lecture about the financial rules set out in its circulars. It should be as quick to bless a clean fix under the eye of the Ypres bench.
As for the Constabulary, its reclassification of fixtures last year shoved too many matches into higher‑cost bands without a clear basis ordinary supporters could recognise. We respect the force. We also expect it to price its Saturdays with intelligible criteria, and to publish them. A receivership period gives the first chance in months to sit the chief, the receiver, and the Council down with the schedule and the bill and agree a method that stands.
They say safety, then shut the East Gate early and we’re queuing thirty minutes in rain while stewards wander. Sort the basics before you talk about who gets paid first.
Tom’s anger is at the turnstiles, and he is right that the basics are fraying. That is precisely what a receiver is for: small operational decisions that, accumulated, stop the drains on cash and patience. A standstill without someone minding the queue ends the same way as a boastful board, badly.
It is fashionable to say none of this touches Middelkerke or Nieuwpoort. Rubbish. The Ostend Port Authority’s fees and auction quotas already squeeze boats outside the Borough. When our Council toys with rent holidays for a club while foreign boats pay dear at the quay, it looks like one law for the crest and one law for the rest.
Our moorings cost more this spring and your Port rules bite us first. If Ostend throws good money after a club that can’t pay the police, tell me why we should land here at all.
Luc fishes outside the Borough. His gripe, however, lands in every ratepayer’s pocket. A receiver with a strict code of practice approved by the court and Council is the only way the Council can say, credibly, that any temporary concession at the Mercator Ground is an investment in order, not a thumb on the scales.
There is a parish view too, colder than you would think. The borough’s churches and halls rely on small, boring grants whose totals could be lost in the director fees Mr Puttock says he is owed. They care about cheques that clear, not rosettes on lapels.
If the Council waives stadium rent, that money is not mending the roof at the youth hall. I will support whatever gets me a date and an amount on the clerk’s note.
So let us have dates and amounts. Judge Hendrik Beelaert should appoint a receiver and order creditors to meet under court notice, and the Council should tie any rent relief to open books and a supporters’ vote. That would change the gates at once: a posted weekly sheet of takings and payments, police bills cleared ahead of director fees, and light repairs done without argument. The point is simple enough that a parish treasurer can see it in one glance at the noticeboard.
If Mr Puttock declines a write‑down, the court will have given him a fair forum and the club a lawful route into receivership or a scheme of arrangement. If Salient Sports Group cannot live with a supporters’ director and binding covenants, the receiver will find a buyer who can. If the Borough refuses to link rent to reform, the Council will be choosing romance over rates and should own that choice. But if the work begins now, the quay will keep its Saturdays and Poperinge will have three of its own.
Outside the Commercial Court yesterday, umbrellas bobbed along Vandenpeereboomplein and the clerk pinned a fresh notice to the board by the door, the paper already damp at the corners.