As Bad as Things Got: Middlesbrough, 22nd August 1986

Several years of decline resulted in the club being locked out of their ground and only ten minutes from extinction on the day before the first day of the season.

With the benefit of almost thirty years’ distance, the opening of the Riverside Stadium in August 1995 feels like one of the truly symbolic moments of the game’s post-Taylor Report boom. With a capacity of 30,000 seats, this was the largest new stadium that had built in the five years since the report was published, a new citadel on the banks of the River Tees and a radical departure from Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough’s spit and sawdust home of the previous 92 years. For supporters, though, the Riverside Stadium represented something else, as well; a bright new future for a club that had spent much of the previous decade and a half on the brink of financial disaster.