How Not to Run a Football Club

Nathan Fogg

Description

On a sweltering day in May 2010, Blackpool achieved the impossible dream. The Seasiders booked their ticket to the Premier League in a thrilling play-off final win, with all the riches that came with it. Twenty-four hours later, while everybody else was celebrating, the Oystons were meeting to plan how they would take it. Ian Holloway and his side fought bravely for survival, becoming the nation's second team with their swashbuckling style. Behind the scenes, the club was falling apart. Buckets collected rain leaking through the training ground roof. The manager's office could have the heat or lights on, just not at the same time. The Oystons paid themselves nearly GBP30m. It took five years for Blackpool to suffer three relegations back to the basement of the Football League. When fans hit back, they were sued. Chairman Karl Oyston told a fan he was on a 'never ending revenge mission'. How Not to Run a Football Club is the inside story of how one family nearly ran a football club to its death. And how a community brought it back.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801500326
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Nathan Fogg, 2022
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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Print ISBN 9781801500036
eBook ISBN 9781801500326
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Best Trip
2. A Year in the Sun
3. The Fall
4. Protest Libel
5. Retribution
6. The Riga Revolution
7. War and Peace
8. Aftermath
Epilogue
Photos
For Hannah
Acknowledgements
I WOULD like to thank my girlfriend Hannah for supporting me throughout this whole process, and always being there despite being busy enough with your own work. I couldn t ask for a better partner to spend a lockdown during a global pandemic with. Next, I would like to thank my parents, Kathryn and Michael. Especially my dad for raising me as a Blackpool fan, forcing me to stick with them even when I wanted to support Burnley because all my friends did. Also, for reminding me every time we met up for a beer and would talk about the crazy twists and turns at Blackpool, You should have written that book you talked about Nath. I m glad I finally decided to. I d like to thank my brothers, Matthew and Niall, for their support. I d also like to thank Rachael Kay for providing some research, and Kevin Clarke for helping read through early drafts. I would also like to thank Rebeka Kay, who did nothing, but wouldn t let me get away with thanking the others but not her. I interviewed a lot of people for this book. I would like to thank anyone who took time to speak to me. There s too many to get through and some I can t mention by name due to anonymity. I need to especially thank Tim Fielding however, for providing an endless amount of help and spending many hours over several different interview sessions talking with me, and for reading through a draft version. Thank you to Jane at Pitch Publishing for believing in me and this story, and giving it a platform. Thank you to Alex Wade who provided the invaluable legal edit. Thank you to all my friends. Thanks to Adam France. Thanks to all the staff at the Fox pub in York, especially Mandy, Mica and Anna. Thank you to Brett Ormerod for being my first hero in football. Thank you to Charlie Adam for scoring that goal at Wembley. And thank you to every single Blackpool fan who sacrificed in the fight to get the club back. Everyone who boycotted and put aside the joy that watching football on a Saturday afternoon gave them, for a greater cause. Everyone who donated to the fans wrongfully sued. Everyone who turned up to protests and made their voices heard. You won.
Introduction
BLACKPOOL WERE in crisis. It was 1986. The club had long since slipped from the top of the English football pyramid and had been mired in the lower leagues ever since. The town was undergoing social and economic change. The prestige and shine of one of the UK s most booming holiday destinations was wearing away, year by year. The club followed the fortunes of its community. Fans were bitter. Some were angry. Others had grown apathetic. Their home, Bloomfield Road, was quite literally falling apart. Capacity had been slashed in half and then slashed some more due to safety concerns. It came close to being condemned several times.
The club had no money to renovate the ground. Instead, short-term fixes created a Frankenstein s monster of a stadium, with its rusty, corrugated steel exterior an eyesore on the town. The roof of the iconic Spion Kop needed urgent repairs. To save money, they had it removed and fans were left exposed to the harsh seaside elements. They chopped down the floodlights which careened in the high winds coming off the Irish Sea.
