Blyth Spartans: Business before pleasure

Irfan Liaquat was effectively handed Blyth Spartans. Less than six months on, it says something that it's a good thing that he has put it up for sale.

Perhaps the ultimate point is that football clubs at this level of the game are only businesses in the most tangential of senses. When Blyth Spartans were effectively handed to Irfan Liaquat in April, the very act of selling the club for a quid while writing off hundreds of thousands of pounds in debts owed to former directors certainly seemed to demonstrate just how valueless they were as a business.

But the name and the club has a value which those who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing may never fully understand. This name tells a story which is woven into the fabric of the history of the game in this country; a small corner, but a corner nevertheless. And the club itself is a pillar of a community which has had its share of economic trauma over the decades, not least the loss of both the shipyards and the mines.

In such places, a football club can become a totem, a point to rally around. Its value is almost ethereal. Many local residents won’t often (or ever) go to matches, but even for many of them…it’s nice to know it’s there. Blyth Spartans run walking football and have previously partnered with a local food bank, while an adjacent juniors club has teams for boys & girls of all ages. Understanding these fundamentals is crucial to maximising the potential of just about any non-league football club.

In the end, the transfer of ownership took a long time to go through. Although announced in February it took until the middle of April to materialise, and by this point Spartans had sunk into trouble on the pitch. In a tight bottom half of the National League North table, four straight defeats had put them only just above the relegation places on the final Saturday of the season, the day after the takeover formally completed.

A win at home against third-placed Brackley would have guaranteed their survival at the expense of Farsley Celtic, but despite a decent crowd of 1,400 turning out to will them to stay up, Blyth were beaten 5-1 at home while Farsley beat Buxton 2-0 to relegate them into the Northern Premier League. It was only the second relegation in the club’s entire history.

In the summer Liaquat went on the offensive, with an angry club statement which has since been deleted from the club website. Good job the internet never forgets, then, eh?

In recent weeks the Football Club has received several complaints by a large number of our supporters including, the wider respected community members, and those who hold a particular interest within the Football Club.

The complaints brought forward by the aforementioned, are against particular individuals who are fabricating stories that are deceitful and without merit.

Furthermore, these individuals are fuelling hatred across social media platforms with fake news, including harassment and defamatory comments against the club and its officials.

This also includes misleading and deceitful statements about the Football Club and its day to day operations.

We would like to inform you we are currently investigating all of your complaints against the culprits, and will act swiftly and accordingly where necessary in due course.

We are a community driven Football Club, and we would like to assure you we have taken your concerns and complaints very seriously.

We would like to thank you for your understanding and ongoing support, which is always greatly appreciated and highly valued by everyone at Blyth Spartans Football Club.

It wasn’t the first time that the club had found itself in the news following the end of last season. Manager Jon Shaw didn’t last long following the relegation, but the decision to offer the job to Nolberto Solano hinted at a fundamental misdiagnosis of the club’s problems. Blyth Spartans had suffered a body blow with relegation, and while in a precarious condition required considerable care.

This was not the time to be making an attention-seeking managerial appointment, bringing someone into the club who yes, may be a local legend for his time with Newcastle United, but whose previous managerial record was almost almost entirely unimpressive and who had no real experience of this level of the game beyond half a season in the Northern League with Newcastle Benfield more than a decade ago.

What happened next was almost entirely predictable. The pre-season was chaotic, with Solano subsequently complaining that he only had ten players available after many left at the end of last season. He started the new one with three draws and a narrow defeat in the league, but when they lost successive matches heavily—5-2 at Worksop and then 4-1 at home to Morpeth Town—over the August Bank Holiday weekend Solano was sacked. He was, perhaps understandably, not especially happy to be treated in such a way. The former Brighton goalkeeper David Stockdale was appointed as his replacement. He has no previous managerial experience. Good luck, David. This is what they call a ‘baptism of fire’.

Blyth Spartans remain bottom of the Northern Premier League. Stockdale has managed a couple of wins, against Workington and Stockton over the course of eight days in September, but they’ve failed to win in the league since then, while their FA Cup run came to an end with an unceremonious defeat at home to Bury in the Third Qualifying Round, and Stockton returned to knock them out of the FA Trophy, a match boycotted by some supporters. At the exact time of writing, they’ve lost their last three straight league matches.

One example of how a club degrades when in this sort of position is in the fact that there’s no fixture list for this season available on the club website. There's also no reference to their last game at Leek Town, while a 4-0 defeat at Mickleover is still their main headline story, despite the fact that they’ve played three games since. Click on ‘Fixtures’ and it brings up a complete set of last season’s results.

On the club Facebook page, meanwhile, the former administrator of the Blyth website confirmed in the comments that he’d been asked to hand over the keys to it on the 24th March on the promise that a new one would be coming. Seven months on it hasn’t, and the site that the club does have is barely being updated.

And at this level of the game, these things matter. If I’m thinking of going to see Blyth Spartans play, I’ll go to their website and look at either the front page or the fixture list. I might not even know what league they play in, and honestly, if I’m not that committed in the first place, how long am I going to spend searching?

If I don’t bother because that information is hard to come by, the club misses the opportunity to convert someone into a potential new supporter. Few clubs at this level of the game, where match-day revenues really are everything, can afford to not be on their game over this sort of thing.

And this vague smell of dry rot is everywhere. On Companies House, their annual confirmation statement—the document which confirms that a company's information is accurate and up to date with them—is overdue, while there’s no way of getting any visibility of how the club has been run under Liaquat because the next set of company accounts aren’t due until the end of May 2025.

With the announcement that the club was being put back up for sale came another statement. This raises questions, but while Liaquat is happy to talk about what he feels that he’s done for the club since taking it over (while getting the month in which he completed the sale wrong, presuming it completed a couple of days prior to relegation), he’s somewhat more coy about current developments, saying only that, “I would also like to announce I am in advance stages with a potential sale to a strong party who have the means, and capacity to take the club forward.”

Well, okay. Who is this ‘strong party’, then? What does that even mean? How can supporters carry out their own due diligence on these people and, with all due deference, what the bloody hell is the need to be so secretive about the sale of a goddam Northern Premier League football club? How long will the sale take to complete (because the amount of time that the sale of a football club takes usually equates to ‘the length of a piece of string’)? Does the boycott continue until Liaquat has actually left the club, or is his statement enough to quell concerns? Because there’s no concrete evidence of anything actually happening beyond this statement at the moment.

Irfan Liaquat bought Blyth Spartans for £1, and with £700,000 of debt having been written off to enable a smooth passage. He should sell the club for the same amount, and write off any debt relating to money that he’s put in. This time is over. It’s cooked. It’s done. Move the club on and get it into the hands of people who recognise it primarily as an asset to its community, and a name of which that community can be proud. Not everything in life has to be about business. The very name of Blyth Spartans is too important for that.