Statutory demands are curious documents which have caused some degree of controversy in recent months in the world of debt recovery. They are served under the Insolvency Act of 1986 and are the first step in the process of petitioning somebody's bankruptcy or issuing a winding up order against a company.

Weymouth Football Club, one of the ongoing financial basket-cases of the last three years in non-league football, might have finally reached the end of the line. Reports on the BBC this morning confirmed that, with talks with new buyers having collapsed, the club's administrators are planning to wind the club up this morning.

Q. Where do you see Chester City FC and Steve Vaughan in 5 years time?

A. Chester City in the Championship or even the top flight. As for myself, still chairman unless of course you know something I don't! Are you the VAT man, or the Taxman or maybe even the police?

In October 2004, Stephen Vaughan was interviewed by the independent Chester City website "Blues Mad" and volunteered that answer to a question from a supporter of the club.

It seems as if there's been an exponential increase in clubs heading for the courts over unpaid tax or VAT bills this season. The answer to the question, "Accrington Stanleee, ‘oo are dey?" was "the League Two club that owe £308,000 to HMRC" until they found salvation the other week. And it feels like every other lower league Scottish club has been up before the tax beak in recent weeks.

When the story first broke that Newcastle United's Mike Ashley had decided to sell the naming rights to St James Park, it seemed unlikely that he was doing it with the best interests of the supporters of the club at heart. However, the confirmation made this week that for the rest of this season St James Park will be known as "sportsdirect.

It's not what you own, it's what you're owed this is how the balance of power currently lies at the Rangers Football Club. Lloyds Banking Group is owed far more than they own, and they are prepared to take drastic measures to get what they are owed up to and including administration, if reports of Rangers' mid-October board meeting are to be relied upon.

On Wednesday this week Stirling Albion face a winding-up order from HMRC, their second recently following a similar one back in May. A deal was agreed by Chairman Peter McKenzie back then, but according to the latest petition, the amount seems to have gone up slightly in the interim, to £48,000.

Football fans have become better educated in the mysteries of football finances over recent years out of necessity as much as anything else, but just occasionally old naiveties come to the fore. It might just be that they can't believe that things could be as bad off the pitch as on it at the moment, but Hull City fans are less concerned than they should be about the lack of financial information coming out of their club in recent times, and now that the information has come out and has proved as grim as one may have feared, they still don't sem to believe that things can be as bad off the pitch as on it; despite the phrase "significant doubt over their ability to continue as a going concern" appearing not once, but three times in a relatively short annual report and statement of accounts for the Tigers' promotion year.

There comes a point at which inept management crosses an invisible rubicon and passes into something even more depressing and worrying. There can be little arguing with the case for the prosecution. Ashley's time in charge of the club has been an unmitigated disaster. He oversaw relegation from the Premier League when the club had the fifth highest wage budget, has managed to almost the entire support of the club and managed to fail to sell the club when it had a buyer which seemed keen to tie up a deal to secure the purchase of it from him.

To the surprise of absolutlely nobody that knows anything as much as an iota about the way in which they run themselves, the Football Conference bowed down at the altar of Stephen Vaughan for (depending on which way you look at it) either the second, third or fourth time yesterday. They decided, having issued a stern warning to the club at the end of last week, to adjourn the issue of whether this hollowed out, withered shell of a club can actually, realistically, viably continue to trade for anything like the long term future yesterday for another three weeks.

Chester Fans United, a coming together of the different fans' groups at the stricken Blue Square Premier club, meet tomorrow night to formally agree their formation. They have a few thousand pounds in the bank, which is enough to get them up and running, but it certainly isn't enough to save their club and the general consensus now is that they already know it.

It was something of a disappointment that there wasn't a big empty space in this morning's edition of the Guardian's sports section. It would have been the most fitting response to Ken Bates' decision to ban the newspaper from Elland Road as a result of reports written by David Conn about the increasingly murky issue of the ownership of Leeds United.

You'd have thought that even the publicity junkie that is Sulaiman Al-Fahim would keep as low a profile as possible, after his dismal, embarrassing failures at Portsmouth, but no. Having done a round of self-justificatory chats with the UK press, who didn't balk at pointing out the flaws in every argument he put forward, he returned to the happier, compliant hunting ground of the Arabic press for his latest lecture to the masses.

In his 2006 book "Floodlit Dreams", writer Ian Ridley brilliantly summed up the small town politics that drive the running of so many football clubs. He had taken the chairmanship at Weymouth Football Club with big ambitions, but a combination of under-achievement on the pitch, vultures circling overhead and internal squabbling saw him eventually removed by a coup d'etat.

The News of the World will surely soon reveal Qadbak, Sardar Hyat, Ali Al-Faraj and all the other names involved in the welter of recent takeover tales, as part of an elaborate sting to expose the inadequacies of football's "Fit and Proper Persons" tests. Sulaiman Al-Fahim, alas, you couldn't make up).

As regular readers of this site will be aware, Manchester City supporters turning up at Eastlands last week for their Monday night Premier League match against West Ham United might have been somewhat surprised to see a clutch of people outside their ground with collection tins. These collectors weren't, to the probable disappointment of the home crowd, Manchester United supporters having a whip-round after the collapse of the Glazer empire, rather they were supporters of Blue Square North club Hyde United, who were desperately collecting money to stave off a winding up order brought against them by HMRC.

The situation at Chester City, as we have noted on here before, appears to be going from bad to worse. A report in The Non-League Paper yesterday reported that the club may have just weeks to live and, as we saw from the accounts posted on the club's website just last week, this may be no great overstatement.