Blackpool had to take a loan from the council just to stay afloat. They had already gone cap in hand to the supporters several times over the last decade, selling shares at inflated prices to bring money in. The generosity of those loyal patrons kept the club alive, but the vultures were circling, ready to pick it apart. It was reported a retailer was interested in buying the Bloomfield Road land in order to demolish the stadium and build a supermarket. Rumours swirled over where Blackpool would find their new home, ranging from a new development down the road to a ground-share with fierce rivals Preston. The future was uncertain. The Premier League and all its glitz and glamour, which would breathe new life into English football, was still being planned in secret meetings behind closed doors. Football was in a bad place, and Blackpool came close to not seeing its bright future.
Then came an investor. A local businessman who wanted to save his childhood team from bankruptcy. Yet when Owen Oyston bought the club in 1988, relief and excitement were tempered by a great deal of suspicion. By now, Oyston was one of the most famous businessmen in Lancashire. He had the money needed to save the club from extinction, that much was clear. He told an inspirational story of growing up as the son of a miner and turning himself into a multi-millionaire. The finer points of his history are spotty. At one point it is reported he left for London to find work as an actor, living on a pint of milk every two days. He gave up and returned to Blackpool with just 7 pounds in cash and four gallons of petrol . The fact that the petrol was in the Jaguar he was driving is a detail left standing jarringly on its own. He went into business with his father, running an estate agency out of their home, eventually taking over ownership himself and developing it into the huge network it had become by the late 80s. Despite his success, there were some doubts about his credentials. Many of those new minor shareholders voted against his takeover.
Oyston was known as an eccentric character, parading himself in outlandish white suits on TV adverts for his estate agency. He professed his lifelong love for the club and described himself as a superfan, but few could recall ever seeing him at the ground - until he bought it. Then you couldn t miss him, when he arrived at games five minutes before kick-off in his flash sports car. His money was good, he just didn t need to use any of it to purchase the club. The price was 1.
Oyston took on the liabilities, which included the loan of nearly 200,000 from the council, but fans and local businesses had put more money in themselves, and they didn t boast to everyone in earshot that they saved the club. There were times when Owen portrayed it almost like charity, something he d done purely out of the goodness of his own heart. This downplayed the status and power the purchase gave him. Now, he could wine and dine people and give them free tickets for a day out at the game. He could cosy up to local council members and get them on his side for the endless projects he was always trying to get off the ground. His arrival sparked a tension between owner and fans that never went away. Owen probably had saved Blackpool FC, but in doing so he had gotten his hands on an asset of great community value. Even the liabilities he d taken on were more than offset by the value of the land he d acquired. The sale brought with it not just the stadium and team, but the training ground, a nightclub neighbouring the stadium, and some other land that could all easily be sold - and later was - for profits in redevelopment schemes. Still, nobody could deny Owen went on to put his money where his mouth was to try to turn around the club s fortunes.
In 1971 Blackpool were playing in the old First Division, where they had competed for most of the last half-century. Ten years later, after a stunning decline on the pitch, they suffered their third relegation in a decade to fall all the way down to the Fourth Division, the basement of the Football League. It had been a spectacular crash, culminating in the embarrassment of having to apply for re-election in 1983. They survived the process and were even able to climb the table and win promotion two years later, but these were still well and truly the dark days of Blackpool Football Club. This was the scene when Owen Oyston took over. After 17 years away from the top division, any idea that Blackpool were too big to stay down had surely dissipated long ago. Now their noses were just being rubbed in it. Many fans had given up hope almost altogether. So, when Oyston came in with bombastic rhetoric and grand schemes for change, some were simply too jaded to believe him.
It didn t help that his biggest plan was a super stadium that could house 50,000 fans, with a retractable pitch and roof, a built-in coliseum of shops, along with a bowling alley and a concert venue. It was announced with great bluster to a bemused audience. Blackpool fans didn t need a high-tech coliseum, only 3-4,000 were even attending games by 1990. In a football world shaken to its core by the recent tragedies of the Bradford City fire and Hillsborough, they just wanted a stadium that was safe for them. As the years went by, nothing ever came, and Bloomfield Road fell into more and more neglect. It became clear that the new stadium was just a pipe dream. Oyston lost whatever credibility he had.