It is not straightforward sometimes understanding how Bolton Wanderers have strayed dangerously close to being financially shipwrecked when it does not seem too long ago that Sam Allardyce was dancing on the pitch with Jay-Jay Okocha and they were establishing themselves as the poster-boy team for every club of that size that wanted a place at the top table.

Yet there were a few clues offered up in a case at the high court recently about the kind of financial thinking that has helped to put them into this position and the only plausible reason why it has not generated more publicity is they are no longer involved in the glare of the Premier League.

The case was brought by an agent named Tony McGill, suing for £300,000 because he claimed he had set up a deal for Gavin McCann to sign from Aston Villa only to be cut out of the arrangement when Bolton brought in the sports agency SEM “at the last minute”. McGill lost his case, having not had a binding contract with McCann, but the judge did describe him as “basically credible” whereas it was a different choice of words to describe the Bolton chairman, Phil Gartside.

In court it emerged the agreement with SEM was dishonestly backdated to strengthen the agency’s position and, according to McGill’s lawyers, “forestall” any inquiry from the Football Association. Gartside originally claimed to have signed the document on 1 June but then admitted it was actually a week later. Judge Waksman describes the backdating as “amateurish”. He was not convinced Gartside was party to it but did note he was “becoming visibly uncomfortable when asked questions about this; I consider that he only accepted that he signed on 8 June when the other evidence rendered such a concession inevitable”. Gartside’s overall evidence, the judge concluded, contained “significant elements which were unsatisfactory”. As for SEM, the judge described evidence put forward by its chief executive, Jerome Anderson – and the supporters of Blackburn Rovers will remember this guy – as “very unreliable” and in one part “clearly implausible”. His colleague Jeff Weston was “unconvincing” and some of what he said had been “absurd”.

All that reflects badly on Gartside but it is the sums of money that really jump out and the fact that Bolton were willing to pay £300,000 in agent fees from what would ordinarily have been a routine £1m deal. Agents do not usually charge 30% unless they are dealing with exceedingly obliging clubs. And what did SEM do for that windfall? The judge makes it clear: “The result is that, in truth, SEM did little or nothing for their fee.” Little or nothing, and an invoice for £300,000, plus VAT. Nice work if you can get it.

Bolton, to recap, announced debts of £168.3m in their last financial figures, published in December. They are on their knees, without a manager and bottom of the Championship, and when the Bolton News interviewed Gartside a few days ago and asked him to explain the figures his answer was a wonderful piece of head-in-sand deflection. “I’m sick of answering that question,” he said. “If someone has been willing to invest that sort of money in this football team, why does anyone complain about it?”

That someone is the club’s owner, Eddie Davies, the Bolton-raised businessman who started watching his local team in 1958, the year Nat Lofthouse’s goals won the FA Cup, made his fortune through kettle parts and, at the age of 68, is the sole reason, from his home in the Isle of Man and via a company listed in Bermuda, why they are not rattling collection buckets outside the stadium.

Unfortunately for Gartside, the questions are perfectly legitimate given Bolton did, lest it be forgotten, spend 11 years in the most lucrative league in the world. Yes, their relegation in 2012 was a grievous setback and any club that struggles to get back under the parachute payments will inevitably suffer for it. Yet it is still staggering to see the speed at which Bolton have unravelled. There is more to it than just being a victim of circumstance and Gartside has to take a significant portion of the blame when the decision-making on his watch has been so profoundly poor.

It is certainly starting to seem like a trick of the mind that Gartside was once regarded as one of the sport’s more impressive administrators, thought of so highly he was given a place on the Wembley board and put in charge of the FA’s selection process when David Bernstein was made chairman. Then again, people used to rave about Peter Ridsdale at Leeds United. They do not have any fancy goldfish I am aware of in the ground we are now obliged to call the Macron but they do have a habit of being careless with their money and they have also been terribly short-sighted in their planning.

Johan Elmander may be taken as one example. He did not do a great deal for Bolton – he once went 11 months without a league goal – but the Swedish striker was the club’s record signing when he arrived from Toulouse in 2008. They gave him a three-year contract and, first of all, what a strange piece of business that was when a player’s valuation starts to depreciate as soon as he is down to two years. Elmander was extremely poor for two seasons then had a better third year and left for Galatasaray on a free transfer. He had cost Bolton £8.2m and he was on £45,000-a-week wages. So, in total, one player alone cost Bolton in excess of £15m.

