Gartside Dismisses Debt Worries & Backs Dougie

In an interview with BBC Radio Manchester, Bolton Wanderers chairman Phil Gartside has played down concerns regarding of the £163.8m debt recently announced by the club.

News emerged that over £150m of the figure published in December is owed to club benefactor Eddie Davies.

Gartside said:

"We owe the bank £8m and there will be many a club who will be envious of having an £8m overdraft.

Technically it is a debt, but it's not in the sense of a bank debt. It doesn't cause me any sleepless nights.

It is an amount of money that a benefactor has lent to us. It's not bank debt.

If some other foreign owner does that sort of thing, it would never get a mention. Because it's Eddie Davies and because it's Bolton Wanderers, it gets called debt."

Wanderers posted a loss of more than £50m for the financial year ending June 2013, taking into account Bolton's first season back in the second tier after 11 years in the Premier League, while turnover dropped by £30m.

The chairman reiterated that Eddie Davies has no plans to end his involvement with Bolton.

He also publicly backed manager Dougie Freedman following on from a difficult first half of the 2013/14 season.

"Dougie's had a tough job since he came here.

Financial Fair Play rules have made it more difficult to be able to give him funds to go and buy players. He's comfortable with that."

He's changed our training, the structure of the training ground and he's very keen to look at youth. He's somebody who, in the past, has developed young players.

From my point of view, I enjoy working with him and he's doing a good job. He's a young British manager and we haven't got enough of those. In football, we've got to be responsible for developing those sorts of things."