Fans’ pain as Blackpool suffer torturous decline
Walk around Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road before any home game and you will find a vigil to a contaminated club.
A collection of fans gathers near the main reception, their banner unfurled as they offer leaflets 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, making his way from the Bloomfield Road pub, standing outside the stadium until kick-off. One step he will not make: to go through the turnstiles.
“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.”
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.
Blackpool chairman and owner 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 with his disqualification.
The Premier League was informed that Oyston would transfer his shares to his son, Karl. Blackpool were relegated in 2011, weeks after the league insisted that the transfer took place.
Last year, the High Court ruled that the owner “illegitimately stripped” Blackpool of £26.77million after reaching the top flight. “When the [Premier League] millions poured into Blackpool, they were not used to improve the team. 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,” says Rowland.
The bleak sight of empty stands is testimony to their campaign. There were 15,529 fans inside Bloomfield Road for their first Premier League game; against Scunthorpe last week there were 2,769. Despite being entitled to 9,000 tickets for tonight’s Carabao Cup tie at Arsenal, only 1,240 will make the trip as 45 per cent of gate receipts go to Blackpool under cup rules. 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 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 10 years, but it felt like a personal vendetta against supporters who criticised him. He eventually dropped the case, but never apologised. Some people sued were put under horrendous stress.
“I can’t tell you how hard it is to go the stadium at 3pm every Saturday and not go in, but we just have to do this. We see no other way. We want our club back.
“For a while here, everywhere you looked around the town it was tangerine – all the kids wore Blackpool shirts. Now it is back to Manchester United or Manchester City. We are losing a generation.”
The anger is not limited to the Oystons. The Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore responded to BST criticism that his organisation failed to take robust action in 2010.
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 were relegated to the Championship.
“On reflection, learning from the ‘Blackpool experience’, if a similar situation were to occur again we would press the EFL to continue and conclude the process initiated by the PL.” The EFL has since changed its rules but says it cannot apply them retrospectively.
Tanya Harvey, a supporter for 25 years, says: “The Premier League are basically saying, ‘Sorry, we should have done more at the time but it is not our responsibility any more’, and the EFL say they can’t do anything.
“How can a man who has been in prison for rape be considered ‘fit and proper’? I had to ask myself, do I want to take my daughter to a club owned by a rapist? It’s unbelievable. The club is a community asset. The EFL needs to wake up.”
Tony Wilkinson, of the BST, says: “It is really difficult not to go in. People say it must mean we are not ‘true fans’. It is the complete opposite. I had been going for 50 years before the boycott. My first game was against Chelsea when I was five in 1966.
“Before 2010 we were always ‘little Blackpool’ but then came the windfall. That was the gamechanger. I remember being sat in Wembley – we were all together – and I looked at it and thought: ‘Will Oyston spend the money?’ We do not regret going up, we regret the legacy of it. It amazes me. It could happen to any club.”
Yet not all Blackpool fans back the boycott – they are nicknamed “mushrooms”. A few quicken their step as they reach the turnstiles. “There have been days when
‘We just have to do this. We want our club back’
I have been made to feel like I was crossing a picket line going into the stadium,” says one fan. “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.”
Gary Bowyer, Blackpool’s eighth manager in four years when appointed in 2016, and who took them up to League One, quit one game into this season.
As manager he led a search for a training venue – which he initially paid for – when lack of investment in the Squires Gate “facility” made pitches unusable. Another story tells of the kit being ceremonially handed to a new signing who thought it a wind-up when told he would be washing it himself.
For those who experienced the Premier League era, the rapid deterioration is depressing. But hints of what might follow were there. “The club was not ready for the Premier League,” says Gary Taylor-fletcher, scorer of Blackpool’s first and last Premier League goal. “Sometimes we had no hot water in the showers. The pitch was like a local park and there was no security at the training ground. One day a homeless guy came into the training ground and we were feeding him in the canteen.
“We trained on the beach before one game against Liverpool and would travel 10 hours on the coach for some games down south. There was no flying to games. We accepted it because we were so delighted to be in the Premier League.
“We still had great times, beating Spurs, beating Liverpool home and away – 10 wins and 39 points and fighting until the last day. We were everyone’s second team that season. You look back at the small things like training ground, preparation for games, rehabilitation facilities – would that have given us that little bit more?”
There has been backing for the fans’ boycott beyond Blackpool. Burnley invited BST members to a fixture last season, and Accrington Stanley chairman Andy Holt refused to sit in Blackpool’s directors’ box, taking his place with away fans instead. Aside from Oyston clinging on, the BST’S biggest fear is apathy. “Some of our online petitions have had a disappointing response,” says Wilkinson. “A lot of fans maybe get tired of hearing about it, or maybe they think something like this will never happen to their club.
“When we set up a petition to force a parliamentary debate for the Government to set up an independent regulator for English football, it got only 14,500 signatures. Then you see these daft campaigns like getting Harry Maguire on to a £50 note receiving 25,000 signatures in a day.
“Is this what we will let our clubs become? What is English football’s priority?”