The Remaster: 100 Owners - Ken Wheldon (Walsall & Birmingham City)
Almost ruin one West MIdlands football club, shame on you. Almost ruin two West Midlands football clubs, shame on the whole of football.
The 1980s were a period of decline for football in the West Midlands. A decade which had started with one of its clubs, Aston Villa, winning the Football League Championship and the European Cup in successive seasons soon saw several of its most notable clubs hit hitherto unplumbed depths in their histories and one man, a scrap metal dealer from the Black Country, seemed to be at the centre of much of the tumult, with vitriolic anger being hurled his way from the supporters of two different clubs at which promises of a brighter future were lost amid desperate struggles to keep failing businesses afloat.
At both Walsall and Birmingham City, Ken Wheldon is remembered with little great affection, but to what extent was Wheldon responsible for his own legacy and to what extent was he a victim of an era of rapid decline during which he was involved in the game? Wheldon’s arrival at Walsall’s Fellows Park in 1972 was greeted with enthusiasm and some relief by the club’s support. He was a local businessman made good, and Walsall was a club that had slipped into financial difficulty with the decline which followed the game’s post-war boom in attendances.
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