It’s not every day one of Britain’s richest men knocks on your door to say hello, especially in Rochdale. Sir Peter Ogden’s impromptu doorstep in Percy Street met a typically unvarnished response delivered in flat Lancastrian: “You’re not trying to sell me summat are you?”
If the Ogden family are selling anything it is dreams. Giving, not selling, is the real game here, giving back to the community, to the town and to the club that means so much to its people.
Since the Covid torpedo hit four years ago Rochdale had been fighting a desperate rearguard against a fiscal hammer bashing them inexorably towards oblivion. And then in March, through the saloon doors walked billionaire Sir Peter, who not only picked up the £2m tab to maintain the National League club as a going concern, but pledged investment to fund a utopian future on and off the pitch.
This marriage of local boy made good and the town’s most significant identifying feature after Gracie Fields is one of the game’s great romances. Love was, however, slow to surface on the last day of August when Sir Peter chose the home match against Woking to celebrate ownership of his boyhood club with members of the extended family and to revisit with them his modest roots, including No 3 Percy Street, where he was raised.
Son Cameron, who assumed the role of co-chairman and describes himself as born southerner, bred northerner, recalled the family’s re-entry into the Rochdale atmosphere.
He told i: “We stayed over at the Hampton Inn down in town, had a nice dinner in Norden, and decided to do a little morning walk on the day of the match. Dad was keen to show us all the landmarks. We went to the Town Hall, which actually blew my mind. Amazing building.
“There was a guy there, a Rochdale fan and one of the historians giving a talk, which added a load of flavour. We went to the parish church where my parents were married. That was cool. And then we went on to Percy Street.”
The group were kitted out in their Rochdale gear bought at the club shop the day before, which prompted the neighbour’s defensive reflex.
“We knocked at No 3 but unfortunately the people, an older couple, were away. We were milling about and this little old lady comes out. [Cue selling rebuke]. My dad goes, ‘no, no, no, I used to live here.’ And she goes [in deeply sardonic voice] ‘you used to live here?’ We had a nice conversation with her after that. My dad remembers everything, where he used to play, where he went running, climbing down the drainpipe to avoid doing his homework. It was a lovely moment.”
The day ended positively with a 3-0 win to cement a solid start to the season, which sees Rochdale firmly in the play-off places. The Ogden mission mirrors the survivalist project at neighbours and Saturday’s visitors Oldham, a similarly distressed club rescued from the inevitable by its own white knight, self-made magnate Frank Rothwell, who rose from the same inauspicious roots as Sir Peter to fashion a different life than that of his forebears.
Where Rothwell flipped an impoverished education in Oldham that ended aged 14, Sir Peter was propelled towards nirvana by Rochdale Grammar School and subsequently via a PhD in theoretical physics from University College, Durham, an MBA from Harvard Business School, a banking career at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and finally a computer empire that made him a fortune.
Sir Peter had been giving back for two decades via the Ogden Trust, a charity which focuses on various educational programmes promoting the sciences, before he answered the desperate plea from the club he supported as a boy. Whilst Rothwell can talk a rocking horse to sleep, Sir Peter rarely speaks on the record, leaving the delivery of the Rochdale undertaking to Cameron.
“We got an email in February from one of my dad’s old school mates from Rochdale Grammar saying these guys really need some help. He asked me to have a look. At the time there were quite a few suitors. We had been doing some things in the early 2000s from an educational perspective in Rochdale but I always felt that there were something more to be done.
“And I thought the football club could be an amazing platform for doing some of the stuff that we hoped we could do in the community. We were bowled over by what the club was already doing through their own community trust. My thought was, imagine what more they could do with the right resources.”
Co-chairman Simon Gauge, the long-standing board member who steered the club through takeover, remembers the date night when romance blossomed.
“I had so many conversations with so many people who said they were interested. Some were just time-wasters. Some were crooks that you knew would do it but were not great,” he told i. “What makes a club, the fabric of the club would have changed. We didn’t want that. To be fair Sir Peter was on our radar because we knew he came from Rochdale. But they came to the party late in the day. We were quite a bit down the line with American investors.”
