Southend United's takeover-not-takeover may end up back in court, six months on

Ron Martin gonna Ron Martin, and so it is that there are dark clouds swirling over Roots Hall again.

There comes a point at which questions have to start being asked. When the takeover of Southend United was first confirmed in September, it felt like the closing of a chapter. At last. But what has come next? Why is it that, six months after the dramatic events of the start of this season, when it should have been completed, is history still repeating itself at Roots Hall? 

It is almost a little too on the nose that the company who issued the latest winding up petition against Southend United are Stewart Law LLP, the legal firm who successfully defended the club at previous winding up petitions by arguing that they are, despite being a private business, still a community asset. 

But as seasoned Southend United-watchers might say, “Ron Martin gonna Ron Martin”. According to a statement issued by the club on the 2nd April: 

A sales contract for the club was signed in December 2023, which governs all aspects of the transaction, but was subject to various conditions being met.

Two main conditions remain outstanding; the completion of the Council’s diligence process and the consent of the Martins’ finance partner.

While the Council has kept us updated on their process, which is expected to complete in late April, we have not received a formal response from the finance partner.

This process has of course taken longer than any party expected, and as a consequence we have had to rely on patience from the club's numerous creditors.

Unfortunately, one creditor is unwilling to wait until the sale closes to receive repayment and is now petitioning for the Club to be wound up.

While the consortium continues to pay all wages and other operating expenses, we are not willing to fund pay-outs to historic creditors until we are confident that the closing conditions, over which we have no control, will be met.

So, let’s take a little bit of a journey back in time to refresh ourselves on where Southend have found themselves recently. First of all, on the pitch, with three games to play of their National League season, they’re in tenth place in the table. They’re six points adrift of the play-off places; had they not been deducted ten points this season for missing a final deadline to get a previous winding up petition dealt with, they’d be in 6th place in the table and pretty much assured a place in the play-offs and the possibility of a return to the EFL. Points deductions can come with not-insignificant ramifications.

The line in the sand being drawn by the presumably-soon-to-be new owners of the club do not seem unreasonable, by any stretch of the imagination. They state that they have already invested £3m into the club. Let’s not forget that this is theoretically non-league football that we’re talking about, here.

And if the matter here is simply that the club has not paid their legal fees to Stewart Law LLP—at which point it’s perfectly reasonable to ask, “Well, what the gibbering fuck did Martin expect to happen, here?”—for costs incurred prior to their involvement in the club, then Ron bloody Martin should be paying that himself. Good God. The man is insufferable.

There’s good reason to be angry about this. This club remains a ludicrously viable proposition as a business. They have had two home league attendances this season of over 8,000 and a further three of over 7,000. Their average home attendance this season has been almost six and a half thousand. In the National League. You know, ‘non-league’ football.

The fact that Southend United have fallen from the EFL to the middle of the National League is purely and simply a matter of neglect on the part of the current owner of the club. There is no way on earth that this could ever be considered a football club simply ‘finding their level’.

When that many people are attending home matches for a team in the mid-table of this division, you know you’ve got something that you can build. That is surely the reason why the new owners are in the traps, looking to get on with building an actual future. But for now, that smell of dry rot continues to linger. It reaches a point at which it starts to feel almost performatively cruel. I do not believe Ron Martin to be an idiot, but… talk about damned by faint praise, especially when we pause to consider what the alternatives to this are.

The most visible manifestation of the state of disrepair into which the club had fallen was the condition of Roots Hall itself. Renovation of the ground itself is on pause, pending the takeover being completed. Things have largely been suspended in time in space since the last massive flurry of activity at the start of October. So why is this?

There are essentially two ways of looking at it, but the outcome remains the same. For literally decades, Fossett’s Farm was the intended location for a new stadium for Southend United, but this never came and Martin has submitted a planning application to build 500 homes on the site. This planning permission has not yet been finalised, hence Martin not having yet signed over ownership of the club.

One way of looking at this would be to say that the council are ‘dragging their feet’ and that they should just agree it, sign it off, and allow everyone to just move on with their lives. But the other perspective would be to say that, well, no, town and city planning is a complex business, and getting it wrong can have severe implications for an entire locality.

It’s also the case that the granting of planning permission remains a matter of law, and therefore takes as long as it takes. It’s not as simple as simply signing off a chit. Any shortcuts taken by the council in this process would be manna from heaven for anybody seeking to object to the development and could become incredibly expensive for all involved were they to be exposed.

But the matter of the fresh winding up petition is not about that delay. This much seems pretty much cut and dried. The new consortium have already demonstrated their commitment to the club. But the legal bills have come from the period while Ron Martin had responsibility for the day-to-day running of Southend United in a way that he simply doesn’t any more. It’s easy to roll your eyes at mentioning the phrase, “moral (or ethical) obligation”, but this is the case, really.

Southend United supporters have spent more than a quarter of a century watching with increasing horror as Martin continued to act this way, in the full knowledge that the ledges that he was gripping to were getting narrower and narrower. And this is ultimately how we’ve arrived at something approaching a Mexican stand-off, with Martin holding a barrel to the heads of both Stewart Law LLP and the would-be owners of the club, and with both of those parties now pointing one straight back at Martin.

But it stands to be remembered. Those thousands of people who make Southend United such a viable proposition deserve better than this. They deserve for the object of their affections to not be treated as the Queen in a game of property development chess. They just want to support their local team without any of this… bullshit. None of this should be in any way necessary; the maddening truth at the heart of the travails of so many football clubs in the 21st century. Just get it paid, Martin. This money was your responsibility unless you can materically prove otherwise.