Oldham Athletic: How does the mess end?
Throughout the Pandemic-enforced absence of fans, a common phrase was that “football without fans is nothing”. The games without fans were very different, and a pale shadow of the real thing.
Since fans have returned, however, matters have come to a head at Oldham Athletic, my team. Fairly organic protests have taken hold since a fairly innocuous pitch invasion after a rare League Cup win in early August lit the blue torch paper.
Insipid performances, and continued disappointing defeats have galvanised those protests as a sense of desperation has taken hold — just how bad are things? Note: I am not saying the protests are only because of the results.
The protests are born of an owner who has overseen the latest instalment in Oldham Athletic’s fall from the heady days of the early 1990s, when for a few brief years, they graced the top flight of English football — the Premier League.
An owner who has made plenty of mistakes, and via his means and method of communication, continues to compound them. Regardless of whether or not he’s a “very charming man”, it’s pretty clear things are beyond repair. I don’t see how the owner can turn things around as things stand.
That presents a significant problem, because the protests have the potential to harm the team. The head coach has appealed for them not to — no more pitch invasions or objects launched on to the pitch. Ideally Push The Boundary and the Supporters Foundation would echo these and request fans don’t go on the pitch. PTB’s email this week emphasised protesting “in a passionate but lawful manner”, but to me that’s not enough since I think those fans going on the pitch don’t recognise that it is a criminal offence to go on the pitch.
It’s highly likely that continued pitch invasions (5 in 6 home matches so far this season) will trigger consequences — maybe a return to closed doors football, even.
If there was an alternative owner waiting in the wings, ready to step in should the current owner decide to sell up, then things may be OK — assuming the alternative owner wasn’t a crook or a fraud (Rochdale’s recent near miss is a salutory tale). I really hope there is some alternative ownership bid being plotted behind the scenes, because if there isn’t there is a serious problem ahead.
Because while the injury crisis at Oldham shows no sign of relenting, it’s hard to see on-field fortunes picking up, which might help ease fan tensions at least a bit. So that implies continued protests that will likely see the club forced to play without fans.
It’s not inconceivable the owner gets sufficiently fed up by the protests that he decides he will sell up — but without an alternative bidder, to what end? And if the owner decides he is no longer willing to write the cheques to subsidise what is a loss making business, there may be yet more significant problems ahead — administration and points deductions.
I don’t think the current owner is great. I would like a better owner. So how does that come about? I really don’t think it comes about by further pitch invasions, and by throwing things on the pitch. I don’t think it’s harmed by peaceful, lawful protest.
I think it’s aided by all Latics fans working on whatever angles they can. Who do you know? Do you know people involved with successful businesses? Wealthy folk? Do you know folk involved in takeovers of other clubs? Have you chatted with them? If you don’t ask, you don’t find out.
Has anyone tried to contact Sir Jim Ratcliffe? Brian Cox? JW Lees? On the latter, fans spend when attending football, but not all of it gets to the club — they buy drinks, they grab food. Obviously in the dim and distant recent past Lees sold the Clayton Arms for the supposed development of Boundary Park — but the Clayton Arms was always a rather tired establishment. Surely a fan park like that proposed at Tranmere would be a revenue generator. Develop the area behind the Rochdale Road End, and ensure more of the revenues generated by football in the area accrue to the club directly.
Of course, such a vision involves a heck of a lot of hurdles to be overcome — ownership of the stadium, of the North Stand, of the car park area behind the North Stand. I doubt that nobody has ever thought of it before — but it likely also needs government intervention to help it happen, and help secure the future of the club.
The current owners of the North Stand and car park value the land, surely for future development. If the government’s “fan led review”, for what it’s worth (given the lack of fans on it), can do anything useful, it can push towards all land associated with existing elite football clubs be listed, and protected only for football-related development. That then reduces the value of the land to anybody other than those looking to develop football in the area.
So what I’m saying is action needs to be constructive, for the sake of the club. It’s dead, dead easy to make negative comments and put the hashtag #oafc on them. The ticketing situation is a disaster, the club announcements tend to be terse, and hence attract lots of negative energy. But it doesn’t do the club and hence us as fans any good to be armchair warriors.
We all love our club — let’s pull together, cast aside the negativity and put in place the necessary supportive infrastructure for our club to succeed.
It means doing more ourselves. After Stop the Rot then Save Athletic’s Future Existence in the 2000s, enough wasn’t done to do precisely that, alas. The pure and simple fact is that over the decades, the club’s fanbase has not put enough into the club where it matters — the bottom line, for it to succeed. That needs to change.
