As Bad As Things Got: Oxford United, 5th November 1991

The death of the club's owner and patriarch almost resulted in the death of the club as well.

The past can interact with the present in many different ways. The revolting story of Jeffrey Epstein seems a million miles removed from the history of a League One football club, but recent news headlines have called to mind one of the most turbulent and eventful decades in the history of that English football club. Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused of some heinous crimes, but that she should have served as a director of Oxford United for more than five years is a curio that us leads towards an extraordinary story in its own right, taking in football, the media, politics, financial mismanagement, and a very grand larceny indeed.

Robert Maxwell purchased Oxford United Football Club on the 6th of January 1982 for £128,000. Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the small town of Slatinské Doly in Czechoslovakia in 1923, he escaped to France as a child – much of his family was later killed in the Holocaust – and settled in England, buying a small publishing house called Butterworth-Springer in 1951 and changing its name to Pergamon Press. It would go on to become one of Britain’s leading publishing houses.