The critical moment came in the Bamford Suite, Rochdale’s premier hospitality space, on the night of Tuesday 12 March for the visit of Woking, inadvertent witnesses to transformation. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham was also present to demonstrate the support and involvement of the political class in this process.
“As well as the Ogdens, there was a representative of the American group from Texas. It was like trying to manage two girlfriends in the room on the same date. We told the Americans the Ogdens were interested primarily in the community side, which was their initial pitch anyway.
“But once we knew the Ogdens were really serious it was the perfect fit for us. We got a last-minute winner too. It was like a sign. They have been the perfect owners. It’s easy to smile when you don’t have to beg and borrow to pay the bills at the end of every month. We were trying to sell for a year, but the club was on a downward spiral and no one wanted it at that point.
“It is not easy trying to sell a National League club, because the only way to make it work is to throw a load of money at it and get back into the EFL. I felt like the whole world was on my shoulders. You are like, ‘this club had been around for a hundred years. I can’t let this go.’ It was such a relief when they said yes.”
The Ogdens’ philanthropy taps into a community thread enshrined in a town that gave us the Co-op, the nation’s first consumer co-operative predicated on the distribution of a share of profits, and a club rooted in fan ownership.
That sense of community endeavour, depicted in a mural of a father and son holding hands as they walk to the match on the wall of the Ratcliffe, the club’s social hub – “It’s not just a club, son, it’s a way of life” – is preserved under the Ogden ownership.
The social and charitable work previously undertaken by the club’s community trust delivering vital health and educational services was valued at £5m a year. That is expected to grow under ambitious plans funded by the Ogdens and related partners.
Discussions with architects are under way to redevelop the four-acre Spotland site, aka Crown Oil Arena, in order to host events, an NHS diagnostics centre, a 70-place school to help kids who fall off the curriculum and multi-use office space, which might yet be home to football’s independent regulator should an ambitious plan put to the House of Commons by Rochdale MP Paul Waugh, come to fruition.
“We know the football regulator will be based in Greater Manchester, which reflects how the North West is the beating heart of the national game,” Waugh told i.
“I’m really hoping that it can be based at a small club like Rochdale which does represent everything about community based football rather than one of the big boys. It’s an ambitious plan. I have no idea whether it will materialise but full marks to them for having the ambition to go for it.”
Waugh was born and raised in Spotland, “literally floodlights through the windows stuff”, is how he describes it. As the town’s MP under the Labour government he has a duty of care towards the club as well a season ticket holder’s enthusiasm. Together with the Ogdens, local councillors and Mayor Burnham, Waugh is part of what might be seen as a multi-faceted campaign to demonstrate the relevance of small-town football clubs to their communities.
“My role is to be a community champion, making sure that community assets like a football club, rugby league club, cricket club, boxing club, etc., get the maximum help they can get from central and local government and to make sure the support is joined up as much as possible from the public sector, private sector and all the agencies along the way.
“As a government we are looking at football in the round. You have this extraordinary inequity between the very richest clubs and those lower down the pyramid. The football regulator will make a big difference on that, hopefully, recalibrate the difference between large and small, and also recognise that football relies on grass roots.
“Rochdale is a genuine community asset. It’s a small club, the butt of everyone’s jokes. We are used to all that, but the key thing is we are survivors and always have been. It’s a similar story to the town itself, incredibly resilient.
“There are lots of challenges but despite everything it’s the people that make it, and the football club is exactly the same. I’m a season ticket holder, so I’m interested in what happens on the pitch, but I’m just as invested in what happens off the pitch, and that’s the key for any MP.”
Surrendering a winning position to goals in added time at home is football’s thumb screw, emotional wipeout for three days at least. This was the fate of Rochdale against Crawley in the first round of the FA Cup last month, an outcome that would have been a grievous hit in the all too recent doom-spiral when existence relied on cup runs and player sales. Not anymore.
