Not for the first time... Swindon wilts

The club has been drifting towards the bottom of the EFL over the last three or four years, and there are serious questions to be answered about an owner who was once hailed as a saviour.

When Grimsby Town were relegated from League Two at the end of the 2020/21 season, BBC Radio Humberside co-commentator Gary Croft had some choice words to say about one of the club’s former managers, who’d quit through a Twitter statement the previous December:

He's done miles more than me in the game, but I feel like it was just a bit of a play thing, a toy for him to play with. I just can't believe that people have stood around and watched it happen, watched it unfurl without getting into him, questioning him, and finding out what's going on.

He was like that all-powerful person that no-one dare question. Crazy interviews that once were entertaining YouTube viewing, and are now completely not funny. He's come here and turned this season into a disaster. I don't think this is a particularly strong league, I don't think Town needed to do an awful lot, and for a club of our size in this league, we shouldn't be down where we are.

Ian Holloway hadn’t worked in football since, but now he’s been appointed as the manager of Swindon Town, who are third from bottom in League Two and only four points above the relegation places. And this appointment, especially considering what happened in his last managerial position, raises some extremely pointed questions, because this particular club does not seem to be a particularly happy place to be at the moment, in an increasingly precarious-looking position near the foot of League Two.

The decline of Swindon over the last decade has been neither swift nor dramatic, but a club which a decade ago was at Wembley playing for a place in the Championship (and losing 4-0 to Preston North End) is now at risk of becoming the second former Premier League club after Oldham Athletic to fall as far as the non-league game since that league came into being in 1992. Is Holloway the man to fix this, when Swindon have rattled through managers in recent years to little evident effect and there are more questions to ask about the owner of the club than anyone else?

At the same time that Grimsby were getting relegated from the EFL, a couple of hundred miles south-west, another change was coming. Swindon Town had just been relegated from League One after a one-year stay. They’d only been promoted as the League Two champions a year earlier, and the atmosphere surrounding the club was turning mutinous. The brief stay in League One following promotion from the curtailed 2020/21 season had been an indicator that the previous ownership of Lee Power had run seriously awry.

The club was in a sorry state by the time that Clem Morfuni became the majority shareholder in July 2021 following a legal battle with Power, with end of season departures having reduced the club’s first team squad to just nine players just three weeks before the start of the new one. Ben Garner was brought in as manager and a team was built. But despite this, Garner took them to 6th with four straight wins at the end of the 2021/22 season before losing to Port Vale on penalty kicks in the play-off semi-finals.

That was about as good as things got for Clem Morfuni, who was previously a 15% shareholder having previously invested £1m in the club, and Swindon Town. In all honesty, the first question mark to hang over Morfuni’s ownership materialised just a few weeks after the takeover was completed, when he appointed three people as non-executive directors of the club including Zavier Austin.

Austin was not unfamiliar to Swindon supporters. It was he who was understood to have first introduced Morfuni to Power in 2015, which resulted in the power struggle for ownership of the club which ended with Morfuni taking over. In July 2022, Mofuni told an Advisory Board meeting that “Zav is the club’s vice-chair. EFL approval is ongoing”, but as of October 2024 he has never been listed as a company director with Companies House.

But if he was a non-executive director—meaning that his name wasn’t on any of the formal paperwork—it only took fans a few days to establish that Austin had a somewhat ‘colourful’ past. In 2005, Austin had been sentenced to 4 years in prison for laundering £12.5m of drug money. By the summer of 2023, the club’s Supporters Trust was being told by the club that: “He is not the Vice-Chairman. He does not hold any position of influence within the club and does not receive a salary.”

Well okay, but what happened to that “EFL approval”, then? Fortunately, the Trust kept pressing on that issue and eventually got the answer that, “After legal advice we did not apply for the Owners and Directors Test and therefore Zav is not Vice Chairman”. He wasn’t the only one who may or may not have been connected to the club. Adam Hart, once described as “Britain’s most wanted man”, has also reportedly held a position there. Like Austin, his name features nowhere at Companies House. It should also be mentioned that the club had stated that Hart was never directly employed by the club and was in a consultancy role only. Here he is, being listed as the club’s Operations Director for a match against Gillingham.

Elsewhere, there were other troubling signs. The explanation given for why “we’d recommend supporters to bring the exact cash for their tickets where possible” for their recent home game against Gillingham was ‘'issues with a third-party platform on match days', but while it’s important to keep an open mind about why this might have been, there isn’t really a prism in this day and age through which this is a good thing. Trying to make tickets cash only and limiting their sale on match days will only likely affect the club’s bottom line.

But the most troubling sign of all was what was happening on the pitch. Since finishing 6th three years ago, Swindon have continued their steady downward trajectory to the point that it’s now been four consecutive seasons where they’ve finished lower than they did the year before. In 2022/23 they managed 10th place in League Two, and last season it was 19th. At the time of writing, they’re in 22nd place.

It is not unreasonable for supporters to wonder where this trajectory bottoms out, and how well-equipped the club might be to fight another relegation battle should Carlisle United, who were only relegated from League One at the end of last season and whose appearance in the relegation places is certainly something of a surprise, pull their fingers out and start putting together a few better results themselves.

