The comments left under the post are brutal.
“Embarrassing,” says one. “Disgraceful,” is another. “The worst York City team I have ever witnessed,” reads a third. And they’re the more charitable ones.
“This is a direct strong message to Matt Uggla, sell the club now to someone who knows what they are doing,” writes one fan. It’s half-time, York are 3-0 down to Altrincham, anchored to the foot of the National League and heading for a 6-1 defeat. This is mid-March and the Facebook comments sum up the toxic mood.
Fast forward 177 days and i is speaking to Uggla, the York’s 30-year-old co-owner, from his office at the club’s training ground over Zoom. Apart from an energy-saving light bulb which keeps switching off and plunging him into darkness, the mood is buoyant. York are flying high in the National League after a summer of impressive recruitment with a popular manager in charge.
After a decade in the doldrums, it feels like a switch has been flipped on in this corner of North Yorkshire.
“I can feel the positivity all around now, people saying things like ‘It’s our year,'” Uggla says now. “I’m happy with how it’s going but I do remember where we were.
“I know things can change quickly. March was a low. I can’t lie, it hurt.
“I felt a bit depressed because my intentions were never bad. But ultimately it’s helped us get where we are now.”
Those desperate days prompted a complete reset of strategy and bracingly honest inquest into what had gone wrong. The Altrincham defeat turned out to be the start of a revival rather than a staging point on more regression.
Under Adam Hinshelwood, the bright young manager with a free-flowing, attacking philosophy that Uggla plucked from Worthing to replace Neal Ardley, a stunning unbeaten run followed. National League status was retained on the final day of the season.
Uggla is not used to failure. The son of Canadian entrepreneur Lance, a financial data tycoon with a net worth north of £650m, his background is in property and investments, previously working for the family office. But football has always been his biggest passion.
A lifelong Arsenal fan – he has kept his season ticket but says the club “doesn’t have the hold on my emotions it once did” – it was during Covid and shortly after the birth of his first son that he decided to get serious about owning a club, with the backing of his parents.
Before York there was an ill-fated takeover attempt at Yeovil Town. “An absolute mess, lawless,” he says now, looking back. “I felt like we got scapegoated for the troubles which were deep, deep issues.”
Buying a 51 per cent stake in York through 394 Sports, the company he co-owns with mother Julie-Ann, was smoother. “We did a lot of due diligence through the leagues. We wanted to find one that had fallen from grace a little bit but had the chance to go far,” he explains.
“The big metric for that is the fanbase here. You’ve also got a great city here with a big enough population to compare it to somewhere like Bournemouth, Luton and clubs that have proven you can go all the way to the Premier League.”
Expectations were high but reality soon impeded.
“We made a lot of mistakes when we first got the club,” Uggla admits.
“When we came in we realised why the club has been where it is for so long. From the outside it’s a big club in a big city but it’s almost like it had been left to rot for 10 to 20 years. That was quite shocking.
“We were playing catch up with other teams and, to be honest, our background isn’t in football.
“I could tell you a lot about the Premier League but if you asked me back then about players in the National League and how much they should be earning I didn’t know.
“If you’d said to me £3,000-a-week is reasonable when players in the Premier League are on £300,000 I probably think it makes sense. We rushed, didn’t have enough time to learn and we made mistakes in terms of our recruitment.”
He cycled through two managers as well, sacking Ardley who “didn’t feel like the right fit”. This time Uggla did his due diligence. Hinshelwood – whose son Jack plays for Brighton – was identified for his style of play and character.
“You want a manager on the way up rather than the way down. We met a few times, I just clicked,” he said.
After initially watering down his attacking principles, the ownership urged him to go back to what he knew.
That, combined with the transformative effect of signing Marvin Armstrong from Barnet, carried them to safety and focused minds.
“When we stayed up I thought ‘We got away with that one, let’s make sure it never happens again’,” Uggla says.
To understand how York got there in the first place, you probably need to speak to lifelong fans like Michael Miles.
The 51-year-old, who set up the brilliant throwback fanzine Y-Front eight years ago and still owns, has seen his beloved club running out at Manchester City and winning at Manchester United. For most of his adult life they have been a Football League fixture. But two words still bring him out in a cold sweat: Curzon Ashton.
“Curzon Ashton is our Vietnam,” he quips. York spent five years in the National League North, playing village teams and – more often than not – losing to them.
“We could never get a result at Curzon Ashton. We played five or six times, we never won once. Three managers lost their job either on the day or just after. Honestly, people wake up in sweats about going there.”
A decade of bad decisions – from appointing Jackie McNamara to the divisive ownership of Jason McGill and administration – had left them in the football wilderness.
