Tag: Dartford

It was, as you will no doubt be aware by now, the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Premier League next month, but what will likely be forgotten in the slew of retrospectives is the fact that just three days after the behemoth which has come to eat English football in that intervening two decades the Football League saw its last – to date – resignation during the season. Furthermore, just a few weeks later, a non-league stalwart club whose fortunes had become irrevocably tied up in that clubs fortunes was also forced to resign from the league in which it was competing. Those two clubs were Maidstone United and Dartford FC, and their decline and fall in the space of such a short period of time were both allied to a man who had otherwise achieved something unique and positive for non-league football as a whole: Jim Thompson. At the time of the collapse of these two clubs, Thompson was largely considered to be one of The Great & The Good of non-league football. He had served his professional life in advertising before ending up as the managing director of the Kent Messenger Group of newspapers whilst also acting as the chief executive of the Maidstone Chamber of Commerce, but it was in the frequently clandestine world of non-league football that he came to make his name....