Doncaster: Worst. Season. Ever.
Played 46, won 4, lost 34, conceded 113. FFT revisits Doncaster’s wretched 1997-98 campaign, featuring funeral processions, pitch invasions and a tally of league losses that hasn’t been topped two decades later
Rovers’ 1997-98 annus horribilis
Grief and anger populate the streets of Doncaster. Lining the roads leading to Belle Vue, hundreds of mourners march in unison towards the ground, surrounding a funeral procession that carries a sign reading: ‘The Rovers, Cruelly Taken Away’. Led by a pallbearer dressed in a full black suit and top hat, the cortege snakes its way to the foot of the old stadium’s family stand, where a number of wreaths and handmade memorials are laid to commemorate the departed. Despite the sombre atmosphere created by the mock funeral Doncaster Rovers fans are holding, no one has died. But as the supporters edge their way to Donny’s final fixture of the 1997-98 season, a feeling of loss is everywhere. “It felt like a real funeral, like the death of the club,” says then-doncaster Rovers Supporters’ Club secretary Maureen Stephenson.
“We had a trumpeter playing the Last Post, we laid wreaths and there were grown-ups crying – me included. It was heartbreaking. I honestly believed that was the end of Rovers.”
The demonstration was the culmination of one of the worst campaigns English football has ever witnessed. And not just because the South Yorkshire side’s beleaguered squad had suffered a Football League record 34 losses on the way to relegation to the Conference – a tally of defeats that still hasn’t been topped more than 20 years on.
Doncaster’s tale of woe is about more than just on-pitch struggles. Theirs is a story that is so bonkers, it wouldn’t have looked out of place as a script for Sky football drama Dream Team, which had debuted a few months earlier.
With benefactor Ken Richardson pulling the plug on his financial support, the club started the season in administration. There were no points deductions as punishment back then but depleted funds meant the bank was bare, with scant money to pay players and nothing to fix increasingly ramshackle facilities.
“It was a joke,” former manager Kerry Dixon tells Fourfourtwo. “I loved Doncaster, the place was great and it was my first managerial job, but with what was going on in the background and how it was, it was a disaster.”
The eight-cap England international had taken over under controversial circumstances at the beginning of 1996-97. Named Donny’s player-manager on the season’s opening day, Dixon arrived only to find that his predecessor, Sammy Chung, hadn’t been informed that he had been replaced. Perhaps the writing was on the wall straight away.
Dixon lasted a little over 12 months. Before August had finished the following year, the Chelsea legend walked away from Belle Vue, citing boardroom meddling on the back of an 8-0 battering at home to Nottingham Forest in the League Cup.
“It started off for two or three months and was all fine,” continues Dixon. “Then I started getting phone calls saying Ken thinks this and Ken thinks that, so come and meet him. He was talking to players and telling me training wasn’t too good that week. He was ringing up the players and, obviously, people who aren’t in the team or getting picked are disgruntled. It was just general mischief-making as far as I was concerned.
“I agreed my release with the administrators because it was a joke – you didn’t know who was running the club. Wages weren’t getting paid on time and the PFA was involved. It was a complete shambles.”
Things had started to turn ugly long before Dixon arrived in Doncaster, though. When the Richardson Trust purchased the club in 1993, money had been spent on bringing in several new signings. But that optimism soon vanished when an advert was published in the Financial Times advertising Belle Vue for sale, despite it being leased to the club by Doncaster Council.
The ground’s site was valued at £18 million, making it the most lucrative plot in the Football League outside London. But after the council put a kibosh on the sale attempt and refused to reconsider, investment in the club dried up. And when a fire burned down part of the main stand shortly after the council discussions had ended in 1995, the rumour mill began to churn.
It had all come to a head by the summer of 1997 and, as the season kicked off, Doncaster supporters were bracing themselves for the worst. With some now publicly challenging Richardson about his intentions and little investment on the team, there wasn’t much hope on the terraces when August arrived.
“We knew what would happen, because we knew Richardson was here for the land,” says Stephenson. “It was the worst scenario.”
Dixon’s exit a few weeks into the campaign was the first of five managerial changes during the season as the club limped from one failure to the next. Youth team coach Dave Cowling lasted only nine days – and three losses – prior to throwing in the towel.
In fact, it took until boss number five before Rovers won a league match. It was testimony to Richardson’s interference that it ended up being his right-hand man, Mark Weaver, who guided the team to their first three-point haul at the 21st attempt, beating Chester 2-1.
Weaver, who was Donny’s general manager, didn’t have any credible experience of running a football team and had previously been in charge of overseeing the fans’ lottery. But in the absence of any other candidates, he found himself in the dugout.
He was supported on the training pitch by ex-uruguayan under-21 international Danny Bergara, a La Liga hotshot in his playing days who had since blazed a trail as one of the first foreign-speaking coaches to work in English football. Bergara had endured seven matches as manager before Weaver took charge, but stepped back because of abuse from the fans.
Belle Vue’s revolving door extended to the players, too. With wages not being paid in full, they were free to negotiate moves away from Rovers under freedom of contract laws. This led to an ever-changing XI line-up and some hastily made, budget signings to fill the gaps.
