Stockport County revival has reconnected club and community
Stockport County fell from the second tier to the sixth in 12 years, but the clouds have now lifted and the club is looking revitalised.
Considering the relative positions of the teams concerned, they were expecting an eventful evening at the top of the National League for the clash between Stockport County and Chesterfield last week, and they certainly got it. They went into the fixture occupying the top two places in the league table, level on points and separated by just three goals worth of goal difference.
A crowd of 10,236 turned out for the match. This was, remarkably, not the biggest National League crowd of the season – a new record attendance for the league was set in November, when 12,843 people saw Notts County play Solihull Moors – but it was still another huge crowd in a season that has seen attendances at this level of the game and below take a sharp upward turn.
The match that followed didn’t let them down. Chesterfield raced into a 2-0 first-half lead – ably assisted by the Stockport goalkeeper, who allowed a tame shot to pass through his legs and in – but the sending-off of Jeff King four minutes into the second half allowed Stockport a route back in, and goals from Will Collar and Ryan Croasdale brought them level with 25 minutes still to play. By the end, Chesterfield were hanging on a little for the draw. The result left Stockport top of the table. Just.
Stockport County are undergoing a revival that is long overdue. Twenty years ago this year, they were in what is now known as the Championship. It wasn’t an especially happy time for the club – they ended the season bottom of the table, and the middle of February saw them thoroughly stuck in a rut that had seen them win just two of their last 14 games – but even against this gloomy background, Stockport picked up some decent wins that season.
From six wins against five opponents in 46 matches (it was a very bad season), three came against clubs who are now in the Premier League: Watford, Norwich City and Manchester City. If you wanted an idea of just how wild the attendance of 10,236 for the Chesterfield match was, the attendance for the Manchester City game – a valedictory 1-0 win to mark the end of their time as City’s equals – was 9,537, their highest of that season.
But Stockport ended up falling much further than most would have guessed. As the fallout from the ITV Digital collapse crashed into the Football League, Stockport were badly hit. The club was sold to Brian Kennedy, owner of the Sale Sharks rugby union club, in 2003. He lost £4m in two years and passed the club onto the supporters trust, keeping Edgeley Park for himself. But in 2009 the club collapsed into administration.
By this time, the club had almost lost its EFL status once. Stockport only avoided relegation into non-league football by one place at the end of the 2005/06 season. But this turned out to be only a temporary respite. They made it back into League One in 2008 against a background of growing financial difficulties, but in April 2009 they were placed into administration, surviving relegation despite a points deduction, before completely collapsing to two successive relegations and a return to the non-league game in 2011. They’d been Football League members since 1905.
Non-league football was not much kinder to Stockport than their final seasons in the EFL. Jim Gannon had played almost 400 games for the club between 1990 and 2000 and had been the manager for their 2008 promotion, but he’d been made redundant by the administrators in 2009. He returned in November 2011, but in the 30 months since his departure, the club had seen five full-time managers come and go and had suffered relegation into non-league football, while they hadn’t won back-to-back games since February 2009.
By January 2013, Stockport were in the National League (then still known as the Football Conference) relegation places and Gannon was relieved of his duties again. Stockport’s nightmare had not ended with relegation from the EFL. At the end of the 2012/13 season, they were relegated into the Conference North, and if the previous five years had felt like a descent into hell, the next six would come to look more like purgatory.
Stockport had to turn part-time while playing at this level, and it took until the last day of the 2018/19 season to get promoted back, when 4,000 supporters travelled to see them beat Nuneaton Town 3-0 to lift that title. Their manager that day was Jim Gannon, who’d returned to the club for a third spell in 2016, and would end up staying until January 2021.
Slowly but surely, the clouds over the club have lifted. Stockport ended up as co-tenants of Edgeley Park with Sale Sharks after their sale to Brian Kennedy, but Sale left for Salford City in 2013. The ground was under threat when it was put up for sale in 2015, but in August of that year the council bought it for £2m and leased it back to the club. The club announced a return to profitability in 2017, and in 2020 it was sold to local businessman and lifelong fan Mark Stott, the founder and CEO of the Cheshire-based Vita Group, a property company.
