Back Where We Belong
Back Where We Belong
It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m spending it at the desk. Teams open, Outlook open, and the #BWFC hashtag open on another tab as I watch in awe as Chris Forino mounts a serious challenge against David Wheater for Wanderers seshmaster.
I’ve been scheduling content for our social channels, and each time so much as a thought about Wembley enters my mind, I can’t stop the grin from appearing on my face. But I also can’t stop the ‘have we actually done it?’ feelings too - it feels like there must be a catch. It felt too easy, no disrespect to Stockport, but Bolton Wanderers don’t do things that comfortably… do we? Promotion to the Championship isn’t just a result, or a day out, it’s a feeling. A feeling that will last long into the summer, almost as long as Chris Forino’s hangover.
4-1 the full-time scoreline. Rodrigues inside three minutes. A bicycle kick from the man with the biggest bollocks in Bolton. A return to the Championship, after seven years away. It wasn’t ‘just’ 7 years away, though, was it? I think we’d be doing our football club a disservice by saying it’s just been some time away.
Where it all went wrong
Whilst the fact is true, Bolton Wanderers have spent seven years out of the second tier, the return to the Championship is monumental, so monumental, I don’t think 50 years away under ‘normal’ circumstances would come close to the feeling we all have. It’s an unwelcome symptom of the modern game that so many football clubs experience hardship, plagued by owners with fragile egos and nothing but their own interests at play.
In 2012, we were relegated from the Premier League. By 2015, over 50 million pounds in losses became too much for Eddie Davies to rescue, and a winding-up petition over an unpaid tax bill of £2.2 million barely scratched the surface of the £172.9 million worth of total debt.
Upon selling the club, Eddie Davies wrote off the £175m he was owed, and Dean Holdsworth, with Ken Anderson, took ownership of Bolton Wanderers Football Club. Now I’d use the term ‘ownership’ loosely here. It would be like referring to a notorious BBC TV Presenter in the 70s, 80s, and 90’s as a babysitter.
In 2017, Ken Anderson bought out Holdsworth and takes 95% control, which set Bolton Wanderers on a one-way journey to depths so low that so many thought the damage was irreversible. By 2018, Wanderers players went on strike over unpaid wages, and the club narrowly avoided administration after Eddie Davies, on his deathbed, gave Bolton a £5m loan. Eddie Davies died four days later
27th September 2018 - a winding-up order served by HMRC; the fourth such petition in 14 months
November/December 2018 - November wages not paid, and the PFA intervenes. Forest Green Rovers owner Dale Vince publicly slates Anderson over the collapsed Christian Doidge loan-to-permanent deal, which, in the grand scheme of things, was a minor slip-up by Anderson’s ‘standards’.
21st January 2019 - the night we’ll remember. Bolton 0-2 West Brom, live on Sky Sports Monday Night Football. Around 4,000 fans congregated outside the stadium for 45 minutes before kick-off in an organised march. "Anderson Out" banners draped across the Nat Lofthouse Statue. Inside the ground, fans threw tennis balls onto the pitch in protest - the ultimate symbol of how powerless football fans are to individuals who eradicate all sense of trust, connection and security from a football club, that all we can do in protest is throw tennis balls on the grass…and when we thought things couldn’t get worse, up steps Laurence Bassini.
17th April 2019 - Bolton announce Laurence Bassini, the disgraced former Watford owner (banned from EFL involvement 2013-16), has agreed a deal to buy the club "at the 11th hour" and just two days later our relegation from The Championship is confirmed. Only now does the headline countdown ‘away from the championship start’.
26th April 2019 - Bolton Wanderers players, supported by the PFA, refuse to play. The Brentford home game, 16 hours before kick-off, was called off, and our players hadn't been paid since February
May 2019 - Despite his papers, his pleas and his mushroom-shaped pleasantry, the Bassini deal collapses with the club stating his approach is "at an end"
13 May 2019 - Bolton enters administration. 12-point deduction for the following season confirmed. Transfer embargo. Slowly approaching what we thought was the point of no return.
Mid-May 2019 - Club chaplain Phil Mason and the Bolton Wanderers Community Trust set up an emergency food bank inside the University of Bolton Stadium. Non-playing staff hadn't been paid for six weeks, and in true Boltonian spirit, local businesses, charities, and Preston North End donated. The club staff carried on working unpaid out of loyalty to the club.
The fixture we’re all excited about next season, the Lancashire derby returning to the league, has a layer underneath it that some of us will have forgotten. In 2019, when Bolton Wanderers was on its knees and staff couldn't feed their kids, Preston North End stepped up, and now, both clubs meet in the Championship as equals again.