Premier League clubs, it should be remembered, enjoy every single advantage that the football world can throw at them. They have massive television contracts which give them an annual amount of money that would keep most lower league clubs going for years. They have the opportunity of European football.

When Chester City's Stephen Vaughan won permission to start this season in the Blue Square Premier, there were several gasps of disbelief. While the issues relating to the financing of football clubs are seldom a black and white issue, there seemed to be little question that, in having an application to enter into a CVA successfully opposed by HMRC during the summer, they should not by any rational logic (and certainly not under the rules of the league in which they play) have been allowed to start the season.

English football's "fit and proper persons" test, I would submit, has failed, and here are just four reasons why:

1) Tom Hicks and George Gillett still co-own Liverpool.
2) Sulaiman Al-Fahim owns Portsmouth.
3) The Gods alone know who owns Notts County, even now "they" have "told" us
4) It isn't really a "test" at all.

...you may find that there are a number of people outside the stadium with collection buckets. They will be collecting for Blue Square North side Hyde United, who are still fighting a winding up petition brought against them by HMRC. Manchester City are, of course, one of the richest football clubs in the world at the moment, but Hyde United are battling to save their existence over a debt of £122,000 an amount of money which is but a mere fraction of City's weekly wage budget.

HMRC finally managed to swing the axe successfully against a football club today, and Hyde United were the victims. It's ironic, really. Hyde, as have so many small clubs for as long as any of us can remember, have been occasionally poorly run over the last few years, but they were by no means the worst offenders in the game.

For some, it was the romantic football story of the summer, whilst for others it was a story that didn't quite make sense. The take-over of Notts County and the subsequent arrival of Sven-Goran Eriksson and Sol Campbell changed the future of Notts County, but is everything at Meadow Lane sweetness and light?

A football club died at 4.30 yesterday afternoon. Farsley Celtic, formerly of the Blue Square Premier and more recently of the Blue Square North, had the plug pulled on them by their administrators, Mazars, after a consortium bid to take the stricken Yorkshire club over fell through and no new investors could be found.

The tangled paths that various football clubs weave across each other don't come much stranger than the ongoing saga of Accrington Stanley and Oxford United. When Accrington resigned their place in the Football League in controversial circumstances in 1962, Oxford were elected in their place. When Oxford surprisingly fell through the trap door and into the Blue Square Premier in 2006, Accrington were promoted in their place.

It could be argued that the greatest condemnation of the Football League's "Fit and Proper Person" test was that Ken Bates could pass it. This, however, may no longer be the case - not because of anything Bates himself has done, but because of the serial mismanagement of AFC Bournemouth's affairs last season – which has emerged from the Football League's explanation for maintaining the strictest possible transfer embargo on the South Coast club.

Geoff Sheard is sniffing around at Newcastle United, and Mark Murphy is less than convinced that he is the right man to lead Newcastle United to a bright, new dawn.

The list of potential bidders since Mike Ashley first considered selling Newcastle (about two weeks after buying it, some reports would have had you believe) could fill its own page Yellow Pages.

It has been a difficult start to the new season for Durham City AFC. Newly promoted into the Unibond League Premier Division - their second successive promotion - they may have been expecting the start of a brave new world and a push for Conference football, but the dream has started to unwind after just a couple of weeks and the club may be heading back to the Northern League, from whence they came.

The new League Two season has started with everybody financially stable - more or less - but Lincoln City supporter Keith Duncan doesn't feel that the authorities are going far enough.

In 2002 Lincoln City FC nearly closed down. In fact, the club was 24 hours from having its application to enter administration in court considered when two of the then Board got together to try to secure enough funding to make that a reasonable possibility.

Livingston's financial collapse has started to turn into a bit of a soap opera with, as Gavin Saxton reports, the Scottish Football League having taken severe action against the stricken club.

Rob Freeman has already given some of the background to the ongoing saga at Livingston, but since then the situation has developed apace, leading to three clubs being moved between divisions three days before the start of the season, Livingston not playing any games pending their appeal(s), other clubs playing "provisional" fixtures, and the Scottish Football League left pondering a change to their rules to enable clubs to bypass unscrupulous owners.

So, Steven Vaughan wins and the game of football dies a little more inside. The FA have decided to back the Football Conference and have given Vaughan's Chester the right to start the new season, in flagrant contravention of rule 2.7 of the Conference's own constitution and awarded the club a licence to play football for this season.

Never let it be said that the FA and Football Conference never help out member clubs. If a story in this morning's Liverpool Daily Post is to be believed, the beleagured Blue Square Premier club Chester City seem set to start this season, albeit with a twenty-five point deduction. Such a punative deduction will almost certainly mean that the 2009/10 season is another season of struggle for Chester, and likely relegation to the Blue Square North.

It's all in the timing. The BBC couldn't have chosen a better time to run a special report on the state of finances in English football. The eve of the new English season is a time of optimism at most clubs, but in an interview with Radio5's Dan Road, the UEFA general secretary David Taylor expressed concerns about many aspects of the way that Premier League clubs in particular are running themselves, singling out the saddling of clubs with debt and the transfer activity of some (hello, Manchester City) as having a destabilising effect on the health of the transfer market.

It has been a very sad day for football on the eve of the new season. We have lost one of us. It is, perhaps, a reflection of the the hole in the heart of English football that we should mourn a football man whose greatest single attribute was nothing more or less than a sense of common decency.

Upon first sight, it may seem surprising that a victory for the tax man should be greeted with the faintly audible sound of cheering in the distance but such was the mess that is Chester City Football Club that it feels increasingly as if their demise is the only way that the game will rid itself of their owner, Stephen Vaughan.