Tamplin’s tale of vaulting ambition ends badly
Billericay Town are up for sale… just the latest club to suffer from sugar daddy owner syndrome, writes Jim White
After his side’s win, Tamplin unleashed his inner Alan Pardew and danced right up the pitch
Those Manchester United supporters who hired a plane to fly over Turf Moor on Sunday, trailing a message berating the leadership of the club’s vice-chairman Ed Woodward, should count themselves lucky. They could be supporters of Billericay Town.
Billericay’s Ed Woodward goes by the name of Glenn Tamplin, a much-inked, Ferrarifancying, born-again Christian self-made man who bought the club in December 2016. After a career forged on liquidating and bankrupting a series of companies, leaving behind a trail of furious creditors, the Essex Donald Trump promised to elevate the modest outfit to the Football League within five years. He recruited the former Premier League trio Jamie O’hara, Paul Konchesky and Jermaine Pennant on eye-watering wages. Not that they stayed long, Pennant preferring to head for the Big Brother house, while Konchesky left to open a pie and mash shop. Meanwhile, Tamplin built two new stands (one of which he modestly named after a young local whose hospital treatment he had paid for), financed an expensive new pitch that needed relaying after less than a season, and decorated the home dressing room in a garish lion mural. He also let cameras in to record his “motivational” pre-match team talk in which he led a communal singing of the R Kelly song The World’s Greatest.
Noisily insisting on social media that it “is not about me”, Tamplin proceeded, despite having zero coaching qualifications and no history as a player, to appoint himself team manager. He then demoted himself to assistant, before sacking his replacement and reinstating himself. Yet somehow, perhaps because of a wage bill 10 times higher than rivals, Billericay were promoted to the National League South, where they currently sit second. And there can be no suggestion he was not enjoying the experience: so delighted was Tamplin by his side’s opening victory back in August, he unleashed his inner Alan Pardew and danced the length of the pitch, a David Brent-like shuffle that is more than worth a look on Youtube.
On Saturday, however, after the loss to Woking Town, a Billericay fan reported him to the police, claiming he had been seen snorting cocaine in the lavatories. Tamplin denied it. And indeed anyone who has seen his rambling, self-dramatising interview – also available on Youtube – would be astonished to hear of such a claim.
Dismayed by the resulting police attention, Tamplin put the club up for sale – though given his previous record, it may only be a matter of time before he announces he has sold it to himself.
Humorous as it might be to observe, Tamplin’s hyper-active ownership fits an all-too familiar pattern in non-league football. It goes like this: a wealthy local businessman buys a modest club and promises to propel it to the sunlit uplands of cup and league triumph.
Sometimes, inflated by their sugar daddy’s backing, clubs actually progress and make it to the league. But eventually, inevitably, the Mr Toad-like owners grow bored of the endless need to underwrite the by now unsustainable operation. When they walk away, the house of cards collapses. Rushden and Diamonds, Fisher Athletic, Colne Dynamoes: the list of those clubs who no longer exist after their so-called benefactor has departed is poignant enough to read like a John Betjeman poem.
And let us not for a moment in this context mention the words Salford and City.