“The turnover of players was scary – every week there were different players,” says winger Ian Clark, who was in his third season with the club before joining Hartlepool in October 1997.
“There were players coming in on a Saturday morning. You’d turn up at Belle Vue ready to play and there’d be a new guy there, and you didn’t have a clue who they were. They weren’t on loan, they were just some non-league lads. At the time, there was no development at the club. We only had about 15 players so they were definitely going to play – it was so hard going up against professional clubs.”
As the losses stacked up, a total of 45 players were used, with the tally of recognised senior pros steadily dwindling as the season wore on.
One of the signings who came to epitomise Doncaster’s plight among fans was goalkeeper Dave Smith, an amateur gloveman who earned a Football League debut on the basis of being Weaver’s neighbour and playing for his dad’s Sunday League team. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go very well and “Fatty” Smith, as he became known with the home faithful, was hauled off at half-time as Rovers lost 5-1 to Darlington. He never played for them again.
New faces were drafted in from all over the north-west, with a group of four players from Manchester earning regular slots in the side, despite multiple sources telling FFT they were gang members. Although that claim was never substantiated, the quartet rarely trained in the week but still played on matchdays.
Weaver’s contacts book was being stretched to its limits. While he did unearth some talent – including the enigmatic Prince Moncrieffe, who became the team’s top scorer and once played a game in a bobble hat – other targets hadn’t taken to the field in years.
“I got offered a contract on the phone,” says Phil Brennan, an ex-strike partner of Weaver’s for a park team in Stockport. “The last time I’d spoken to him, he was with a local amateur club, so I assumed he meant them. I told him I wasn’t interested, but he said, ‘Just come to
training and have a look’, at which point I was wavering until he said it was Doncaster. For vanity more than anything, I had to say no.”
With their menagerie of footballers, it was no surprise when standards continued to slip. “People wouldn’t believe half the stories now, as things have changed,” says Clark. “Training pitches changed weekly from training grounds to a public park. You didn’t know what you’d be coming in to from one day to the next.
“It was run like a non-league club. People turned up and kit was non-existent, so they wore old gear from other clubs. On Saturdays, there were no tracksuits. If you think about professionalism and wanting everyone to act the same, and eliminating issues so players can’t make excuses, there was none of that.
“I used to turn up and nothing was in place. We’d set off for away games on the day of the match, which wasn’t the norm. The lads were leaving their cars at the ground and coming back. One time, we got back after a game and a player found that someone had pinched his wheels – his car was on bricks.”
As Doncaster’s struggles worsened, so did Richardson and Weaver’s relationship with the fans. Crowds fell beneath 1,000 as relegation from the Football League became inevitable, and the supporters’ club formed a group to come up with strategies to force the duo out.
There were pitch invasions, walk-out protests, and even a picnic arranged in the car park as a game was taking place. On another occasion, Stephenson and her husband, Tony, spent an evening putting ‘Club For Sale’ posters along the route from Weaver’s home to Belle Vue.
“I’ve got a couple of security lads who travel with me to games, home and way,” Weaver told Channel Five documentary, They Think It’s All Rovers, about the Donny debacle.
“I had a death threat at the club and at my home in Manchester, where a colour picture had been taken out of a local newspaper with my head chopped off and blood dripping down. It said, ‘Leave or else, Donny Boot Boys’.”
In response, a digger was commissioned to destroy the terrace beneath the box where the directors sat, to stop fans getting too close to them. And while Richardson stopped attending matches on safety advice later in the season, there was no sign of the benefactor leaving.
Doncaster’s relegation was confirmed with four games to go after losing at Chester, while three more losses before the campaign’s end meant the record for number of defeats was theirs. Over 46 games, Rovers won four times, lost 34, and recorded a goal difference of -83.
As 5,000 fans gathered for the season finale at home to Colchester, to pay tribute at what many felt would be the club’s last ever match, a series of demonstrations were held, starting with the mock funeral and ending with a pitch invasion that threatened to call the match off.
“We couldn’t visualise where we’d go from there,” adds Stephenson. “We had no players, no money, no corner flags, nothing. The club was stripped bare by the Richardson gang.”
Relegation wasn’t the end, though. Donny survived to start the new season in the Football Conference, but there was one more plot twist.
Nine months after the curtain came down on the club’s 75-year stay in the Football League, benefactor Richardson was facing charges for conspiracy to commit arson relating to the fire at Belle Vue in 1995. The jury heard how he’d offered a former SAS soldier £10,000 to burn down the main stand as part of a scheme to force Rovers out of the stadium.
The plan might have worked, but firefighters recovered petrol cans from the scene of the fire, along with a mobile phone that contained a message to Richardson that said, “The job’s been done.” The evidence proved enough for Richardson to be found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail. It was a fittingly ludicrous end to a scarcely believable story. A tale that Doncaster fans are happy has been laid to rest.
“WE GOT BACK AFTER A GAME AND SOMEONE HAD PINCHED A PLAYER’S WHEELS. HIS CAR WAS On BRICKS”