Embargo lifted, but Morecambe remain moored to the bottom

They're still at the foot of the EFL but they haven't been cast completely adrift just yet. But can Morecambe get back ashore before the tide goes out for good?

Perhaps the most frustrating of it all has been that so much of it has seemed so close. Morecambe started their season with five successive defeats and then drew their next four games. Of the 17 League Two defeats they’ve accumulated so far this season, ten of them have been by a one-goal margin and only three have been by as much as a three-goal margin.

Considering what has been going on behind the scenes at the club, it might even be considered surprising that Morecambe still seem to have such a fighting chance of staying up, and in a game of fine margins, you can only wonder how many points they may already have missed out on as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the club.

But they are still just about in touch. Wins against two teams just above them in League Two (no-one is currently below them), Carlisle United and Tranmere Rovers, on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day respectively, combined with the abject form of those just above them in the league table, have ensured that even now, with well over half the season played and February honing into view, they’re still just six points from safety.

The last week has brought a salutary reminder of just how precarious the club’s position remains. Friday 24th January brought a statement from the club that the reason for a lack of transfer activity during this window was because the club was under an embargo because they had demonstrated that they had adequate funds to operate until their fiscal end of years, at the end of May. As director James Wakefield said on Twitter, “There’s no sugarcoating this, it’s a proper punch in the guts.’’

The following week at least brought better news on that front, when it was confirmed that this proof had now been provided and that the club could now resume normal transfer activity, albeit with barely over two days of the window left. It certainly can’t have come soon enough for manager Derek Adams, who had previously confirmed that he had two loans lined up that he hadn’t been able to complete, but that he was hoping to get over the line before next Monday’s deadline.

When this happened in July the club quickly signed fifteen new players, and there’s no reason to believe that the same won’t happen again over these two, although the club’s position hasn’t been helped by the delay caused by that embargo. It’s a good example of how this sort of financial mismanagement can just get in the way of a football club simply being able to act in the way in which a football club should.

Morecambe have been an EFL club since 2007, and most of that time has been spent in the apparently dogged pursuit of Not Having a Particularly Good Season. Over the seventeen years since then, they’ve only finished in the top ten of whichever division they’ve been playing in on two occasions. In 2010, they finished in fourth place in League Two but were comprehensively beaten by Dagenham & Redbridge in the playoff semi-finals.

It was a dozen years before they tasted such heights again. They finished fourth again in 2022, but this time they were promoted through the playoffs, beating Newport County in the final. It now looks very much like this was a promotion for which they were not remotely ready. At the end of their first season in League One they finished in 19th place with 42 points. The following season they were relegated in 22nd despite getting 44. Back in League Two for the first time in three years, last season they finished in a fairly respectable 15th place.

The club’s financial position will have been alleviated by their little run in the FA Cup, which eventually took them to a 5-0 defeat at Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the Third Round. It’s a run worth an estimated £400,000 to the club (shared gate receipts for matches at 40,000 capacity grounds matter), and this seems to have been enough to persuade the club’s current owner to loosen his purse strings and ensure that funds were in the club’s account before the Monday transfer deadline.

Much was made of the fact that the club’s 2023 relegation from League One was the first relegation in their 103-year history, but there is another curious anomaly about their accession into the EFL, in that every promotion that they’ve had on the way has come about without a league title, from the Northern Premier League in 1995 in second place because that year’s champions Marine’s ground wasn’t up to scratch, and then from both the Conference in 2007 and from League Two in 2022 through the playoffs. As it goes, they haven’t won a league title of any description since the 1968 Lancashire Combination title, which was their fourth of those in seven years and which assured them entry into the then-brand new Northern Premier League.

Back in the current day, Morecambe do have an enormous fight on their hands. The only teams they’ve beaten since November are the two immediately above them in the league table. Without those six points, we would probably be talking about them as a lost cause. Yet as things stand they’re still just six points from safety, and they even have a superior goal difference to third from bottom Tranmere Rovers on account of all those one-goal defeats. But with just 19 games left they need an improvement to come from somewhere. Perhaps the end of the January transfer window could be just the shot they need, should they be able—or, in the case of the current owner, willing—to get anything over the line.

Accompanying Image by Dave Noonan fromPixabay.