As Bad as Things Got; Fulham, 28th February 1987

With a ground sitting on the banks of the Thames, Fulham have always been at risk of losing Craven Cottage. But they never came as close to actually losing their home as they did in 1987.

As ever, when professional football is threatened with financial peril, the galaxy-brained have come crawling out of the woodwork to tell us why their version of reforming the game – which somehow always seems to end up benefitting the club most closely connected with the galaxy-brain concerned – is definitely the idea that will save the game from penury.

It’s not always a bad thing. Promotion and relegation, play-offs, the entire concept of league football, have all come about because of the game’s need to keep evolving. But it’s also not uncommon to see wrecking balls getting involved, suggesting that to keep football viable, we have to try to kill it.

Few ideas on how to reform football have such a capacity to enrage supporters as mergers, and indeed there hasn’t been one involving a Football League club since Rotherham Town of the Midland League merged with Division Three North side Rotherham County to form Rotherham United in 1925.

For a while, though, the idea became popular idea again amongst club owners during the 1980s, possibly most famously when Robert Maxwell announced his plans to merge Reading and Oxford United as Thames Valley Royals, in 1983. Maxwell was beaten back by legal challenge at Reading by a former player who’d become a successful businessman, but the idea didn’t go away.