How Blackpool’s fairytale run to top flight turned into a toxic nightmare
WALK around Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road before any home game and you will find a vigil to a contaminated club.
A collection of supporters gather near the Main Reception, their banner unfurled while they offer leaflets to the uninitiated explaining the toxic consequences of what should have been a £100million lottery win in 2010, when Blackpool won promotion to the Premier League through the play-offs.
Steve Rowland, chairman of the Blackpool Supporters Trust, is one of those performing the same match-day ritual, standing outside the stadium until kick-off. There is one step he will not make now: he will not go through the turnstile.
“The ethical boycott commenced in 2015,” he explains. “Thousands of fans will never go back to our football club until the Oystons go. We want all supporters across the country to support our campaign. We’d rather Blackpool played in front of no supporters.”
Grotesque
To these fans, Blackpool are a grotesque monument to failed governance in English football; the Premier League, English Football League and Football Association failing to prevent a convicted rapist circumnavigating the Owners’ and Directors’ Test (ODT).
Blackpool chairman Owen Oyston’s imprisonment in 1996 for raping a 16-year-old girl – he was released in 1999, after serving half his six-year sentence – prohibited ongoing association with the club following promotion to the top flight but he did not comply.
The Premier League was first informed that Owen would transfer his shares to his son, the club’s former chairman Karl. Blackpool were relegated in 2011, weeks after the league insisted that the transfer took place. Last year the High Court ruled the owner “illegitimately stripped” Blackpool of £26.77m after reaching the top flight.
“When the (Premier League) millions poured into Blackpool, they were not used to improve the team or the club infrastructure. Promises
to complete the stadium and build a fit-for-purpose training facility were broken. We dropped from The Championship to bottom division in four years.”
The bleak sight of empty stands is testimony to the impact of their campaign to oust the 84-year-old Oyston. There were 15,529 fans inside Bloomfield Road for their first Premier League game; against Scunthorpe last week there were 2,769. Fans still travel in reasonable numbers to away games as those funds do not end up in the club’s coffers, but, despite being entitled to 9,000 tickets for tonight’s League Cup tie at Arsenal, only 1,240 will make the trip as 45pc of gate receipts will go to Blackpool.
For BST members, the most important London fixtures are in the High Court, where former shareholder Valeri Belokon – who also fails the ODT for a conviction for tax evasion and money laundering in Kyrgyzstan, which he has said he will challenge – is pursuing the rest of the £31million Oyston was ordered to pay him in November, 2017.
The BST will retain a presence at Bloomfield Road until they “have their club back”, but it has often created a poisonous atmosphere, inflamed when the Oystons taunted and sued protesting fans. “That was the tipping point for me,” says BST member Pauline O’Rourke, whose husband Billy was a Blackpool goalkeeper in the 1980s. “Oyston knew me personally but wrote to me threatening legal action. I ran Blackpool’s junior supporters club on a voluntary basis for ten years, but it felt like a personal vendetta against supporters who criticised him. He eventually dropped the case against me, but never apologised.
“Some people sued were put under horrendous stress and needed treatment for mental health issues.”
The anger is not limited to the Oystons. The Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore directly responded to BST criticism that his organisation failed to take robust action in 2010.
Disciplinary
In a letter to the BST last May, Scudamore wrote: “Unfortunately, we ran out of time and at the stage at which we would have taken disciplinary action, the club was relegated to the Championship.”
The EFL have since changed rules but say they cannot apply them retrospectively. “The Premier League are basically saying, ‘Sorry, we should have done more at the time but it is not our responsibility anymore’, and the EFL say they can’t do anything,” says Tanya Harvey, a supporter for 25 years who backs the boycotting fans.
“How can a man who has been in prison for rape be considered ‘fit and proper’ to own any business? I had to ask myself do I want to take my daughter to a football club owned by a rapist?”
Yet not all Blackpool fans support the boycott, and a few visibly quicken their step as they reach the turnstiles. They say the action goes too far and the situation has fractured relationships, those attending games referred derogatorily as ‘mushrooms’.
“There have been days when I have been made to feel like I was crossing a picket line going into the stadium,” says one fan, Barry. “Words have been said, but nobody will tell me what to do on a Saturday afternoon. This is my football club and I have been coming since 1967. I am more interested in what is happening on the field than the boardroom.” (© Daily Telegraph, London)