Maldon, Tiptree, and a familiar story unfolding again
A wealthy man has bought into a non-league football club and is making grandiose promises of success. Heard this story a thousand times before, haven't we?
For the second home match in a row, Maldon & Tiptree saw a big jump in attendance. Earlier this season, they were struggling to attract more than 170 or so to their home matches. For their game before last, they attracted 477 to the Maldon Stadium for their Isthmian League Division One North match against Haringey Borough only to lose 2-1.
But this didn’t make any difference to this upward swing; 668 turned out for their match against Basildon United last Saturday, and on this occasion everything went according to plan, a 5-0 win against a team that has been in freefall for the last few months. The ultimate cause of all this is the hubbub caused by the takeover of the club by the Drewitt-Barlow Organisation. This ‘organisation’ is fronted by Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, who became “Britain's first gay dad, fathering a twin boy and girl through surrogacy” in 1999. A worthy and noble cause, on that we can all agree.
But Barrie Drewitt-Barlow is also a businessman and an entrepreneur, and this is when we start to see greater issues. They start when we start to look at what has been going on at the club since they took ownership of it. This report from AOL.com concludes with the somewhat unusual closing line; “He stressed there was no plan to build houses on the club's land.”
Oh… ohhh…kayyy?
This is later clarified in the BBC piece from which it seems to have been based:
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow stressed he had no plan to build houses on the club's land.
"The aim is to make it – and keep it – a leisure place for the community," he added.
Oh… ohhh…kayyy? Why would that subject be brought up? Ah. They’re property developers.
The stadium itself was previously owned by the owner of Colchester United, Robbie Cowling, with his brother running the club. Maldon & Tiptree were the result of a merger between Maldon Town and Tiptree United in 2010 in which everybody essentially upped sticks to Maldon, with the Tiptree ground being lost to housing.
They’ve been in the Isthmian League Division One North ever since and have lost three times in the playoffs before. Things have improved. Attendances were comfortably in two figures a decade ago. They were double that by this season. Their biggest moment came in the 2019/20 FA Cup, when they beat Leyton Orient 2-1 at Brisbane Road in the First Round before losing 1-0 at home to Newport County in the Second.
At that point they were running away with the Division One North title as well, but in March 2020, with the pandemic starting to rampage, the Isthmian League abandoned their season. Maldon & Tiptree were 14 points clear at the top of the table at the time. But legal challenges from elsewhere failed and we all ended up losing two seasons to it all. Since the football came back, they’ve finished 9th, 15th and 11th.
Back in the 2024/25 season, the eccentricity started at the beginning of this year. Brett Munyard had been appointed as the club’s manager on the 13th of November, at which point they’d lost nine of their last ten league matches and were in the relegation places. Munyard went his first nine games unbeaten, with five wins and four draws which hauled Maldon & Tiptree from the relegation places towards mid-table, but after they lost 2-0 at home to Sporting Bengal United on New Years Day he was suddenly and unceremoniously sacked.
His replacement was to be Liam Bailey until the end of the season. They needed a manager. The team had lost three and drawn one since they got rid of Munyard. Bailey’s first two matches ended in a win and a defeat—a mixed bag, but still an improvement on prior to Brett Munyard—only for Bailey to be demoted back down to assistant and the manager’s job given to the former Needham Market manager Kevin Horlock instead. The Basildon game was Horlock’s first win from his first three games as manager. His first game was the Haringey defeat.
There are high-falutin’ plans to redevelop the ground, because there always are at such times. There isn’t much to the Maldon Stadium; two seated stands and not much more. So it’s not that it couldn’t stand redevelopment. The problem is that this sort of endeavour can become extremely expensive, and clubs have been financially sunk by the costs of redeveloping their grounds before.
They’ve also changed the club’s badge to whatever the hell this is supposed to be, which has, according to the BBC, “divided supporters”. They’ve also renamed the ground after themselves, which is definitely very normal behaviour. And of course there has to be some sort of crypto-related shenanigans when it comes to anything like this, and they managed to work this into the signing of goalkeeper Elliott Justham from Dagenham & Redbridge. A pugnacious style on social media hasn’t endeared them to many people, either.
