10 years on: Remembering the grim days when Worthing FC was so close to extinction

Charles Dickens, you were only half right. Best of times? Forget it, but the worst of times? Bang on the money.

It’s mid November 2014 and after 128 years, Worthing FC, probably not for the first time, have effectively run out of money. But unlike previous occasions, this truly looked like the ‘end game’ for the Rebels.

Having supported and written about the club for over three decades, and having been in and around the club with the youth team since the close season of 2011, in the summer of 2013, I was approached by Al McKail to see if I and two others would be interested in joining the board?

The others were then Worthing Dynamos Chairman Lee Noakes and Dynamos Executive Committee member Julian Church. It was never a formal merger between the clubs but with Lee taking the chair for both it would mean much closer ties, something which had been mooted as far back as the early 1980s.

So, on the July 4, 2013, all three of us signed on the dotted line at Companies House. And immediately the die was cast, and with that the first schoolboy error.

Due diligence? It didn’t even cross my mind, even though there’s that old adage that people leave their brains and common-sense outside the building when they get involved with a football club.

Just over a week later various debts incurred by the club came to light. A considerable amount outstanding to HMRC for unpaid VAT. A brewery loan and another loan from a third party to effectively cover the ongoing playing budget when the club were aspiring to get in the newly formed National League South in the late noughties.

To give some context, as many football fans the length and breadth of the country probably don’t realise, effectively 20% of any football club’s income isn’t theirs – it’s VAT, and the clubs are merely unpaid ‘tax collectors’ for the Government.

That 20%, even though it doesn’t actually belong to the club, is initially in the coffers and might sometimes get spent on other things rather than going to HMRC.

Unfortunately, and there’s no way of dressing it up, previous regimes at Woodside had not been very good with keeping up with paying the VAT man, and the 20% levy of a period of time soon mounts up.

There was a Woodside Road story about a particular VAT payment, and it wasn’t an urban myth – it actually happened.

Back in the day the pre-season friendly between Worthing and the Albion was a huge moneyspinner, always in July and usually Sussex-based fans’ first chance to watch the Albion.

In the days before card payments were fashionable, the morning after one particular Albion visit, an amount of money almost totaling five figures was being counted on the boardroom table, the count eventually being interrupted by a ‘surprise’ visit from the VAT man, who patiently waited for the count to finish before walking out of Woodside Road with about 90% of the previous night’s take in lieu of the Rebels’ liabilities to HMRC.

So, returning to the summer of 2013, and Lee, Julian and I had received a pretty abrupt wake-up call fairly quickly into our boardroom tenure.

Our fellow directors had effectively been left holding the baby after a number of years of poor management.

There was a line in the recent documentary about George Dowell, not from George I hasten to add, that stated that there had previously been no ambition at the club.

But it was actually the complete opposite, there had – probably over decades – been too much ambition at times, which culminated in the club spending money they didn’t have, (i.e. the loans) or money that didn’t actually belong to them (the VAT).

Season 2013-14 started, and early on included a suggestion from the then first team manager to relocate the ground to Hil Barn recreation ground and build a housing estate on Woodside Road!

For the record, through the aforementioned circumstances I have been party to the complexities of the freehold situation at Woodside Road, and rest assured Worthing Football Club will never leave their current ground.

We also had the ‘experience’ of the notorious flight back from a game in Guernsey in November (that in itself is an article in waiting), but a turning point came in the December, with the dispensing of the services of the manager and appointment of a certain Adam Hinshelwood in his place, probably one of the most important managerial appointments in the clubs history.

Bear in mind at that point Adam was only 29 years of age, having had to retire due to injury. He came into the job with his eyes open – he probably wasn’t fully aware of the full extent of the financial situation but he was aware enough to know that things weren’t ideal.

As a board we were effectively living from week to week, all, like the famous Little Dutch Boy, with our collective fingers in the dyke.

The late and much missed John Whyte, at that point the Financial Director, managed to put a deal together concerning mobile phone masts, which gave us a vital cash input, while Julian, despite the obvious money worries, was working tirelessly doing the spadework, pardon the pun, for potentially ripping up the pitch and putting in a state-of-the-art 3G pitch, fully funded, something that would provide the club with a stable income. Julian should really add visionary to his CV!

We limped through that season and the following summer, and unfortunately due to work outside commitments, ie, their full time jobs, both Lee and Julian had to reluctantly step away at the beginning of the following season.

Looking back Lord knows how – but we managed to get to the November board meeting before John, as financial director, uttered the words we all knew that were coming, that basically we were coming very close to, if we not had not already arrived at, the end of the road.

All credit to Sussex FA Chief Executive Ken Benham, who did everything he could to help us when we reached out to him, including sending us a mentor, ex-Rebels director Matt Major, to guide us through whatever process we had to encounter, and a meeting was immediately called to face the fans and tell them the hard facts.

I look back upon it now with mixed emotions. It was a cross between the Salem Witch Trials and the Woodside Inquisition. Whether or not I had been party to what had previously gone on, this was all happening on my watch, so unfortunately local sporting history would say I was one of the people with the blood of Worthing Football Club on my hands.

I was also given the job of speaking to the Isthmian League about the nuts and bolts of resigning from the competition mid-season, and had initial conversations with the then County League, talknig about whether a phoenix Worthing FC, if that were to happen, could go into a league.

I have to say that aside from the usual stressful situations in life, like bereavement, this was one of the darkest times in my life. A born worrier, the chance of me being one of the apparent architects of Worthing FC’s demise saw me get very little sleep that first week of December.

Then an apparent (semi) lifeline. Via various discussions there was a proposal that once we had resigned from the league and wound the limited company up, we would effectively let Worthing Town FC take over the running of the club, with a new 25-year lease from the freeholders and start the aforementioned phoenix club in the County League the following August.

There was a small number of financial issues to navigate but nothing I didn’t think we couldn’t sort out as the two representatives of Worthing Town sat in my lounge with myself, John Whyte and Al McKail on December 6, 2014.

They seemed very receptive, and being the forward-thinking club that I know they still are to this day, seemed keen to take the project forward, they obviously had to go back to their full committee and meet us again seven days later.

So, for all those who know their Worthing FC history what actually happened on 13th December?

In the end it all came down to one individual from Worthing Town who tried to move the goalposts so drastically that the person he was with that day rang me later to apologise. The goalpost mover later left Worthing Town.

Needless to say, the meeting didn’t last long – they left fairly quickly and we were back to square one with Worthing FC.

We were on the face of it, out of options, and facing what many would have thought was unthinkable. But just then, as happens many, many times, life throws you an unlikely curveball.

Calvin Buckland, a truly unsung Worthing FC hero and by then my assistant manager with the U18s, phoned me, and the content of that call perhaps the most significant in the history of the club.

“Harty,” he said. “George Dowell wants to talk to you...” And as they say, the rest in history.