Some years ago, I attended an Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Bristol Rovers Supporters Club. As ever, various officials and board members were in attendance and contributed to the proceedings, as and when requested. I recall the then club chairman Geoff Dunford telling the meeting that the club was always looking for new investment, but only from people who had ‘the interests of the club at heart.’ I took that to mean rich supporters and a few years later, in 2006 to be precise, a rich supporter did join the board. His name was Nick Higgs. A year later he became chairman and has subsequently proved to be the worst chairman in the history of the club, ‘leading’ the club into the Conference for the first time in its history following the second of two relegations on his watch (or was he asleep at the wheel?), failing to modernise one stadium and then build another, running up huge losses and appointing and sacking a legion of managers. Apart from these minor blips, the Higgs reign at Rovers has been one long success story, or at least you’d think it had been if you had heard him at the pre season supporter Q&A.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline in today’s ‘Bristol Post’, which reads ‘Bristol Rovers chairman Nick Higgs takes search for investment to the Middle East.’ The story, which has been directly lifted from a Bahrain publication “Gulf Weekly’ (I read it all the time), goes on to explain that Mr Higgs, for it is he, ‘is inviting inviting interested parties to invest in a ‘sleeping giant’.’ He added that “There is an opportunity to come in at grass roots level for not a huge investment to start with and to be able to take this club to the highest level if they so wish.”
He goes on (and on), “We have a clean sheet now, the bones of an international standard stadium and the catchment and ability to bring in a lot of local support. We have full planning permission and are ready to go with a new 22,000 all-seater stadium.
“It can extend to 26,000 very cheaply and 35,000 if the club makes the higher echelons and needs it. And, with a population in wider Bristol of 1.2 million people it pays to have that ability to be able to extend because if we can bring success to this club that’s the sort of crowds we could be getting.”
This all looks fantastic, almost too good to be true, so it begs one question: if there is so much potential for success, why does Mr Higgs, a very rich man by most people’s standards, and one surrounded by a boardroom of many millionaires, not seek to carry out this investment himself? Mr Higgs has taken the club to the lowest point in its history so wouldn’t he want to share in the spoils of this apparently guaranteed success? Unfortunately, the Bristol Post/Gulf News journalist doesn’t ask awkward questions like this, or for that matter any awkward questions at all. It’s a sales pitch.
The move to the new state-of-the-art stadium at the UWE was to be funded by the sale of the Memorial Stadium to Sainsburys, but the supermarket giant informed Rovers in February 2014 that they did not wish to proceed with the development, although supporters did not find this out until many months later. The chairman and his financial director Toni Watola have always been bullish that Sainsburys would be forced to hand over the cash for the Memorial Stadium because of the ‘watertight contract’ between the two parties, but the Post merely reports that Mr Higgs continues to ‘work through the ‘legal niceties’ of (the) sale of the current Memorial Stadium site to Sainsbury’s’ which doesn’t say very much at all, but it’s still more than the club has bothered to tell supporters in recent times. But regarding the cost of the new stadium, Mr Higgs goes on to add, “Where it was cash neutral, we may have a small deficit now because prices have gone up and we may have to raise some money. I think it’s a good time for investors to come into the club.” Well, what does that mean? The suggestion that the reason the club will need to raise extra money (“a small deficit’, so not much, perhaps?) is because prices are going up and not because of any shortfall from Sainsburys. Confused?
But then comes the clear suggestion that Mr Higgs wants out. He states unambiguously that the club needs “investors who have the level of funds we would need to kick on.” So is this to cover what he refers to as the “small deficit”? The implication is clear that without these new ‘investors’, the club clearly does not have “the level of funds to kick on.”
Sadly, Mr Higgs lurches into La La Land in his next statement, “We have invested our own money to get to where we are and it would be nice for someone to realise that now and take it to the next stage. As a fan it has never been my intention to be here forever as chairman, I just wanted to get the club on a level footing again and get the stadium in the process of being built.” The chairman has never been the world’s greatest communicator but here he sinks to new levels. The board of directors, and mainly him, have invested their own money to take the club down two divisions and into the Conference. It turns out he never wanted to be chairman of the club forever – well, that was hardly likely anyway, was it? – but he “wanted to get the club on a level footing again”, like League One, perhaps, where it was when he took it over?
Nothing there, you will note, about ‘having the best interests of the club at heart’, just a plea for Arab money because, I suggest, neither he, his directors or anyone else in this country wants anything more to do with the club.
And who’s going to stop him? Not the board of directors who, I would imagine had been fully consulted about flogging the club to some rich Arabs and not the Supporters Club who, one would expect, would also have been consulted via the two full directors they have on the board of directors. Above everything, Mr Higgs effectively owns the club and he can do what he wants.
This was not the ownership model I anticipated over a decade ago when I was part of the Supporters club Shareholding Scheme which has since ploughed over £1 million of supporters’ money into the football club in exchange for having their shareholding percentage halved (I am not making this up). The money fans have paid across will have been completely squandered, if it hasn’t been already, if some Bahrain businessman takes over.
The whole wretched article stinks of contradiction, confusion and desperation. We are not being told what’s going on ‘behind the scenes’ (a popular Rovers expression used when they don’t want to tell you something) because, I suspect, we might not like it.
On the pitch, it seems as if the club is headed back to the Football League, but off it things seem to be in a bigger mess than ever.
