There are several clubs which will turn up more than once on this list, and one of those is
Chester City FC. The story of this particular clubs last twenty years is one that could fill a book
on its own, but its demise can largely be traced to the activities of three men. One, Stephen
Vaughan, is unlikely to openly become involved in the running of a football club after being banned
under the FAs Fit & Proper Persons rules, from being involved in the directorship of any business
at the end of 2009.
It's a familiar enough scene to anybody that has ever been to the movies. The bad guy gets shot,
and some soothing music is played but, just as the audience settles down after the previous few
minutes of tension, the music cranks up a notch and what we thought was his lifeless hand grips the
handle of his gun again.
It's starting to become known as The Vaughan Effect, and it's a very modern phenomenon. Whenever
any mention is made of the slightest possibility the involvement of either of the Stephen Vaughans
getting involved in a football club, there is a reflex reaction from the supporters of the club
concerned and from various social media outlets, and this time the club with which this most dread
of names has been associated with is Stockport County.
Was it really two years ago? I am in the middle of rebuilding this site for a summer
relaunch, and some of the new pages that will be available will be covering various running themes
that we have gone into over the course of the last five years or so. I thought that I may as well
put these up as posts as well, so that you can trace back some of longer running sagas.
That it wasn't a great surprise doesn't mean that it wasn't a disappointment. Geoff Moss, the
owner of Wrexham FC, had the chance to do the right thing just the once before handing over
ownership of the club to someone else, and he couldn't even manage to do that in the form of
handing ownership of the club to the Wrexham Supporters Trust, preferring instead to hand it over
to a group of individuals with no prior interest in Wrexham FC, one of whom is also banned from
acting as a company director until 2018 and was as recently as the end of last year was struck off
the Solicitors Roll as well.
Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold and, while the imprisonment of Stephen Vaughan
for fifteen months at the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre yesterday was an incident
unrelated to his involvement in football, there may be some people in Chester that will regard this
sentence as some degree of providence, held over for what he did to their club.
On a Saturday afternoon, it usually takes quite something to draw attention away from what has
happened on the pitch. At Wrexham, however, the truth is proving to be stranger than fiction and so
it was that on Saturday even a 7-2 home defeat at home against mid-table Gateshead was overshadowed
by a protest the likes of which The Racecourse Ground has seldom seen before.
He's back, and it's almost if he never went away. The return of Stephen Vaughan onto our radar
would be funny, if it weren't for the fact that his involvement in anything to do with football
(or, indeed, rugby league) wasn't such a portent of doom for those likely to be on the receiving
end of him.
The email arrived this morning a press release issued by City Fans United, the supporters
organisation that brought the supporters of the fractured club together, mobilised them, organised
them against the cancer that was killing their club and then picked up the pieces from the wreckage
of it all and starting making arrangements for the future.
Chester City Football Club were wound up this week, with their 125-year existence ending for the
sake of a tax bill. Portsmouth might have gained headlines for becoming the first Premier League
club to enter administration but they somehow stagger on with debts of ÂŁ60m, while the club four
divisions below Pompey are now defunct thanks in part to the Blue Square Premier outfit owing HM
Revenue & Customs a, by comparison, paltry ÂŁ26,125.
With the global economic crisis affecting everyone from car makers to shopkeepers it is no surprise
that football, arguably the second most financially mismanaged industry in the world after banking,
would be affected.
The club making the most headlines in England is Portsmouth, given their dramatic fall from FA Cup
winners in 2008 to becoming the first top division side to enter administration.
Send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. The bell tolled for Chester City at just
after 2.00 this afternoon. Against the predictions of many myself included the Football Conference
made the right decision and expelled Chester City from its organisation. This evening isn't a time
for celebration.
It almost feels as if we should be apologising for the amount of time that has been given
over to Chester City on this site over the last few weeks. However, this story has unravelled into
one of the most extraordinary football stories of recent times, and it still is not being reported
to the extent that it should be elsewhere.
Since we last reported from Chester City, much has happened and nothing has changed. At the same
time, owner Stephen Vaughan was due to have ceded all control in the club by the middle of December
having been disqualified as a company director after an investigation by the Insolvency Service's
Disqualification Investigation Team over alleged carousel fraud.
Poor Chester City, of England's Football Conference. Imagine waking up the day after Christmas
and finding that your club had appointed as Director of Football a man who had led another club
(Halesowen) into severe financial peril and expulsion from the FA Cup, and who had received a
year-long touchline ban after clashing with one of his own players?
We have been paying close attention to the goings-on at Wrexham Football Club over the last
few months, and have decided to bring together all of the articles on the subject for quick and
hopefully easy reference. Mistrust had been building between the supporters of the club and the
owners for some considerable time, and November saw a story that proved to be a portent for what
would come to follow over the next six months, as various speculators locked horns with the club's
supporters trust for ownership of the oldest professional football club in Wales.
It has been another eventful week at Wrexham, as the fog that had shrouded the attempt to take
over the club by Van Morton Investments began to lift, while a bizarre and faintly ridiculous
statement from Wrexham FC appeared on the club's website last Friday. Through fifteen seperate
points, the club's owners (or someone speaking for them) managed to dismantle whatever was left of
any credibility that they had amongst the club's support.
The email arrived this morning a press release issued by City Fans United, the supporters
organisation that brought the supporters of the fractured club together, mobilised them, organised
them against the cancer that was killing their club and then picked up the pieces and starting
making arrangements for the future.
The supporters group Chester Fans United may not have reached a consensus over whether they
should formally call a boycott of their club, but it seems to have started already. They beaten 1-0
at home in the Blue Square Premier last night by Salisbury City in front of a record low crowd of
just 425.
It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes, and it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that Stephen Vaughan and his gaggle of followers may be doomed to repeat their mistakes forever. The first current owner of a football club to fail the Football Association's Fit & Proper Persons Test while the owner of the soon to be deceased Chester City, Vaughan is still serving an eleven year long disqualification from acting as a company director in this country, but this didn't stop him from heading to the Mediterranean in the summer to have another go at running a football club with, as it is starting to look, predictable results.
The boycott, as things turned out, only ended up being unofficial for a couple of days. After
just 425 people turned out on Tuesday night for their Blue Square Premier match against Salisbury
City, the results of a survey carried out by the supporters group showed 72% of those polled to be
in favour of a boycott of the club's home matches, while 23% "considered it an option".