Go Woking or Go Broke

A loan from the owner's parents will keep them going for now, but Woking aren;t out the woods yet, and all as a result of good old-fashioned overspending.

It will come as little consolation to Woking supporters currently surveying the wreckage of the club’s financial affairs and the dark words of owner Drew Volpe—if ever there was a case of nominative determinism, surely this is it; what is the time, Mr Wolf?—but there is something almost charmingly retro about their club’s current plight.

Often these days, when a club finds itself in some sort of mess, there’s a minefield to have to negotiate. Perhaps the owner has just been sent to prison for colossal fraud. Perhaps they’re just utterly incompetent and have lost interest. Perhaps they arrived with intentions of shaking things up and ended up shaking themselves down instead.

At the wilder ends are murky grey areas and the possibility of very real criminality. There’s money in football, and where there’s money there will always be those who want to shave off a tiny cut for themselves, whether by fair means or foul.

But in comparison with anything like this, the plight of Woking Football Club is fairly straightforward; a matter of good, old-fashioned over-spending. Conscious decisions were taken on behalf of the club that, despite how difficult this would be, money would be spent on trying to get them into the EFL. Too much money was spent. And now the owner is appearing on BBC local radio, telling the world that without significant financial backing the club could be pushed into administration.

There’s no particular structural reason why this should have happened. After all, non-league attendances boomed after the ending of pandemic-related. Woking’s jumped by more than a quarter, increasing by 28% in 2018/19 over 2,700 by 2023. In a league in which commercial revenues can be low, broadcast revenue is negligible unless you have a good run in the FA Cup, and match day revenues matter, the club should have been able to thrive, to the extent to which they could in a deeply financially imbalanced league.

Of course, there could be some degree of mitigation to be found in that the pandemic exploded a bomb under the finances of all football clubs, but we’re not four years on from that now and, to his credit, Volpe didn’t mention it as a cause in his interview. This was simply a matter of a failed gamble, good money after bad in pursuit of a dream that was always on the unlikely side of things to come good.

And it comes with a good old-fashioned dollop of boardroom intrigue too, in the departure of former CEO John Katz in June. The pair had arrived at the club four years ago with plans to get Woking into the EFL in three years. It would appear that there was some degree of plan for those three years but nothing in the event that everything didn’t go exactly as they hoped. Bills continue to fall payable even if you run out of money. Debts may start to mount. It’s an extremely familiar cycle which, yes, can ultimately result in administration.

But none of this seems to be imminent. A £600,000 loan from Volpe’s parents has bought liquidity and consequently time for now, with Volpe stating that this allowed the club to get through the latter stages of the summer, when revenues are lower, to the start of the League season on 10th August. Books will still have to be balanced, but the screaming headlines don’t exactly help. This isn’t the EFL, so there won’t be any ruinously lengthy player contracts to have to honour.

Volpe has made a plea for ‘investment’, a familiar cri de coeur in an age when money is God. Obviously the biggest question to be asked at such a point is what an investor would be getting for their money. It’s fair to say that, on the pitch, recent years have been… variable. Five years ago Woking had just been promoted back following relegation two seasons earlier, but since then, and since the arrival of the new, American owners, things have been up and down.

The club came through the pandemic relatively unscathed, but with a number of well-backed clubs near the top of the National League table, the likelhood of getting into the promised land was always slight. The nearest they came was in 2023, with a 4th-placed finish and a home defeat in the play-offs to Bromley. Last season, they slumped to 17th.

This is, of course, the fifth division of the English League System, and more or less the bottom rung of the professional ladder. And the National League heads into the new season with unhappiness growing. Chesterfield won the league at a canter, and there have been whispers that the League’s television deal with TNT Sports could be coming to an end. Meanwhile, there has been considerable dissatisfaction at the League jumping into bed with the Premier League for another competition. The heady optimism of those first couple of post-lockdown years is dissipating.

Should new white knights appear on the horizon, there’ll be a need for careful scrutiny. The number of tyre-kickers hanging around financially embarrassed football clubs has shot up in recent years, and at several clubs prospective new owners have been flushed out as wrong ‘uns by journalists or fans themselves. This is particularly important in view of Volpe’s comment that he’d put the club up for a sale for a pound, if he needed to. Nothing’s more likely to attract the interest of the chancer than the promise of not having to put anything much into the project themselves.

But ultimately those questions are for another day. And even the most scrupulous of pre-screening can’t account for brain melts once in the job. No-one even doubted Volpe and Katz’s intentions. If Volpe has learned his lessons, there’s still opportunity for Woking to continue at this level of the game. Attendances have, after all, been healthy.

But until broader inequalities within football are evened out, there will always be a glass ceiling for most and the risks of trying to break through it can be considerable. It’s a lesson that the owners of Woking Football Club have learned the hard way over the last four years or so. It is to be hoped that Mr Wolf’s parents don’t learn a similarly hard lesson, no matter how important their money may have been for Woking Football Club.