The Long Read: Southend United & The Nonsense of Football
Hopes go up and hopes go down, but Southend United are running out of road.
This has been a long, hard slog of a summer for Southend United. They ended last season only just short of a place in the National League play-offs, but matters on the pitch have very much taken a back seat to goings-on elsewhere as they have seemed to lurch closer and closer to some sort of point of no return. But with the club seemingly at an ebb so low that serious doubts have been raised over whether they should be allowed to even start the coming season, what happens next?
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When it finally came, and even though it was just a day before the match was due to be played, the announcement wasn’t completely unexpected. "We regret to inform supporters that tomorrow’s pre-season friendly against Billericay Town has been cancelled”, read a short statement from Southend United. "Due to some injuries to contracted players, we are unable to fulfil a matchday squad. We apologise for the inconvenience caused."
This may ‘only’ have been a pre-season friendly, but when the fortunes of a football club start to decline there are certain milestones that they reach on the way towards what becomes an irreversible tailspin, and this certainly felt like one. Increasingly exasperated letters and the presentation of winding up petitions from HMRC are another such milestone, and Southend have been batting them away for years, but there are further milestones beyond that too, and the club have been reaching those with alarmingly increased frequency of late, too.
There were reports throughout last season of players and staff being paid late. This reared its head again at the end of June, but while that particular matter appears to have been resolved (kind of–it has even been suggested that some staff remain unpaid in full), taking care of the club’s finances looks increasingly like a game of Whack-a-Mole that becomes exponentially more difficult every passing 48 hours or so. It was reported on the 9th July that the club had paid everyone for the end of June, but even the headline to that story came with a highly conditional-looking “...but club still in crisis” attached to the end of it. A week later, a story about their second league match of the season against Dagenham & Redbridge being televised, the headline had “if it goes ahead” appended to the end of it.
Two days later, on the 11th, it was confirmed that the water supply to their training ground had been cut off due to unpaid bills. Another milestone ticked off. The following day they managed to get a further 42-day adjournment of the case brought against them at the High Court by HMRC. It is to be presumed that club owner Ron Martin–or those acting on his behalf–successfully persuaded the presiding judge that a sale of the club can be agreed. Courts tend to be flexible over matters such as this. A winding-up order is very much a point of no return, and every opportunity will be given to avoiding issuing one. This is a position of which Martin seems to be fully aware and has in the past repeatedly exploited.
But this is always a gamble, too. A judge has the right to say no, if persuaded that there is no realistic likelihood that a sale will actually take place. The bar is low, but it does exist, and it gets substantially higher with each deferral. Much as he would like to, Martin cannot defer forever. There’s no dispute here. The club owes the money. And with each appearance at the High Court Martin is pulling the lever on a slot machine that pays out time. But while this machine pays out lavishly on the first pull of that lever, you can never be completely certain when things will turn against you, and when they do, the end can be swift and harsh.
On the 17th July, Martin confirmed his conditions for the sale of the club. As might have been expected, Southend United as a business is worthless and the sale price is £1. But after this, it all starts to get rather expensive. Martin wants £4.5m for Roots Hall, though he seems happy to accept this over three years, and with no rent paid in the interim period. Meanwhile, the club say they need £1m "in the short term" to settle the winding-up petition and finally lift the transfer embargo that has left the first team squad so threadbare in the first place. Southend United currently have a squad of fourteen players. In this day and age, that’s no way for even the most basic of Sunday league clubs to start a season. Bringing new players in isn’t an optional extra for Southend. It’s an absolute necessity, if starting the new season is to be worthwhile in any way whatsoever.
Forward funding will have to be proved, and the League may well err on the side of the more stringent end of their own rules for owners, directors and other persons of significant interest, in view of the bargain basement price that would be being paid for the club. There have been plenty of examples in recent years of chancers, tyre-kickers, charlatans, incompetents and outright frauds hanging around distressed football clubs, usually having already persuaded themselves of how easy this will all be and fully aware of how little consequence there will be for them personally should they mess it up. Any sale needs to be scrutinised. A failure to do so may end up making it feel like little more than an exercise in kicking the can down the road for a while.
Then there’s that £4.5m for Roots Hall. On the surface, that sounds like a decent price for a football stadium. But Roots Hall is in a state of considerable disrepair, with mushrooms growing in some toilets while others are described as being “like a lake”. Signs falling down and the pitch may or may not have been mowed with a hand mower. Despite the work of volunteers who’ve done what they can, Roots Hall is dilapidated and further money will have to be spent on getting it back into a reasonable condition.
This only heightens concerns for supporters, because the worse condition the ground is in, the more likely it is to attract the interest of those who only want it for the land upon which it’s built. A new owner could fail to reach terms over the stadium and move the club out to a nearby non-league ground (providing, of course, that said stadium meets National League ground-grading criteria). Or the land could be sold with no takers for the club, even at a quid, because the costs don’t end there. Southend United will still owe Martin £1.5m, and that would have to be repaid as well.
