The Daily: Wednesday 28th June 2023

Stormzy, Wilfried Zaha and Danny Young prepare to give Croydon a facelift.

Thornton Heath may not be very far from Selhurst Park in terms of distance, but Wilfried Zaha is about to find out that there is a world of football in Croydon a very long way removed from Crystal Palace. Zaha, Stormzy and the former Crystal Palace head of care Danny Young have put their money where their mouths are in buying into AFC Croydon Athletic, who currently play in the Premier Division South of the Combined Counties League. The club finished last season in 15th place in the table, so there’s a lot of work to do, but at this level of the game there’s also a lot of potential. Fairly modest investment may bring rewards, if money is spent right.

AFC Croydon Athletic are a reformed club, only coming into existence after Croydon Athletic collapsed in 2012 as a result of of the great non-league scandals of the era. The club had been purchased in 2008 by Mazhar Majeed, a UK-based property developer and agent for several members of the Pakistan national cricket team. In 2010, after the club had won the Isthmian Division One South title, came the fall. Following allegations that Majeed was involved in spot-fixing during the Pakistan cricket tour of England, Croydon Athletic were investigated by HMRC due to allegations that Majeed had bought the club to act as a front for money-laundering purposes, after Majeed was recorded by an undercover journalist stating that that was the only reason he had bought the club.

The manager and his assistant left the club after a match on the 4th September 2010. The following day the club announced on its website that upcoming league and cup games were being postponed, resulting in the team forfeiting their FA Cup First Qualifying Round match against Kingstonian. With speculation already rife that the club may not be able to survive such a scandal squad members began to transfer to other clubs, with the club's official website referring to an "exodus from the KT Stadium".

But events would soon take a tragic turn when, on the 2nd October 2010, club chairman David Le Cluse was found dead, having committed suicide. Mr Le Cluse had been at the club for just under a year, having been brought in to replace disgraced former chairman Dean Fisher, who was the subject of a fraud case. The 36-year-old was forced to step down from his position at Croydon Athletic after embezzling £500,000 from his day job, using some of it to prop up the club. It emerged in court that Fisher put more than £250,000 into the club during the 2009/10 season, which had led to the club earning a reputation for being able to offer players attractive wages of up to £500 a week. Fisher had been jailed for three years in July 2010 for the fraud.

The club limped to relegation at the end of the 2010/11 season, but they couldn’t survive this sudden shock to its system. Croydon Athletic received a £7,500 fine and a ten-point deduction after a case of financial irregularities was proven on the 8th December 2011. The club had been charged with twenty-four breaches of FA Rule E1(b) in relation to the club’s 2009/10 title-winning season. On the 10th December 2011 the club was unable to fulfil a fixture away to Ramsgate and stated that it would be unable to fulfil the following weekend's fixture either. The Mayfield Stadium had been locked up, the management team had quit, and most of the players had found clubs elsewhere. Six days later, on the 16th December 2011, the Croydon Advertiser reported that the club had effectively ceased to exist.

AFC Croydon Athletic were formed in 2012 as a successor club, but they ran into almost immediate issues when they had to start their lives playing at the somewhat unsatisfactory Croydon Arena athletics stadium after a fire destroyed the Mayfield Stadium. They eventually moved back in November 2014, but the eleven years of the new club’s existence haven’t been especially successful. They’ve not yet got past the Second Qualifying Round of the FA Vase or the First Qualifying Round of the FA Cup, while they’ve not yet scaled the giddy heights of the Isthmian League yet, in the same way that their predecessors did.

So AFC Croydon Athletic are not a non-league football club who are unfamiliar with being in the spotlight, though at least on this particular occasion they’re in it for what might be considered ‘good’ reasons. Of course standard warnings apply, at this sort of juncture. A non-league football club is for life, not just for Christmas, and all that. But the three who’ve bought into the club have a demonstrable love of football, and the increased profile that comes with their ownership may also bring rewards. It only could only take a couple of hundred extra punters on a Saturday afternoon next season to have a transformative effect on the club’s position. The opportunity is there, although as many have found before running a non-league football club can’t ever really be described as “easy”, in any meaningful sense. Good luck to the club’s new owners.