I have been a City fan for a decade now, time really does fly, and have seen some of the greatest moments in the clubs history of recent years, Our top 3 finish and our fantastic run in Europe the following season the highlight of course.

But now it has all gone horribly pear shaped. With Robert Chase leaving us with a hefty £7 million debt to contend with, as is the crisis with many smaller clubs, money is always the issue, and as the bridge between the premiership and the 1st division gets wider every year, so do our chances of actually making it in the big time.

All we have ever done is sold players, once we held the British club record, for the sale of Chris Sutton to Blackburn for £5 million, although that only lasted about a month before Man U bought Andy Cole for £7 million plus the £1 million (under)rated Keith Gillespie going on to Newcastle as part of the deal.

The thing is we have sold so much and bought so little that surely we must be out of debt by now, with sales of Sutton 5, Fox 2.25, Eadie 3, Johnson 2.2, Ward 2, Ekoku 1, Newsome 1, Bellamy 6.5 million, O'Neill 0.7, Akinbiyi 0.25, Mills 0.25,to name but a few who have left, totalling over £24 million in transfer fees alone, and we haven’t even spent half of that on signing new players. Where has all the money gone?

Admittedly we do have a good youth academy, but a poor youth policy, whereby anyone who is any good from our youth team will get to play about 1 season in the first team before being sold for pennies e.g. Danny Mills who is now an England international and bought for £5 million by Leeds from Charlton. Jamie Cureton, top scorer for Bristol Rovers and Reading, scoring goals like there's no tomorrow. Akinbiyi, scored goals for fun when he left Norwich and went on to command yet another £5 million transfer fee, although goals are hard to come by in the Premiership he has scored his fair share in the other divisions. Another talent that di
dn’t even get to play in the first team before being thrown on the scrap heap for "being to small to be a professional footballer" Bobby Zamora of Brighton, who every team in the country would love to have!

We need to sort out our transfer policy and get in either good quality youngsters and hold onto them or get in long term loan players, but stop wasting money on sub standard players, like Clint Easton for example, £500,000 for that you could have bought Jamie Cureton and Danny Mills off Norwich for that money!

The moral to all of this is, surely we have overcome our debts or at least recouped enough of it to no longer be a selling club. Look after our investments, or we will never go anywhere.