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First Football Stories: Does your heart bleed for Gretna? |
Much is made of the influence of money and business interests in football. Fans and foes talk wistfully of the near-amateur nirvana of the game being played by and for people in their local communities. This was never quite true, of course. Even in its amateur origins in the 19th Century, many of football’s early stars shone in a public- school galaxy, removed from the lives and aspirations of most ‘ordinary people’.
It is true, though, that the rapid development of football as a national sport came at the grass-roots level, and progress was aided by improvements in transport and communications, for fans and players alike. Community business interests were keen to be represented and the self-made man of the Victorian Age played a role as both investor and philanthropist. Without such investment, many fledgling clubs would not even have emerged, nor success on the football pitch achieved.
The key question I suppose is whether you wear your heart on your sleeve where the hopes and aspirations of your local club are concerned, or do you build good business foundations and live within the often limited means that your local community can provide – both in terms of attendances and sponsorship? As a football fan, my head is in the clouds most of the time, whilst my feet are only firmly on the ground occasionally.
In the summer of 1995, Chelsea’s then owner Ken Bates and senior management colleagues, as well as manager Glenn Hoddle, met at the Marriott Hotel in Slough and agreed that wider commercial investment and outreach to established international players was required. A period of success followed before Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was attracted to and bought the club in 2003, leading to the most lucrative period in the club’s history, including winning the Champions League title in 2012.
Manchester City had moved to their new City of Manchester stadium in the same year as the Abramovich purchase of their London rivals, yet had had achieved only four mid-table finishes in the Premier League before being bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group in August 2008. Again, success on the pitch has followed the huge investment that has been made in the club, including four Premier League titles and two FA Cups.
Much of that success has of course to be put down to the new ideas and talents of the coaching staff at each club – and the ruthless hiring and firing regimes that accompanied them – as well as their ability to purchase quality players. However, success breeds success because, so the argument goes, money attracts the best talent which might otherwise go elsewhere.
Massive investment in our leading clubs from business interests in such non-traditional football hotspots as the Middle East, Far East and America has followed and is unlikely now to be halted.
Do enormously rich owners with no previous connection to, or history with our famous old clubs, really deserve our respect? If Abramovich declares that his heart is in Chelsea, it really does have to be taken with a pinch of expensive salt as his football club actually plays in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.
Indeed, Abramovich has frequently been criticised by groups of Chelsea fans and the club received a ban over its flouting of the rules concerning academy players. The City regime is facing a Champions League ban over Financial Fair Play, but would fans of either club wish away recent football success, prefer to play by the rules or preside over a return to ordinariness? The sheer size of their owners’ wealth makes it unlikely that those clubs’ stability will be substantially damaged anyway.
Perhaps not, but what of other clubs - traditional football communities that feel they will never again be able to compete for major football prizes without trying to copy such mega-rich business models for success? Is making as much money as possible from a far-flung fanbase and TV audience what really matters now?
25 years ago, Chelsea’s ‘Marriott Accord’ followed Blackburn Rovers winning the Premier League title, having been runners-up the previous season. Kenny Dalglish had masterminded the club’s football success, after being appointed by the club’s then millionaire owner Jack Walker, a local steelworks owner and lifelong Rovers supporter, in 1991. Expensive purchases of star players such as Alan Shearer, Chris Sutton and goalkeeper Tim Flowers undoubtedly spearheaded their success but, after Walker died in 2000, apart from winning a League Cup in 2002, the club’s football fortunes fell away. International investment arrived in the form of Venky’s from India who oversaw the club’s relegation to first the Championship and then League One - the first Premier League champions to fall into the third tier.
Again, mindful that the club had not been League Champions since 1913-14 – just before World War One broke out – and only really had an FA Cup Final defeat to Wolves in 1960 to remember from the ensuing 80 years (the Full Members Cup win in 1987 hardly constitutes a major trophy), could anyone in Blackburn really argue against taking the money in order to try to make a difference in football’s Modern Era?
