Stockport County: The Further Adventures Continue

When Lord Peter Snape, a director of the 2015 consortium, took control of Stockport County last summer, he was finally in a position to fix a mess he had diagnosed two years earlier. In March 2009, he had criticised the Supporters Trust then running the club, declaring that if it “had been run properly we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Twelve months on, his own consortium has presided over a second successive relegation, leaving County to face life in the Conference.

Now, the buck is being passed once more. A new, as yet unnamed, consortium is in the process of taking control, led by a disturbingly young Liverpool businessman named Tony Evans. At just 27, Evans has already joined the board and been installed as chairman for the next six weeks following a “significant investment”. This new money has seen County bidding for players again, a welcome change after years of financial strife. The appointment of former German international Dietmar Hamann as manager has only added to the sense that a new era is dawning.

Yet caution is required. This takeover is far from a done deal; Evans and his colleagues are performing due diligence before deciding whether to take a controlling interest. His business background offers little comfort. A previous venture, Anthony Donald Evans Limited, entered administration last November with debts of £1.2m. While the culpability for that failure is disputed, the firm’s administrators noted its “aggressive policy of writing insurance business at a low cost” and numerous customer complaints. For County supporters, who have seen so many false dawns, the sight of another potential saviour with a chequered past is depressingly familiar.

The Weight of History

The club’s modern problems have deep roots. The sale in 2003 by Brendan Elwood to Brian Kennedy’s Cheshire Sports set the tone. Kennedy, who also owned Sale Sharks rugby club, moved the Sharks into Edgeley Park but treated the football club as the junior partner. The groundshare arrangement he put in place would prove ruinous. In 2005, Kennedy passed the club to the Supporters Trust, who inherited a legacy of debt and what Elwood himself would later call a “suicidal” lease agreement.

Despite the off-field chaos, manager Jim Gannon miraculously guided the team to promotion via the League Two play-offs in May 2008. But the success was short-lived. Within a year, the club was in administration, brought down by winding-up orders and an inability to service its loans.

What followed was fourteen months of administrative purgatory. A consortium led by former Manchester City player Jim Melrose repeatedly failed to convince the Football League of its viability, largely due to the punitive terms of the Edgeley Park lease. After County’s inevitable relegation from League One in 2010, the 2015 consortium, featuring Snape and led by former cake-maker Alwin Thompson, stepped in, paying £250,000 to take the club out of administration.

The new board, which included former chief executive Sean Connolly and the husband-and-wife team of Mary and Tony Gibbons, spoke of community and communication. But their tenure quickly unravelled. They failed to re-appoint the popular Gannon as manager, settling instead for Paul Simpson, who seemed like a second choice from day one. Simpson himself was soon publicly complaining about being burdened with highly-paid players left over from the administration, sarcastically thanking administrator Leonard Curtis for leaving the club “high and dry”. By January 2011, both chairman Thompson and manager Simpson were gone.

Property Before Points

The fundamental issue remained the ground. The 2015 consortium’s renegotiated lease with Kennedy was revealed to have an annual rent of £135,000, rising to nearly a quarter of a million pounds within two years. Snape, who had previously said “nobody in their right mind would have signed” the original deal, was now part of a board defending a new one that fans greeted with dismay.

The boardroom’s priorities soon became clear. In September 2010, two new directors, Ken Graham and Mike Clark, were appointed. The club’s announcement noted their sons were in the youth system, but the key information was their backgrounds in construction and commercial property development. They were to “spearhead the future of…the football club with the provision of new sporting facilities within the borough”. The whiff of property development grew stronger with talk of a “Community Stadium” project involving the local council and Kennedy, who once again threatened to move his rugby team out of Stockport.

It was a comment from a supporter that best summed up the mood: “I think the smell of money is overpowering the smell of football.” This suspicion was confirmed last month when emails were leaked to the Vital Stockport website. They revealed a takeover offer from Rod Gunner of Power Snooker Limited, which promised to repay all shareholders in full. The response from board member Stewart Vann, another commercial property man, was telling. “If I understand correctly…we get our money back? But we walk away from £15/20m or more of development profit?”

In his email, sent just two hours after receiving the offer, Vann was explicit: “As you know, the shareholders comprise of football club fans and property developers. With respect, your email gives no comfort at this stage from my perspective.” So much for acting in the best interests of the club.

Another New Dawn?

The arrival of Tony Evans suggests the ‘football’ faction on the board has, for now, won out over the property developers. The departure in May of acting chair Mary Gibbons, whose public praise for Kennedy had drawn ire from fans, pointed to the deep divisions. She complained of “miss-truths and nasty comments” but had appeared isolated and unsupported by other board members.

Before Evans, another potential investor, a “New York-based hedge fund manager” named Mike Newton, had appeared and then disappeared in March, spooked by the club’s finances and the state of the playing squad.

Now Evans is in the chair, talking of how “there’s more money knocking around”. But after so many false prophets and failed revolutions, scepticism is the only rational response for Stockport County supporters. Too little is known about the source of this new money, and the club’s recent history is a litany of financial collapses and boardroom betrayals. This takeover tale is far from over.