Meanwhile, the door to the manager’s office has become a revolving one. Ben Garner left for Charlton following that play-off defeat in 2022. Scott Lindsay was his replacement, having had success in the non-league game with Chatham Town, but he only lasted six months before leaving for Crawley the following January. Jody Morris replaced him, but he was sacked at the start of May following just four wins from eighteen matches. At the time that Morris took over Swindon were in 6th place in the table. By the time the season ended, they were tenth, and 14 points adrift of the final play-off spot.

Morris was replaced for the last game of the 2022/23 season by Michael Flynn, who signed a contract extension in November 2023 but was still gone by the middle of the following January, with the team in 15th place in the table. Gavin Gunning took over as the club’s manager on a caretaker basis, but left at the end of last season with them having finished in 19th place, their lowest final EFL position since the League went to four divisions in 1958. In the FA Cup, they were beaten 7-4 at home by National League opposition in the form of Aldershot Town. It should go without saying that none of this is ‘good’ news.

Mark Kennedy was his replacement, but things still didn’t seem to improve in any way whatsoever. Kennedy lasted five months before being sacked at the end of October. At the time of writing, Swindon have won precisely two league matches this season out of 14. They were also knocked out of the EFL Cup at the first attempt by Crawley Town. Results haven’t been particularly awful, even if some performances may have been. They’ve only lost two league games by more than one goal, though worryingly enough the last of those was a 2-0 home defeat to Carlisle, one of only two league wins that they’ve managed so far this season.

So Holloway arrives at The County Ground to a club without a win since the 12th October and with a possible winter of discontent looming. Criticism of the owner has been growing for some time, and the appointment of yet another new manager only seems to mask a deeper malaise within the club. Attendances have been falling in line with the team’s decline. In the 2021/22 season, their first back in League Two, the average was 9,449. By last season that had dropped to 8,483. The average so far this season is 7,201.

To put it another way, this is not a club that, at the moment, cannot afford to be further alienating supporters or, for that matter, making match tickets more difficult to obtain. The club’s last set of available accounts confirm that, “Without the funds received from The Nigel Eady Trust related to the purchase of the County Ground in the joint venture, the loss for the year [the 2022/23 season) would have been £1,073,519”.

This relates to the transfer of ownership of the ground through The County Ground Stadium Custodians Ltd (a body set up by the Trust), Swindon Borough Council and the club. It seems vanishingly unlikely that anything like the small profit ultimately reported for that season will be repeated again for the 2023/24 season. We’ll find that out at the end of February, when the accounts for last season are due at Companies House. The council do have the right to buy back their share in the event that substantial development money isn’t put into the ground in the next couple of years or so. There have been no signs of this having materialised yet.

There is a near-total lack of experience of senior leaders within the club. Morfuni has never run a football club before; the club’s CEO Anthony Hall also has no previous football experience; his only previous experience of running a business being at the UK arm of Morfuni's business, which folded in 2020 owing creditors, including HMRC, millions of pounds.

The club's Chief Financial Officer Annabela Da Costa came from the same company, while Director of Football Jamie Russell, a former Academy Manager, has previously only worked in Academy and recruitment roles. Gavin Gunning, who it's widely believed among supporters Morfuni wanted to appoint permanently as manager, has only recently got his UEFA B coaching license and is only now taking his A License.

And at times, even who the exact owners of the club are hasn’t been as clear as it should have been. Morfuni had claimed he was the 100% owner of the club, but a notification then came through from Companies House revealing that two others were shareholders, holding more than 20% of the shares in the club. The widely respected Rob Angus (a former vice-chair of the Trust) was the club’s CEO at the time, and he read out a statement at a public meeting in July 2023 saying that Morfuni was still the full owner and that the Companies House notification was just an "administrative error" that would be put right.

But Morfuni subsequently admitted that these two were actually were shareholders after all. His explanation was that he had to find £2.95m quickly to pay off a debenture held by former owner Lee Power, who was threatening to put the club into administration if it wasn't paid back. Angus resigned in September 2023 and Hall was appointed in his place. The club were subsequently fined £10,000 by the League for failing to disclose persons of significant interest.

It’s too early to say whether all this results in Swindon Town being relegated into non-league football for the first time in 105 years. There is at least a four-point gap between them and the bottom two places, and that’s something. But Ian Holloway is going to have his work cut out to steady a ship that has been listing with greater and greater instability throughout the last few years.

If he can’t, he can probably expect to join the others that have passed through that revolving door during that time. Meanwhile, Swindon Town supporters are for now left wondering whatever on earth could possibly happen next. The only honest answer to this question that can be given is “no idea”, and that’s a very bad position for a football club to find itself at any point, never mind when they’re hanging just above a very important trapdoor indeed. Holloway will certainly need to do more than he seemed to have done at Grimsby to get Swindon supporters happy again.

Produced with many thanks to the Swindon supporters who have helped fill in the gaps on this extremely complicated story.