Relegation Confirmed
As a football fan, I’m absolutely gutted. Depressed. This afternoon the inevitable relegation for my club, Oldham Athletic, was confirmed. With two matches to play, they are now seven points adrift at the bottom of League Two.
A small part of me is relieved, since I no longer need to pay such close attention to the inevitable defeat that Oldham Athletic will suffer each time they play. That’s a tiny part though. Because I fear that next season will be more of the same.
The Most Miserable 30 years as a Football Club?
Relegation from League Two feels a lot worse than relegation from League One felt just four short years ago. This time it is into non-league football. England’s fifth division, the National League. It’s now pretty much completely professional, but historically it has been a league full of part-time teams — the top level of non-league football. Oldham with a bunch of part-timers. The kinds of teams we should only be playing in the FA Cup.
And of course, the FA Cup will need to be qualified for. The League Cup no more. The EFL Trophy won’t be missed, of course. We’ll have to read up on what the FA Trophy looks like.
Oldham are notable now for being the first Premier League member to be relegated into non-league. I’ve watched all of it, from those Premier League days in 1992–1994, to three brief years in what’s now called the Championship (1994–1997), followed by 21 years in what’s now called League One (1997–2018), and the four years being re-acquainted with being a basement dweller. Now the club’s fallen through the basement trapdoor.
My earliest recollection is a sunny afternoon watching Oldham take on Nottingham Forest in the 1990 League Cup Final. Like Tranmere Rovers, we’ve progressed from League Cup Finalists to out of the Football League. Not as big a fall as Oxford and Luton, who both won the League Cup before falling out of the League. Football is a cruel business.
I went to Norwich on the final day of the 1993/4 season to see a 1–1 draw that confirmed our relegation. I watched us beat Norwich 3–0 in 1997 once our relegation had been confirmed. Each time there was a hope we would return.
Very quickly, even in the third tier, it became clear we weren’t about to make a return to any higher a level, and indeed in our second season we very nearly were relegated to the Fourth Division. Those were the times of Stop the Rot, for obvious reasons. The rot did stop, but after two cycles that peaked in Play-Off defeats to QPR (2003) and Blackpool (2007), another rot set in: beginning in 2010/11, a run of now 13 consecutive bottom half finishes.
Finishing in the bottom half has its risks. While under previous owners it appeared Latics had worked out the knack of doing just enough to stay in League One, it’s clear things were far from OK at the club, and the mess of the transfer of ownership to current owners (of the club badge but not stadium) reflected that. The club is in a very, very bad place.
Surreal Circumstances Reflect a Club in a Very Bad Place
Relegation on April 23 was confirmed in suitably bizarre circumstances, with the final 11 minutes of play taking place behind closed doors after a pitch invasion. I didn’t go to the game, but I was there at the Barrow match in September when there was a smaller pitch invasion which halted play.
I wouldn’t have taken part in any such protest, but I completely understand why so many were motivated to take part. A football club is a community organisation with thousands of fans, incredibly loyal customers, who have a huge stake in what goes on at the club. Clubs ignore them at their peril, and Oldham Athletic’s current owners have done precisely that for four years now, and hence have reaped the rewards of their poor decisions.
The main protest group, Push The Boundary, has conducted itself very well over the years since it formed in 2019, concerned about the accelerated decline under the current ownership. They vocalised what increasingly many fans were thinking, and continue to think. They’ve managed the divisions of opinion in the fan base very effectively.
Sport Economics vs Sport Fandom
As a sport economist, I know I’m just observing another badly run club falling on hard times. Pre-1987, there was no relegation from the Football League and hence when, for example, Oldham finished in 23rd in Division 4 in 1959/60, the exact same position they will finish this season, they were re-elected into the cozy Football League club.
Since 2003, two teams have been relegated, in general, with a few exceptions (e.g. when Bury were expelled from the League in 2019). Hence badly run previous incarnations of my club survived in the Football League. This one won’t.
And that’s a good thing, it pains me to say. Poor management should suffer consequences. I wrote above that some of the teams Oldham play next season they should only play in the FA Cup. But there are no shoulds any more in football. Football long had a meritocracy, but only within the Football League. Now, with promotion and relegation throughout all stages of football’s pyramid, teams like Fleetwood, Morecambe, Forest Green, Salford, Harrogate can be well managed and make it to the Football League while Stockport, Wrexham, Chesterfield, Torquay, and Grimsby are in the National League, most of whom Oldham will face next season.
One of the unique aspects of sport is the role of those stakeholders — us, the fans. We don’t have a formal say in what goes on, but we have a huge role in a club’s success or otherwise. Football club trusts, like the Oldham Athletic Community Trust, do wonderful work in the community. The club’s brand is strong in the local area. Football clubs are community assets.
Hence I thoroughly endorse the sentiment in this Tweet: “Another community institution abandoned to mismanagement and neglect. Bad ownership is hollowing out English football, one club at a time.” OACT’s work will be impeded by the club being less able to support it due to being in a lower division, and by it not being part of the EFL Trust. But then, in other areas with better run clubs, community trusts are more able to do good things. It’s an odd way of distributing money for doing social good, but it is a distribution nonetheless.
It’s worth saying that sport economics doesn’t really do much in this more touchy-feely area of the role of football clubs as community organisations. With my PhD student Matt Yeo, we’re trying to make an effort to improve things in this direction.
