That depends who you are asking

It's that time of year once again. Time for the car insurance renewal.








Unfortunately, as a sub-23-year old single male, I'm public enemy number one in the eyes of the motor insurance industry as so finding an insurer that will actually honour their advertising claims of "cheap" car insurance is a nigh-on futile task, even with four years without claiming.

But nevertheless, the law requires me to pay for a piece of paper which only has any value in a moment of crass stupidity on my part.

As you can imagine, I'm subject to all the "young driver excesses" that any insurance company feels free to make up on the spot which makes claiming anything a completely pointless exercise. If I do claim, I have to pay the bulk of the costs out of my own pocket anyway and I'll be forced to pay for the rest next year by way of an increased premium. It's a sort of legalised blackmail that works very well in the insurance industry.

But anyway, the renewal note came through with a revised premium of around £381, which wasn't all that bad and around £80 less than last year.

Now in the past as this point, you would go to your local broker and accept any randomly generated number as "his best possible price that he could do if you bought today" or spend a whole afternoon phoning every listing in the Yellow Pages for numbers even more random that you'd be better off asking your newsagent for a 'Luck Dip'.

But the Internet is now here and thanks to other random number generators like Confused and Money Supermarket, I can do it all in one go and, if I'm lucky, pay a hidden middle-man affiliate fee that nobody cares to mention.

A search on both sides revealed a "best price" that was about the same as the renewal but did miss off a few insurers who don't want to be associated with these comparison sites, so I tried those.

One site offered me a "special online price with 10% online discount" of £568, so they were quickly discarded. Another site, who promised to "beat your renewal quote if you have 4 years NCB, even if you aren't very posh" didn't beat my renewal quote. Instead, the tried to triple it.

Resigned to defeat, I tried an online quote with my current insurer and sure enough, I was quoted the "brand new customers only" price of £331. Knowing that I'd have to change the occupation listed on my current documents anyway, I phoned said insurer.

Now I would think that changing my occupation from "care-free, careless student" to "upstanding professional" would have seen a welcome drop, not a £16 increase and so before I knew it, I was passed onto the "Internet quote team" to get the "brand new customers only, but also existing customers if you ask nicely" price.

The annoying thing though, is that for all these various names in the motor insurance industry, they are, on the whole, the same company. Three insurers I obtained quotes from (including the one I went with), were all the same insurer once you get past the marketing yet offered three prices ranging from £331 to nigh-on £1000. For others, the difference was even greater and those that claim to "specialise in younger drivers" were amongst the worst of the bunch.

Never mind eh, there's always next year.

Football Fortunes

After a summer of turmoil, Leeds United are appearing in a live televised game for the first time this season.






OK, so it's the Johnstone's Paint Trophy, the butt of all professional football jokes since it's inception in 1983, but they face Darlington tonight on the road to Wembley. It was almost inevitable that the match presenter opened the programme with "Seven years ago, Leeds were in the Champions League", but playing in the football league trophy is hardly the worst thing that could have happened to the club lately.

After being all-but relegated last season, the club exploited a Football League loophole and entered administration due to the long-term debts the club accrued in an ill-fated drive for the Champions League, with unsecured debts totaling £100m at one point before a succession of chairman chipped away at the debt.

Football League rules meant that Leeds incurred a 10-point penalty for their financial situation but, as they were effectively relegated anyway, the club faced the wrath of fellow Football League members.

As it emerged, it was all one big debt avoidance scheme by chairman Ken Bates, a man who himself resides in the tax-haven that is Monte Carlo.

Creditors of the club were vast, ranging from a local mobile DJ, a balloon supplier, St Gemma's Hospice and the St John's Ambulance but it was four main parties that were of major interest in this remarkable saga.

Whilst their was a number of creditors, the bulk of the debt was owed to four parties. Astor Holdings, Krato Trust, Forward Sports Fund and HMRC - the tax man to you and me. But here's the twist: Nobody had ever heard of the former three firms, they were based at various parts of the globe, including the British Virgin Islands, where businesses can set themselves up almost anonymously. The link was that Bates was attached or associated with the three firms all along. He was in a win-win situation. 75% of a creditors vote was needed for a new ownership of the club, yet Bates himself was attached to 45% of the creditors.

Bates promptly made an offer to creditors - you would get 1p back for every £1 you were owed. That meant that a local hospice, who were owed more than £800, would get little more that £8. However, in line with Football League regulations, all 'football creditors' had to be paid. That meant that former players, owed hundreds of thousands of pounds, would receive every penny.

The offer didn't go down too well with the tax-man, who challenged the resulting CVA.

I could go on here but I'll bore you. Long story short, the CVA was scrapped, against Football League rules, and after much uncertainty over whether the club would be allowed to compete, they were eventually, at the eleventh hour, granted entry to League One - with a 15-point deduction and no FA membership.

There was one other Yorkshire side though who weren't so lucky.

Scarborough FC are another football club who had been teetering on the brink of collapse for a number of years.

As the debts mounted, the solution seemed to be to leave their home at Seamer Road and move to a new, purpose built ground on the outskirts of the city. There nothing wrong with the McCain Stadium, I went their myself whilst following Farsley Celtic last season and as a Conference North ground, there few, if any that were better. But the site was prime land for property developers. Flats and apartments were starting to surround the ground and the "Seadogs" wanted to cash-in on the housing boom.

But local politics got in the way. A covenant existed on the site that restricted its use only to sporting activities. There was no way that the site could be sold to a property developer without the covenant being lifted. Despite the club's best efforts to convince the authorities that this plan would save the club, Scarborough Borough Council refused to budge.

