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.
The good news is that you can at least watch a match from Northampton Town’s East Stand now. Its seating is split into two.
On the evening I visit, one side is full of travelling Peterborough United supporters and the other has only the odd dotted empty seat where home fans are congregated.
Behind them, work is still in progress. The project is on track, the club say, to be completed in the first quarter of 2025, with hospitality areas, a link road around Sixfields Stadium, extra car parking spaces and a new concourse area for the seats in the stand.
You would forgive Northampton Town supporters for not holding their breath in anticipation of that or any other date. Cobblers? You haven’t heard the half of it.
Amid some stern competition, this ground is home to perhaps English football’s wildest story of the last decade.
It encompasses a missing £10m, a seven-year investigation, a reported four million pieces of evidence and, at the time of writing, no serious convictions. Oh, and one unfinished stand.
In 2003, businessman David Cardoza and his father Anthony became Northampton Town’s owners.
A year later, they agreed a new 150-year lease for Sixfields and revealed their intention to redevelop the stadium and increase the capacity to 15,000.
It was well-received by supporters, but everything then went quiet.
Fast forward to July 2012, when Northampton Borough Council agreed to accept planning permission to develop Sixfields and the area around it.
Because that area was situated in a designated enterprise zone, any development needed to create an agreed number of new jobs, meaning the project was to include shops, offices and a hotel.
By July 2013, the exact details of that project were agreed, including the East Stand increasing to a capacity of 4,000.
The council agreed to lend the club around £10m to help complete the redevelopment. You will hear a bit more about that money.
Over time, however, the plans were slowly scaled back.
The new intended capacity of Sixfields was reduced to only 8,500 and the development of retail and residential limited to a supermarket, several shops and a couple of hundred homes.
Work did start but, by 2015, it had been temporarily stopped due to what the club described as a “contractual dispute”.
Understandably, Northampton supporters began to lose faith in both the notion of the redevelopment being completed – this was two years after the loan landed – and in the Cardozas as credible owners.
They protested before a home game against Oxford United in September 2015 because David Cardoza had told them three months earlier that a sale to an Indian consortium was in process.
There had been no progress and precious few extra details on that or the development work.
“People want to know why we’re in this position – it’s because the contractors went bust and there’s bits and pieces swirling around that, that’s it really,” David Cardoza told BBC Radio Northampton at the time.
“My father and I have spent an enormous amount of money making sure when these problems happen, that the football club would be protected, the loan gets paid back and the stand will get built – it will happen.
“Unfortunately it’s taking longer than we hoped.”
Later that same month, Northampton Borough Council informed the football club that they had three weeks to repay the £10m loan because a) the building work hadn’t been completed and b) as revealed by the local newspaper, the club had missed two agreed loan repayments.
Then things really got spicy. Several weeks after the request for full payment of the loan, it was announced that CDNL – the contractors for the development project – had gone into liquidation.
The council continued to reiterate that the money must be paid back and the club’s players received their wages late.
The owners restated that they were intending to sell the club.
In November 2015, the police were formally contacted by the council to ask them to investigate whether any criminal offence had taken place over the use of the loan money.
At a similar time, a report by the BBC claimed that David and Anthony Cardoza were “loaned” £2.5m by a company formed to oversee the stadium’s development.
Administrators’ reports claimed that that company, 1st Land Ltd, received £7m of the total loan from the council.
With supporters desperate for Cardoza to sell the club, Northampton Town edging dangerously close to administration and the owners seemingly dragging their heels over a sale, manager Chris Wilder finally snapped.
Speaking on the pitch post-game at Notts County’s Meadow Lane after an away win, Wilder implored change.
“I’ve kept quiet and I’ve kept my peace about a lot of things,” he said.
“You’ve got a manager, assistant manager, coaches, staff at the club, all not being paid. I’m exhausted. There’s a deal to be done that takes this club forward, that gives it a bright future.
“How many more years are we going to look at that stand, empty and earning us nothing? We are playing with people’s livelihoods here.”
Wilder’s words did the trick (and thus went down in supporter folklore).
Within a couple of days, Kelvin Thomas completed his purchase of Northampton Town from the Cardoza family and acquired CDNL.
There was understandable relief that the immediate future of the club was secured.
Thomas paid non-playing staff, who had gone two months without wages, and promised to spend an initial £1m before committing extra funds to the development of the East Stand further down the line.
Northampton Town 2-1 Peterborough United (Monday 9 December)
- Game no.: 46/92
- Miles: 110
- Cumulative miles: 7,315
- Total goals seen: 130
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Seeing an out-of-town Bella Italia and Pizza Hut next door to each other from my seat. This is provincial football heritage!
David Cardoza was arrested in January 2016 in relation to the investigation and had his bail extended later the same year.
But 2016 also brought reports that David Mackintosh, a local Conservative MP, had been given a donation by 1st Land Ltd.
Mackintosh was also the individual who signed off on the £10m loan when he was leader of the council.
