Inverness Caledonian Thistle on the brink

August marked the 30th anniversary of the merger which led to the formation of Inverness Caledonian Thistle, but will they even last a further thirty days from now?

Around 200 people turned up for the meeting at their stadium, and those who attended expecting to hear something eye-popping were not left disappointed. Inverness Caledonian Thistle need to raise £200,000 by the end of October if they are to continue trading until then, and a somewhat jaw-dropping £1.6m if they are to survive the rest of this season. At the time of writing, the club are one place off the bottom of the Scottish League One, the third tier of the game north of the border.

It may surprise some readers to find that the club are this far down the ladder, but their decline has been evident for a while. Caley were relegated from the Championship at the end of last season, and this season on the pitch has started with just one six draws from their first nine games in a remarkably tight ten-team division, in which just nine points separate top from bottom place.

Of course, the unusual nature of the Scottish League One so far this season does make the fact that they’re one place off the bottom of it slightly less dramatic than it may at first seem. If anything, the team hasn’t been dramatic enough. They’ve only scored twice in a game once, a 2-2 draw with Alloa Athletic in the middle of September, with every other league game they’ve played having finished 0-0, 1-1 or 1-0. Their only win so far came against Queen of the South at the end of August. 

But what’s been happening on the pitch has not been the main story of their season so far. Following relegation at the end of last season, the club made the decision to remain full-time, but this was accompanied by another one, to move the club’s training base 143 miles from Inverness, at Kelty Hearts. Only a supporter protest put a stop to that. But the matter forced the resignation of chairman Ross Morrison. 

Panos Thomas replaced Morrison as the club chairman, but Thomas himself didn’t last very long in the position, resigning at the end of September for what were described as “personal reasons”. He in turn was replaced by interim Scott Young, who’s the club’s supporter liaison officer and had previously been the vice-chairman. It was Young’s job to deliver the bad news at Monday’s meeting, and at points it started to come across as farcical. The numbers were dreadful. The club owes £3.4m to directors with another former chairman, Alan Savage, having put in £342,000 and already stepped in to save them in August.

Savage’s return has brought at least one silver lining, which is the departure of former chief executive Scot Gardiner. At Monday’s meeting it was confirmed that on one occasion Gardiner emailed Carlisle United to inform them that they didn't need to pay compensation for a player, Cameron Harper, and that a shirt deal was signed with Puma whereby Caley would pay them £125,000 a year. Add this sort of weird profligacy to the decision to stay full-time after another relegation and the reasons for the club’s current crisis-ridden state start to become more obvious. 

It wasn’t always like this of course. There was a time when their headlines made headlines. But Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s golden years weren’t just the punchline to this joke. Following the club’s 1994 merger their rise to the top tier was rapid, promoted in 1997, 1999 and 2004. The pace of this ascent was too quick for the club, in one important respect. They had to play their first season in the Premier Division at Aberdeen because their own stadium didn’t meet a 10,000-seat requirement which was then in place for the top flight. 

They stayed in the top division for 13 years, winning the Scottish Cup in 2015 and getting to the final as recently as 2023. They’ve also won the Scottish Challenge Cup three times, were runners up in the Scottish League Cup in 2014. But following their return to the Championship in 2017 they received nothing much beyond annual heartache in the play-offs. Relegation at the end of last season was not in keeping with their performance, broadly speaking, since they went down seven years earlier.

And these relegations have come at a material cost. The average attendance at Caledonian Stadium for the 2016/17 season, their last in the SPFL Premiership, was 3,946. After five games of this season, and now two divisions lower, that figure is 1,630, a fall of 60%. Of course, with no significant television money at this level of Scottish football, the question of how on earth it could ever have been believed that a club already millions of pounds in hock to its directors could remain full-time on attendances like these is just about anybody’s guess. 

A fundraiser has been set up, and at the time of writing it’s raised £72,000, so it’s about a third of the way there with a week to go to hit the £200,000 that the club claimed it needed in order to survive. Once again, it is left to the supporters themselves to try and stick a finger in this particular dam and try to raise the money to keep it going. Never mind that the club has already had many of their season ticket monies already. There will always be someone who has to put up the mess after terrible mismanagement, and a lot of the time it’s the supporters themselves.

But that record on the pitch offers a strange degree of hope. A win in their next league match could lift them as high as 6th in the table and put them just a couple of points and a couple of places off the play-offs that have proved so difficult for them over the years. They’re only actually five points off the top of the table.

Of course, that’s not where the attention is at the moment. As things stand, a fifteen-point deduction for entering into administration would be disastrous for the club, and it may speak volumes for their desperate financial predicament that some board members are suggesting that this is likely the best option for the club. In the eventuality of relegation this season, Inverness Caledonian Thistle would have made the journey from the basement of Scottish football and back in just 28 years, a period which takes in nine-tenths of their entire history. They may well end up completing that on the tenth anniversary of their finest ever moment. To Caley fans, it may well feel longer ago than that.