Team rises from ashes of non-League football’s scandal
Robert Dineen on the man who wrecked Croydon Athletic, and the people who put side back together
The scene around the Mayfield Stadium in south London on a warm summer’s evening depicts grass-roots football at its most encouraging. An enthusiastic squad of players are preparing for AFC Croydon Athletic’s first-ever FA Cup fixture next Saturday, a qualifying tie against Virginia Water. In the modest stand, chairman Paul Smith talks hopefully about the non-League club’s future, citing a thriving youth section and recent successes in league and cup.
Not for a moment would you imagine this was the site for one of the darkest – and, until now, untold – episodes in English football, involving a club’s battle for survival, a tabloid scandal, two jail sentences, financial wrongdoing and one case of human tragedy. That Smith could sit here now and describe what happened with the club in good health is remarkable.
“It was an incredibly difficult period, almost surreal,” he recalls. “You would never expect to experience what we did, not in football, especially not in the nonLeague game.”
Smith was just a fan of Croydon Athletic when the story begins in 2008, with the club having received an ambitious takeover bid from a property developer, Mazhar Majeed.
Born and educated in Croydon, Majeed seemed the perfect candidate to own the club. He had glowing references from borough councillors. He was prepared to buy 90 per cent of
their shares and promised investment to fight for promotion from Division One South of the Ryman League.
“He seemed genuine,” Smith says. “He had the money and he was respected in the community. I remember the mayor had turned up to open his offices. There seemed no reason to concern oneself.”
With his offer accepted, Majeed quickly strengthened the staff. Tim O’Shea, the former Gillingham defender and a well-regarded nonLeague coach, was hired as manager. He was given the resources to recruit an assistant and higher-calibre players.
Majeed bought an electronic scoreboard for the stadium. He had the clubhouse painted and new windows fitted. A devout Muslim, he demanded the fruit machines were removed. “He changed the mood around the place,” Smith, a trade union official, says. “Things started to look up.”
Results quickly improved, with Majeed attending every game, often bringing along his brother and young children. He seemed thrilled when the club won the title less than two years into his reign. The achievement placed Croydon Athletic in the Ryman Premier League – two divisions below the Football League – for the first time in their 22-year existence. “You got the impression he just really enjoyed the buzz of being involved,” says Chris Roots, another stalwart supporter.
The mood did not last. Fans were disturbed to discover the club chairman, Dean Fisher, had been found guilty of defrauding his media-agency employers of more than £500,000, earning him a three-year jail sentence. The son of club founder Ken Fisher, Dean had helped to bring Majeed to the club and managed their accounts on his behalf.
But that was nothing compared to the shock of reading the News of the World splash a month later. Its sting operation revealed that Majeed had orchestrated spot-fixing at Lord’s involving three members of the Pakistan cricket team, who were later convicted. The newspaper filmed Majeed accepting £150,000 from reporters posing as representatives a gambling syndicate. During their conversation, Majeed correctly predicted when bowlers would overstep the mark against England.
“Word began to travel around the club that morning on mobiles,” Smith says. “It was just shock. No one had an inkling that Majeed was capable of something like this.”
Majeed went to ground, leaving wages unpaid. O’Shea quit, with his players soon following suit. As the club went into a tailspin, the Ryman League gave them 12 days’ grace to get their affairs in order. Roots and Smith assisted new chairman David Le Cluse in trying to keep the club alive. They persuaded non-League coaches Bob Langford and
Dave Garland to run the team unpaid. Trials unearthed enough voluntary players to restart the campaign.
Off the field, the situation spiralled. While a criminal investigation was launched into the cricket scandal, the Football Association opened an inquiry into Croydon’s financial dealings under Majeed, who had told journalists he bought the club to wash money through it. Alarming details began to emerge. It turned out Majeed had been the director of 14 dissolved companies. Several of his businesses had been registered under relatives’ names, including Croydon Athletic. He had piled £307,000 on to the club’s debt in the first year of his ownership alone. Majeed and his family did not respond to requests to comment.
Le Cluse’s commitment to the club at this point impressed Smith and Roots. Though he was never implicated in the spot-fixing, he was a business associate of Majeed’s and had reportedly lost £50,000 in deals that failed because of the damage to Majeed’s reputation. He had no reason to stay at Croydon Athletic other than a sense of duty.
This ran deeper than the others realised. On Oct 2, 2010, Le Cluse was found dead in a garage two miles from his home in Carshalton, Surrey. He had shot himself with a rifle used in his pest-control business. A relative told the Daily Mail: “The scandal had really brought him down. Staff had left and it was through no fault of his own. He took it really personally and saw it as his failure.” Roots says: “I saw him just a couple of days before it happened. I had no inkling. What happened was by far the worst thing to come out of all of this. No one thought he was responsible.”
The team managed to fulfil their fixtures that season, but were still relegated. Their hopes of surviving in the lower division were destroyed when the FA’s inquiry found that the club had committed 24 breaches of the rules relating to the payment of players. The details were never disclosed. The punishment was a £7,500 fine and 10-point deduction, plunging them to the bottom of the table. Majeed, meanwhile, was imprisoned for 32 months.
With the club’s bills unpaid, the council evicted them from their stadium. For Smith and Roots, acting as chairman and vice-chairman, that was the final straw. In December 2011, they wound the club up. “We had no alternative,” Roots says. “The battle we’d been fighting was lost.”
Roots went on to work with the non-League club Welling United. Smith, though, was unwilling to walk away. By the following summer, he had set up AFC Croydon Athletic, who were accepted into the Combined Counties Football League in the 10th tier of the league pyramid.
Officially, AFC Croydon Athletic are distinct from the expired team, with different kit and club badge. They attract the core of the old support and play at the reopened old stadium.
The fans own all the shares, but the scars remain. “There is a sense of betrayal,” Smith says. “Non-League football is a tight community. If you’re part of a club, even as a fan, you feel especially close to it.”
Were the club partly to blame? “There was always the question: why was he doing it? A lot of people said the club should have known better, but it’s easy to be an expert after the event.”