“Everything at the club was toxic and had been for as long as he could remember,” he recalls.
Just as painful as the ownership issues was the emotional wrench of moving from former ground Bootham Crescent, with the pandemic preventing supporters from even getting to say goodbye.
The new ground, an out-of-town new build, was greeted with scepticism. But the LNER Community Stadium has attracted a new generation of fans.
“The problem at York for a generation is the majority of people will go and watch Leeds United,” Miles enthuses.
“There’d be 1,000 or 1500 people going off to Elland Road every Saturday but that has changed now, we have kids supporting York for the first time in a generation.
“Maybe they felt a bit intimidated at Bootham, people had been standing in the same place but they’ve claimed the seats behind the goal and created an atmosphere.
“We’re getting twice as many as we were getting at Bootham Crescent so it has been worth it.”
Now, under Uggla, who retains the majority stake with 25 per cent owned by a silent partner and the final quarter by the club’s Supporters Trust, Miles believes “the buzz is back”.
The Ugglas are certainly serious about this project. i understands they have already invested £3m in the club – some to improve the medical department and infrastructure (a gym has been constructed at the training ground to replace a previous arrangement where players were using a local council-run facility but limited to five at a time) but a hefty chunk to pay off players on fat contracts who “didn’t share our vision of where we want to go.”
“Over the summer we said we’d rip a lot of this out and start again,” he says.
“So we had to give some heavy payouts to players to leave the club if we didn’t think they had the right attitude for us or weren’t in the plans.
“If we hadn’t – and left it as a natural cycle because these players have longer contracts – you’re not going to be able to evolve and get to the next stage until they’re out of contract.
“So we thought ‘let’s suck it up, hold up our hands and get on with it’. We started again with a lot more knowledge and if you look at this summer I don’t think one player we’ve brought in has looked out of place.”
The club’s wage budget now mirrors what Uggla sees as the “magic number” of £1.8m-a-year that took Stockport and Notts County out of the National League. The immediate aim – within two years – is promotion but there are bigger goals.
“If you’re talking real long-term the ambition is there and the club has the potential to go as far as you want to take it, I think,” he says.
“But the hardest part is this bit. Getting out of the National League is the hardest thing to do in English football because it’s a bottleneck. You can have a phenomenal season but then there’s a Wrexham or a Notts County and you’re playing for the play-offs and in them anything can happen. This is the tough part.
“My view is we’ve now put together a good core of players who will be together a good number of years. I think this is the group that will eventually get us out. We can sprinkle a few additions here or there but you have the core.
“Maybe this is the year they have to get to know each other but then I would hope the next year we’d be knocking on the door. I hope it’s this year but in my head when I was planning this I was thinking ‘Give them a year’.
“We’ve played well but I don’t think we’ve really clicked yet and that’s quite a scary prospect. If we do there’ll be trouble – and not for us.”
Investment will continue and a midweek restructure saw the popular Tony McMahon appointed director of football.
There are eyes on eventually owning the LNER Community Stadium, the new-build out-of-town ground that replaced the much-loved city centre stadium Bootham Crescent.
In a complicated structure agreed by McGill it is partly owned by the council and a private firm, with York as tenants.
“It is a fantastic facility looking from the outside but we’re limited with what we can do with it,” he explains.
“Eventually you’d probably want to own the stadium. When that is I don’t know but we’ll definitely have discussions about it.
“There are triggers where if we do certain things we can trigger the right to buy the stadium for a set piece.
“You’d probably do it when you’re out of this league as at the moment it doesn’t make too much sense but the long-term plan for us is definitely to own the stadium.
“It’s imperative we do own our own stadium. Everything is in place and I think the fans are starting to get an attachment.
“It might feel a bit soulless but at the end of the day, you create memories and it takes care of itself.
“We need to add a supporters’ bar… that’s more of a short-term thing we could do ourselves. But to make it our own home we need to own it.”
For now, enjoyment is enough.
Uggla noted a sense of harmony and unity on a recent training ground trip.
Hinshelwood, he senses, has fallen in love with the club and “it would take a lot to prise him from us”.
Uggla, too, is here for the long haul. He has relocated to York and “fallen in love” with the city and club.
“We understand it’s a long-term project – it will take quite some time before becoming sustainable, if ever really, but anything we lose on it we’re prepared to do that,” he says.
“I’d like to think we can get there but in football it’s a difficult thing to do.
“We’re not here for that, we’re here because we love it, we want to build something and we want to be successful. Us and the fans, we’re both going to be here for a long time.”
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