In March 2019, Southend United and Scunthorpe United met in League One, where they were separated by a single point.
That represented relative overachievement; both had recently been in the fourth tier but were promoted in successive seasons. Scunthorpe won the game 4-1 but sacked manager Stuart McCall 12 days later. Three days later, Southend sacked Chris Powell.
And then life began to turn firmly for the worse. Southend stayed up but then suffered consecutive relegations, falling into non-league after 101 years in the Football League.
Scunthorpe suffered even worse. Their five consecutive league positions: 23rd, 20th, 22nd, 24th, 23rd and dropping to the sixth tier having never previously been relegated from the Football League. Neither has been back in EFL football since.
For both, on-pitch decline was a reflection of off-pitch chaos, mismanagement and misery that took them to the point of extinction. At opposite ends of the country, an industrial coastal town and a south east coastal city almost lost their football clubs.
At Roots Hall, owner Ron Martin appeared to play a game of chicken with administrators and the courts.
Martin bought the club in the 1990s partly because he liked the idea of selling the land at Roots Hall to developers and building a new stadium that would also generate extra revenue from additional commercial property. Martin owned just the place: Fossetts Farm.
Fossetts Farm never happened and Southend, literally and metaphorically, went nowhere.
In July 2023, Southend were given a further 42 days to pay off a tax debt of £275,000 and a specialist court gave the club the go-ahead to pay football-related debts of £300,000 so they could remain in the National League. The court heard that the club’s debts totalled £2.5m. It became a running dark joke among supporters: HMRC (a).
“There are always fans that don’t concern themselves with this sort of stuff, they didn’t care that their club had £17m of debt on the balance sheet, they just wanted to know if we were finally going to get a striker,” says Liam Ager from Shrimpers Trust, Southend’s official supporters trust.
“The club had always gotten away with it under Ron, his cash to support the club was all secured against land he owned through various companies. The futility of not being truly equipped to effectively hold the club to account was hard to accept.
“The people that didn’t care about all this stuff might wake up one day and their club wouldn’t be there. The situation was horrible. Football is supposed to be fun.”
At Scunthorpe, an eerily similar scenario albeit with one extra bogeyman.
Under previous owner Peter Swann, Scunthorpe had fallen into debt, ignominy and non-league. All the hallmarks of steady decline were present: transfer embargoes, a high turnover of managers, a young team by necessity rather than design, dwindling attendances, local journalists banned from matches.
In January 2023, David Hilton bought the club for £3 in January, taking on the debt obligations, but Swann still owned Glanford Park. Hilton announced plans for a new ground that never came.
A civil war with supporters began when they – perfectly reasonably – asked why the owner had taken on the club if he was not able to fund it. Banning orders were issued to long-serving fans. This was a guy who had taken a club from one guy that had overseen messy protests and then fallen into exactly the same trap.
“We were absolutely at the 11th hour,” says Matt Blanchard from independent Scunthorpe United fan website and podcast Iron Bru.
“When Swann was trying to sell the year prior, there was always the feeling that somebody may step in and there were a number of names linked before David Hilton eventually purchased the club.
“The majority of fans wanted to believe that Hilton was the man that could turn around the fortunes but what followed was a complete car crash. It was pretty surreal. No football club should ever be allowed to get into that position.”
Both clubs were eventually saved. In October 2023, local businesswoman Michelle Harness completed a takeover from Hilton, a week after he had announced that Scunthorpe would be playing home games at non-league side Gainsborough Trinity, something Gainsborough said had been determined without their knowledge or consent.
On 19 July, 2024, a consortium led by Australian businessman Justin Rees finally completed their own takeover of Southend United, seven months after contracts were exchanged and 16 months after Martin publicly announced that the club was for sale.
One repeated lesson from football clubs being “saved” is that the point of sale is a line in the sand and a cause for celebration but only ever the start of the hardest work.
Well-meaning new owners tend to have some sense of the disarray, but a look under the hood reveals layers of grime that make progress mighty difficult. Saving the club is the easy bit.
“When you extinguish a bin fire, you’ve still got a bin,” Ager says.
“Trying to untangle it all felt like when you pull some headphones out of your pocket, only the cable was 100m long.
“Getting reliable information about money, related third parties and all of the existential threats against the club was so difficult.”
But the last two years have brought progress. This summer, Southend United submitted an on-time supplementary report to the accounts that detailed processes and strategies to improve financial sustainability.
Scunthorpe United, whose debts once looked impossible to cope with, are now at manageable levels and again the owners are increasing sustainability. Context is important here: in lower league and non-league, self-sufficiency is a distant dream.
On the Saturday I attend the first meeting between the two clubs since the takeovers, I find them both in positions of comparative strength. They are both in the National League’s top seven, surrounded by northern former Football League staples who were down on their luck or suffered at the hands of unpopular owners: Carlisle United, Rochdale, York City, Hartlepool United.
It is the ability of clubs to survive even the harshest conditions that shines through. Scunthorpe were promoted out of the sixth tier last season and already seem equipped to push at the top again. Southend United lost in the National League play-off final in June at Wembley. At one end of the national stadium they held aloft a massive banner: “Never give up”.
Success for any club is not linear, least of all those who are reacting to, and trying to move away from, the bleakest years of their existence.
Scunthorpe are riding high now, but there was disillusionment when the club were linked with FC100,000, an investment group where people pay a subscription to become involved in club decision-making. The club invited fan groups in response to the anger and the proposal was quickly shelved.
At Southend, the worrying surrounds on-pitch matters. They lost the game I attended 2-0 to make it three defeats in five matches (although they have since bounced back). With promotion so close last season, some supporters fear that club legend Kevin Maher will always be loved but might not be the best manager to take them forwards.
But then these are victories of their own, mileposts along the road to normality.
Fans whose fingers have been burnt so many times before are more watchful of off-pitch developments. If you are spending your time fretting about having the right manager, it is proof that most of the stuff that really matters is less frantic and frayed.
“It’s such a massive relief after a turbulent few seasons to care about football,” Blanchard says about Scunthorpe.
“Recent wins at promotion hopefuls are special nights that will live long in the memory.
“It may be a far cry from our escapades during our three seasons in the Championship but we have a team and manager to be proud of.”
Adversity shapes your behaviour – it provides an early warning system for the future.
If it makes you more likely to join a fan group or a supporters trust, to take a greater part in the future of the club and how it can be rebuilt after destruction, it can all be worth it. That has to be the lesson here and elsewhere: you can make a difference.
Most of all, the two fanbases are strengthened by everything they have fought through. The crowd at Roots Hall on the Saturday I am in town is 8,185, having dropped below 5,000 two years ago. It is also higher than the average attendance of eight clubs in League One this season.
At Scunthorpe, the same. The attendance at Glanford Park for their successful play-off final in May was 9,088, breaking an attendance record set against Newcastle United in the Championship in 2009.
Football supporters don’t ask for much: a little hope, a club pointing the right direction, surefire belief that your club will exist in five years’ time. That should never be too much to ask for.
That is what we are really talking about here: potential. Nobody expects success; precious few football supporters are really entitled despite it being a regular accusation.
There are foundations here to build something after years of everything being trampled upon by a bad-faith actor and that is all everyone ever wanted and deserved.
“It is awe inspiring to see clubs like Luton reach the Premier League,” Ager says.
“Blackpool, Barnsley, Wigan, Brentford, Swindon, Bournemouth have all done it; Wrexham will probably get there eventually.
“Our natural place in the pecking order is probably the top half of League One, but so what? Now Martin is out of the club, it’s just nice to be able to dream again.”
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