Being a fan-owned club can be a deeply special experience, but never let the sense of reward and ownership overshadow the reality of life making ends meet with the lights off and your hands half-tied. Newport County empathise with that more than most.
Last summer, with money desperately needed for investment in the playing staff, Newport supporters launched a player’s fund to try and do their bit. One fan, a six-year-old girl named Olivia, did a sponsored walk, aiming to complete as many laps of the Rodney Parade pitch as she could in 90 minutes during a pre-season friendly against Cheltenham Town.
Olivia raised almost £1,000 and gave it all to the fund. As Newport prepare to face Manchester United in the FA Cup fourth round, there will be calculations made of the vast financial gap between football clubs in England’s professional leagues. Olivia, her idea, her work and her donation, are the perfect representation of an imperfect climate.
Newport County know hardship like few others. There have been times when they experienced nothing else. To supporters, it feels like their entire modern history has been spent recovering from calamity and that can inadvertently threaten to dampen the good times. Success is always caveated and, too often, has merely been a prelude to the bad joke at their expense.
Newport have rarely been trendsetters, but in the 1980s welcomed a US investor to south Wales with the now typical promises of lavish spending and ambitious aims of promotion. Jerry Sherman was drawn here because he hailed from Newport, Washington and within years most wished he had been born elsewhere.
The old ground, Somerton Park, was sold (Sherman had promised to build a new one). Bills weren’t paid (Sherman had promised that the money was there). Newport were relegated first from the third tier and then the Football League (Sherman had promised to take this club higher).
By the time he had finished, Newport were being liquidated, reformed and starting again in the Hellenic League. It took Newport County until 1999 to even get their name back. As for Sherman: sentenced to a seven-year sentence in 2007 for (unrelated) fraud.
Newport’s subsequent nomadic existence is another embodiment of their struggle. With the local council considering the reformed club merely a continuation of the old, liquidated entity, they were refused permission to use Somerton Park. Thus began an exile that became the club’s nickname as a badge of honour: Moreton-in-Marsh (85 miles away), a brief stint back in Newport followed by Gloucester, Spytty Park (Somerton Park was now a housing estate) and now Rodney Parade.
Life is always precious and fragile. After a 10-year rental agreement to play at Rodney Parade ended last summer (the ground is owned by the Welsh Rugby Union), a short-term extension was agreed in late July. Another, longer-term deal will have to be thrashed out. The EFL will require clubs to have a 10-year lease on their home grounds from the start of the 2025-6 season.
Or have you heard the one about the EuroMillions winner, who landed £45.5 million in June 2009 and, three years later, became the club’s chairman? Les Scadding arrived with grand intentions for the community club in the town where he lived, but quickly began to live beyond its means. Former manager Justin Edinburgh, sadly no longer with us, said it simply and said it best: Newport were “using this year’s money to fund last year’s debt”. That cycle cannot repeat forever.
Through it all, Newport County was loved, cherished and saved by its supporters – usually there was nobody else. It was they who reformed the club in 1989, they who campaigned for a return back to south Wales and they who agreed a takeover from “Lottery Les” in 2015.
The club needed to raise £195,000 alarmingly quickly and yet supporters raised significantly more to ensure that overdrafts could be cleared and the Supporters’ Trust installed as owners. That season and the one after, Newport County finished 90th in the Football League. Mere survival, on and off the pitch, was cause for celebration.
Newport County thrived under that supporter ownership. The appointment of Michael Flynn was a masterstroke, a man of Newport leading a team to hitherto unthinkable heights. Newport twice reached the League Two play-off final, but could never quite escape their own reality. Twice they lost, twice in extra-time: a controversial 107th-minute penalty and a 119th-minute winner were the only things stopping them from touching the sky.
But, the theme will be familiar now, life has been hard. The Trust has rarely had “comfortable” money and the departure of Flynn to Walsall laid bare how much the manager had distracted from the cold reality of League Two life.
When, in June 2023, an annual loss of £1.2 million was announced, the Trust accepted that the club needed to seek alternative investment.
Without the lucrative cup runs of the Flynn era, a hole had appeared that fundraising – as extraordinary as that had always been – could not fill. Another emergency was arriving over the hill.
To some, this struggle will barely register. Clubs like Newport County only tend to come onto the radar when they draw a big name in the cup or teeter on the edge of the financial abyss. The circus will roll into town for a day with its accidental patronising and well-meaning goodwill that counts for very little at all.
But this is about more than a football club. Newport is not an affluent city. At the last count, more than a third of children in Newport West lived in poverty.
In 2021 it was calculated that 23 of the city’s 95 areas registered amongst the top 10 per cent of deprived areas in Wales. They know only too well what can happen here when the Exiles fall out of the Football League. Newport needs a football club and so Newport needs a league football club.
Hope somehow springs eternal, although few invest emotionally in it until hope has transformed into more tangible evidence. In September, former Swansea City chairman Huw Jenkins made an offer to become a new majority shareholder.
Later that month, Trust members voted unanimously (455 of 464 in favour) in favour of Jenkins’ bid. After a wait while all information was provided to the EFL, Jenkins’ takeover was confirmed on Wednesday afternoon. The responses from supporters, the relief and the hope, offered a glow that should warm all football supporters. The next age has landed.
This weekend, Newport County face what Graham Coughlan calls “the biggest game of Newport County’s history”. That’s probably true by some measures: the sense of occasion, the tradition of the competition, the eyes of the world on this south Wales town, the revenue at stake and earned simply by reaching this stage. The estimated payday, £400,000, is vital to balancing the books.
But it’s also the chance to lay down a marker for the next era of this club, a celebration of what might finally come to a club that desperately deserves it. These supporters have shouldered the responsibility for carrying the club over the last decade.
Now it’s time for them to sit and watch someone else treasure it even half as much as they did. Manchester United coming to town is a reward for their service. It might also be the marker of a new age for a football club that has always battled just to keep itself keeping on.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/KtDZwb0
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