Harrogate has never been a football town. It is an emphatically middle-class North Yorkshire enclave, recognised as the most expensive place to live in the north of England.
The average home price on Fulwith Mill Lane, on the south edge of the town, is a shade over £1.5million. Harrogate attracts tourists from around the world keen to sample a sepia-tinted version of chocolate-box England.
The town lies both 15, and a million, miles away from city-centre Leeds. On a good day the traditionally dressed waiting staff at Betty’s, the original world-famous Yorkshire tea shop, can do 1,400 covers. That’s comfortably more than Harrogate Town’s average home attendance.
The club has spent most of its existence in the Midland Football League, Northern Counties East League and Northern Premier League, existing firmly on the periphery of Yorkshire football.
Harrogate will always be subservient to the Leeds United sprawl, home to an official supporters club that have this week basked in the glory of arrival in the Promised Land. A borough of 160,000 people contains many more Whites than Sulphurites.
Instead, Harrogate is the home of footballers not football clubs. England manager Gareth Southgate’s country pile overlooks Swinsty Reservoir, and you could count yourself unlucky to spend a week in the area and not bump into a former Leeds United player or manager – David O’Leary, George Graham, Danny Mills.
When Marcelo Bielsa first moved to England, he lived at the town’s five-star Rudding Park hotel before choosing something a little less grandiose in nearby Wetherby.
But Simon Weaver is flourishing amid that subservience. Appointed in 2009 at the age of just 31, Weaver has spent more than a quarter of his life in charge of Harrogate Town. That makes him the longest-serving manager in English professional football by more than three years, remarkable for a man still in his first coaching job in the game.
We speak four days before a play-off semi-final against Boreham Wood and a potential Wembley final on 2 August. “An awful lot has happened in my life – marriage, two children – and through all of that I’ve managed over 500 games,” he tells i.
“But I’m not walking into the same setup as I was 11 years ago; I’ve effectively managed two clubs. Going professional in 2017 totally relaunched Harrogate Town. It allowed us to train full-time, but more importantly it allowed us to create a vision of what we wanted to see on the pitch: Young, aspirational individuals transforming the club. Doing that forged an identity that took us to the next level.”
In Weaver’s first season as manager, Harrogate finished bottom of the Conference North and were saved only by Northwich Victoria’s financial implosion. When chairman Bill Fotherby agreed to sell the club in 2011, it was Weaver’s father who purchased it. If that provokes obvious suspicions of nepotism, they lose all weight when the manager is achieving record-breaking success. This father-and-son team have taken Harrogate Town further than anyone ever thought possible. After turning professional, Harrogate reached the fifth tier for the first time in the club’s history in 2018, made the National League play-offs in 2019 and in 2020 finished second after a curtailed season. They were 12th favourites for promotion a year ago and have the fifth lowest average attendance in the division.
Win at Wembley, and Harrogate could claim to be the smallest Football League club in history.
The National League is packed with wizened non-league clubs and former Football League staples desperately trying to recapture old glories. Harrogate Town are proudly different.
“It’s not a hardened non-league setup that will intimidate by name and location,” Weaver says.
“Harrogate is a lovely place; there’s no point denying that. And you can’t be the antithesis of that and hope to be authentic. We learnt from mistakes, and realised that this could only work if we understood what Harrogate would want to be associated with and proud of. By standing for what the town stands for, and creating a mirror image of that on the pitch, the identity persists.”
Harrogate’s manager is realistic. Even if they make the Football League this or next season, attendances will not swell much beyond 2,000. The Leeds commuters that call the town home will never be swayed in their loyalty. But rather than Leeds United being a footballing shadow that casts itself across their Wetherby Road ground, a symbiotic relationship can be established that serves both clubs’ needs.
“I really hope that we can continue to work together, and clearly promotion would aid that. We’re not in competition with Leeds United; we’re on different levels. But we can bring through youngsters, we give them minutes and we like to think that we’re a mini-Leeds – energy, hunger, fast pressing. We’re not a Sunday league side anymore, and we’re only just down the road. It can work hand-in-hand.”
Harrogate Town do not seek to be the EFL’s Next Big Thing. Their only wish is that they create a football club that can sit snugly in its surroundings and pick up a few admirers along the way for staying true to what they believe in.
The last 11 years have flown by for the Weavers. Their greatest hope is that the original dream is only just starting to be realised.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2OShC0z
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