Dumbarton FC and a "get-rich quick pipe dream"
One of Scotland's oldest football clubs is in danger because it's been treated as a pawn in a wider game.
Sitting on the north bank of the River Clyde where the River Leven flows into the Clyde estuary, Dumbarton is an unassuming town of 20,000 people with a history that can be traced back to the Iron Age; the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Strathclyde.
That sense of history stretches as far as its football club. Dumbarton Football Club are Scotland’s fourth oldest, formed in September 1872, but after 152 years in existence their future is uncertain, and all because the club itself has effectively become an object lesson in what can go wrong when one becomes a means to an end in the failing ambitions of others.
Dumbarton first moved to Boghead Park in 1879. These were very different times for the club. They were runners-up in the Scottish Cup in 1881 and 1882 before winning it in 1883. Eight years later in 1891 they became joint-winners of the first season of the Scottish League alongside Rangers, and they won it outright the following year.
Of course, such success was never likely to last. As football began its century long process of industrialisation, Dumbarton slipped down the order, but they did also maintain their position as one of the historic clubs of the Scottish game. They were also the first in Scotland to form a Supporters Trust, The Sons Trust (the club’s nickname comes from an old informal nickname for people from the town as ‘The Sons of the Rock’), in 2003.
The club left their ancestral home in December 2000, by which time it had fallen into considerable disrepair. Formerly capable of holding 20,000 people, by the time of its closure it held just 3,000, with a fire in 1985 destroying one of the stands and no replacement for it having been built.
But the new ground, the Dumbarton Football Stadium, more commonly known as The Rock due to its adjacency to Dumbarton Castle, also came with certain issues. Built on the site of a former shipyard, most notably it only had one stand and one of the smallest capacities in the entire SPFL, holding just 2,000 people.
It’s now more than ten years since the club’s former owners Brabco 736 Ltd put in an application to leave the stadium and move the club again, this time to a site at Young’s Farm on the northern side of the town, only for the application to be rejected by the council in 2018 because it was on what was considered to be valuable green belt land. Brabco later submitted a “slender” application for a much smaller development at the same site, but this was also rejected in 2020.
The following year, Brabco sold the club to another company, called Cognitive Capital. They had grand plans as well, but again they’ve fallen flat on their face. This time the idea was to redevelop land around the ground, but these plans were finally scrapped for good in February this year following further rejections by the local council.
The matter even went as far as the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, where Labour MSP Jackie Baillie raised concerns about the ownership structure at the club. Calling for an independent regulator and greater fan-power in Scottish football Ms Baillie said:
The introduction of an independent regulator to scrutinise governance, finance and transparency should be considered to give fans a much louder voice and ensure good governance in the game.
The Sons Supporters Trust has told me that, for nearly two decades, Dumbarton has been in the hands of owners whose primary interest appears to be land and property deals, and who have frequently failed to deliver the resources promised to the club.
Reportedly, they have stalled possible community development because of a get-rich pipe dream. Instead of treating clubs such as Dumbarton with the respect that they deserve, they have been treated like development opportunities to get rich quick.
That would have meant moving the club from its existing ground to release it for an upmarket housing development. There were real concerns about the club’s future and whether this was a case of asset stripping.
We must come together for our communities and clubs to guarantee that public interest is at the forefront of football ownership, that Scottish football is run for the benefit of the people and that accountability can flourish.
Strong words.
It’s only taken nine months from then to the club collapsing into administration. Quantuma have been appointed as the insolvency practitioners and the club have been deducted the standard 15 points in the Scottish League One, which wipes everything the team has gained on the pitch so far this season and leaves them bottom of the table, on zero.
Of course, they’re not even the first club in this ten-team division to have found themselves in this state already this season. Inverness Caledonian Thistle are one place above them on four points after having followed the same path themselves just six weeks ago, and there have been rumours that more might even follow.
The reason given by the club for this collapse has been “the non-receipt of significant funds that were owed to the club from the sale of development land in 2021”, and this raises very obvious questions, many of which have already been asked by The Sons Trust, who are hoping that the administration process will finally shed some light on what they describe as “opaque” dealings that have been going on behind the scenes at the club.
Companies House documents show that, as of May 2023, the club was in a financial mess, making a loss of £12,500 a month. These accounts also state that a club sold heritable assets—part of the land upon the stadium is built and its surroundings—worth £1.8m to a ‘related party’ called More Homes DFC, with the first payment for this of £300,000 due in April 2023 and the remainder to be paid upon completion of the redevelopment project. This, it now seems reasonable to say, is never going to happen, so what now happens regarding this money, or does ownership of the land now pass back to the previous owners?
