Post by a more piratey game on Jul 16, 2021 8:44:25 GMT
The League Two club are in utter disarray three weeks before the new season with staff not having been paid in full
On Tuesday night, Swindon arrived at Hungerford Town with a squad containing five first-team players, a sobering reminder of the way the club has spectacularly nosedived since being crowned champions of League Two a little more than a year ago. With three weeks until the start of the new season, they are rudderless: without a manager, assistant manager, chief executive, director of football or a strength and conditioning coach. Worse still, the remaining players and staff are still awaiting June’s wages in full.
In February, the Swindon owner, Lee Power, who took temporary control of the team in 2015-16 after sacking Mark Cooper, said the club was on the brink of bankruptcy. At the centre of Swindon’s financial problems are a number of legal cases, one in the courts, one from the Football Association and now one from Swindon borough council. The council, which owns the County Ground, has not been paid rent since April last year and is seeking to recover a six-figure sum.
Meanwhile, the English Football League lists defaults in payments to HMRC and non-payment to football creditors among the reasons for Swindon’s transfer embargo.
Four people were tasked with managing the team last season, including John Sheridan, whose appointment was widely regarded as disastrous. Sheridan, critical of players and staff, lasted fewer than six months and for now the goalkeeping coach, Steve Mildenhall, is the de facto manager. The academy coach, Lee Peacock, the club’s former striker, is helping oversee first-team matters.
The start of pre-season was delayed and a squad featuring nine contracted first-team players is being supplemented with academy youngsters and trialists, one of whom last played in the ninth tier. Saturday’s friendly against Swansea City has been cancelled after a mutual agreement that the game would not benefit either party.
It is thought Swindon employees, as well as players whose contracts expired last month, received about 60% of their June pay on Wednesday and were told to expect the outstanding amount to be paid at the end of this month, when July wages are due.
Wages were paid a couple of days late during last season. It is thought money due to the club from the EFL was used to help pay and players’ staff for June. TrustSTFC, the supporters’ trust, is launching a hardship fund to help contribute towards unpaid staff wages.
Clem Morfuni, a minority shareholder who owns a 15% stake in Swindon’s holding company, Swinton Reds, has been trying to buy the club and has the backing of the trust. Morfuni, who owns the building services contractor Axis, is involved in a high court legal battle with Power over the ownership of the club. Morfuni’s application for approval to clear the EFL’s owners’ and directors’ test is thought to be progressing well.
Even the best-case scenario looks bleak. With 22 days until Swindon’s season begins at Scunthorpe they look set up to fail and, all the while, for players and staff communication has been nonexistent. In May, the defender Anthony Cheshire claimed he found out he was being released on Twitter.
“You’re always hearing rumours about things but no one knows what the truth is,” says one person who wishes to remain anonymous but has seen the club unravel from the inside. “It turns into Chinese whispers. Things get put into the WhatsApp group, everyone is asking ‘where did you hear that from?’ and it is just chaos. It is just not professional, that’s the nub of it.”
Swindon appointed the former Colchester manager John McGreal in May but he and his assistant, Rene Gilmartin, left within a month, citing their positions as untenable. Swindon signed the goalkeeper Jojo Wollacott and the defender Pierce Sweeney in June but the latter, whose two-year contract officially began at the start of this month, left by mutual consent 24 hours later and has since returned to Exeter.
Two days before McGreal’s departure, he sent an open letter to fans that detailed plans to sign six additional players to help push for promotion but acknowledged the club was in no position to do so “due to the ongoing court case regarding the ownership”. One prospective signing is even thought to have completed an in-house media interview under the impression he would be able to join but has since signed elsewhere.
The squad relegated from League One in April was unrecognisable from the one that got them there, with Eoin Doyle, Keshi Anderson, Kaiyne Woolery and Lloyd Isgrove among those to depart upon promotion under Richie Wellens, while the loanees Jerry Yates and Steven Benda stayed put at their parent clubs. Doyle, who scored 25 goals en route to promotion, turned down a one-year contract extension in favour of a three-year contract at Bolton, while a clutch of players agreed to stay on reduced terms. This week, last season’s player of the year, Akin Odimayo, joined Portsmouth on trial.
Those close to the club felt the writing was on the wall from the moment Wellens departed for Salford City in November. The exit of the popular assistant manager, Noel Hunt, was also considered a significant blow. The sale of winger Diallang Jaiyesimi six months into a three-year contract was equally galling.
Wellens galvanised a fractured club but former staff held longstanding concerns about the infrastructure behind the scenes. “We were promoted in spite of the way the club was being run, rather than because of it,” says another person at the club that season.
In League One and League Two more than 30% of club revenue is from gate receipts, but many staff and some players were placed on furlough when coronavirus hit during last season. Supporters have boycotted buying season tickets, one-off tickets or merchandise in a stand against Power’s ownership.
In April, the strength and conditioning coach, Jack Deaman, left the club without being replaced, so experienced first-team players moonlighted as coaches and led matchday warmups. Unsurprisingly, injuries started adding up.
“Opposition were laughing at us for taking our own warm-ups,” one person told the Guardian. “It was worse than Sunday League. Walking through the park the other day these guys were having cigarettes and beers, warming themselves up before a game, and that’s what it must have looked like.”
Before the final game of last season, by which point Swindon had already been relegated, players convened at the County Ground from 6.30am for a three-and-a-half-hour trip to Wigan for an early kick-off, digesting their pre-match meal – cereal and toast – on the bus journey north. The previous season, away trips that would take more than two hours resulted in an overnight stay but as the club cut its cloth that was increased to three hours last season.
“At times the place was such a shambles, you thought: ‘We deserve to get relegated for the way the club is being run.’”
www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jul/16/no-manager-not-enough-players-how-swindon-town-were-left-to-fall-apart
