RUMOUR was rife in the City this week that Bolton Wanderers were about to join the growing trend of football clubs to float on the stock market.

The Burnden directors immediately issued a firm denial with chief executive Des McBain stressing: "At this moment in time they have no intention of floating."

It's understandable, though, that the suits in the Square Mile should eye Wanderers as potential new business for the money markets.

Colin Todd's team is on course for promotion and the double delight of starting life in their spanking new super stadium as one of the Premiership elite has seen their stock soar.

With the Sky TV millions, the advent of digital television, pay-per-view and the rest of the commercial spin-offs, Wanderers hold the key to a footballing fortune.

It's a far cry from the dark days of the early Eighties when they were, it was said, only weeks away from financial ruin. Bottom of Division Two, they were losing £10,000 a week and, when their overdraft crashed through the £500,000 limit, their bankers Williams and Glyn's turned off the credit tap.

The reality dawned on Sunday morning, December 5, 1982 when players, staff and the successful Development Association agents were told that the club's directors had been paying wages and covering running costs out of their own pockets.

Chairman Terry Edge launched the Burnden Lifeline Society - a scheme Wanderers would subsequently sell to a host of football and rugby clubs - and thus began the long haul to financial survival and, ultimately, security. Supporters have had to endure years of austerity and the bitter blows of relegation to Division Three and, for the first and only season in the club's proud history, Division Four.

But the fans may well agree now that it has been worth the pain to see the gains that have been made in recent times.

In the intervening 14 years since the launch of Lifeline (still a substantial source of the commercial department's profits), Wanderers have re-established themselves as a force in football by good housekeeping methods run on traditional, footballing lines.

They have paid their way and never over-stretched themselves financially. As Stoke chairman Peter Coates said in a recent interview: "They are run on a sound business footing, which is an example to any other club.

"It's taken them a long time and they were in the doldrums for many years but because they have stuck to their policies and been patient, it has come right for them."

Four members of that particular Burnden board - George Warburton, Gordon Hargeaves, Graham Ball and Gordon Seymour - are still directors.

As they and their fellow board members hear the club's financial consultants discuss figures for ground building, transfers and wages that would have been unthinkable in December 1982, there must be the temptation to go to the money markets for even more.

Flotation might offer the prospect of an additional cash injection that would go a long way to helping the club to not merely hold its own but to compete with the fat cats of the Premiership.

But it might also run the risk of surrendering control of the club to individuals or groups who couldn't match their track record of loyalty and success.

Yet there is more than one way of skinning the financial cat and it would be out of character for the Burnden directors not to have explored the various avenues of funding which have been taken by the likes of Newcastle, Sunderland, Aston Villa, Birmingham and Sheffield United.

But they will also have taken note of Millwall's experience. Stock market flotation and the move to a new stadium was seen as the dawn of a bright new era. Now they are in the hands of the administrator.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.