Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
Chesterfield have had quite the decade. Ten years ago this week, they were fourth in League One, aiming for promotion to the second tier for the first time since 1951. Under the inspirational Paul Cook, by then already written into the club’s folklore, they would eventually succumb to Preston in the play-offs.
And yet Chesterfield have spent more than half of that decade as a non-league club. In 2016-17 and 2017-18, they achieved the unwanted double of finishing bottom of their league twice in consecutive seasons. From a position of grand ambition, everything seemed to have been laid to waste.
Five years ago, exactly halfway through our timeline, Chesterfield were bottom of the National League and winless after 10 matches. This was the regret that then-owner Dave Allen had been forced to bear. Allen had taken over Chesterfield to facilitate the move from the old Saltergate ground to a new stadium that now at least remains as a long-term legacy of his work; he put around £10m into the club.
Both of my interviewees are keen to talk that up, whatever the eventual circumstances of the end. Chesterfield own the freehold and own the footprint. That was a platform.
But as a private owner, the cost escalated. Cook’s departure caused a loss of identity that was heavily exacerbated by poor managerial appointments and player recruitment. When a football club starts losing and the losing doesn’t stop, it becomes mighty difficult to change the mood.
“When Paul left and went to Portsmouth, things started to change,” CEO John Croot, himself a lifelong fan who started by selling programmes and has been here virtually ever since, tells i.
“Many fans will say that he should have invested more, but that’s easy to say if you’re not the one investing it. What I will say is that during that tenure there were challenges, but everybody got their wages every month, even towards the end of his tenure.
“Non-league was a reality check. By then, it very much felt like the rot had set in. The whole club had an atmosphere that wasn’t right. A change was needed.
“I think if you look at clubs that fall out of the Football League, very few of them come back with the same owner. It tends to need a refresh. Dave spent three or four years openly saying ‘Buy it’.”
“I think there were a few years when money wasn’t spent wisely,” says Phil Kirk who, along with his brother Ash, is now one of the two brothers who own Chesterfield.
“And when an owner puts money into a club and either it isn’t spent wisely or poor choices are made, you get into a spiral of despair. You lose the fans, you lose the gates, the money situation gets worse. That happened to Chesterfield.
“It’s an onerous business, and if you aren’t a fan and haven’t got bottomless pockets, they can be pretty joyless.”
Chesterfield 2-1 Grimsby (Saturday 7 September)
- Game no.: 14/92
- Miles: 76
- Cumulative miles: 2285
- Total goals seen: 36
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: “Who the f**king hell are you?” chanted in a thick North Derbyshire accent is one of this country’s greatest audial experiences
The initial takeover, which effectively saved a toiling club edging towards financial oblivion, was groundbreaking.
Supported by local councils, Chesterfield were bought by its own Community Trust, the charitable arm to which it was affiliated.
The aim was to avoid liquidation and then aim to make the club sustainable while also continuing the fine work within the community that had made it so valuable.
It was a monumental task, not least because the purchase happened in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“On the first day that the Trust took over the club, I remember walking around the pitch and the grass was high and there were daisies growing in early August,” Croot says.
“We rang up to get the pitch sorted and the company said ‘Send us some money first, because there’s a debt that needs clearing.’”
For all the goodwill Trust ownership generated, not least because of the eventual unpopularity of the previous owner, simply keeping Chesterfield treading water was daunting given the scale of required change on a meagre budget.
As Croot says, the aim initially didn’t extend beyond getting to the end of the calendar year and then the season. The first strategy was rebuilding the relationship with supporters.
“When we put plans together, we worked on an average gate of 4,000 and there were serious considerations about whether that was too ambitious, even with the goodwill generated,” Croot says.
“There was a relief in the town that the ownership had changed, but I think the town probably also thought that it was a lot easier to run a football club than it is in reality.”
“Now the Trust had taken over, the magic wand would be waved and we’d be back to the sunlit uplands of the Football League pretty quickly,” Kirk says.
“The Trust had success on the field, but it definitely extended how much money they had intended to commit.
“It was a mammoth ask when you consider that it was effectively being run by volunteers who had to take on huge amounts of responsibility.”
Like Croot, Phil and Ash are men of North Derbyshire. Phil shows me his 20-year-old membership card for the Supporters Trust, who had themselves saved the club in the early 2000s.
Their mother and father live next door to Chesterfield’s finance director and so they received updates on the economic situation.
When both sold businesses in 2022, they decided to break a promise made to their dad and chose to invest in their beloved club.
“The first thing I did, literally, was to ring people up and offer to put some money in [the initial investment was £1m],” Kirk says.
