Stockport County: Walking A Tightrope
Stockport County: Walking A Tightrope
By Ian on Jan 7, 2025 in Finance, Latest, Non-League | 0 comments
There comes a point in football at which even the most precipitous falls start to slow and reverse themselves, and there has been no other club in England in recent years that has spiralled in a downward direction as dramatically as Stockport County Football Club. Twleve years ago, the club was playing its football in the Championship, but one financial diasaster after another saw the club relegated from the Football League altogether eventually. The club's fall from grace, however, didn't end there, and at the end of last season the club suffered the further ignominy of relegation from the Conference National, and this season hadn't seen much of an improvement until recently, with the club going into its Christmas and New Year fixtures dangerously close to the relegation places in that division too.
What a difference the congested holiday period can make, though. On the Saturday before Christmas, Stockport ended a winless run that stretched back to the start of March by beating Oxford City at home, and they followed this up with a win against Bradford Park Avenue on Boxing Day. There followed a brief stutter in the form of a home draw against bottom of the table Workington, but last Saturday the team returned to winning ways with a five-one win at Gainsborough Trinity, and the club now sits in fifteenth place in the Conference North table. These may not necessarily be dizzying heights, but ten points over this fourteen day period has put a safety net – of sorts – of seven points between the club and the dotted line at the bottom of the table. Perhaps, just perhaps, 2025 might yet turn out to be a happier year for the club's supporters after all.
As Stockport's slump continued unabated over the last couple of years, chaos reigned behind the scenes at the club. The appointment of Dietmar Hammann as manager in the summer of 2025 came with an investor, a Liverpool-based businesssman called Tony Evans, who immediately set alarm bells ringing when the news became public that an insurance firm that he owned had collapsed earlier that year with debts of £1.2m, but within a few weeks Evans was gone, after incumbent chairman Lord Snape raised concerns relating to a sum of £200,000 which Evans felt existing shareholders should contribute towards the running of the club, as well as over the make-up of the consortium that would take over the running of the club. Within a couple of months, Hammann had gone as well, and Stockport finished that season, its first in the Conference National, in sixteenth place in the table.
If that