If Rovers do not rise to those footballing heights again for another 80 years; if Chelsea or City somehow lose their huge international backing and go back to mid-table mediocrity, at least their fans’ dreams of unprecedented football glory will have been met – albeit temporarily.
However, regardless of whether investment comes from within a traditional football community or from multi-million-pound global sports interests, what if football success duly follows, but then the club’s very existence is put at risk because of the financial gamble? It’s one thing to dream of football success at any cost, but we don’t really mean that do we, not in the rational, thinking parts of our brains? If your club goes out of business altogether, the only dreams you are left with are for what might have been. What would you do with the rest of your life?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson suggested that ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ but I’m not sure that even his often melancholic poetry could have summed up what it feels like to lose such a lifelong love as a football club.
Lovers in 1754 were horrified to learn of Lord Hardwicke’s new Marriage Act - or, to give it its full title: "An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage” – which made it illegal to marry in England and Wales without your parents’ permission if you were under the age of 21. It was much easier to get married in Scotland and so the romantic age of elopement saw many young couples heading north to get married just over the border in a blacksmith’s shop in Gretna Green. Legend had it that touching the anvil within would bring good fortune where affairs of the heart were concerned.
An amateur football club called Gretna Green had existed in the town in Victorian times but went out of business in the 1920s. Servicemen returning after World War II joined forces with local workers to form a new club: Gretna FC. The club started life in the local Dumfries and District Junior League before crossing the border into England in 1947 to play in the Carlisle and District League. Here they stayed until 1982 when the joined the new Second Division of the Northern League. The largely amateur Northern League is the second oldest football league in the world, having been formed one year after the English Football League in 1889. Northern giants such as Newcastle United and Middlesbrough once competed in it.
Gretna progressed steadily and were promoted to the Northern Premier League in 1992 where they remained for the next 10 years. During their time in English football they also played in the FA Cup proper – the first Scottish club to do so since Queens Park in 1887.
However, Gretna harboured football ambitions back in the Scottish League and applied unsuccessfully for membership in both 1993 and 1999. They were finally admitted in 2002, replacing Airdrieonians.
Soon after this they were taken over by self-made millionaire Brooks Mileson, the eldest of five children, who hailed from the tough Pennywell estate in Sunderland. He broke his back after starting a landslide in a nearby quarry at just 11 years old. Doctors told him he would never walk again but, instead, he took up cross-country running, winning a bronze medal in the English junior championships in 1967.
This same drive and self-belief saw him amass a fortune – at one point estimated at around £75 million – from business interests in construction and insurance. Always a fan, his interests lay very much with grassroots football, donating money to more than 70 football clubs and football Trusts. He was a one-time president of Whitby Town, and tried to buy Carlisle United, before setting his sights on Gretna.
He took over the club just as they joined the Scottish League in 2002, ploughing in an estimated £8 million. Under manager Rowan Alexander – who had been in post as player-manager during their latter days in English football – the Anvils won three successive promotions, helped hugely by prolific striker Kenny Deuchar.
In 2007, despite leading the Scottish First Division by 12 points at one stage, and surviving a corrosive dispute involving Alexander, coach Davie Irons and Mileson, tiny Gretna won promotion to the Scottish Premier League (SPL) on the very last day of the season – April 28th, 2007 - beating Ross County 3.2 at County’s Victoria Park ground.
If this was the stuff of the most romantic of dreams, Gretna’s Scottish Cup odyssey the previous season was even harder to believe. On 13th May 2006 51,232 fans packed into Glasgow’s Hampden Park to see the 120th Scottish Cup Final, played between Heart of Midlothian and Gretna – playing that season in the Second Division and thus the first team from the third tier of Scottish football to reach a Scottish Cup Final.
Roared on by 12,000 fans (despite Gretna having an actual population of around 3,000) the underdogs went behind to a goal from Czech midfielder Rudi Skácel in the first half, before local boy Ryan McGuffie equalised just 14 minutes from time. As at the blacksmith’s anvil though, not all romantic journeys which begin with so much hope and goodwill end well: Gretna went on to lose 4.2 on penalties.
