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
It is early afternoon in Cheltenham on what is likely the last warm Saturday of the year, just so long as you stay in the sun; as a result one side of the high street is busier than the other. Walk south from here and you hit the Promenade, the high-end shopping street, and Montpellier. The tourist season may be coming to a close, but the pavement is still clogged with visitors.
At the end of the Promenade stands the exclusive Cheltenham Ladies’ College. The further you edge away from the town centre, the more Cheltenham’s Regency architecture takes over, wider, tree-lined streets with grandiose properties set back in gravelled grounds. Cheltenham, it must be said, is a glorious place to spend the day aimlessly wandering, popping into establishments for a nosy like a bird building a nest with time to spare.
What you don’t see anywhere – and I have been seeking out evidence to the contrary – is a sign that there is a sporting fixture starting in two hours’ time in this town. There is no club shop (fair enough, perhaps) but nor are there posters or advertising boards.
As James Young, chair of the Robins Trust (Cheltenham Town’s Supporters Trust), says, this is conspicuous. Ask 20 people you pass on the street on Saturday lunchtime in the town centre if they were going to the match and half likely wouldn’t know which sporting fixture you were talking about.
Walk the other way from the high street, north east towards Whaddon and its Rec, and you find Cheltenham Town Football Club. The EV Charger Points Stadium may hint at green, forward-thinking facilities, but don’t be tricked: this is a real football experience.
The gents toilets are in a cubby room under the stands. The press box is a thin corridor behind glass. Two sides of the ground is terraced. To this connoisseur, it is everything I want.
Whether that applies to everyone else is a matter of opinion, but many have clearly voted with feet that rarely tread on this side of town. On this Saturday, Fleetwood Town are the visitors, from a town of around 26,000. At their last home game against Morecambe, 15 per cent of that town was present.
Cheltenham has a population of roughly 120,000, but that’s only part of the story. They are now the only league club in Gloucestershire following Forest Green Rovers’ relegation, a vast gap with Bristol and Swindon to the south, Oxford to the east and Birmingham to the north. The attendance for the game is less than 4,000. On average, they rank in the bottom 10 of the 92 league clubs.
One common explanation is that this is rugby country. That carries some weight, given that Gloucester is only nine miles away and their average home attendance more than doubles Cheltenham Town’s. But, as Young advises, I walk back through the town after full-time. Plenty of pubs advertise the Wolves vs Liverpool game at 5.30pm and most are more than half-full with viewers. That 15-minute walk to Whaddon feels like many miles from here.
The ticket prices probably don’t help – it costs £25 in the only seated section for an adult on matchday and £20 for standing room. That is one of the warped effects of English league football’s deep financial inequalities: those at the bottom need to charge prices that make money from loyal supporters for the necessary revenue; those at the top charge what they want anyway even though they depend upon it less.
Nor does Cheltenham’s recent fall from grace. Fifteen months ago, they were a lower mid-table League One club who had seemingly got over the significant loss of manager Michael Duff to Barnsley and were hoping to further consolidate in the third tier for the first time in their history.
Then Cheltenham broke records by failing to score in each of their first 10 league games of a season, Darrell Clarke replaced Wade Elliott but couldn’t save them from relegation, Clarke jumped ship to Barnsley too (that’s getting annoying now) and Michael Flynn has come in. The expectation of him this season? Nobody is quite sure.
All this theorising of attendance gaps is window dressing really. Cheltenham’s highest average attendances in League One only just broke 4,600. They have ostensibly overachieved significantly in their recent history through the work of three managers: Duff, Gary Johnson and Steve Cotterill, who originally took them out of non-league in 1999.
Unlike some other League Two clubs, there is no grand history of FA Cup success or league heritage. The biggest cup draw in the club’s history was against Manchester City in 2021, when they came within nine minutes of arguably the biggest shock in the competition’s history. No supporters were permitted in the stadium due to Covid-19 restrictions. Isn’t that just their luck?
