WOLVES ARE AT THE DOOR
Torquay United needs its own Ryan Reynolds to save club”, so read a headline on the Devon Live website last week following news that Gulls owner, Clarke Osborne, would no longer fund the club and, with losses totalling about £5 million, administration loomed.
A few days earlier, in the Manchester Evening News, the message coming from another National League member, Rochdale, was similarly bleak.
“The existence of Rochdale AFC is at stake,” were the words of chairman, Simon Gauge, who was seeking £2 million by the end of March to stave off liquidation. No wonder they’re dreaming about a rich saviour like Reynolds sailing into the English Riviera, with a Hollywood pal in tow and a wave of energy and ambition, because as Wrexham’s fans will tell you, without a wealthy benefactor, it has never been harder to survive, never mind thrive, in the lower leagues.
History? Stature? Status? Doesn’t hold much weight anymore. Particularly in the National League. Until last year’s relegation, Rochdale had been Football League members for over a century. Torquay, who have twice fallen out of the 92 since the turn of the century, had accrued a total of 85 years membership of the EFL.
Now, though, with EFL funding a distant memory and an absent owner more interested in building a white elephant stadium than the club’s sporting adventure, Torquay languish in mid-table in the regionalised realms of the National League South. A ten-point deduction for entering admin would imperil their National League status altogether.
Now, a lower league club on its uppers, as we’re all aware, has always been a vulnerable beast. But in the past few years, between them Torquay and Rochdale have faced just about every challenge modern football throws your way these days: hostile takeovers, property developers, fan-ownership, protests, administration fears, the yawning funding gap between the EFL and the National League. Now, in a contemporary twist, Rochdale face the prospect of becoming part of a burgeoning multi-club ownership group. Rochdale’s fans warded off one owner with dubious motives to save their club in 2021, but quickly realised that football’s financial structures are such that without external investment it’s virtually impossible to keep the wolves from the door.
“In an ideal world, everyone – including myself – would like to stay on the fan-ownership model,” Gauge, who has injected more than half a million into the club, said last week. “The financial reality is that you have no one to fund the club when you need a cash input, so it doesn’t work. It is that realisation that people feel angry about, that you cannot operate a fan-led model.”
Alarm bells
That’s the thing about fan-ownership: it is dependent not only on the size but the wealth of your fanbase. Chesterfield, who winning the National League title at a canter, are owned by a Supporters’ Trust. But a few millionaires in their ranks is rather helpful when it comes to covering seven-figure losses every year.
Torquay are acutely aware of that truth. In 2015, the club was sold, for £1, to a fan-led consortium. Despite cutting costs to the bone, reality quickly bit at Plainmoor too. Within two years the club was forced to take out a £140,000 loan from Gaming International (GI) and, when repayment of the loan was forfeited, so too were the deeds of the club. Osborne, GI’s owner, made no secret of the fact that he wanted to build a shiny new multi-purpose stadium somewhere in Torbay, but his track record did not inspire much confidence that one would materialise. Companies owned by or linked to Osborne operated greyhound and speedway stadia in Reading and Milton Keynes, both of which were closed under their watch, and Poole and Swindon, where redevelopment plans dragged on for more than a decade.
Bristol Rovers were evicted from Eastville. Hereford narrowly avoided their stadium, Edgar Street, becoming a supermarket amid plans to construct a new stadium elsewhere. As a litany of clubs would attest, if the primary motivation for buying a club is a property deal, alarm bells should immediately begin to ring. Seven years ago, though, Osborne was the least bad option for Torquay. The same is likely to be true of the next custodian.
These days, much of the interest in lower league clubs comes from investors from America, partly owing to the exposure provided by Wrexham’s well-documented takeover by Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and partly because of a fascination with promotion and relegation in a country where leagues are invariably a closed shop.
Institution
But new money comes with new challenges. On Thursday, Rochdale agreed a deal, subject to shareholder approval, to sell the club to World Soccer Holdings, who also own a stake in MVV Maastricht in Holland’s second tier. The Texas-based company previously tried to take over ADO Den Haag — another Dutch club, now under the patronage of the American businessman, John Texor, whose multi-club ownership group includes French Ligue 1 club Lyon and Premier League Crystal Palace – as well as holding investments in America, too. Rochdale’s fans will greet the news with relief, but some reservations would be understandable too. Last month, a UEFA report revealed that there are now more than 300 clubs in world football who are part of multi-club ownership groups – a 60 per cent increase in the space of 12 months – including 33 in England, perhaps soon to be 34. MCO’s are great for the clubs at the top of the food chain – clubs like Rochdale’s neighbours, Manchester City, for example – who can pool resources and knowledge, loan out players, benefit from economies of scale. The experience for the much-cherished local institution nearer the bottom of the pile, however, is often rather different. But this is reality for a lot of clubs like Torquay and Rochdale nowadays. Cross your fingers, pray that history judges the next custodian better than the last. Or perhaps even that your own Ryan Reynolds saves your club next.