1 July 2019 - Football Ventures (Whites) Limited, led by Sharon Brittan, was named the preferred bidder
The revival
3 August 2019 - League One season opens at Wycombe. Bolton travelled with only three contracted senior outfield players. Eight players made their debuts. Lose 2-0. Manager Phil Parkinson said the takeover "cannot come soon enough"
8 August 2019 - Professional pillock, Laurence Bassini, wins a court order suspending the Football Ventures takeover.
10 August 2019 - Bolton 0-0 Coventry City. Bolton fielded their youngest-ever team, with an average age of 19. Not a single senior player appeared in that starting XI. Finlay Hurford-Lockett (16 years, 122 days) made his debut and became the second-youngest debutant in club history, behind only Ray Parry. The kids hold a Coventry side that finishes the season pushing for promotion to a 0-0 draw.
21 August 2019 - Phil Parkinson resigns
23 August 2019 - Football Ventures deal agreed at 5pm Friday by all parties except Ken Anderson's solicitors (surprise, surprise)
24 August 2019 - deal collapses Saturday morning
27 August 2019 - The EFL's 5pm Tuesday deadline arrives. Bury are expelled from the Football League that evening, becoming the first club expelled in 27 years. Sky Sports News runs the horrifically out-of-touch Jim White deadline countdown clock, treating the potential death of two clubs like Transfer Deadline Day. Bolton's deadline passes without a completed deal, which means the club is hours from following Bury out of the Football League
28 August 2019 - Sharon Brittan completes the takeover. Bolton Wanderers, 145 years old, survives
Why does it mean so much
The emotional debt that builds up over years like that is incomprehensible.The fans who lived through every single minute of that gradual decay and venomous years under Ken Anderson. The staff who resorted to food banks to put food on the table. The players who pulled on that White shirt in times of pure desperation. And the countless others, Bolton Wanderers’ journey has impacted, no matter how big or small, Sunday was for you.
Thank you, Sharon Brittan
Before Schumacher. Before Evatt. Before the EFL Trophy. Before the Wembley lap of honour. Before Rodrigues's goal inside three minutes and Dalby's bicycle kick. Before any of it, there was Sharon Brittan, signing a document on the 28th of August 2019 that had absolutely no business getting signed.
What she inherited wasn't really a football club. It was a 145-year-old name attached to a building, and an exhausted community of fans. With most of the contracted senior players gone, a staff body that had been working unpaid for weeks and eating from a food bank inside their own stadium, a 12-point deduction waiting for them, a transfer embargo waiting behind that, and a debt structure that was going to take years to honour properly. Whatever Eddie Davies' final act of generosity had bought the club, Anderson had spent. Bury were gone, and we were mere hours from joining them.
The thing about Sharon Brittan that you have to understand, the thing that separates her from almost every other owner currently sitting in a Football League boardroom, is what she did next. She didn't do a sit-down with Sky. She didn't time her arrival for the cameras. She didn't write a rousing first-day-as-chairman column for the matchday programme that read like a manifesto. She just got on with it.
She paid the creditors. She honoured the 35% obligation to unsecured creditors that the EFL required when Football Ventures completed the takeover, and in September 2021, quietly, almost as a postscript, the club announced it had settled every single penny. Embargoes lifted. Penalties gone. A clean slate, six years after that slate had been smashed into a thousand pieces by Ken Anderson.
She rebuilt the academy. She invested in the women's team. She restored the relationship between the football club and the town it belongs to. Now that relationship is a special one. It’s the kind of relationship that doesn't get rebuilt through press releases; it gets built through hard graft, through showing up, hiring the right people, and not interfering with them once you have. The reason Max Conway can start a play-off final at Wembley in 2026 is because of the decisions Sharon Brittan made in 2020 when nobody was watching. The reason there's a Toughsheet sponsorship deal, a refurbished stadium that doesn't feel like a relic, and a manager in Steven Schumacher who chose Bolton, all of it comes back to Shazza.
Most owners would have been on the Wembley pitch on Sunday, front and centre. Most owners would have made sure the cameras found them in the directors' box during the trophy lift. Most owners would have given the interview, posted the selfie, and taken the credit. Sharon Brittan stood back. She danced around the edge of the pitch, applauding the fans, and let the players have it. She let Schuey have it. She let the 28,000 of us in the West End of Wembley have it because for her, that's what Bolton Wanderers Football Club is supposed to be… ours.
But it needs to be said, Sharon Brittan, you deserve it as much as anyone who wore white on Sunday. The promotion belongs to the players. The fact that there was a football club left to be promoted belongs to you.
Back where we belong
It's still Tuesday morning. The Teams notifications are still going off. Forino has just edged ahead of Wheater in the seshmaster standings, allegedly. The next social post is queued. The preview show shortlist for next season has names on it now, proper names.
I keep catching myself reading words I haven't paid attention to in seven years. Ewood. Deepdale. Turf Moor. Replacing Forest Green, Fleetwood, Accrington and Crewe. The lower-league away days were their own thing, and we loved them for it, but you don't know how much you miss the big ones until you have them back.
We're not done. We're just back.