Against Fleetwood, the regulars are probably happy that no prospective new recruits have turned up to watch. Cheltenham produce a home performance free from any grain of positivity or charm. They are outplayed from start to finish, concede in the first stages of each half and barely muster a chance in anger.
In one corner of the Colin Farmer Stand, a group of supporters have taken to dancing for their own entertainment. On comes the dark humour: “How shit must you be, it’s only 2-0?”
I don’t really want to frame this as “How do you solve a problem like Cheltenham Town?” because that seems far too blunt, but you get the point. What Cheltenham are really lacking is a unique selling point, an identity on which to sell themselves to a vast population in one of the wealthier parts of England. That’s hard to do anyway, but even more so when you change managers and sign 18 new players over the course of a summer.
There are basics that could work, such as using marketing and advertising spend to sell the club – and its matches – in the town centre to create a deeper connection between the location and the sporting institution so that it actually feels like a vital community asset to an outsider. With that must surely come greater investment in the facilities at the stadium. You cannot – and should never – try to sell lower-league football as entertainment in extreme comfort, but there is a middle ground.
As Young is at pains to say, the current owners and people in positions of authority are good people trying to do good things for a club they love. They spend so much time having to fight against the tide, the day-to-day running of the club, that the bigger picture can sometimes become a pipe dream. It may take different voices, experts not necessarily in Cheltenham Town.
Statement of the obvious time: these things cost money. Cheltenham Town recorded an operating loss of £531,000 for the year ending May 2023. There are 101 ways in which the stadium and training ground and five-year plan could be sculpted and the current owners probably know 99 of them. But when you lose half a million pounds and then get relegated, ideas are easier than words, let alone actions. The Robins Trust has invested over £300,000 since 2005 on improvement projects, but budgets are clearly tight here too.
This week, three of Cheltenham’s four biggest shareholders accepted this reality publicly. They released a statement that said, jointly, that they were all prepared to transfer their shares if the right investor could be found. The Robins Trust, which owns 15 per cent of the club, plan to keep their stake but any decision will, ultimately, be down to its members. The rough translation: the club is up for sale.
“The club is in need of significant investment – particularly with regard to infrastructure at the stadium and training ground – so given the sums of money required the club may need to find investors from further afield,” chairman David Bloxham says.
“Three of the four largest shareholders have indicated that if the right person or organisation can be found – provided they have the right motives and the best interests of the club at heart and are able to make the level of investment required to develop the club – then those three shareholders will be willing to transfer their respective shares so that the new investor can move the club forward.”
Cheltenham Town 0-2 Fleetwood Town (Saturday 28 September)
- Game no.: 22/92
- Miles: 188
- Cumulative miles: 3,375
- Total goals seen: 52
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The press box is a thing of anachronistic beauty, the tightest possible corridor of desks behind glass. I hovered by the door to watch the match with added atmosphere.
Cheltenham Town are not the only lower-league club in need of – or seeking – outside investment. The country is not packed full of ageing billionaire supporters who have been biding their time before taking their beloved into a glorious new dawn. Bloxham’s caveat about the right motives and interests is important, but sometimes it falls to organised supporters to ward against the chancers or the empty promisers.
But there is reason to believe that it could work here. Cheltenham is a town where there is wealth in pockets. There is a planned development for a £1bn new Golden Valley, which would secure Cheltenham as the UK cyber capital. Golden Valley would form a business and community centre with 1,000 new homes.
Potential is a double-edged intangible. It speaks of growth, ambition and dreams, all of which exist here. But if potential paints the future in a warm glow, it also raises questions about the present: this could happen here but it is not happening now.
As you wander through the car park at Whaddon Road, you witness a club that has done perfectly well by existing, that makes those who love it happy by its very relevance. You also see the cracked paint and the rustic facilities. What makes Cheltenham Town lovable to its own is also what stops it from growing. Perhaps that era may soon be coming to an end.
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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