Perhaps Gartside could explain why he considered a 31-year-old midfielder worthy of a three-year contract and £25,000-a-week wages as he did in 2012 for Keith Andrews, a moderate player who has been loaned out for the past two seasons. Yet there are plenty of other examples. The list is substantial and this, more than anything, is where Bolton have lost their money: poor signings, exorbitant wages, muddled thinking.

Gartside once described as “numpties” the Bolton supporters who dared criticise him. The volume has been turned up lately – a poll in the local newspaper shows 94% want him to resign – and the crowd are probably entitled to be jumpy when, a few miles up the road, there is another club that Bolton once looked down on but who could probably now teach them a thing or two. Wigan Athletic’s debt is a manageable £20.7m and their last financial figures showed an £822,000 profit. True, this is only their second season in the Championship, compared with Bolton’s third, and the next set of results might be revealing. Yet there is no hint of implosion; just the sense they are run with clarity and common sense.

At Bolton it is a history of strange and often unexplained goings-on if one thinks back to the infamous Panorama documentary about Allardyce and, later on, the considerable influence of Mark Curtis, one of the industry’s more controversial agents. Bolton never did get round to replying to the list of 20 questions my colleague David Conn put to them in 2007 about their financial dealings (although all of those named in the Panorama programme denied the allegations).

“I’m sick of answering that question,” Gartside said about the mountain of debt, and no doubt he is. In football the people in powerful positions never do like to go into detail when, ultimately, it might highlight their failures.

Ferguson did not have a care over Keane

That was some moment sitting opposite Roy Keane in a fourth-floor suite at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin as one of the great character assassinations mercilessly rolled on and it became apparent however much we thought he resented Sir Alex Ferguson we had underestimated it.

Keane may have left himself open to accusations of rampant bitterness but the essence of what he said was largely true and not only when it came to his former manager at Manchester United. José Mourinho’s habit of offering a handshake to rival managers and leaving victories a few minutes early has been inviting the kind of withering response Keane expertly delivered and Tony Pulis was guilty of a serious form of crawling when he withdrew his loan players from Preston North End after the sacking of Ferguson’s son, Darren. At least Ferguson Sr had the defence of family interests when he did likewise. Pulis was looking for brownie points and it fell neatly into Keane’s conviction that his former manager used to have a clique of yes-men pandering to him.

It is Ferguson, plainly, who has wound him up into this retaliatory position and I doubt Keane’s mood will improve if I can offer a journalist’s account about what happened on the day that changed everything between the two men – 18 November, 2005 – and the little scene played out in a downstairs room at United’s training ground.

Ferguson always held his media briefings on a Friday lunchtime and when we turned up for this one, maybe an hour or so after Keane’s sacking, there was no hint whatsoever something monumental had just changed. On the contrary, those of us who were there were struck by Ferguson’s levity. It was his first media gathering for two weeks because of an international break. “And thank Christ for that,” he joked. “I needed a break from you. Did you know Bayern Munich have a press conference every bloody day? Can you imagine that?”

Someone asked about Keane’s fitness and the possibility of a new deal and Ferguson said there was nothing to report on the contract but he was “not far away” from returning to the team. He was jovial, bantering, talking about Scotland winning “the unofficial World Cup” and he rocked in his chair when he was asked about England’s chance of hosting the 2018 World Cup. “Dearie me, I’ll be 76 by then – if I’m still alive.” It was a pleasant little session. He shooed us out at 12.25pm. We went to a cafe on the country lane where not long before Keane had sat crying in his car, and it was 1pm when the statement went out. It was shocking; mostly because Ferguson – and the old so-and-so really is utterly ruthless – did not appear to have a care in the world.

Keane’s grievances have clearly festered but he needs to be careful not to allow the occasional glimpse of paranoia to slip in as well. The long-held view here is Ferguson was a brilliant manager but not a brilliant man but, in the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out he did not “put out little snippets” about Keane or use “friends in the media” to spread “lies, basic lies,” as alleged. Ferguson did not have that relationship with the media in his last decade at Old Trafford and there is a much more straightforward explanation why it came out that Keane’s infamous MUTV interview had been spiked.

We journalists had been waiting for it, close to deadline, when suddenly it disappeared from the schedules. It did not take a genius to work out something had happened and, after that, there was anything but a policy of deliberate high-level leaks. United simply did not act that way back then.