Essentially, this is what makes Southend United essentially worthless as a business. They only have fourteen players and are under an embargo which means that they cannot currently bring in any more than sixteen. They will have to keep playing in their dilapidated ground, will have to pay a seven-figure sum to do so, and even after all of this they will owe the old guy another seven-figure sum. It’s an existential assault on almost every level.
Somebody, somewhere along the line needs to pay for all this, and the amount of money required just to fix everything to a standard that it’s not unreasonable to expect at this level of the game–a modern and smart stadium, no debt, a full playing squad–is likely to be astronomical.
Hope rose again after a Twitter Spaces event on the evening of the 19th July at which it was confirmed that a new group of local businessmen may be about to enter the fray with the aim of saving the club. There had been talk of a takeover(£) in May from a group called Kimura, with lavish talk following of a new stadium, a Netflix documentary series and the possible involvement of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Ray “The Bet” Winstone and Steve “The Former NBA Player” Nash.
This seemed to have run aground–the silence over this became increasingly ominous as the subsequent weeks progressed–and this (Thursday) morning Kimura issued a statement in which they said that “we do not believe that we are the right people to lead this at this time” and that “we are interested in joining with other interested parties if they deem it appropriate to move forward”.
For those who chose to read between the lines, this was further reason to get excited. The interest of ‘other parties’ had been confirmed the evening before. Were they so promising that Kimura wanted a piece of whatever action they were offering? All would become clear at midday on TalkSport radio, fans had been told, except when it came and went there was, well, nothing, really, apart from the possibility of there being another group of local businessmen who may be interested in becoming involved. Not for the first time, this wasn’t really the transformational news that Southend supporters need to hear.
So what happens, should this group fail to materialise? It’s a question that has to be asked. At what point does it become more prudent to give this iteration of Southend United up as a bad job and look to rebuild completely from the ground up? The Shrimpers Trust have said ‘no’ for the time being–their efforts seem largely concentrated on raising money elsewhere–but as time progresses we start to reach a point at which the total number of options for fans of the club could yet reduce to:
Start a new club.
Support another local non-league club (or other).
Quit watching live football, or at least supporting a football team.
And no, no it’s not an especially enticing list of options. But when your football club is in the condition in which Southend United currently find themselves, the simple fact of the matter is that this sort of dread scenario looms very large on the horizon. None of this to say that anything is certain at this stage–this is a situation that very much hangs in the balance–but that possibility is real. The sequence of events that has come to pass already looks very familiar to the fans of clubs who’ve gone bust before.
So let’s take a look at those three options. Should Southend United go to the wall, it is likely that some will just walk away from live football altogether. It’s impossible to say how many would take this decision, but it seems certain that it will be a net loss to the game, overall. The local non-league scene is healthy enough, with local(ish) clubs at a similar level including Dagenham & Redbridge in the National League, Braintree Town and Chelmsford City in the National League South, and a host of clubs in the Isthmian and Essex Senior League. Some may choose to seek refuge there.
But there’s also a problem with this option. It’s not your club. Football is by its nature highly territorial. There’s a reason we call the grounds at which matches are played “home” and “away”. Going to watch matches at someone else’s “home” is simply not the same experience as going to your home, and it’s something that you may never become fully accustomed to. Ground-hopping is not for everybody. “Just go and watch your local non-league team” is easy to say, but for anyone who’s been in a routine of watching this one particular club, and likely for years and years, it’s just not that simple.
And that leaves forming a new club. Firstly, I have to declare an interest here. I’m a member of the Trust at Enfield Town FC, and in the case of that club the supporters took a vote to break away from the original club, Enfield FC, in 2001. Twenty-two years on, Towners are still owned by their supporters, playing at their own ground (which Enfield FC weren’t in 2001 and their successor club–it’s complicated–still aren’t), and have been playing at the same level–the Isthmian League Premier Division, two divisions below the National League–for more than a decade, troubling the top end of the table more than the bottom in recent years. I remain an advocate for the mutual and community ownership of football clubs. It’s only fair that irregular readers should know that.
So, what does supporting a new club, or a successor club, or a phoenix club, feel like? Well, to me it… feels like supporting the same club as before. When I get to games, I still see some of the same faces who were at the old club when I was a child in the early 1980s. It helps that the new ground is close to the location of the old one, though I couldn’t say for certain whether I would feel the same had they left their previous ground voluntarily rather than having it swept from under them by an owner who sold it with no practical plan to replace it. That’s the shit that hurts.
The club name is different, but if I wanted to change that I could propose a vote on changing the name of the club to anything if I wanted to, which I would almost certainly lose. Understanding how important this is, to me, is the key to understanding what it means to support a fan-owned club. If you think the people running the club are doing a bad job and there might be someone better for the position, you can nominate them for election. You can even stand yourself, should you choose.
But this comes with responsibilities. While you can vote them out, you also vote them in. And the nature of your ownership structure means that your club will be financially on itsown, to a great extent. There isn’t going to be an owner chucking millions of pounds onto a bonfire of wages and bills, and that can have ramifications on the playing side. Football remains tilted in favour of those who end up with someone who’ll throw millions of pounds into clubs, and until that changes those who can’t load themselves with debt can find themselves at a disadvantage on the pitch at times.
