WHO DO WE SUPPORT?
Bury were expelled but now two clubs are fighting to replace them. The fans are divided and asking just...
NINE months ago, Bury had no football club for the first time in 134 years. Now there are somehow two. Original Bury desperately trying to cling on, new Bury desperately trying to crack on by way of a phoenix club. The town is divided at a time it needs to be united.
Their tale is long, winding with financial tangents beginning long before owner Steve Dale rocked up at Gigg Lane two years ago with a pound in his pocket. The stewardship by Dale’s predecessor — when St e wart Day pai d t he s quad scarcely believable wages — is now held up as a fundament argument for an introduction of a stricter, more sustainable EFL pyramid.
The mortgaging of the ground and the sale of parking spaces for almost £10,000 with the promise of a healthy, ultimately fictional, return to investors from far-flung parts of the world who had never even heard of Bury. The club’s assets were pawned and untangling that web is no easy task.
Encountering worse financial peril than first imagined, Dale subsequently ran it to the wall, with Bury expelled from the Football League last August. Dale fell silent for months, with fans assuming l i qui dat i o n l a y a head, bef o r e recently claiming that he has applied for a place in the National League next season — whenever that might be. Quite why, nobody knows.
As an owner who has presided over an expulsion, Dale recognises that he would need to step aside. There are fears around the town that a family member could replace him. Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic springs to mind. The Football Association refused to comment when asked about the state of Dale’s application.
Rumour swirls that Dale recently rejected £400,000 for the club. A consortium of local businessmen were also hoping to take over but wanted the local council to purchase Gigg Lane, a proposal fraught with difficulties and difference on valuation. To further complicate it, the company with a charge of around £ 3.7million against the stadium, Capital Bridging Finance, are i n administration. Capital Bridging had themselves mortgaged the stadium to TMF International Pensions Ltd in 2017. Google TMF and you come up with the Paradise Papers, a huge leak of documents relating to offshore finance. This is still Bury, Greater Manchester, we are talking about.
‘Bury has been dealt a bad hand this decade, summed up as easy as ABC,’ former Labour MP James Frith said. ‘ Austerity, Bury FC (some might say Brexit) and now coronavirus. The rise of a phoenix from the ashes, or finally some good fortune with new ownership and a credible plan for the ground would genuinely buoy us all. Sadly, false dawns and time-wasters are attracted to fallen football clubs.’
‘This is still a substantial scandal,’ one source said. ‘It’s all a bit of a game for Dale. It’s what he does in his business life. He takes risks. If he only walks away with £1, he’s fine with that. For him it’s about seeing what he can do. He doesn’t understand the public opinion of him. I don’t think gaining money is the motivating factor, it’s playing the game.’
Meanwhile, AFC Bury — the fan- owned phoenix club hoping to f ol l ow in t he f ootsteps of
AFC Wimbledon — are pressing ahead with their plans.
Almost 500 supporters have signed up to a community benefit society that owns the club. An agreement is in place for a nearby groundshare. A place in the North West Counties provisionally awaits when the 2020- 21 season starts. Talks with the FA are due at the end of this month with elections to the board a few weeks later. Talks over the badge have taken place, votes cast on the away strip. Former players Andy Bishop, Cameron Belford and Derek Spence are whipping up support online.
Invaluable advice has come from
Wimbledon, Wrexham and FC United. Chester manager Anthony Johnson has offered advice on how to approach the management structure.
For Chris Murray, chairman of the phoenix club, the elephant in the room i s the original club. Supporters are split. ‘ You have good friends arguing with each other and it should never have come to that,’ Murray said. ‘The problem is the lack of real clarity. The application went in, we were looking at plans for the season and then coronavirus happened. It makes people panic but we have to keep on doing what we’re doing.
‘ We launched our membership and that went well then Steve Dale is in the paper talking about how he is applying for the National League. There always seems to be something there that divides the fans. We knew creating another club would divide opinion but that’s not the aim. I thought he’d sell the club before now.’
Dale has not and does not seem inclined to do so. The phoenix club eventually want Gigg Lane but realise pragmatism is required in the short term. ‘The town isn’t big enough for two clubs,’ Murray added.
‘If the takeover deal earlier in the year had gone through we would have gladly stood down from doing what we are doing. Now it’s reaching a point where it looks like there’s us and Bury FC.
‘We need to keep working to build a club and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it and put it to our members. It’s a weird situation. We have not looked into getting the ground valued yet. I’d like to hope it wouldn’t cost more than £3m. If we have to groundshare for two years and fund-raise during that time to get back there then that’s what we’ll do.’
Right now, nobody in Bury can predict the near future, let alone any further, as one of recent history’s saddest stories staggers on.