With their Raydale Park ground only able to house some 3,000 fans, it was deemed unsuitable for Scottish Premier League football and so they played their ‘home’ games at Motherwell’s Fir Park. Fantasy quickly turned to farce as Gretna began to really struggle on the field. Consequently, SPL games were often being played in front of crowds of less than 1,000, which did nothing for its standing in Scottish, let alone international football circles.
Mileson’s investment – while almost guaranteeing success in the lower leagues – had also engendered considerable resentment from fans of other Scottish football clubs, not unlike the ‘buying the league’ insults hurled at Jack Walker during the rise of Blackburn Rovers. Mileson became seriously ill with chronic fatigue syndrome and a brain infection, and withdrew his financial support, which effectively caused the club to go bankrupt with huge debts.
Few outside of the town lamented Gretna’s forced resignation from the Scottish Football League on 3rd June 2008, and subsequent liquidation as a club in August of that year.
Mileson died, alone, in November 2008, of a suspected heart attack which forced him to fall into a garden pond. Was it all worth it? Was he a true football fan or just on a personal ‘ego trip’, as once suggested by St Johnstone chairman Geoff Brown? A new phoenix club – Gretna 2008 – was formed shortly after Gretna FC’s demise, now playing back at Raydale Park in Scotland’s Lowland League, but will they ever cause hearts to flutter in the way that their predecessors did?
So, do we put our complete and unquestioning trust in someone - whether with rich but distant family connections like Chelsea or City, or a ‘man of the people’ who has made it big through hard graft and sheer determination as at Blackburn or Gretna? Should we believe – even swear to it – that they will truly look after us for the rest of our lives? If so, what happens if they are suddenly no longer with us; how do we go on without them?
Is it better to witness mediocrity every day of our lives or be blinded by a love that promises something so much better? Is football supposed to be a sometimes dull, but reliable, sustainable community business for the long-term, in sickness and in health – rather like a marriage – or should it be a thrilling and passionate affair of the heart: great while it lasts but leaving only memories when it doesn’t?
Part of the research for this article was done for our book – First Football Histories: The Chelsea FC Story
It is true, though, that the rapid development of football as a national sport came at the grass-roots level, and progress was aided by improvements in transport and communications, for fans and players alike. Community business interests were keen to be represented and the self-made man of the Victorian Age played a role as both investor and philanthropist. Without such investment, many fledgling clubs would not even have emerged, nor success on the football pitch achieved.
The key question I suppose is whether you wear your heart on your sleeve where the hopes and aspirations of your local club are concerned, or do you build good business foundations and live within the often limited means that your local community can provide – both in terms of attendances and sponsorship? As a football fan, my head is in the clouds most of the time, whilst my feet are only firmly on the ground occasionally.
In the summer of 1995, Chelsea’s then owner Ken Bates and senior management colleagues, as well as manager Glenn Hoddle, met at the Marriott Hotel in Slough and agreed that wider commercial investment and outreach to established international players was required. A period of success followed before Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was attracted to and bought the club in 2003, leading to the most lucrative period in the club’s history, including winning the Champions League title in 2012.
Manchester City had moved to their new City of Manchester stadium in the same year as the Abramovich purchase of their London rivals, yet had had achieved only four mid-table finishes in the Premier League before being bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group in August 2008. Again, success on the pitch has followed the huge investment that has been made in the club, including four Premier League titles and two FA Cups.
Much of that success has of course to be put down to the new ideas and talents of the coaching staff at each club – and the ruthless hiring and firing regimes that accompanied them – as well as their ability to purchase quality players. However, success breeds success because, so the argument goes, money attracts the best talent which might otherwise go elsewhere.
Massive investment in our leading clubs from business interests in such non-traditional football hotspots as the Middle East, Far East and America has followed and is unlikely now to be halted.