Fans suffer when bad owners drive a club into the ground. I hope Oldham’s owners don’t manage to be as destructive as those at Bury, and at Darlington, as two particular examples. But I don’t know why I have any hope, really. It’s hope in spite of all the evidence.
Back to the point: bad management should suffer its consequences. Well-managed teams — and congratulations to Forest Green who have been promoted to League One, a team only recently in the Football League in the first place — do well. That’s a structure that works well, it could easily be argued. It sucks when your team is one of the badly run ones. But it provides hope that, once the current owners have left, there can be a well-run club that returns to the Football League.
What the Future Holds
Because while it is hard to get back into the Football League, that difficulty ensures (arguably) that it has to be well run clubs that make it into one of the two promotion spots.
Below is every team relegated from the Football League since Hereford in 1997–38 cases across 33 teams — and their final league position in the subsequent 10 season. Currently it’s capped if the team gets relegated again (like York in 2016), but it shows that there’s a huge variation in performance, from the good to the bad and the ugly. I count four teams that have made an immediate return (Bristol Rovers, Carlisle, Cheltenham and Shrewsbury), hence they are the exception rather than the rule.
Three teams (Barnet, Leyton Orient and Torquay) made a return to the Football League in their second season in the National League, one (Tranmere) in their third season, and three (Barnet, Chester, Oxford) in their fourth season. Doncaster, Exeter, Luton and Mansfield had to wait until their fifth season to win promotion back. Grimsby, Lincoln and Mansfield took until their seventh season.
I don’t know how we get there though. Saturday made it fairly clear that, while the current owners are in place, it is highly unlikely another football match will be completed at Boundary Park. John Sheridan’s spell acted as a sticking plaster on the anger from the fans, and the continued lack of any action towards selling the club by the owner will only add further to that high level of resentment.
That seems likely to force matters to a highly uncertain conclusion. My desperate hope, naturally, is that the current owner sells, and is replaced by a better owner, and that that new ownership can unite all the messy and disparate ownership and power groups in and around the club.
I wholeheartedly applaud all the tireless efforts that have done in that direction by Push The Boundary, and the Supporter’s Trust/Foundation, and I hope that all their efforts behind the scenes yield a seamless and peaceful transition to better ownership — in an ideal world, fan and community ownership. I hope I can play some role in helping that come about.
What about a football regulator?
A number of Tweets yesterday referred to an independent regulator — something mooted in the Fan-Led Review by the government. Because fans suffer from bad owners, the argument is more needs to be done. Fans also benefit from good owners — a huge social benefit outweighing the private benefit to an owner. That yields an economic argument for some intervention. Not necessarily governmental — it could be at sports league level.
The English Football League (EFL) has had a system in place for some years now — the much maligned “fit and proper owner’s test” — that potential owners of clubs must pass. The succession of bad owners and terrible outcomes for teams over the last decade and more — not least, the owners of many of the teams dropping out of the Football League — is testament to how well that test is performing. Arguably.
Football is a competitive business, and as the structure is fixed — 24 teams, 72 or 92 teams — it means there will always be some losers. Unlike in the business world, poorly performing firms aren’t taken over. They continue to exist. So there has to be, every season, an Oldham and a Scunthorpe.
But there’s also that Forest Green, that Accrington, that Harrogate. Arguably, good owners will pass a test designed to weed out bad owners, and hence a better system to root out bad owners wouldn’t affect the existence of good owners.
But equally, any bad owner’s test, if sufficiently strict, could lead to some good owners failing it inadvertently. False negatives. Investments lost to the game, potentially. But there is the rub: how valuable are those investments, really, and how certain are they, and can they be, ahead of any instalment of a new owner?
I believe there is plenty of scope for a more rigorous Fit and Proper Owner’s Test. I believe it ought to be on-going too. I believe it could be designed to ensure that good owners don’t fall foul of it. But even were it in place, I’m not sure it would make a difference, since two teams have to finish 91st and 92nd in the Football League, and make their exit, each season.
At the End of the Day…
My take on my team is that they’ve stood still. They never moved with the times, even despite being in the Premier League, the real vehicle of change in English football in the last thirty years. Because of that money from TV in the Premier League, clubs lower down the divisions spend to get there. It means that now, even in League Two, clubs on average lose a quarter of a million pounds a year according to Deloitte’s Football Finance Report.
Oldham’s ownership in the 1990s didn’t recognise this, and were not prepared to subsidise the club’s existence. There was a brief flirtation with this in the early 2000s with Chris Moore, before the ITV Digital collapse put paid to that. Since then, it’s been shoestring, for the most part, with in the current season, an attempt to make do with the lowest wage bill in the division.
The problem with that is that there’s a fairly solid relationship between wage expenditure and final league position — see below from Stefan Szymanski.
The plot isn’t from the current season, or even close to it. Though Scunthorpe then, as now, are at the bottom. But if you pay peanuts, you tend to get bad outcomes, as Oldham have. And that was fundamentally a choice of the owner. One of many, many very bad decisions made over the last 4 years.
Will things change in the coming season? It’s hard to see that happen, even getting beyond the possibility that the club can complete fixtures whilst the current owner remains in charge. Which suggests another season of struggle, even out of the league.
