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.
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.
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.
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.