Do enormously rich owners with no previous connection to, or history with our famous old clubs, really deserve our respect? If Abramovich declares that his heart is in Chelsea, it really does have to be taken with a pinch of expensive salt as his football club actually plays in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.
Indeed, Abramovich has frequently been criticised by groups of Chelsea fans and the club received a ban over its flouting of the rules concerning academy players. The City regime is facing a Champions League ban over Financial Fair Play, but would fans of either club wish away recent football success, prefer to play by the rules or preside over a return to ordinariness? The sheer size of their owners’ wealth makes it unlikely that those clubs’ stability will be substantially damaged anyway.
Perhaps not, but what of other clubs - traditional football communities that feel they will never again be able to compete for major football prizes without trying to copy such mega-rich business models for success? Is making as much money as possible from a far-flung fanbase and TV audience what really matters now?
25 years ago, Chelsea’s ‘Marriott Accord’ followed Blackburn Rovers winning the Premier League title, having been runners-up the previous season. Kenny Dalglish had masterminded the club’s football success, after being appointed by the club’s then millionaire owner Jack Walker, a local steelworks owner and lifelong Rovers supporter, in 1991. Expensive purchases of star players such as Alan Shearer, Chris Sutton and goalkeeper Tim Flowers undoubtedly spearheaded their success but, after Walker died in 2000, apart from winning a League Cup in 2002, the club’s football fortunes fell away. International investment arrived in the form of Venky’s from India who oversaw the club’s relegation to first the Championship and then League One - the first Premier League champions to fall into the third tier.
Again, mindful that the club had not been League Champions since 1913-14 – just before World War One broke out – and only really had an FA Cup Final defeat to Wolves in 1960 to remember from the ensuing 80 years (the Full Members Cup win in 1987 hardly constitutes a major trophy), could anyone in Blackburn really argue against taking the money in order to try to make a difference in football’s Modern Era?
If Rovers do not rise to those footballing heights again for another 80 years; if Chelsea or City somehow lose their huge international backing and go back to mid-table mediocrity, at least their fans’ dreams of unprecedented football glory will have been met – albeit temporarily.
However, regardless of whether investment comes from within a traditional football community or from multi-million-pound global sports interests, what if football success duly follows, but then the club’s very existence is put at risk because of the financial gamble? It’s one thing to dream of football success at any cost, but we don’t really mean that do we, not in the rational, thinking parts of our brains? If your club goes out of business altogether, the only dreams you are left with are for what might have been. What would you do with the rest of your life?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson suggested that ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ but I’m not sure that even his often melancholic poetry could have summed up what it feels like to lose such a lifelong love as a football club.
Lovers in 1754 were horrified to learn of Lord Hardwicke’s new Marriage Act - or, to give it its full title: "An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage” – which made it illegal to marry in England and Wales without your parents’ permission if you were under the age of 21. It was much easier to get married in Scotland and so the romantic age of elopement saw many young couples heading north to get married just over the border in a blacksmith’s shop in Gretna Green. Legend had it that touching the anvil within would bring good fortune where affairs of the heart were concerned.
An amateur football club called Gretna Green had existed in the town in Victorian times but went out of business in the 1920s. Servicemen returning after World War II joined forces with local workers to form a new club: Gretna FC. The club started life in the local Dumfries and District Junior League before crossing the border into England in 1947 to play in the Carlisle and District League. Here they stayed until 1982 when the joined the new Second Division of the Northern League. The largely amateur Northern League is the second oldest football league in the world, having been formed one year after the English Football League in 1889. Northern giants such as Newcastle United and Middlesbrough once competed in it.
Gretna progressed steadily and were promoted to the Northern Premier League in 1992 where they remained for the next 10 years. During their time in English football they also played in the FA Cup proper – the first Scottish club to do so since Queens Park in 1887.
However, Gretna harboured football ambitions back in the Scottish League and applied unsuccessfully for membership in both 1993 and 1999. They were finally admitted in 2002, replacing Airdrieonians.
