If you have never been to Spotland before – and this is my first visit – then believe me when I say that the conditions are perfect: early February, freezing cold with the promise of snow, breath filling the air and the warm orange glow of clubhouse rooms and bars creating huddles of beery merriment.
Borehamwood have brought only 25 supporters to Rochdale on a Tuesday night. Each of them deserves a medal.
For Rochdale AFC, life is good again. No team in England’s top six tiers has won a higher percentage of its games this season.
By the end of the evening, after a 4-1 win over a supposed promotion rival, Rochdale will have the most points of any team too. They are top of the National League with two games in hand and the chants emanating from the Pearl Street End celebrate as much.
Rochdale have suffered enough that this season is more of a karmic rebalance than a march to glory. It is a painful game you can play with plenty of former crisis clubs, but still: five years ago they were 18th in League One and that season they drew with Sunderland in a league game.
Crisis averted
Ostensibly, two things happened in tandem. Firstly, in 2021 the club was subject to a hostile takeover from Morton House MGT, an organisation that effectively tried to acquire shares without speaking to board members or informing the EFL.
Rochdale were eventually given a suspended six-point deduction through no fault of anyone in charge and the takeover was averted. As everyone on Tuesday is keen to tell me, it would have been a disaster.
But at the same time, money was running out. Rochdale were a fan-owned club overachieving in the third tier and then relegated to League Two, environments where the finances do not make sense and clubs repeatedly submit annual losses that would be deeply alarming in any normal business.
“We had problems anyway with a previous chief executive and shareholder and a couple of the directors,” co-chairman Simon Gauge tells me before Tuesday’s match in a bar in the Main Stand as supporters begin to mill around.
“It’s alright if you’re coming up from nothing and you can keep control of your costs, but when you’ve already incurred those costs, it is impossible.
“You’re down to the bare minimum staff; you can’t do much on the football pitch. We just didn’t have the cash to carry on existing. If the eventual takeover hadn’t gone through that night, we would have been in liquidation the next day and the club would have died. I spoke to administrators and they wouldn’t have touched it. It would have been immediate liquidation.”
The local benefactor
All the while, Rochdale were dropping and so too was their revenue potential. In May 2023 they finished bottom of League Two and were relegated to non-league football for the first time since their original invitation to the Third Division North in 1921.
The warning to clubs in similar situations is that benevolent, wealthy, local owners do not grow on trees, and it carries weight. But really, one did here.
Sir Peter Ogden was educated at Rochdale Grammar School and, in 2014, the company he co-founded, Dealogic, was sold for £440m. He stepped in at the last minute in May 2024 after hearing about the emergency situation and, along with his son Cameron, vowed to rebuild the club.
Being financially self-sufficient, the ultimate vision, is as hard as ever in a league where Gauge estimates revenues drop 96 per cent from the EFL. The initial aim was to re-engage the club with its community by investing in infrastructure to make Spotland a community provider.
In the back of the Willbutts Lane Stand, where the Borehamwood supporters have room to spread out, is a non-for-profit alternate provision school that will offer education to 100 children who have fallen out of the curriculum.
A community hub
The passion is in education and huge sums have been invested in the club’s community trust. You see the lineage here: be a home for the community and the community will pay it back through their affinity with the club. Rochdale AFC becomes an intrinsic part of Rochdale again.
Obvious statement: money also makes everything else easier, too. There has been investment in data analysis, in a larger staff, in a new pitch, in a technical style that creates greater loan opportunities and in two and three-year contracts for players that allows greater retention and allows playing assets to hold value.
Manager Jimmy McNulty was supported and has delivered beyond most expectations this season.
“They are shaping the club in how they want a football club to be,” Gauge says.
“You can’t help but get bitten by the on-pitch stuff, but there is a social aspect to it that they’re really keen on, and it’s great to see. It’s trying to get local people outside of council and politicians to take control of their own destiny in the town, and get behind various projects.
“They want to do it through education and via lots and lots of projects. We wouldn’t be able to run how we run now without their money, but that’s just a small part of it: their vision is for the whole of Rochdale. They’re definitely in it for the long haul; they want to see social change in this town.”
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That is the juggling act here. Nobody can know where this season will end. There is a determination to get back into the Football League as soon as possible but there are a clutch of former EFL clubs who believe in the same goal and only one automatic promotion slot. For now, supporters will simply enjoy having a team that once again reflects their club; this time for the better.
But all the while, there is also a growing permanence to the place now. Things are happening. Someone has an idea of how to make life better for other people and it can become action rather than exist as a half-formed, financially unviable dream.
That creates its own form of sustainability. A club has been rebuilt, a team has been reborn and a community is being re-engaged for the good of all. This is the good stuff.
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