Why I‘m not sure the current protests are the best strategy against Oldham Athletic’s Owner

Many years ago I joined in with the only real protests I’ve ever been part of — Stop The Rot. At the time, Oldham Athletic were several years into the long and slow decline that leaves us where we are, at the end of the 2020/21 season, finishing 86th. Back then, in 1997/98, the time of Stop the Rot, we finished 20th in League One, 64th, having just a few years previously finished 19th in the Premier League.

At the time, it seemed mind numbingly obvious where the problem lay for the club — the owners, JW Lees, a brewery within spitting distance of my childhood home. So a campaign was organised — Carl Marsden did huge amounts, and I still owe the man many a drink (he always told me that as I was a student he’d be buying). We even took a coach trip to where the owners at the time lived to make our points.

But despite our efforts to make things uncomfortable for the owners, they didn’t budge. I’ve no reason to believe it was stubbornness, more just a simple lack of offers coming along.

Eventually, new ownership did appear for the club. In 2001 the now-disgraced Chris Moore took over, promising the Premier League in five years, riding the wave of ITV Digital’s ill-fated move into Football League television coverage. Oldham fans know exactly how all that turned out. A couple of years of challenge towards the top end of the table, two of Oldham’s five top-half finishes the club has managed in 30 years since 1990/91, before administration in 2003 — thankfully before 10 point deductions were introduced.

At the time that we protested, many told us we shouldn’t protest. Who else would come in? Would they really take us to better places? Shouldn’t we be thankful for what we have?

It’s an exercise in the counter factual to think what might have happened had JW Lees not sold up. I doubt Stop The Rot really had much influence in their decision to sell once Moore came in flashing the cash.

Would steady ownership over the last 20 years by a company heavily invested in the local area have been better for the club? Well, Lees didn’t come back in to help out when the club went into administration — not to blame them for it, but more to say that by then they didn’t see Oldham Athletic as any viable part of their business structure — even the minimal one that they’d been in the 70s and 80s (see this WSC archive article for detail).

Ownership moved from Middleton-based JW Lees, to Oxfordshire-based (it’s almost like ownership was stalking me — or vice versa — I’ve lived in Oxfordshire since 2002) Chris Moore, to the American “three amigos” reduced somewhat to one in Simon Corney, and now to the Dubai-based Moroccan Abdallah Lemsagem. I’ve had a few trips to the States, and a couple to Saudi Arabia so I think the stalking has stopped.

But the point is, ownership has moved further and further away from Boundary Park, Oldham, both in distance, and culturally. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — football needs to avoid being insular, needs to be welcoming to all who are willing to support its existence. But it does likely mean a learning curve for those who come in.

The Latics’ American owners presided over two decades in League Two, English football’s third tier, in a time period where it became costlier and costlier simply to maintain a team even at that level, as the riches of the Premier League filtered down. Absentee ownership like that of Lees wouldn’t have cut the mustard in the way it did in the 1970s and 1980s when the Football League kept revenues much more equitably distributed.

Nonetheless, the American owners clearly left Latics in quite the mess, with part of the ground still owned by those previous owners, and all sorts of other things going on when Moroccan Abdallah Lemsagem turned up allegedly literally flashing the cash in 2018.

Nonetheless the chaos at Latics ratcheted up a gear even from the times under Corney of appointing IRA sympathisers with minimal coaching experience as manager, of players being paid late and attempts to sign jailed footballers. Players still weren’t paid at times, others have been exiled, and many after leaving have fired broadsides at the owners. And the rate of managerial turnover increased yet further.

In recent weeks major sponsors have walked out acrimoniously, and there’s been upheaval at board level. Added to a limp finish, another bottom half one, another negative goal difference one (even if we scored lots of goals…), and it’s not surprising there’s huge levels of unrest amongst the fans. It’s easy to imagine that had fans been in the stadium this season (with a miserable club record set of 15 home defeats in 23 matches), there would have been some deeply unsavoury scenes.

So why, given this, am I reluctant to offer anything more than lukewarm support to efforts to encourage (perhaps force would be a better word) the owner, Abdallah Lemsagem, to sell his ownership of the club?

It’s not because I now, as someone twenty years older, might believe that things can’t get worse. They of course can (Bury, York and Chesterfield, amongst many others, make this clear), but that’s not the point.

It’s more that I think that football has changed significantly in the last twenty years such that there just aren’t as many folk willing, or able, to stump up the cash to bankroll a team, even at League One level (let alone the Championship, where Oldham spent most of the 1970s and 1980s).

Football at the moment simply isn’t sustainable, hoping for sufficiently rich owners to come along. Especially, regrettably, for a place like Oldham. Football success is moving south where clubs can extract more of the wealth from the local area.

But if I’m wrong, and they do, they surely want to invest in a place where they will at least get some emotional, or non-monetary return, to their investment. Any such potential owner would know about the murky and complicated financial situation at Oldham, with one owner for part of the stadium, and the former owners still having the land surrounding. They’d want, surely, to be able to come in and receive the patient support of the fan base, and be able to make mistakes along the way as they got into the business of ownership. I imagine — but perhaps I’m wrong.

As someone who took part in sit-in protests at games, who hurled abuse at the owners, boycotted their products (I still haven’t drunk Lees beer for decades), and visited the leafy villages of the owners of the club to protest loudly, I’ve done it — and I get it. I’ve done the things I don’t think we should do now. But I don’t think it presents a club in a way that is more attractive to potential owners.

I think owners can remain immune to pressures, should they wish to. I also think owners will sell a club if a viable offer comes along, almost regardless of what protests we might put in place. And I believe (not based on any hard facts) that it’s more likely a good offer comes along if a wealthy individual sees a club with a set of fans doing things that are constructive towards the survival and prospering of the club (regardless of its owners).

And, on the financial sustainability side of things, I don’t think it gets us anywhere to keep relying on this possibility of a rich owner coming along. Exeter City are a fan-owned club, and community ownership is something that exists in much more further down the pyramid. It’s a structure that much better reflects the relationship between a football club and its town than the rich-owner model.

Exeter City make it clear that such a fan-owned structure can be consistent with success at Football League level, too, given they have challenged at the top of League Two for many years now.

I think the steps Oldham Athletic fans should be taking should be focussed on making a constructive proposal, making a club worth investing in, that someone looking in would think “here’s a club I want to take far”.

Push The Boundary, like Stop The Rot way back when, have built up excellent capital in the last few years. They’ve pushed the agenda, as per their apt name. What I wonder is whether they can keep pushing the agenda in the direction of making the club the club we want it to be. The PTB retro shirts are a great example of this — it allows fans to show their support for the club whilst also making a statement.

I wonder if we as a club and a set of fans can be saying to potential investors “buy us”, rather than telling the current owner to sell up. A petition to an as yet unknown future owner — please buy us because we’re great.