Inevitably, the club was wound up. A new club has formed, Scarborough Athletic, in the Northern Counties East League and the club, an offshoot from a side that was facing Chelsea in the FA Cup in 2004, will face Kirkbymoorside this coming Saturday as part of a league campaign that will take in Rainworth Miners Welfare and the Leeds Metropolitan University team.

There are probably intricacies and details that I'm probably not aware of in the case of Scarborough FC, but from the outset, it seems a shame that a local authority was so short-sighted when it came to the state of the club. After insisting that the site at Seamer Road could only be used for sport, they now have a site with no sports team which will, in all likelihood, be sold off to a property developer.

I also type this just hours after Widnes Vikings RLFC themselves entered administration.

In the chase for promotion, they banked heavily on a result which, on Sunday, never came. Today the club are counting the cost of that ambition and, although it would seem unlikely, the sport could lose one of it's great names.

The rugby league authorities are introducing a franchising system from 2009, which would eliminate automatic promotion and relegation and force clubs to build a long-term plan and prove that they are capable of competing in the elite division - both on and off the field. It can't come soon enough.

A rich man's game

It doesn't take a genius to realise that the wallets of professional footballers have been overflowing for the best part of 10 years or more.










Since Alan Shearer's record transfer of what now seems a modest £15m to Newcastle United in 1996, the levels of cash coming into the game, particularly in Britain, seems to have rocketed.

Russian billionaires, American tycoons and celebrity publicists have all had an influence in the games financial growth, but the lions share of the credit, if that's how you want to look at it, goes to an Australian media mogul.

At the Premiership's formation in 1992, Murdoch's newly-launched Sky venture paid the FA £191m over the course of five seasons. From the start of the new season, a total of £2.7bn will be paid over the next three years which will cover almost every medium from terrestrial television highlights and live satellite broadcasting to mobile phone clips and delayed online downloading.
The result is that Premier League player wages are tipped to top a collective £1bn a year, with predictions that the first £200,000 a week player is not far away.

The debate will always rage as to whether such individuals are deserving of such salaries but with those numbers in mind, it's worth taking into consideration the current plight of Leeds United. Guardian football writer David Conn has taken a deep enough look at the financial state of the club and the figures make for surprising reading.

As a result of former chairman Peter Ridsdale handing out cash to players as if it had come with a board game, the club are today contenting with a bill of almost £850,000 to be paid to former players - over £216,000 of which will be heading in the direction of Danny Mills, a player who left the club back in 2003.

Unfortunately, the people responsible for the club's current state are far from the losers in this increasingly sorry affair. A local window cleaning business and mobile DJ will be offered just 1p per pound of the £6,800 they are collectively owed whilst the volunteers of St Johns Ambulance will still be expected to attend Elland Road events next season despite being reimbursed just £1.65 of their £165 expenses claim.

It's not for me to argue how much any individual should or shouldn't get paid and I'll be the first to acknowledge that Leeds United is the very extreme of embarrassing financial mismanagement. I voted with my feet a few years ago, I can't justify to myself paying inflated ticket prices to watch badly managed clubs in an industry that frequently rewards underachievement. The "loyalty"argument that many supporters put forward is pathetic. If any other business in any other industry tried to financially milk them as a customer in such an overt manner, they would take their custom elsewhere without a moments thought.

As unlikely as it is to happen, salary caps would be one of the best things to ever happen to British football. The argument that such a system would have to be Europe wide is true, but I'm yet to find a sport in which salary capping hasn't had at least partial success in saving clubs from themselves and making the competition a better spectacle. The unpredictability of American sports is virtue of a cap system, the Australian NRL likewise and British sports have also benefited from such a system.

In the meantime, supporters will continue to complain about rising cost of Sky subscriptions and increased ticket prices to pay for the latest Portuguese superstar. The chances are though, they'll be complaining whilst stood outside the box office, renewal form in hand.

No change?

Banks and credit card companies have come up with yet another brilliant idea to part us from our hard-earned.




Realising that they aren't allowed to charge illegal late payment penalties (or at least, get away with it), they're now looking at other ways of getting us to use our cards more and thus, making up for the shortfall.

And here is their latest idea, Touch & Pay.

The idea is pretty simple. If you're one of these people that buys a newspaper, tin of baked beans or a packet of Polo's with a credit card, you won't have to go through the hardship of entering your PIN number or signing your name. Instead, you just wave your card over a "secure scanning device" - probably an RFID chip or something.

It's the latest idea in turning us into a 'cash-less' society where coins become obsolete and where computers can literally track you up and down the high street.
But it's not actually a new idea. Anyone who lived in Leeds in 1997 will probably remember some strange ATM machines popping up with 'Visa Cash' logos plastered all over them. The idea was pretty similar to this "new" system. You loaded money onto the card (think of a pay-as-you-go mobile phone) and then went and spent it on low value goods. It was supposed to be a hassle-free way to buy things without the need for lose change.

It was rubbish. The shops didn't accept it, people didn't get the cards and the trial was a massive waste of everyone's time. In the end, I seem to remember Visa giving away cards with Leeds University ID cards, just so that somebody would actually be able to participate in the trial. A similar thing happened with Mondex, which was an equally big failure.

Needless to say, I can't see how this 'fresh' and 'innovative' idea won't suffer the same fate. People will continue to spend their coins where they please, small retailers won't be best pleased with an idea that encourages needless card use and of course, those "odd tenners" soon add up when the bill turns up.

These people really must try harder.