April 5, 2024

National League North's Most Hated

Some musings on having fallen so far that we're the "big club" everyone wants to see fail

It seems like most fans in the National League North are pretty happy to see Tamworth effectively crowned champions. Not so much because they have any particular affection for the Staffordshire club, but because it means Scunthorpe United will not be champions, and they delight in our discomfort.

We haven't helped our case in many ways. The fans - and I ruefully include myself in that number - take the approach that we're not so much a National League North team as a Football League team on loan to the lower division. A chant to the effect that Scunthorpe away is "your big day out" became commonplace. We give every impression of being too big for our boots, and it's not exactly surprising that other teams want to see us brought down to earth.

The usual reason for a club that thinks they're better that their surroundings is a rich owner. Someone with more money than sense who wants to play at being a football club owner, and pumps a club up with investment. There's a feeling that this is a kind of cheating, an undeserved short cut to football success, and that again breeds resentment. Given what happens when the rich owner gets bored and the money dries up, I feel like we should let them enjoy the good times in peace, but football fans as a group aren't known for their compassion.

In any case, our route to big and hated status was a little different. An owner with more money than sense also played a role, but Peter Swann didn't pump us up with investment. Instead, he saddled us with debt, dismantled or tried to cash in on our assets, and oversaw a catastrophic fall from the brink of the second tier in 2018 to the sixth tier in 2023.

In the Football League, we were an almost embarrassingly modest club, with a boxy little ground that had seen better days and attendances that left a lot to be desired. But in the National League North, Glanford Park is palatial purely by virtue of having covered stands on all sides, and we routinely have the division's best attendance of the day. We've fallen so far that our former mediocrity has become supreme.

And instead of a rich owner, we have the people of Scunthorpe1. Our sweat and tears and willingness to buy "Jackson Stapleton Accountants" mugs. We trek out to places like Blyth, Brackley, and Spennymoor, not even on the rail network, just to cheer on our team. We take hundreds of fans to grounds that hardly know what to do with us - and surely the tickets, programmes, and burgers we buy are helping the clubs that delight in our every setback.

There are no shortcuts being offered to us. Rumour on the terraces says that even if we can get promoted through the playoffs, most of the squad will have to leave to get our finances in order. The debts racked up under the previous regime will constrain our options for years to come; even with the biggest crowds in the division, we're not exactly rolling in cash. If we can claw our way back into the National League, into the Football League, we will have very much done it the hard way.

So it hurts to see everyone else delighting in our setbacks as if they were somehow deserved. Was it not bad enough to suffer the humiliation of back-to-back relegations? Can you really blame us for trying to make the most of feeling like a big fish in a much smaller pond than we ever expected to inhabit?

I suppose the answer to that is that yes, football fans can blame anyone for anything. The tribal mentality likes nothing more than an opposition they can bond together in hating, and we, with the help of Peter Swann, have effectively volunteered for the role. So there's nothing we can do but endure, keep showing up, and hope we can turn things around before it gets us down too badly.