Morecambe FC have been saved and for now that will be the only headline. A club that was apparently for sale for three years has been sold several days before a likely fall into liquidation and extinction.
Jason Whittingham no longer owns this football club and that is enough to provoke joy, relief and hope.
Next Saturday, 11 players will play against 11 players at the Mazuma Mobile Stadium. That is the lowest bar for a football club, its most basic function of all.
Over the course of this hot summer by the seaside, even that felt like the dream of every other town and city in the country but never theirs.
Morecambe FC have been saved and that is why I have come here. It should be Morecambe vs Brackley, the first home league game of the season, but the home team were suspended from the National League because no governing body could reasonably believe that they would last the season. The club was closed and locked up, staff told that they would not be paid (again).
There were plans for protests on this day, the last chance to campaign against an owner that seemed intent on killing something made beautiful by its importance to its community.
Instead, news of the eventual takeover being agreed “in principle” last Thursday creates a serenity that is both reassuring and bleak – there should still have been a game on.
In the Hurley Flyer pub, where the stadium looms over the beer garden at the back, there is none of the pre-match buzz that can now return.
A few gather to watch Premier League lunchtime football, a couple of them wearing home shirts.
Others have gone to Preston, Lancaster or Garstang, whose clubs have let Morecambe supporters in for free.
But most who I spoke to on Saturday appreciated the offer and politely declined it.
Going to the football would only hammer home they weren’t going to watch Morecambe. Pale imitations can sometimes be worse than nothing at all.
There is something awkward about the stadium, even on a beautiful August afternoon.
Football grounds are empty far more often than they are full, but it is as if the shutters down and locked gates here are an act of unpleasant permanence, an enforced hibernation.
For 15 minutes I sit, and the only movement is from a learner driver whose instructor knows enough to foresee a desolate car park and an opportune moment for some parking practice.
And then two things happen. A jovial Scottish groundhopper drives in and takes a couple of photos before distilling every reasonable thought to me in two words: “Feckin’ shame.”
Shortly after he leaves for a local non-league game, a retired couple drive in and ask if there has been any news. They are holidaying nearby and are lifelong Bolton Wanderers supporters who wanted to show support in their own way. “We went through times like these too and they are the worst.”
Morecambe FC have been saved and there are those who led the movement to make it happen, even when doing so dragged them close to futility.
I meet Pat Stoyles, the vice-chair of the Shrimps Trust, the supporters’ trust that has done so much good in this area over the last three years.
They are a champion of their community: the campaigning, the raising awareness and media interest, the constant retorts to the claims of the owner, the demands for reason, the messaging to other supporters like a Morecambe FC emergency hotline.
Stoyles is wearing a Morecambe shirt, itself a small victory. He explains how, for far too long, he couldn’t bring himself to dip into his shirt collection. That has changed this week.
During the first suspended match, he went for a long walk because he couldn’t face any news of other football when there was no good news around Morecambe’s survival. He is cautious, but cautiously optimistic.
I meet Lizzi Collinge, the local MP who freely admits to not knowing much about the game of football but who made it her concern to take this fight as high as she could and whose work has evidently – and Stoyles is keen to stress as much – moved the needle over the summer.
Stoyles says that Collinge was instrumental, Collinge says that Stoyles has been a phenomenon; that’s what community leadership looks like.
Morecambe FC have been saved but it should never have taken this long. In February 2025, with Morecambe previously subjected to points deductions, players being paid late and non-payments to HMRC, Whittingham told BBC Radio Lancashire that he wanted to leave the club by the end of that month “with every fibre in my body”.
We may never know why or how he lasted it out until now. Panjab Warriors, now the club’s new owners, will face questions over their own role in those delays and their communication certainly could have been better. Their first act, to sack manager Derek Adams, has been unpopular although they always seemed likely to bring in their own head coach.
I must be careful what I write, but I’m minded to blame the guy who helped take Worcester Warriors rugby club under and was banned from company directorships for 12 months as a result.
