Bolton Wanderers supporters are desperate for Saturday to bring the best news, naturally. They have sold 30,000 tickets in 10 days, and more will follow. Their team did silly things this season, like dropping points against teams they had beaten 7-0 and drawing six of their last 11 league games to slip into the play-offs. Saturday is their second chance.
It is also an opportunity for League One to complete its redemption year. In the automatic promotion positions were Portsmouth and Derby County, two former Premier League clubs who fell into financial ruin and ignominy and are now breathing more easily again. Bolton want to make it three.
No team has a rightful place to be anywhere, but pride and expectation still murmur in your subconsciousness. This town, this club, this stadium want to be back in the Championship because it represents a chance to atone for past misery. The nerves themselves are proof of recovery and normalcy. For years, matters off the pitch tended to hog the reserves of dread and fear. This is progress.
For Bolton fans, every game is a blessing. It is not melodramatic to say that there easily might not be a club left here at all, at least not in its current state. The stadium, with its cycling name changes but still the Reebok in the hearts of the many, could be a statue to something that soared and then careered downward into the dust. AFC Bolton Wanderers would be a North West Counties Football League team.
In August 2019, five years ago that now feel like half a lifetime, Bolton’s administrators warned that the club would be placed into liquidation within days. A potential takeover by Football Ventures looked to have collapsed and the EFL had given Bolton 14 days to complete one or face expulsion. To those outside of this community, it may seem unlikely, just another football club that sailed close to the wind but was saved. But here they know how close they came.
Then, owner Ken Anderson was the baddy. Anderson had become grossly unpopular with supporters (and had barely tried to repair the relationship) and began using the club’s official website as his scornful teenage diary, attacking fans, protests and anyone else who seemed to suggest that things weren’t going well. Those statements became appointment reading, but only as rubber-necking for those outside Bolton.
Anderson was unfit for purpose. In September 2018, Bolton only avoided administration after former owner Eddie Davies gave the club £5m before he passed away. Players had effectively gone on strike in preseason over unpaid wages and bonuses; they issued a statement about their treatment (and were criticised by the owner-chairman for it).
And, to end it all, Anderson was accused of hampering the eventual takeover despite it being the only means of keeping Bolton Wanderers alive.
But Anderson merely exacerbated (and mismanaged) existing economic woe. He inherited Icarus FC, one that had overpaid on transfer fees and wages in an attempt to keep their cult hero team dream alive. When relegation from the Premier League in 2012 was not immediately followed by promotion, Bolton lived a top flight lifestyle on EFL budgets.
By 2014, debts were calculated to be £168.3m, almost seven times the cost of building the then-Reebok Stadium. The only surprise is that it took until May 2019 to enter administration. The only other surprise is that they got out of it without falling further.
It’s hard to overstate just how miserable an experience following Bolton was then. There are too many examples to mention, but one stands out. Several days before the takeover’s completion, Bolton lost 5-0 at home to Ipswich Town in front of 5,454 supporters. Because administration had caused so many senior players to leave, Bolton’s matchday squad contained 12 players aged 18 or under.
What is often overlooked – and time tends to shrink itself in hindsight – is just how long that period of deep torment lasted, those many months when nobody could see any escape. Between April 2017 and October 2020, a period of three-and-a-half years, Bolton won just 27 matches in all competitions.
This breadth and depth of mess could never be solved quickly. In the first season post-takeover, with no chance to recruit players and with the club only edging away from the precipice, Bolton finished 23rd in the third tier and were relegated to a level they had not experienced since 1988.
That became a symbol in itself. The stability under Phil Neal, the rise under Bruce Rioch and Colin Todd, the celebrity, fame and European achievement under Sam Allardyce – what was left other than the fumes of happy memories? Where did we end up other than where we started, battered and bruised?
Over those five years since, when hurt and mistrust was finally fumigated and maybe, just maybe, for good, two heroes stand out. The first is Ian Evatt, a manager who can boast the second-longest serving tenure solely existing in the EFL, that patience vacuum.
Evatt has not been perfect – how could anyone be in this scenario? But he won promotion from League Two in his first full season while rebuilding the squad, established Bolton back in the third tier, took them to two consecutive play-off campaigns and won the EFL Trophy. The sense of permanence itself is important. Evatt has passed 200 games in charge – nobody else since Allardyce came close.
But far more than Evatt, far more than anyone else, Sharon Brittan is the saviour of this story. She was the foreperson of Football Ventures, who saved the club with their takeover. She is the chairperson, who calls the shots. She is beloved by every supporter and deserves it all.
This week, Brittan spoke in front of MPs at a select committee about the importance of wealth distribution within the English pyramid and the desperate need to address the self-interest of the Premier League and its clubs. Within that remit, she reflected upon the situation she found at Bolton.
“There were staff who hadn’t been paid, they were eating from foodbanks, people hadn’t paid their mortgages, they hadn’t paid their rent,” Brittan said.
“I do a lot of work in mental health and people’s wellbeing was beyond catastrophic. I have seen first-hand the impact of having the wrong owners at football clubs and the effect that has on the community.”
Brittan has been successful because she is the antidote to everything that came before her. She provides the honesty and transparency that supporters long craved. She refuses to sugarcoat reality, good and bad.
She has been perfectly candid about Bolton continuing to lose money because sustainability is so hard when you have been losing money for so long before. She has stated, quite openly, that promotion on Saturday will cost the ownership group £20m if they wish to be competitive. Bolton’s ostrich era is dead.
Bolton’s chairperson also understands that this only works if Bolton as a town and a population is kept close to the bosom of Bolton as a football club. That is where the most work has been done, renewing the connections with local business, the Supporters’ Trust and Bolton Wanderers in the Community. It’s reported that Bolton have already sold 15,000 season tickets for next season with no knowledge of which division the club will be in. Wind back to that 5,454 crowd and reflect on how far they have come.
Wembley has already hosted one breakout day for Bolton’s recovery, when 34,000 travelled down for the 4-0 EFL Trophy final win over Plymouth Argyle. That was the release, the party; this Saturday is business. It provokes the twisting tummies of tension, that unique feeling of wanting something to be over and yet needing to appreciate the moment.
Even amongst all that, Bolton supporters understand that Saturday need not define their future. Make the Championship and they will hope to survive there, stay in League One and they will aim for automatic promotion next year. The focus is on football. There is a chance to be proud and to express gratitude, and then to watch Bolton Wanderers standing on their own two feet at the national stadium. All of that is an intense privilege.
Nobody says it better than Evatt: “When I walk out on Saturday and see the white army there it makes everything worthwhile. All the hard work, the early mornings, the late nights. I will be immensely proud and I will take a look over and say ‘thank you’ to everything and everyone. After that it’s strictly business and we are there to win a game.”
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