And then there’s the small matter of how far a football club in this location can be taken. The town of Maldon and village of Tiptree combined had a population of around 24,000 according to the 2021 census, but since 9,000 of them lived in Tiptree, which is about eight or nine miles from the ground, so how many of them can be counted upon for week-in-week-out support may be open to question.
There’s a further problem, too. The nearest railway station to Maldon Stadium is six miles away, a two-hour walk, while there aren’t any particularly major roads nearby, either. The nearest other big settlement is Chelmsford, and that’s ten miles to the west and has a club of its own already. If Maldon & Tiptree are going to thrive over a period of years, they’re going to need consistent new support, but where is that going to come from? Sometimes football clubs can run into glass ceilings just on the basis of their location. What will this club’s be?
And there is one other troubling story from their past, that in 2010 Drewitt-Barlow and his (now ex-)husband were banned from acting as company directors for eight years over their actions in relation to a cosmetics-testing company that they had owned. For the avoidance of doubt, there, a 6-10 year disqualification is usually for serious misconduct which is detrimental to the public interest. This wasn’t a mere oopsie. Drewitt-Barlow’s response to it all didn’t do him any favours, either:
All of our businesses are USA- based now, so accepting a disqualification here in the UK is no big deal to either one of us.
All it means is that our investments are now liquidated and that’s a loss for the local community in terms of jobs.
Well, it might not have been a big deal to you in 2010, but this sort of thing really isn’t considered a good thing in football. Since these disqualifications are now long spent, there’s nothing to stop him from owning a football club, but it should be added that this disqualification will be brought up throughout his involvement in the game, however long that lasts. There have been too many cases of leopards categorically not changing their spots in football over the years for this to not be the case.
So, where does this end up? It is entirely possible that Maldon & Tiptree could go up a couple of divisions with money behind them. The suggestion is already that they’ll be spending way more than any other club in the Isthmian League Division One North on wages next season, and on the basis of everything I’ve seen from that division this season, it looks eminently winnable.
But it doesn’t take very long before it starts to become extremely difficult. Non-league football is savage, in this respect, with only two promotion places in most divisions, which only the champions can claim without a playoff. By the time a team of Maldon’s size gets promoted twice, it’s starting to rub shoulders with former EFL clubs and those who are leaning towards professionalism. The National League is stuffed with them. And promotion means improving the facilities to their satisfaction. Ground-grading issues aren’t as bad as they were a few years ago, but they can still trip clubs up.
The danger is that, for people who know little to nothing about football, it all looks quite easy. Throw money at a tiny club, win a lot of matches, crowds grow, and the dopamine keeps flowing. But the history of non-league football is scattered with the bodies of those who’ve believed that their force of personality would do things differently, only to find that the game at this level often plays by its own rules.
The owner of Maldon & Tiptree has (inevitably) already said that “Wrexham, we’re coming for you”, but this overlooks almost everything about what made that story a success; the global reach of the new owners, the easy access to a high-profile documentary series, the additional advertisers who came on board. And they chose their club wisely, a storied ‘sleeping giant’ with an extremely large catchment area and a lot of history behind it, and brought in highly experienced people to run it on a day-to-day level.
What’s the hook that would be supposed to draw people into the Maldon & Tiptree story? Because “Wealthy man buys football club and throws money at it until it wins” isn’t going to cut it. There have been successful examples of this in the past, at Salford, Crawley, Fleetwood and elsewhere. But there have also been failures, and clubs that have ended up in a worse place than when they started, and if Barrie Drewitt-Barlow is in this at least in part of raise his own profile, he should probably be reminded that club owners who ‘buy the league’ seldom find themselves very popular for long, except among their own supporters.
The old adage remains, “What’s the best way to become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and buy a football club”. Small clubs are financial sink holes into which no amount of burning money is too great. The new owners of Maldon & Tiptree know enough to litter their statements about the future of their club with warming words like “community”, but they need to be aware that this is not going to be easy, and is likely to cost somebody a lot of money. Given his less than spotless business history, it is to be hoped that Barries Drewitt-Barlow has learned from his past mistakes. We shall see, but the early signs haven’t been especially promising.