The Remaster: 100 Owners, Number 97 - Jim Thompson (Maidstone United & Dartford)

A second one in this series for paid subscribers this Saturday, and approriately enough, considering I'm going to see them play today, this one involves Maidstone United.

It was, as you will no doubt be aware by now, the thirteith anniversary of the start of the Premier League last year, and what was forgotten by most of the slew of retrospectives which accompanied it was the fact that just three days after the behemoth which has come to eat English football in that intervening two decades the Football League saw its last—to date—resignation during the season. Furthermore, just a few weeks later, a non-league stalwart club whose fortunes had become irrevocably tied up in that clubs fortunes was also forced to resign from the league in which it was competing. Those two clubs were Maidstone United and Dartford FC, and their decline and fall in the space of such a short period of time were both allied to a man who had otherwise achieved something unique and positive for non-league football as a whole: Jim Thompson.