100 Owners: Ken Wheldon at Walsall and Birmingham City

On Valentine’s Day 1984, a wall at the Railway End of Fellows Park collapsed. A near-capacity crowd of almost 20,000 had turned out for the biggest night in Walsall’s recent history, a League Cup semi-final second leg against Liverpool, but the pressure proved too much for the creaking stadium. More than twenty people were injured and play was held up for thirteen minutes. Liverpool won 2-0, but the result was secondary to the near-tragedy that highlighted the decay at the heart of the club. At the centre of it all was the chairman, Ken Wheldon.

Wheldon, a local businessman made good, had arrived at a financially troubled Walsall in 1972 to a warm reception. For a time, things looked promising. The club reached the FA Cup Fifth Round in 1975, beating Manchester United along the way, and repeated the feat three years later. In 1979, as transfer fees spiralled, Wheldon paid a club record £175,000 to bring striker Alan Buckley back to Fellows Park from Birmingham City. Buckley would go on to be appointed player-manager, scoring a goal every other game in another two hundred and forty appearances for the club.

The Molineux Manoeuvres

Behind the scenes, however, problems were mounting. Fellows Park was dilapidated and its location, between the town centre and the M6, made the land valuable to developers. In 1982, Wheldon announced his intention to move Walsall in to share Molineux with Wolverhampton Wanderers. Wolves were also in financial difficulty, and their new boss Derek Dougan was open to the idea. But Walsall supporters were not. They organised into the Save Walsall Action Group and, before the final home game of the 1981/82 season, a thousand of them marched in peaceful protest. Wheldon fired broadsides at the supporter groups, but within weeks he began to back down on the Molineux plan.

The idea of leaving Fellows Park was not without logic. A new site half a mile away, on the land of a former sewage works in Bescot, was available for redevelopment. But Wheldon’s focus seemed to be on rationalisation, not investment. The collapse of the wall against Liverpool in 1984 laid bare the consequences of that neglect. It was a stark and dangerous illustration of the state of the club and its ground.

From Fellows Park to St Andrews

Two years later, Wheldon was gone from Walsall, but he only moved ten miles down the road to St Andrews. In December 1985, he took control of Birmingham City from the Coombs family for the nominal sum of twenty-five pence, on the condition he assumed the club’s £3m debt. At the time, Birmingham were kept off the bottom of the First Division only by West Bromwich Albion. Their manager, Ron Saunders, departed for West Brom within weeks of Wheldon’s arrival. His replacement, John Bond, could not prevent a relegation that had long seemed inevitable. The club had seen its own stadium problems, with a wall collapsing during riots at a match against Leeds United on the final day of the previous season.

Almost immediately, a suspiciously close relationship developed between Wheldon’s new club and his old one. It was announced that Birmingham and Walsall would share a training ground at Elmdon and a groundsman, and a request was made to the Football League to alternate their home fixtures. Then, in April 1986, Wheldon confirmed what many had suspected: he wanted Walsall to leave Fellows Park and ground-share with Birmingham at St Andrews. The Save Walsall Action Group mobilised once more, backed by the local press. Finally, the Football League Management Committee met in Newcastle and blocked the move. On 1 August 1986, London-based businessman Terry Ramsden took ownership of Walsall.

The issues at Walsall, however, were far from over.

Decline and Fall

Birmingham City certainly did not flourish under Wheldon. Having been relegated in 1986, they barely avoided a second successive drop the following season, staying up by one place and two points. Cost-cutting was severe. The Elmdon training ground was sold in 1988 for £350,000 to try and stabilise the finances, but the team’s performance did not improve, with the club again finishing two points clear of the Second Division relegation places. The following season, 1988/89, the slide became terminal. Birmingham were relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time in their history.

Attendances, which had plummeted across the country in the mid-1980s, continued to flat-line at St Andrews. The average crowd dropped to an all-time low of 6,289, with a paltry 4,026 watching a home defeat to Swindon Town in April 1989. That same season, city rivals Aston Villa knocked them out of two cup competitions, scoring thirteen goals without reply over three games. The manager Ron Saunders, ironically, had left Birmingham for West Bromwich Albion not long after Wheldon's arrival. For Wheldon, the game was up. In April 1989, he sold his controlling stake to the Kumar Brothers of Manchester. He died four years later, in May 1993, aged sixty-eight.

In 1981, Aston Villa were champions of England and West Brom finished fourth. By the end of the 1988/89 season, Villa were battling relegation, West Brom were in the Second Division, and both Birmingham City and Walsall were heading for the Third. Was this just part of the game’s wider national decline, felt more acutely in the Midlands, or was the close relationship between the men running its clubs a malign influence? At Birmingham, a case could be made that Wheldon simply kept the club alive during a turbulent period. But Walsall supporters might be more unanimous in their judgement. The chain reaction he started continues to have ramifications for their club, raising the question of how close some owners came to killing the very institutions they were supposed to protect.