Soon after this they were taken over by self-made millionaire Brooks Mileson, the eldest of five children, who hailed from the tough Pennywell estate in Sunderland. He broke his back after starting a landslide in a nearby quarry at just 11 years old. Doctors told him he would never walk again but, instead, he took up cross-country running, winning a bronze medal in the English junior championships in 1967.
This same drive and self-belief saw him amass a fortune – at one point estimated at around £75 million – from business interests in construction and insurance. Always a fan, his interests lay very much with grassroots football, donating money to more than 70 football clubs and football Trusts. He was a one-time president of Whitby Town, and tried to buy Carlisle United, before setting his sights on Gretna.
He took over the club just as they joined the Scottish League in 2002, ploughing in an estimated £8 million. Under manager Rowan Alexander – who had been in post as player-manager during their latter days in English football – the Anvils won three successive promotions, helped hugely by prolific striker Kenny Deuchar.
In 2007, despite leading the Scottish First Division by 12 points at one stage, and surviving a corrosive dispute involving Alexander, coach Davie Irons and Mileson, tiny Gretna won promotion to the Scottish Premier League (SPL) on the very last day of the season – April 28th, 2007 - beating Ross County 3.2 at County’s Victoria Park ground.
If this was the stuff of the most romantic of dreams, Gretna’s Scottish Cup odyssey the previous season was even harder to believe. On 13th May 2006 51,232 fans packed into Glasgow’s Hampden Park to see the 120th Scottish Cup Final, played between Heart of Midlothian and Gretna – playing that season in the Second Division and thus the first team from the third tier of Scottish football to reach a Scottish Cup Final.
Roared on by 12,000 fans (despite Gretna having an actual population of around 3,000) the underdogs went behind to a goal from Czech midfielder Rudi Skácel in the first half, before local boy Ryan McGuffie equalised just 14 minutes from time. As at the blacksmith’s anvil though, not all romantic journeys which begin with so much hope and goodwill end well: Gretna went on to lose 4.2 on penalties.
With their Raydale Park ground only able to house some 3,000 fans, it was deemed unsuitable for Scottish Premier League football and so they played their ‘home’ games at Motherwell’s Fir Park. Fantasy quickly turned to farce as Gretna began to really struggle on the field. Consequently, SPL games were often being played in front of crowds of less than 1,000, which did nothing for its standing in Scottish, let alone international football circles.
Mileson’s investment – while almost guaranteeing success in the lower leagues – had also engendered considerable resentment from fans of other Scottish football clubs, not unlike the ‘buying the league’ insults hurled at Jack Walker during the rise of Blackburn Rovers. Mileson became seriously ill with chronic fatigue syndrome and a brain infection, and withdrew his financial support, which effectively caused the club to go bankrupt with huge debts.
Few outside of the town lamented Gretna’s forced resignation from the Scottish Football League on 3rd June 2008, and subsequent liquidation as a club in August of that year.
Mileson died, alone, in November 2008, of a suspected heart attack which forced him to fall into a garden pond. Was it all worth it? Was he a true football fan or just on a personal ‘ego trip’, as once suggested by St Johnstone chairman Geoff Brown? A new phoenix club – Gretna 2008 – was formed shortly after Gretna FC’s demise, now playing back at Raydale Park in Scotland’s Lowland League, but will they ever cause hearts to flutter in the way that their predecessors did?
So, do we put our complete and unquestioning trust in someone - whether with rich but distant family connections like Chelsea or City, or a ‘man of the people’ who has made it big through hard graft and sheer determination as at Blackburn or Gretna? Should we believe – even swear to it – that they will truly look after us for the rest of our lives? If so, what happens if they are suddenly no longer with us; how do we go on without them?
Is it better to witness mediocrity every day of our lives or be blinded by a love that promises something so much better? Is football supposed to be a sometimes dull, but reliable, sustainable community business for the long-term, in sickness and in health – rather like a marriage – or should it be a thrilling and passionate affair of the heart: great while it lasts but leaving only memories when it doesn’t?
Part of the research for this article was done for our book – First Football Histories: The Chelsea FC Story