And you can, should you choose to, just give up and sell. If the trust membership votes to do so, there is nothing to prevent a trust-owned club being sold. This has had mixed results in the past. The Notts County Supporters Trust membership voted to sell their club to a mysterious company who turned out to be a front for a convicted fraudster. The Portsmouth Supporters Trust sold up because it was considered that the trust had taken the club as far as they could, only for the team to continue to stall in League One. And the Wrexham Supporters Trust’s membership voted to sell to Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and they oversaw the club returning to the EFL amid global interest.
But the one thing that the three above examples all have in common is that the clubs had been rescued by their supporters' trusts in the first place. Those bodies are the only reason why Notts County, the oldest professional football club in the world and one of the twelve founding members of the Football League in 1888, Portsmouth, twice champions of England and winners of the FA Cup in 2008, and Wrexham, the oldest club in Wales and the third-oldest professional club in the world, still exist in the first place. Trusts work. Not always, and certainly not perfectly. But they work.
In the case of Enfield Town, it’s felt a little at times over the last decade as though there is a glass ceiling at the top of the Isthmian League, but thatt’s not insurmountable. The top of the division is usually competitive and there are only two promotion places, with only the champions going up automatically.
And it’s… fine. It would be nice if they had a run in the FA Cup, like their predecessors occasionally did throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but the club exists, and it does valuable community work, running women’s, youth, walking and disability teams. And that’s what really matters. My family lived in that area for three generations, and the club is a benefit to a community that does matter to me even though I don’t live there. I’m glad of what they represent.
The problems that the Shrimper’s Trust would face if they wanted to buy Southend United would likely be manifold. Firstly, raising the sort of money that they would need to buy the club would take time, certainly if they wanted to keep the club at Roots Hall. And even if they didn’t, it is also likely that the club’s books would require due diligence followed by a substantial level of financial commitment from the outset.
Meanwhile, any talk of a new club will be divisive, and a schism among the support in such an eventuality is likely. That’s certainly what happened at Bury, and it’s happened elsewhere to a lesser extent, too. At Bury, it took a long time for supporters who wanted to somehow keep the old club alive and those who accepted that the jig was up to reconcile and there was hostility between them which manifested in hostility towards Bury AFC. But they are now reunited as one club for the start of the new season, which is encouraging.
But it doesn’t have to happen. There was no such schism at Macclesfield, where the replacement of Macclesfield Town with Macclesfield FC (a privately-owned club) has brought two successive league titles, crowds touching 4,000, and 57 wins from 78 league matches. Whatever were to happen in the eventuality of Southend going to the wall, there would likely be dissenting voices, and they would likely be loud. But it can be difficult to establish how representative all these competing voices actually might be, at times.
It might not come to any of this. There are said to be people interested and not without good reason, because the fundamental absurdity of Southend United’s situation is that they should be a viable proposition. With no Premier League or EFL clubs particularly nearby, they could still pull in crowds of over 5,000 at Roots Hall last season, and when that level of support exists in an area it is clear that professional football can comfortably be supported there.
To that extent, Southend United have become yet another club to have become afflicted by what I have call The Nonsense of Football; that’s to say, the point at which the financial stability and wellbeing of a football club becomes unmoored from the usual machinery that keeps it ticking over, when land value starts to matter more than season ticket sales or TV money, when conveyancing, company and insolvency law become more important than gate receipts or sponsorship money.
They long ago became a cog in a far bigger wheel, a pawn in a land deal that was meant to net the club a state-of-the-art new stadium while earning its owner millions of pounds from associated housing. But this has never quite happened (and the whys and wherefores of that saga would make this long read look like a brief byline), and it remains uncertain whether this story will end up with the land deal turning into a land grab or not.
If there are local businessmen with an interest in saving the club, the time for meetings and discussions is over. Now is the time for action to be taken. The National League season starts in just over two weeks and assurances–firm assurances, not those from The Trust Me Bro Business School–need to be made that the club can meet the financial strains of next season.
Ron Martin has set this price–and at this stage the rights and wrongs of that are neither here nor there–and that price either has to be met or a counter-offer made to which he will agree. The National League cannot have a repeat of seasons in which they’ve had to wipe matches from existence because a club’s record had to be expunged altogether. That’s not only unfair on Southend United supporters; it’s unfair on every other club in the league. Either this is happening or it isn’t.
Southend United can be saved, but salvation won’t come cheap. They have to start playing actual football soon, in a professional league, and with a full squad of players. The season starts in two weeks and the National League will be demanding answers. All supporters can do is keep their fingers crossed that these snippets of rumour and speculation finally form into something a little more solid. Time is running out, and every answer given in relation to this club seems to raise yet more questions.
Deadline is getting tighter by the day, a small chink of light on Friday but still a lot of cogs need to turn and very quickly in order for them to start the season.
There’s obviously a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of debt and ongoing financial commitments any prospective new owner would take on. Apparently our new owners the Uggla family looked at Southend as a purchase but changed their mind - lucky for us, but shows that if a family worth a rumoured 000’s of millions don’t want it because of oncosts etc it’s not looking good. Genuinely hope Southend are sorted and pull through, some great fans there