Sticking with Mackintosh, in November 2017, it was claimed that the figure of the payments he received totalled £39,000.
The MP was heavily criticised for his role in agreeing to the loan, not least because a council audit concluded that insufficient checks had been carried out over its award.
Facing potential deselection as an MP, Mackintosh announced that he would not stand for re-election. Mackintosh denied any wrongdoing but said “I now feel it is the right time for my constituents to have a new representative.”
In November 2023, Mackintosh was found not guilty at Warwick Crown Court of failing to disclose the source of political donations to Northampton South Conservative Association (NSCA) in a landmark case.
He was accused of deliberately withholding information of where the £39,000 had come from which he denied and was cleared of wrongdoing.
Mackintosh told the media that “justice has been served – I have cleared my name.”
By then, the police investigation had grown exponentially.
The council had already applied for an injunction that the proceeds of a sale of a home owned by David Cardoza’s wife should be kept by solicitors, and were successful.
The council also sued Anthony Cardoza to recover some of the money loaned to the club.
The case took until 2019 to complete, as Judge Simon Barker called Anthony Cardoza “untrustworthy and unreliable”, ordering him to repay £2.1m to the council. David Cardoza was ordered to pay an undisclosed sum as part of the same judgment.
Several months later, Anthony Cardoza declared himself bankrupt but the court heard that a portion of the loan money was used to remodel the home of David and Christina Cardoza, David transferring the house to his wife in the process.
This strand of the case came to some conclusion in March 2022, when Christina Cardoza had her home seized.
Council leader Jonathan Nunn – now of West Northamptonshire Council after the borough council was disbanded following a reorganisation of local government – explained the situation.
“They moved away from Church Brampton, but the council’s charge moved to the new property,” Nunn told the BBC.
“The council has taken possession now, marketed the property, and had an acceptable offer.
“Sale is yet to complete, but is progressing, so as always with house sales it is likely, but not certain until we have the money.”
Further investigation was hampered by the sheer complexity of the case.
In September 2017, a statement from Northamptonshire Police said that it was investigating allegations of “theft and fraud, bribery, misconduct in public office and electoral offences” and seven people were arrested.
By 2019, police revealed that they were examining more than four million pieces of evidence, had case files on 30 individuals and had interviewed over 550 witnesses.
Later that same year, property developer Howard Grossman, who was in charge of 1st Land Ltd, was banned from running any company for a period of 10 years for his inability to provide records for where £5m of the loan money had gone.
The Insolvency Service, who had pursued the case, said Grossman had made dividend payments of almost £1.5m to benefit himself and his family members that caused 1st Land to be unable to continue as a going concern.
Cases like these also cost money. Northampton Borough Council were reported to have spent almost £3m trying to recover their lost money.
They had a difficult choice: either accept defeat, leave a black hole in their own accounts and lose the trust of their public, or fight for their money and spend more in the process.
Northampton Town were kept in limbo too. With the work not completed and the local authority insisting that the land next to the stadium could not be sold until the work on the stand had been finished, a term of the original agreement, the East Stand stayed as it was.
A new deal was finally reached in November 2021 for the land to be sold to County Developments Northampton Ltd (CDNL), owned by the football club.
There was another hitch. A rival bidder for the land was given permission to apply for a judicial review into the sale to CDNL and was granted that review by the High Court.
That review took until July 2023 to complete, with the verdict in favour of the council and the sale to CDNL.
Almost a decade after the initial work began, completion was more likely than not.
As for the police investigation, it seems unlikely that any serious convictions may ever land.
Seven people were charged in 2021 with electoral offences surrounding alleged failure to ensure that any donation above £500 to a political party must supply the recipient with correct details of the funding’s source.
They were the first criminal court appearances directly related to the missing millions.
In mid-December, a week or so after my visit to Sixfields, Northampton Town published a story on their website with a visual update of the progress within the East Stand.
It consisted of just 25 words, as if acutely aware that supporters have heard far too many thousands of those over the last decade and not enough action.
Instead it was simply a slideshow: kiosks tiled in Northampton Town colours, silver cookers in their shrink wrap, shiny lifts and electric lights showing that work was continuing after daylight had clocked off for the day.
The subtext smacked you in the face: “We really are getting this stand finished”.
Many Northampton fans will meet that news with relief and dark humour.
This is the conclusion of a chapter that should have taken two years and led to their club becoming bigger and better.
Its opening may at least allow Northampton Town to begin that process, if almost a decade late.
But you can see why this might be a misery that can never fully heal.
The East Stand is likely to be fully operational with fewer than 200 extra seats from its original state 12 years ago.
It will have extra areas for corporate guests, but you can see why ordinary football supporters might distrust those around here.
They also haven’t got justice. Their club was put into a situation by the actions of others that they could not control and life has been made worse as a result.
At the last count, Northampton Town are £7.3m in debt and investigations into how this scandal happened are seemingly without end.
To them, the East Stand will probably always be a reminder of the avarice that could have killed their club.
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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