About that ‘related party’, then. More Homes DFC currently have a proposal to strike-off against their name at Companies House. Their sole director is one Matthew Atkinson, who was a director of Cognitive Capital until December 2021, which offers a hint as to the true nature of what has been going on here.
We can sift through the dozens of names currently or previously showing on Companies House documents for these companies, but there is one person whose name currently shows with them in a somewhat different respect who matters more than any other.
Andrew Laird Hosie is a former commercial manager of Everton and his family have long been involved at Dumbarton, but in November 2016 he was banned from acting as a company director for twelve years over his involvement in companies called Gambling Insight and Bet Butler.
These companies had claimed, somewhat extravagantly, that “it is a mathematical certainty we will win and profit tax free” through what is known as ‘arbitrage gambling’, in which bets are placed with different betting companies to enable gamblers to make a profit, regardless of the outcome, by utilising the variance in odds offered by different bookmakers. This claim, it turned out, was a lie.
It was established from the insolvency process that Hosie had obtained an estimated £7.16m from investors and syndicates under these representations, but after the company went into administration, “practically none” of this money could be traced. David Brooks, group leader at The Insolvency Service, said the long ban highlights that “honesty and openness is an essential element of a director’s role”, and that “Mr Hosie promoted this investment as practically risk free.”
Brooks also confirmed that, “the truth of the matter was that Mr Hosie has lost the investors money through a combination of gambling and a failure to keep records which would show how it has been disposed of, through the thousands of gambling accounts operated by the company.” The company entered administration in January 2015 and Hosie himself declared bankruptcy four months later.
It has also been established that the chicanery doesn’t end there. A charge was secured over “all and whole the subjects lying on the west side of Castle Road” in July 2021 by a lender called Pendragon Group Ltd, which essentially means that the ground itself is now mortgaged to a company who could, if the terms of the charge haven’t been met, default Cognitive Capital and take ownership of the ground. The amount of money concerned isn’t known, but it is believed that not a single penny of any of the money referred to here has found its way to the actual football club itself.
Hosie’s ban from acting as a company director runs until November 2028, but after a former creditor of Gambling Insights threatened to put the club into administration over money that he was outstanding in 2021, club directors were still going out to bat for him with one, Henning Kristofferson, stating that, “Andrew has a degree from Cambridge University, 10 years experience at Procter and Gamble, the world’s biggest marketing company, five years experience as a commercial director of Everton Football Club and 15 years sports marketing with other clubs - plus he has never taken 1p from Dumbarton and will work for nothing.”
It should be added that Henning Kristofferson was, at the time that he made this statement, a director of Brabco (which was just about to be dissolved), Cognitive Capital, and Dumbarton FC. He resigned his position as a director of Dumbarton FC as recently as the 7th November 2024, having already resigned as a director of Cognitive Capital in February 2023.
This is an extremely tangled web, but all arrows ultimately point towards Andrew Hosie, and it should be clear by this point that he should be nowhere near the running of a football club—or, for that matter, anything to do with the ownership of its ground—whatsoever.
What a mess, and all the more striking for the fact that all of this is happening at a small, part-time Scottish football club at which attendances seldom even run as high as four figures. It speaks volumes that it’s even necessary to talk about loans, charges and company director bans when we’re ultimately looking at such a small club.
But this has long been the case at football clubs the length and breadth of Britain. Smaller clubs who own their grounds have long been seen as little more than prey by rapacious speculators, as small businesses with little money which sit on some very valuable land indeed. It’s happened time and again, the length and breadth of both Scotland and the UK, from Cornwall to the north of Scotland.
And the upshot of this basic neglect is that Dumbarton FC have already been suffering. It is understood, for example, that the club has had significant issues relating to paying their wages on time on several occasions over the last few months. This is a mess that needs to be unpicked carefully now, with new owners hopefully to be found from administration and the ground being returned to the ownership of the club itself rather than any of these carpet-baggers.
The size of the club’s squad and its level of full-time staff is small enough that the human cost of administration shouldn’t be terrible, but it should be added that there is an obviously systemic issue with the way in which clubs are being governed if we find ourselves anywhere near this position in the first place. Who knows what further financial horrors may lurk away from public view that the administrators may dredge up? We shall see.
This is a failure on several levels, from owners who’ve treated the club as little more than an afterthought to a League itself which is still trying to resist an independent regulator, even though things like this just keep on happening. The Sons of the Rock deserve better than this. Dumbarton Football Club deserve better than this. Scottish football deserves better, too. At least some answers may now be found. It is astonishing that things have gone this far for this to finally be happening.