Will the real David Hilton please stand up, please stand up, please stand up

Well, at least now we know for certain who the owner of Scunthorpe United is and was. And yes, it raises more questions.

Yesterday was not a great day for Scunthorpe United Football Club. 

Under any other circumstances, it might have felt a little as though they’d dodged a bullet. On Saturday afternoon, they were losing 2-1 at home by Buxton in the National League North when a torrential downpour led to the referee taking the somewhat surprising result to abandon the match with 95 minutes having been played. Perhaps understandably the away side were incandescent, with manager Craig Elliott claiming that the 10 minutes of added time had come about in part due to interruptions caused by objects allegedly thrown at their goalkeeper.

On the Monday evening following the match, the National League confirmed a replay of the match with a statement which said, “The matter was considered thoroughly, with the outcome decided in line with National League regulations and previous occurrences of this nature. A new date for the game will be announced by the clubs in due course.”

It’s not difficult to see why Buxton are so unhappy at this decision. Even notwithstanding that some of the very disruption that the referee decided needed to be played was caused by misbehaviour by supporters of the team that benefited from the decision, at 95 minutes on the clock, this result could have just… been allowed to stand. 

But by the time that decision was announced, it felt like even this was something of a sideshow because Monday morning’s news from The Athletic was very, very bad indeed. Their own words: “An investigation by The Athletic has found that a man we strongly believe to be [new-ish Scunthorpe owner David] Hilton was sentenced to two years in prison for 15 counts of fraud by false representation under the name of David Anderson.” 

Straight off the bat, the wording of the entire article felt very specific. As somebody who used to do precisely this sort of thing for a living, I can say with authority that confirming a link between an individual and their former name can be exceptionally difficult at the best of times. Evidence of a connection can always be circumstantial; it’s not always easy to say with certainty that even the most solid-looking of connections aren’t merely a set of coincidences. But for all that, it did rather feel as though writers Matt Slater and Philip Buckingham were straining at the leash to say it as they saw it, but had to watch their words carefully.

They needn’t have worried, really, since later the same day the club released what sounded rather like a hastily-arranged interview with Hilton in which he confirmed that yes, it was indeed him that was him that had been previously sent to prison and banned for five years from acting as a company director, before then taking the somewhat unusual step of claiming that it was “disgusting” of Slater, Buckingham and The Athletic for running the story, and that it's not in the public interest to know such details about his past. 

Well, no. There are many spheres of business that an individual can move into of which professional football is just one, and the ground rules are well known and well established. Financial probity is important in a business in which the individual businesses concerned mean so much to their respective communities. 

I’ve spoken before at length (so much length) on the subject of what the town of Scunthorpe would mean, were it to be stripped of its football club. Nobody with so much as a tangential understanding of the game should need to have it explained to them why to own or run any football club is such a privilege, why we expect higher standards of behaviour and why we put them under a higher degree of scrutiny than the owners of other businesses. 

I need to be clear on what the exact details of his history imply from a simple lay reading, because they indicate a history of dishonesty (the conviction and prison sentence for fraud, a crime taken seriously in part because it cannot take place without planning and a degree of premeditation), then an attempt to obscure that history from the records (changing his name), and then a systematic public attempt to discredit those who raised questions about that history once he took over at Scunthorpe, even denying it, even though it was true. So, lying about it.

And even then, when finally and definitively called out by journalists who had successfully joined all the dots, all he really had to offer was a mixture of self-pity and continuing to blame everyone but himself for everything that had preceded it. And all of this has taken place over a period of time stretching back more than a decade. With the greatest of respect, Mr Hilton, what the hell else is anybody supposed to think?

(A brief aside: I’m not going to get drawn into a discussion of Mr Hilton’s mental health other than to say that, with more than 25 years as a card-carrying and occasionally pill-popping depressive under my belt, I know fully well that the condition doesn’t abrogate a sufferer of their responsibilities or rob them of their moral compass. If anything, I’d say that lying is extremely bad for the mental health because it adds another layer of stress. But that’s a conversation for another day.)

Some of us—too many of us—have been here before. We’ve seen these stories play out literally dozens of times before. Hell, I’ve been writing about this sort of thing for more than seventeen years now, and the flow of clubs passing through this sort of thing has never really slowed.

We’ve seen our clubs go to the wall and be forced to start again at the absolute bottom of the pyramid with a weirdly artificial-sounding name because some chancer with ‘ambition’ tried to spin too many plates at the same time. We’ve witnessed bulldozers moving in on our clubs’ homes because somebody could make quite a lot of money that way. We’ve seen them used as facilitators in land deals and pushed to the brink of oblivion—and in too many cases beyond—by owners who were either rapacious, incompetent, or both. We’ve seen these grandiose visions of new stadia, with their airbrushed artists’ pipe dreams. We’ve seen both promises of jam tomorrow and the reality of rust today. 

Matt Slater supports Southend United, the other former EFL club whose initials are SUFC and who at the moment require the tender attention of people who actually care about it rather than being pawns in an ongoing land deal. If it feels as though it’s personal for those who write these stories and expose these situations, that’s very much because it is. If you’re a Scunthorpe United supporter and you happen to be reading this; you’re not the first to feel this way, but this means that you’re not alone, either.

Supporters of Southend, Enfield, Barnet, Northwich Victoria, Darlington, Macclesfield, Bury, Wimbledon, Telford, York City, Wrexham, Chester, Newport, Aldershot, Maidstone and literally dozens of others have all seen variations upon these themes (that was literally the first fifteen to fall out of my head), to some extent or other, over the years. This is nothing new, and nothing that a lot of people haven’t seen before. I don’t wish to speak for others (and I’ll return to the subject of the exact specifics of this club’s current position later this week), but I do for now feel justified in saying: a very clear alarm is being sounded. This ain’t normal.