Following news of the sale completing, please see the below update from the Shrimps Trust
— Shrimps Trustpic.twitter.com/RFQC9tWxiJ
All of the bluster, the supposed third parties at the table, the developments that became non-developments and the public tit-for-tat with Panjab Warriors; Whittingham was at the centre of it all.
And all the while, Morecambe’s situation got more grave. I hope that his tenure and behaviour is investigated in full, long after he has passed over control.
Morecambe FC have been saved, but we also have to ask what saved actually looks like? Currently Morecambe have eight players in their first-team squad.
The ground doesn’t have a safety certificate for the new season, although that should at least be a formality.
Many of the casual staff who weren’t paid on time and were then not working at all have taken other employment.
Some of the permanent staff have had to, with heavy hearts, seek job interviews elsewhere.
This club is effectively starting from scratch with a five-day lead time to their first match. How many academy kids have left? How quickly is a new manager going to come in if Adams wasn’t their man?
How do you complete a pre-season in one midweek? We know the house isn’t going to fall down, but what is the floor and ceiling this season?
But it is about more than the tangible assets. When a fanbase goes through the three years that Morecambe’s have – League One to non-league, hope to hopeless, staring its own death squarely in the face – it leaves scars.
There were some fans who began to believe that a phoenix club was the best option.
There are those who view the new owners with mistrust and caution partly because it is all they can remember and Adams’ departure is a bold start.
There are others who ask board members how they were duped into Whittingham in the first place.
It is something we have said before, but financial doom doesn’t just harm you in the moment – it kicks you repeatedly during the years in which you try to rebuild. In some ways, the same is true of being saved.
After the initial rush of relief come months and years that are just as hard because you are trying to repair damage to the foundations of what the club means.
Morecambe FC have been saved, but the message has to be “never again”. Click on the post from the club’s official X account announcing the sale and go through the replies from supporters of other clubs: Southend United, Bury, Crawley Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Macclesfield.
Ask yourself why a couple from Bolton should drive to the ground of a team they don’t support just to feel like they are doing something, anything to show their love. Our pyramid is only as strong as its weakest member.
That sends a message to football. I talk to Collinge about the independent regulator which, if it is to achieve anything at all, must have the teeth to instigate mediation with supporters’ trusts at clubs where owners provoke red flags and, in the most egregious cases, enforce expedited sales at an independently valued sale price when a reasonable buyer has been identified. For her part, she completely agrees.
There is a message to football supporters, too: join your club’s supporters’ trust. Morecambe FC probably wouldn’t exist were it not for the Shrimps Trust.
Nobody gets everything right, but these are the organisations best placed to challenge those who need to be challenged, support those who need to be supported and put on their gloves when a fight for a club’s future is needed.
There is great power and strength in unity, and if it can be their club, then it can be yours too.
Finally, Morecambe FC supporters must deal with this same aftermath. We hear the “never again” message, but it belongs to them most now.
If there is one silver lining to desperately dark clouds, it is that you become adept at hearing alarm bells even at their lowest volume.
That should not detract from their joy next Saturday or any other Saturday afterwards, but they have a mandate for demanding only the best for their club from the guardians who hold it in their hands.
There is a fairly universal truth in football: no decent owner is scared of reasonable questions.
For now, that can be parked. On Friday evening, there is an event planned at the town’s Winter Gardens at which various club legends will be in attendance and supporters will gather in their hundreds to commemorate more than a century of Morecambe FC history.
One can imagine it will be emotional, a celebration of everything but the last three years and the perfect way to move on from it.
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It took Morecambe 87 years to get into the Football League. They never expected it; nobody was ever entitled.
This is not a footballing hotbed, simply a seaside town with a club that provided for its community simply by being here for them every other Saturday and was an institution for them on every other day of the week.
The brilliance of football clubs lies not in their success, their trophies or promotions, but in their permanence.
It can all be undone. It can all be killed, and once that process starts it becomes damn difficult to stop it.
Here it hasn’t, thanks to those who fought hardest because they love it so much. Morecambe FC have been saved. Now it must be rebuilt.
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