Rochdale lose between £500k and £750k a year, and was not viable beyond March’s payroll. So the smile on the face of Gauge, who pumped in £500k of his own family’s money to keep the club afloat, is that of a lottery winner. “The club survived because of exceptional events. We drew Manchester United in the Carabao Cup, Tottenham and Newcastle in the FA Cup. That and player sales kept us going, but it is not sustainable. As soon as those things stop happening you are in trouble.
“What makes this worth doing is the custodians want the best for the club. They are not in it for personal gain. It is all about community and the culture of the town. They get Rochdale. We are so lucky to have them. Sir Peter gets so overwhelmed at matches because people come up to him to thank him all the time. He comes from Rochdale, a boy that has done well. That is where the warmth and admiration comes from.”
Waugh remembers standing at the Sandy Lane End cheering the likes of Mark Hilditch, Grant Holt, Paddy McCourt and, of course, Rickie Lambert, who went on to play for England. “That was such a buzz. McCourt was our George Best who had amazing dribbling skills and went on to play for Celtic. For a little club like this it is such a lifeline having an owner that really cares about the football and the community as well.
“The Ogdens have reflected on the role of the club in the community, and want to do everything they can to help. The club helps veterans, young girls particularly, food banks, a panty at every match, cooking courses, mental health schemes. The community Trust motto is helping the people of Rochdale live, work and play. That’s why people turn up.
“As a lifelong Dale fan I can’t tell you what a relief it was when on the verge of collapse in comes a white knight, an owner who is a genuine philanthropist, born and bred in the town, made a huge success of business globally and is now putting something back in the area that raised him.”
Ultimately the arrangement is predicated on the success of the club. All else flows from that. This is the first year of a 10-year regeneration plan, central to which is a return to the EFL within three season. The Ogdens have worked out the correlation between wages and winning, the higher the former, the better the chances of achieving the latter.
“When you look at the data there is a high correlation between the amount of money spent on wages and promotion. The Wrexhams, the Chesterfields, the Stockports have all proven that,” Cameron says.
“It’s obviously high risk game. There are several other clubs, probably in the region of five to six, looking at having those budgets, well in excess of £2.5m-£3m. The opportunity to be in the league full time has its benefits.
“But the dangers are stacked if you fail. It can become quite an expensive project so we are taking it slightly more sensibly in terms of what we think is needed. I think we have supported our excellent young manager [James McNulty] as well as we can at this stage.”
The Oldham match, a “millionaire derby” in the foothills of the Pennines and an unimaginable occurrence not so long ago, is a litmus test of progress against a team considered the benchmark in the division – a Premier League founder member no less – with the same aspirations to meld football and community.
“We are making it a big family affair. My mum’s side of the family have all been invited so there’s about 30 of us coming,” Cameron said.
“It’s a big game. There are other big games for sure. I’m sure Oldham will feel the same, but November to February are tough months. It’s great to get some points because you come out the other side into that play-off run-up.
“To be there you can’t fall away in this period so we are excited about this game, a real derby. The sad thing is by being in this league with so many southern teams you don’t necessarily get teams with so much of an away following. So it will be nice to see the ground rocking.”
Waugh agrees, the more so after the loss of Bury, the team closest to Rochdale. “It’s tragic that a club like Bury would disappear. Bury lost their club and we lost the rivalry. The next best thing is the Oldham game, that’s why we are desperate to smash ’em,” Waugh says, temporarily setting aside his Westminster manners.
Ironically boundary changes at the last election mean the club is no longer in Waugh’s constituency. “It’s now in Heywood and Middleton North. Heartbreaking for me, I have to say,” he said, almost seriously.
Thankfully Elsie Blundell, a former Rochdale councillor who entered parliament in July at the same time as Waugh, understands the community value of ’Dale, so cross-border relations remain healthy. Besides, for all genuine supporters, football clubs are situated in the heart.
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