Going down
Almost thirty years ago, I spent some time in a town called Darlington, in the north east of England. It had every thing you’d expect of a community that was a mix of rural and industrial, the latter based largely on its proximity to a main railway line. It was a bustling place, particularly on market days, and it had a football team. They were known locally as the Quakers (I never did find out why) and played in an old-fashioned riverside ground called Feethams. (Again, don’t ask me why.) When I was there I went to see them play a friendly against Fulham, then managed by Malcolm ‘Supermac’ Macdonald, who turned out as a player that night, although he had retired, and I’ve had a fondess for them ever since. The Quakers were fine then, owned and run by local people who knew their place in the natural order of things, but in 1999 control of the club was acquired by a businessman who made the colossal mistake of building a new, expensive stadium before building a team capable of sustaining its cost.
He and his big dreams are long gone, and since then the aftermath of his malign intervention has seen Darlington FC in and out of the Football League and in and out of administration. They returned to that state recently, and this may be the end. There is a real danger that they will go out of business this week, unless a benefactor can be found. I use that word because no sensible investor would put a penny into the business with any hope of return. If it happens, I’ll be very sad, and also I’ll have one less score to check on a Saturday evening.
Quintin Jardine's blog 
hi there just read you blog about darlington football club and i have to say that i think its a problem that is going to affect so many scottish clubs in the very near future and just first and not just the lower division clubs. me myself i am an aberdeen fan and i remember a few years ago the players had to chip in and buy a toaster for there canteen i just think you have to laugh when a club as big as aberdeen cant even buy the team a toaster i personally the fiffa need to look and how out of control the spending in football is getting and start to put a cap on player transfers and wages to help the smaller teams to compete on a more even field
FIFA/UEFA are trying to do this through Platini’s Fair Play rules. However we Jocks can’t point our fingers at others. We have watched for a century as the Old Firm imposed their financial dominance on every other club in Scotland. Okay, maybe they weren’t to blame for the players’ toaster at Pittodrie; chances are that wee Milne needed the money for a new rug at the time. However the fact is that Aberdeen are not a ‘big’ club. Like the rest they are a minnow beside the big two in terms of stadium, support and the finances these generate. The BigTwo distorted the market for years. The clubs on whom they depend to fill their fixture lists week in week out learned to cut their cloth accordingly. Thus most of our clubs will go on, (even the Jambos, who will extricate themselves from the Lithuanian’s clutches one day). Indeed, their prospects might improve if the taxman does come down on Rangers with a £50m demand, and the club goes under. In that albeit unlikely event, all those blue-bedecked people who leave places like Motherwell, Airdrie, even Dundee and Aberdeen rather than support their home town teams, might find they have nowhere else to go.