There is a touchy-feely movie waiting to be made about how Portsmouth Football Club's employees fought hopelessness and overwhelming odds this season.
Ian ('Gandalf' and 'Magneto') McKellen might be perfect for the role of Tug Wilson. He is the training ground manager given the cost-cutting boot by the debt-ridden Premier League club but then, touchingly, rehired thanks to the generosity of players who reached into their own, admittedly deep, pockets to cover his small wage.
Maybe notoriously picky actor Daniel Day-Lewis could be tempted to play Portsmouth manager Avram Grant. The Israeli deserves an Oscar himself for the way he has kept his and his players' chins up even as the club drowned in red ink so deep that it couldn't pay them on time or, for that matter, the British taxman.
With his gallows humor and irrepressible optimism learned from his father who survived the Holocaust, Grant somehow dragged his patched-up team all the way to the FA Cup final.
For that, Grant deserves credit he never got at his former club, Chelsea. The London side has wealth Portsmouth can only dream of. It is heavily favored to win their final. Even for a competition with such a long, proud history of upset results by teams that played out of their skins to humble stronger opponents, Portsmouth's progress to the showpiece match next month, including its unlikely 2-0 semifinal victory last Sunday over Tottenham, has been comic-book stuff.
But the trouble with this script is that Portsmouth's riches-to-rags story is really a tragedy for modern football, not a feel-good Hollywood tale that deserves a happy end.
Even if Grant's players again defy the odds and beat the defending champions on May 15, that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Portsmouth's precipitous decline and the horrendous financial mismanagement that got it there is an embarrassment for the Premier League.
The league portrays itself as the most watched and lucrative in the world - the Formula One of football - but yet is allowing its members to amass massive and unsustainable debts. The notion that clubs should live within their means has been replaced by "play today, pay tomorrow ... if we can" rapaciousness.
Portsmouth is only unique in that it is the first club in the Premier League's 18-year history to get bankruptcy protection from creditors. Only a fool would guarantee that it will be the last.
While the league isn't directly responsible for the poor judgment and greed of owners, Portsmouth's woeful example shows that European football boss Michel Platini is absolutely correct to be pushing for a bigger dose of financial reason.
Portsmouth FC, part of life in the southern English naval port for 112 years, was loaded with debt by a succession of owners.
Fans are still waiting for the "new dawn" that then-chief executive Peter Storrie promised in 2007. That was after Alexandre Gaydamak, the son of a Russian-born billionaire with a checkered past, bought the club from Milan Mandaric, a Croatia-born American who, along with former Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp, is now contesting charges of tax evasion.
The "spectacular" new 36,000-seat arena that Storrie talked about, designed by the same architectural firm that gave Beijing its iconic Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, was never built.
Instead, Portsmouth built an expensive squad of players that won the FA Cup in 2008 but which, ultimately, a club of its modest means could ill afford. It spent 55 million pounds, or 78 percent of its turnover, in salaries that season.
Gaydamak quickly tired of his plaything, saying when he put Portsmouth up for sale in 2008 that he could no longer devote the time that ownership required. Fans give their hearts to clubs for the long-term. Owners, too often, do not.
Self-styled property tycoon Sulaiman al-Fahim, known as the 'Arab Donald Trump' because he hosts an "Apprentice"-style reality TV show, came next. He lasted less than six weeks.
As Redknapp noted to the Daily Mail, "When he was buying hamburgers off the stall outside they thought maybe he wasn't as rich as they first thought."
Nor, clearly, was Ali Al-Faraj. The "future is safe and will bring financial stability," the club announced when the Saudi Arabian property magnate took over last October. That promise turned out to be hollow, too.
Portsmouth's fourth owner this season, and an unwilling one at that, is Balram Chainrai, a Hong Kong businessman who loaned money to the club and, when he didn't get it back, took over in February.
Financial administrators brought in to prevent the club from going broke entirely are now looking for a new owner and have been cutting costs, including 85 staff, although groundsman Wilson got a reprieve.
As a punishment for the financial mess, the Premier League docked Portsmouth nine points. That was the equivalent of tearing the wings off a fly - just enough to cripple but not to kill it. Combined with Portsmouth's season of poor results on the pitch, the penalty helped to send the team packing from the Premier League for next season, where it will play in the next division down.
But it likely won't be enough to deter owners of other Premier League clubs from making the same mistakes in future.
John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.
