This article - https://www.thetimes.com/article/0e8231d2-4d26-410d-b780-2594420a5765?shareToken=6be49d297ced18007766235862f1e4eb - originally appeared in The Times. Written by Gregor Robertson it is compulsive reading for anyone interested in the problems at Morecambe.
Morecambe are a club on the brink. Suspended by the National League. Unable to train because of a lapsed insurance policy. Down to a handful of first-team players, still waiting to be paid salaries for June and July. The academy has ceased to operate. Pre-season friendlies have been cancelled. This season’s new strips are lying in unopened boxes inside a warehouse.
The club’s board of directors resigned en-masse last month, exasperated by owner Jason Whittingham’s failure to complete an agreed sale of the club. On Monday, the doors at the Mazuma Mobile Stadium will be locked, staff will down tools. With Morecambe’s opening three fixtures of the season postponed, the growing fear is that the club may already have played their final game.
If, by August 20, the National League is not satisfied that Morecambe can fulfil their obligations, the Lancashire club are likely to be expelled, and 105 consecutive years of football in the seaside town (but for the war) will come to an end. “The sand’s running out of the timer now,” the former co-chairman, Rod Taylor, says.
Haven’t we seen this movie before? The same slow-motion collapse that unfolded at Bury, expelled by the EFL in 2019, and Macclesfield Town, relegated from League Two a year later, prevented from starting the National League season, then wound up in the High Court. The same financial disarray; the same sense of helplessness, of anger. The same issue of a dubious owner, whose track record in business sounded alarm bells years ago. The same paralysis from the game’s authorities, who, ten days after an independent football regulator received royal assent, remain powerless to prevent history from repeating itself.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says Taylor, who was sacked last month, along with the rest of the board, for threatening to put the club into administration, before rejoining to assist a sale to Panjab Warriors, then resigning again when Whittingham failed to complete on the deal.
“I’ve been a board member for 31 years, a supporter since my grandfather took me to Christie Park [Morecambe’s former stadium] when I was five or six years of age. I’m 72 now. And I don’t mean it’s about me, because it certainly is not. It’s about the whole community. Everybody in this town is feeling the same. Absolutely betrayed. There could be 200 people out of work. It’s desperate. And there’s absolutely no logic to it.”
Whittingham, who along with his business partner in Bond Group Investments Limited, Colin Goldring, took control of the club in 2018, could end Morecambe’s suffering with the swipe of a pen. Panjab Warriors, the London-based consortium who have been trying to buy the club for more than a year, have issued numerous statements this week reiterating its willingness to conclude a purchase that was given clearance by the EFL in June, shortly after Morecambe’s relegation from League Two brought to an end their 18-year stay in the Football League.
Two weeks ago, Whittingham suddenly announced a bid from a new buyer, a consortium led by an investor called “Jonny Cato”, before blaming “continual negative press statements” for cooling their interest and urging Panjab to return to the table. Taylor says he attempted to bring Whittingham and Kuljeep Singh, of Panjab, together on a phone call on Thursday. But, Taylor says, when Singh joined the call, Whittingham abruptly hung up.
Panjab, through various associated companies, claim to have paid Bond Group £3.8million, as well as loaning Morecambe a further £1.7million to cover operating costs over the past year. An extraordinary sum for a club with no real assets — the land on which the Mazuma Mobile Stadium stands belongs to the JB Christie Trust, named by Joseph Barnes Christie in 1927, and is being leased to Morecambe on a 125-year agreement — and no majority shareholding in return.
Tyson Fury, who is based locally and suggested he would be interested in buying Morecambe a few years ago, owns a boxing gym in one corner of the ground, but it is understood that he has no appetite to strengthen those ties.
To complete the deal with Bond Group, Panjab have agreed to pay off a £635,000 charge against the club from Charles Street Finance Ltd, taken out by Whittingham in 2022, at which point Whittingham had agreed to reassign a £1.55million director’s loan to the new owners.
The Times understands that Whittingham’s directors’ loan has been accruing interest at a rate of 3 per cent per calendar month, a sum now totalling £688,000. It’s also understood that the Charles Street loan, which originally stood at £500,000, was taken out by Whittingham without the knowledge of directors. Whittingham failed to respond to a request for comment for this article.
Wright & Lord Solicitors, one of the club’s principal partners and main stand sponsor, are exploring the possibility of leading a minority shareholder action in the High Court in a bid to force Whittingham to sell to Panjab. Both Panjab and the local MP, Lizzi Collinge, have accused Whittingham of using Morecambe as “leverage” in his own personal finances. “Jason Whittingham has built a house of cards, and it is now falling down around his ears,” Collinge said in the House of Commons last month.
How did it come to this? For almost two decades, Morecambe were the EFL’s great survivors. Every season, they were among the bookmakers’ favourites to be relegated; every year their crowds and budget were among the lowest in the EFL; and every year they took great pride in beating the odds, retaining their league status, even winning promotion to League One in 2021.
Whittingham, whose business interests have included luxury jewellery, pawnbroking and “high-end lending”, also bought rugby union’s Worcester Warriors, along with Goldring, a former trainee solicitor-turned-entrepreneur, in 2019.
In 2022, however, Whittingham and Goldring’s business portfolio began to crumble rather publicly. In September that year, the Warriors collapsed into administration with debts of £30million, including a £15.7million emergency government Covid loan. Two months earlier, Goldring had been barred by the Solicitors Regulation Authority from working for any law firm without clearance, after his part in the disappearance of £7million of a Saudi client’s money in a botched luxury car deal.
Later that same year, Whittingham and Goldring were disqualified as company directors for 12 months for failing to file company accounts. Whittingham, according to Companies House records, has been a director of 25 companies, 18 of which have been either dissolved, put into administration, receiver action or liquidation.
In 2022, Morecambe were put up for sale, player wages began to arrive late and bills were stacking up, including to the HMRC. It was no coincidence, then, that the first relegation in Morecambe’s history arrived in 2022-23. The club spent most of last summer without a manager, chief executive or more than a handful of contracted senior players. When a transfer embargo for unpaid VAT was finally lifted in mid-July, Derek Adams — who had returned for a third spell as manager and continues to lead the team through this storm with stoicism — signed and registered 15 players in one day. But the rot had set in and a second relegation in three season was confirmed in April.
All the while, prospective buyers have come and gone without the conclusion of a sale. Morecambe know all too well that football attracts its fair share of chancers. Diego Lemos, Abdulrahman Al Hashemi and Joseph Cala, Brazilian, Qatari and Italian “businessmen” respectively, have all passed through in the past decade, causing various levels of distress and dismay.
Sarbjot Johal, a 20-year-old “soft drinks entrepreneur”, failed to convince the EFL of the “source and sufficiency” of his funds in 2023. His business links with Singh prompted the Panjab consortium leader — whose source of funding is rather opaque too — to issue a statement disassociating himself with Johal. It took Panjab almost a year to convince the EFL to give them clearance, but Whittingham is holding the club hostage and the clock is ticking.
“Panjab Warriors are ready and have reached out daily to complete this acquisition,” a statement read. “Without immediate action, our historic 105-year-old club faces total collapse within days.”