We've had some rum owners at Charlton but none of them has actually sent an audio message rallying fans from his prison cell.
Last summer, the owner of Fleetwood Town,
Andy Pilley, was sentenced to 13 years for ripping off small businesses and
charities up and down the UK via his utilities companies, stealing money from
vulnerable people and becoming rich in the process.
Yet, overlooking the halfway line at the club’s Highbury
Stadium, there is still a shrine to the man who was also imprisoned in 1998 for
conspiracy to steal from the Post Office and last year was convicted of crimes
which a judge described as a “sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and fraud”.
“There’s only one Andy Pilley,” — a phrase chanted by
Fleetwood fans at away games this season — says the banner put up by fans just
outside the stadium grounds.
Pilley oversaw six promotions at Fleetwood, taking the club
from the 10th tier to the third in a decade, despite the north-west town
(population: 26,000) being the smallest with an English Football League club. In purely footballing terms, Pilley has been
an excellent owner.
Pilley paid for Fleetwood’s Highbury stadium improvements as
well as a state-of-the-art training centre at Poolfoot Farm, which was opened
by Sir Alex Ferguson in 2016, with the media reporting the cost at £8million.
“We’re on a peninsula,” Pilley said in 2015. “We can’t get
any more fans from the north, the east or the west because we are surrounded by
water: river and sea.”
Almost half of its neighbourhoods are in the 10 per cent
most deprived in the UK according to official government statistics. It is an
isolated coastal town without a major employer or industry — meaning BES
Utilities and Pilley’s other companies are a big deal, alongside the town’s
other notable company, Fisherman’s Friend, a throat lozenge developed for
fishermen working in the freezing Atlantic waters.
Despite resigning as a director of the club’s parent company
immediately after his conviction, Pilley still owns Fleetwood Town.
EFL rules required him to divest his shares after the
“disqualifying event” of his lengthy prison sentence, but nine months after his
conviction, this has not happened.
The club says it is in a “continued dialogue” with the EFL
about a change of ownership. “Andy Pilley (is) in the process of divesting of
his shares,” a spokesperson said. “Mr Pilley resigned as a director of the club
shortly after the verdict.”
The issue with Fleetwood Town is not what the money is being
spent on or how the club is being run, it is where the money came from in the
first place: companies owned by a man who has now been jailed for serious
crimes.
However, the future looks uncertain regarding Pilley and his
companies, with legal action bubbling against his company BES.
Pilley was the man who turned Fleetwood Town from a
non-League minnow into an established EFL club, but his crimes mean he now has
to follow their fortunes from a prison cell.
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