For the football purist, the scene at Aldershot Town’s Recreation Ground last Saturday was one of beauty. The pitch was burnished by Aldershot sun, to quote Sir John Betjeman’s legendary poetic depiction of the garrison town, and the fanbase was in good cheer when National League survival was secured for another year, despite a 1-0 defeat to Gateshead.
But it has been an unremittingly bleak week for the club. A second home defeat, to Southend, followed on Tuesday night – hours after the National League imposed a temporary transfer embargo on the club for failing to pay a VAT bill.
That embargo was lifted on Wednesday when owner Deane Wood agreed to wipe out nearly £500,000 that the club owed him and meet the VAT demand, in return for loans to the club he has made through his Stock Car Racing company being converted into shares.
Theoretically, the club, which has no money and is trading at a loss, can buy players this summer, though no one’s holding their breath. The small shareholders who own a quarter of the famous old club lose out in the new arrangement. As the total number of shares increases, the value of their own is diluted.
The storm might have passed but it’s hard to see any buoyant future for a club which has been engaged in an existential struggle for longer than most fans can remember. In 1992, Aldershot became the first Football League team to fold during a season since Accrington Stanley, 30 years earlier, after collapsing under the weight of debt and insolvency.
The club was reborn as Aldershot Town later the same year, playing to crowds of 2,000, five divisions below the Football League, and making a glorious return to the fourth tier in 2007; a season which enshrines the names of manager Gary Waddock and winger Joel Grant as legends around the place.
But they lasted there just five years before falling back down and there was no disguising the elemental struggle on Saturday, despite the warmth of the reception at the idiosyncratic Recreation Ground, where the family stand is named after a legendary club chaplain and 7,000 packed in for an FA Trophy semi-final against Woking a year ago.
Despite the East Stand noise, Shots manager John Coleman wore a deep air of resignation, offering few gestures as he leant against the dug-out for much of the game. Yet appearances can be deceptive, because out across the Hampshire town is evidence of the fact that Aldershot, perhaps more than any other National League side, do possess the ingredients for development potential.
Aldershot has been home to the British Army for 170 years and though it is clearly now suffering the economic impact of a shrinking, diminishing military, several substantial areas of land once used as sports facilities for the huge population of soldiers now offer potential as a new leisure development with the football club at its core.
The most obvious sits behind padlocked gates and a sign which states: ‘Service Dogs: Do Not Enter.’ It is the site of the former British Army football ground – the Rushmoor Arena in its prime – and now just a field with a grassed amphitheatre banking on three sides which, like so much of Aldershot’s old Army infrastructure, has fallen into disuse.
A second is the Army’s 100-acre polo field, also a vibrant sporting arena in the British Army’s pomp.
For several years now, key movers in Aldershot, who want higher ambitions for the Shots, have viewed these sites of former British Army land as potential for a renewed club.
These are not green fields in the back of beyond. Aldershot is 40 minutes from London, with nearly one million people living closer to it than to any Premier League ground, and Britain’s biggest private airfield, Farnborough, on its doorstep.
The substantial size of the sites – the Rushmoor Arena location extends to 83 acres – creates potential for a facility which is more than a football ground. There are good grounds for aspiration. ‘There is potential here for a leisure investment with Aldershot Town at its core,’ says one source.
The Army, which has already sold some pockets of its disused land for house-building, must be persuaded to part with a site, though it is understood that creating a state-of-the-art facility which the military might itself make use of could make the release of land appealing.
This week has demonstrated the need for big thinking and renewal. The club is effectively insolvent – dependent on Wood’s cash injection to cover overheads and wages like the £1,000-a-week which Aldershot’s top players command.
The costs of the club’s Academy and women’s teams, who train at Tomlinscote School, Frimley, have become very challenging. There is also a £394,000 Sport England loan, extended to the Shots during the pandemic, which now has to be repaid.
It was repayable after five years without interest but now accumulates interest and, under the original agreement, takes precedent over other loans repayments. Wood, who took over as a condition of bailing out his predecessor Shahiz Azeem, says he will fund losses of half a million pounds to keep Aldershot going next season, but even at that price it will be survival, nothing more.
The ownership structure of the football club presents a problem. A new owner would want total control before making a substantial investment. That would mean hundreds of small shareholders handing their stakes over to such an investor – improbable – or the club being placed it in administration, taking a 10-point penalty, and start again, with a new owner in the wings.
For all the stigma that surrounds it, administration is not the death sentence many fear but, in some cases, the only realistic route to survival. Stripped of unsustainable losses, a club can finally reset after years of mismanagement and rebuild on firmer ground.
Is there a prospective owner, attracted to a wider development in an appealing location and big potential fanbase? If Carlisle and Dagenham can attract Americans Tim Piatak and John Grabowski and York City the Canadian Uggla family, then logic suggests ‘yes’.
The Gateshead game revealed how attendances ebb and flow in line with a club’s success and the Shots have certainly struggled for that this spring. Nine defeats and a single win – at since-relegated Morecambe – in the past 10 games and a crowd now just touching 2,000.
Aldershot’s Theo Widdrington – son of Tommy, the Shots manager who walked away from the job in October – was last Saturday afternoon’s shining light. The general view is that he seems liberated since no longer playing for his father. But his late shot from distance was tipped over by Gateshead’s Adam Desbois. ‘Things don’t change much around here. That’s the nature of the club,’ said one resigned fan, who says he doesn’t expect much more than a relegation battle next season.
The rebirth of Aldershot FC might seem far off, though the week’s flirtation with a transfer embargo, bringing echoes of the crises of old, may persuade many small shareholders that ceding their share in the club to a new owner is worth it.
The notion of new Aldershot, forged out of the legacy of the Army identity which has defined the Hampshire town down the decades, certainly has a ring to it.
