When will the sun also rise again for Torquay United?
Every time there's been a bit of revival, the downturn that's followed it has been worse, and even now things might not be as bad as they could get on the English Riviera.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
It may be something of a rube’s trick to quote Hemingway these days, but sometimes the cap just fits a little too comfortably to avoid it. The announcement that Torquay United are going to enter into administration hit like a bolt from the blue, but the truth of the matter is that something like this has probably been on the cards for several years.
The last decade has been a dismal time for the club. Not matter what division they were in, they only finished above 17th place in the table once between 2012/13 and 2017/18, a period which included falling out of the EFL for the second time in eight years. The time before, they made it back after two seasons, but the second time around a rot had set in after four years they were relegated again, this time into the National League South.
Their stay was brief. After two seasons, they were promoted back in 2019. It was an opportunity to finally get some upward momentum, push back towards the EFL place that they’d held uninterrupted for the eight decades between 1927 and 2007. Briefly, this seemed like a possibility. The 2020/21 season saw them finish second, just four points adrift of champions Sutton United.
But then they lost on penalty kicks at Ashton Gate in the play-off final against Hartlepool United, and the downturn began again; 11th in 2021/22, relegated at the end of last season. And this time around, there have been few hopes of a quick return to the EFL. Indeed as things stand right now, they could yet get worse.
With one league win since the 16th December (against rapidly imploding bottom club Dover Athletic), they’re in 11th place in the National League South, and a ten point deduction would leave them just four points above the relegation place. Another relegation, this time into either the Southern or Isthmian league, could be on the cards. With the chairman having apparently wiped his hands of it all and walking away, there’s no money, so it’s hardly as though the team is going to get any stronger.
Were they to go down, they would become the first former League club to fall so far since the introduction of automatic promotion and relegation between the Football League and what was then called the GM Vauxhall Conference in 1987. Those who’ve fallen farther are those who’ve collapsed altogether and needed to be reformed.
So, how bad is it? The answer to this question is that we don’t fully know, as the club’s annual accounts for the 2022/23 season aren’t due for another five weeks. But the accounts for the 2021/22 season are bad enough. They show the club as having lost almost £1.2m throughout that season, taking the total loans to Riviera Stadiums Ltd., taking the total amount owed to them up to almost £4.3m since Gaming International bought the club in December 2016, forming Riviera Stadiums as the club’s parent company.
The next set are likely to be even worse. The 2021/22 season saw Torquay finish in 11th place in the National League, and the accounts that are due at the end of March will cover a season which ended in relegation into the National League South. And for those brave enough to look a year and five weeks into the future, even the accounts soon due are unlikely to be as bad as things could get for Torquay.
Last season’s relegation will have cost the club significant revenue. With promotion back now looking effectively impossible, even had the funding of the club continued, next year’s accounts would almost certainly have been even worse than this season’s, which will almost certainly be worse than last season’s, which were bad.
"With GI, our biggest concern is that they are a property developer, they have very little interest in football apparently and they have very little connection with Torquay as a place," Torquay United Supporters Trust spokesman Alan Robinson told BBC Sport at the time that they bought the club. Talk of a new ground in Torbay came to nothing. Chairman Clark Osborne has been an absentee landlord for as long as his company has owned the club. Communication with fans has effectively been non-existent.
In 1986, Osborne was a director of the company that evicted Bristol Rovers from Eastville. At the end of 2005, the Milton Keynes Greyhound Stadium, again under the ownership of the same company, closed. In both cases, there were serious fires; in August 1980 the majority of the south stand at Eastville was destroyed, causing more than £1 million worth of damage. A fire also destroyed the Milton Keynes Greyhound Stadium early in 2006.
In the 1970s, he was the general manager of the Oxford Greyhound track and sold it for housing, though it was later revived. In 2002 they bought Reading speedway stadium. Six years later, the local council refused to extend the track’s lease citing redevelopment plans. It closed later that year, and was later demolished. Swindon Robins speedway team, another Gaming International team, also ended up in serious trouble after plans for a new stadium for them went nowhere.
Small wonder Torquay supporters were concerned from the outset over what the eventual fate of Plainmoor might be. But the land is still owned by the local council, while the ground is listed as an Asset of Community Value. At least Plainmoor seems to be safe, which is something.
On Saturday 24th February, Torquay United are at home against Aveley in the National League South. What sort of turnout might they attract? Because there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of their current position. It is, at a fundamental level, absurd that a club with average home attendances of well over 2,000 playing in the regional sixth division of the National League System should be in such financially dire straits, particularly at a time when the non-league game continues to flourish, in terms of attendances.
Along with another crisis at Rochdale, it is a sign of a system that is broken at a fundamental level. The fans are already doing their bit. They’re turning out for matches. But still the steady drip, drip, drip of financial bluster remains just below the surface, threatening to break out at any moment. It is a failure brought about by a lack of governance and club owners who, to put it as bluntly as it can be put, simply don’t seem to care about what they’ve bought.
It is yet another shaming moment for the game in this country, another example of why a regulator with actual substantive powers—which we may yet not even get, despite years of promises—is as necessary as it has been for decades now. The sun may yet rise again on the English Riviera. The potential for much better than this remains. But for now, the prognosis for Torquay United is as dark as it’s ever been. This descent into hell has been slow. How quick can any recovery be?