MIDDLESBROUGH chairman Steve Gibson made a shocking revelation at the weekend, claiming that his beloved club faced economic meltdown had he not taken drastic measures to restructure its finances.

Many Middlesbrough supporters believed the club should have retained the squad which was relegated from the Premier League last season and gambled on winning promotion at the first attempt, instead of settling for a season of transition.

But Gibson, speaking after being named as Teesside’s patron of the North-East cancer charity, the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, insisted there was never any temptation to do so as the risk was too big.

“We weren’t tempted to go for promotion at any cost because the threat of not getting promotion, and the fear and economic consequences of that, would have been quite horrendous,”

admitted Gibson.

“Even if we had bounced straight back we still had a £50m deficit. We were down £7m to £8m last year on where we expected to finish in the league and we had a revenue hit of TV money, falling gates and falling sponsorship, which equated to a further £40m.

“The first thing to do is fill that hole and balance the books to secure the longterm future of the club. The only way we could do that was by selling the better players in the squad.”

Simon Jordan’s Crystal Palace may be the only Football League club to have gone into administration in the current campaign, but clubs such as Portsmouth, West Ham, Cardiff, Southend and Notts County are teetering on the brink, with more likely to join them.

This is why the 51-year-old Boro owner issued a warning to his Premier League and Football League counterparts to stop chasing an impossible dream, put their houses in order and live within their means, or suffer the consequences.

“A lot of financial pressure on clubs is self-inflicted,”

said Gibson. “We all have free will and we all make decisions, and it is a consequence of those decisions which affects other clubs.

“I think the finances of football are an economic madhouse. I can only run my football club the way I think I can do it. If you go chasing the dream it has to be something that is achievable and realistic. I think one or two clubs have got carried away.”

Middlesbrough have been as guilty as most of getting carried away. In the past the club has splashed out outrageous sums on transfer fees and wages. But Boro, like many other clubs, are now counting the cost of such unnecessary extravagance.

“Every single season, although we didn’t think we were going to get relegated, we had to plan for relegation,” added Gibson.

“And when you are relegated the first thing you have to do is plan to secure your financial stability and the long-term future of the club, and that is what we’ve done here.

“Things had to change. We got to a European cup final and lost £12m in that year.

We studied it and thought ‘this football club cannot continue like this’.

“And when we looked at what was happening at other clubs, the amount of debt that was being carried forward on an annual basis was the same as ours.

“Agents’ fees, players’ wages and transfer fees were all inflating at an incredible rate and the consequence will be a day of accountability.

“We had very low gates during the (UEFA Cup final) run. We reduced prices and we were only getting 13,000 to 14,000 people in. The cost of running the stadium was greater than the money we were getting through the gate. There was no interest from TV companies in the early rounds and you have the added expense of the travel.

“But where it really affected us was it added a burden to the players. We’d finished seventh in the Premiership the previous season, and I think we dropped seven places.

“The way the merit payments were paid, the seven places we dropped cost us a lot of money.

“We also had a perverse situation that as we progressed the bonus payments we were paying to the management, staff and players was far greater than the income we were receiving.

“So it gave the club a lot of status being there (in the UEFA Cup final) but the cost of that status was horrendous.”

With no real regulatory body to keep an eye on financial extravagance, clubs have been allowed to spend well beyond their means.

But Gibson does not believe it is the responsibility of a football watchdog to hold a club to account.

He is adamant it is a club’s moral obligation to look after itself.

“Football has to say no,”

insisted the Boro chief. “If you go to any car park in any football club and look at the wealth in that car park, it is not real wealth, it is fabricated wealth.

“It has come from the ability of good professionals in the Premiership to negotiate a very good TV deal. It has perhaps made the Premier League the best and most exciting in the world. But to stay in it, clubs have to pay excessive wages and excessive agents’ fees – there does not seem to be any balance.

“I think we have to be selfregulating.

I think every club has to run itself within its means.

“There is always risk in any business and I’m not saying football is free of that, it can’t and won’t be.

But that risk could be less than it currently is.”