The sale left the club debt-free, and in their first two seasons back in the National League they finished in eighth and third place. Last year they qualified for the play-offs but were beaten 1-0 at home in the semi-finals by Hartlepool United. Stockport had replaced Gannon with Simon Rusk, who’d previously been successful with Brighton’s under-23 team.
But Rusk’s time at Edgeley Park wasn’t particularly happy. Defeat in the National League play-offs was followed by a bumpy start to this season, which included home defeats against Dagenham & Redbridge and Yeovil Town. After successive defeats to Notts County and Barnet in October, he was replaced by Dave Challinor.
To say that Challinor has had a good start would be something of an understatement. His first game was away to Bolton Wanderers in the FA Cup, a match which they drew 2-2. They won the replay 5-3 ten days later – there was another 10,000 crowd at Edgeley Park for that match – and their narrow 1-0 defeat at League One leaders Rotherham United in the next round was one of only two matches they’ve lost since Challinor took over, and on Boxing Day they began a run of eight successive wins during which they scored 24 goals and conceded two, and which only ended with that draw against Chesterfield.
But it is tough at the top of the National League. Not only are Stockport and Chesterfield locked in battle at the top of the table, but there’s also a chasing pack of four clubs, all of whom are within six points of the top two, with another four below them within ten. All the way down to mid-table, the National League’s six-team play-offs ensure that there are plenty of teams with realistic (or near-realistic) promotion aspirations.
The clubs just below the top two are a curious assortment, too. Although the National League can at times look like a rest home for former EFL clubs who’ve fallen on hard times, none of those within six points of the top two fall into this category. FC Halifax Town were the successor club to Halifax Town, who folded in 2008, and have slowly ascended from the Northern Premier League since their reformation.
Alongside them, Bromley are a long-time non-league stalwart club – they were founder members of the Southern League in 1894 – who’ve grown steadily since winning the National League South in 2015, and this year’s FA Cup giant killers Boreham Wood, who have several games in hand on all the clubs above them and could yet race to the top of the table, although in this particular division, no-one would take that for granted.
The pack below them includes Wrexham, who are now making headlines that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, and Notts County, who became the first of the 12 members of the Football League to leave it since Accrington, in 1896, when they were relegated from League Two. and were subject to one of the most bizarre takeover stories of recent years. They’ve been just passing through since 2019. Wrexham have been there since 2008.
Wrexham, Notts County, Chesterfield, Stockport and plenty of other clubs are all proof that the National League is considerably easier to fall into than it is to escape from. There is just one automatic promotion place for the champions, with a single place from the play-offs, for one of six clubs. But there is little historical record of clubs promoted into the EFL subsequently struggling. Five of the current top seven clubs in League Two have been promoted from the National League within the last decade.
Following the draw against Chesterfield, Stockport moved three points clear at the top of the National League table with a 3-1 win at Bromley, a difficult fixture and an excellent result against the team that started the day in fourth place in the table. They ended it in fifth, leapfrogged by Boreham Wood, who beat Altrincham 2-0, who have further games in hand on both Stockport and Chesterfield, and who have only lost twice in 24 league matches this season. But in a 46-match season, there is still a long way to go, and Stockport also still have a shot at Wembley in the FA Trophy, where they travel to Suffolk to play Needham Market, the smallest team left in the competition, in the quarter-finals.
For all of their progress on the pitch, Stockport may have been carrying out even more important work off it. Stott raised more than £200,000 to pay for school meals for Stockport schoolchildren over Christmas before the Government was forced into a U-turn, while money has also gone into the Stockport NHS Trust to help supplement their supply of ventilators during the Covid pandemic. £3 from the sale of each replica shirt goes to the County Community Trust, the charitable arm of the football club. This is critical work at a time when the north of England has categorically not been ‘levelled up’.
It’s tight at the top of the National League and Stockport County might not go up come the end of the season, but with crowds buoyant and great work being done in their community, they are surely already winning in all the most important ways. Victory on the pitch is a transient sensation that can often come at a price, but building a football club that is a force for good in its local community is where the true value of the game lies. And besides, with crowds averaging averaging over 6,000 and the team top of the table, the entirely chaotic decade between 2009 and 2019 is already starting to feel like a rapidly fading memory.