“I think there was probably a big sigh of relief from over the garden wall. I rang Ash and said ‘You go on the board, it’ll be one day a month, we’ll go to matches and have a drink and a proper laugh’. I think he’s probably doing five or six days a week now.”
The initial investment was followed up with £1.4m in October 2023, taking their shareholding to 40 per cent. The brothers were adamant that they would not push into majority ownership because they understood the emotional responsibility of owning your hometown club. But after promotion from the National League last season, it became clear that more money was needed.
“It became obvious that to escape from the National League we needed to spend a bit more money and give us a kickstart in League Two,” Kirk says.
“The Trust isn’t a commercial entity, for all the magnificent work in educating kids and helping people.
“In the medium term, the club should be helping the Trust as a charity rather than the other way round.”
Chesterfield arguably now have the best of both worlds, or at least that is the plan.
This is emphatically a community club, an epithet proven by one nugget: when the new stadium was built, it was designed for 10-12 per cent female attendance.
On a matchday now, it is noticeable how many families attend together, the number of elderly couples and the split between genders. The club estimates that an average Chesterfield home game has 24 per cent female attendance.
Were the new majority shareholders anyone else, there may be some trepidation about private ownership that, many supporters might say, got them into the mess in the first place.
But because Phil and Ash are lifelong fans, who grew up near the town centre, and because they built up their ownership incrementally through tangible investment, trust has emphatically remained.
Just because the Community Trust is no longer in charge does not mean that it has been moved from centre stage.
“I think the way that Phil and Ash came into their ownership, holding hands with the Trust, the supporters appreciate that,” Croot says.
“They have seen what the Trust did four years ago. The work that the Community Trust does around this town is extraordinarily positive. The years I have been in football, I think a lot of owners fail to fully appreciate that impact. Phil and Ash do, because they’re lads of the area.”
“It’s Pandora’s Box, it’s never-ending,” Kirk says.
“It’s your hometown club. Everybody knows who you are. You can’t mess it up. But I think it’s a bit of a relief that we are local and have North Derbyshire accents. And we talk to people.
“There’s no agenda here, we just want the club to do well. We don’t want to take money out of the club. They know where Ash drinks, they know who we are. This is now what I do and you’ll probably have to carry Ash out.”
Life is good. On the Saturday I visit, Chesterfield beat Grimsby 2-1 in a feisty, bad-tempered match during which four different members of coaching staff are booked.
The SMH Group stadium welcomes a crowd of 9,325, more than double that 2020 ambitious estimate for the likely average under Community Trust ownership. It is Chesterfield’s highest home attendance for a Football League match since April 2016 against Sheffield United in League One.
This stadium, established as the lasting legacy of Chesterfield even during the worst times, has become their haven.
Remarkably, they have lost only once here since April 2023. Even that was a dead rubber in the National League after the title win had already been mathematically secured. Last season, they won 18 straight home matches.
There is another protagonist to which both Croot and Kirk rightfully demand that we pay homage. If this decade of Chesterfield FC has been defined by its fall and rise, it has been bookended by the manager who they all – supporter, director and owner – hail as king.
A few weeks before the first investment from the Kirks, Cook was reappointed. Croot details how Chesterfield had always been special, the club that gave him his break. Cook and Croot would talk on the phone about results and players and fortunes even when he was no longer here.
It seems unfathomable that Cook would have returned to the National League to work for any other club. It was he who helped mastermind the promotion and will consolidate Chesterfield back in the Football League.
There are two stories that bring together everything that Chesterfield now stands for, epitomising ambition and care in symbiosis. Last week, in the EFL Trophy, Croot and Kirk travelled to Lincoln to watch their team. In the 55th minute, Chesterfield’s winner was scored by Connor Cook, Paul’s son.
In one of the offices at the stadium hangs a photograph of the celebrations of the League Two title win in 2014. Stood near his dad is a nine-year-old Connor. This family is woven into Chesterfield history.
The second story refers to the community ethos – “the informal family” – that everyone insists must lead the life of the club. Every season, the Community Trust is given 500 season tickets at a heavily discounted rate. For each home game, those 500 tickets are distributed to members of the local population who might otherwise not be able to attend matches: schoolchildren, vulnerable, elderly, lonely.
Chesterfield’s final league game of last season, against Maidenhead United, was sold nine weeks before kick-off, with the National League trophy to be lifted at full-time and the players and staff taking a lap of appreciation – the promotion party. In previous eras, Croot says, there would have been pressure to sell those 500 seats and maximise revenue. But for that game, 500 people came to the match who would ordinarily not have been able to go.
As Croot says: “We needed them to see the trophy lift. We needed them to know they were as much a part of the success as anyone else.”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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