Late on Thursday afternoon variations of the same email began dropping in a number of National League chairmen’s inboxes and an unseemly situation became that much messier. The message was more or less uniform: the league was either charging its clubs for not fulfilling fixtures over the past week or holding the prospect of sanctions, which could include fines or even expulsion, over them if they opted not to play this weekend.
Nobody’s mind has been changed. The clubs will not be strong-armed and it means, when a decimated schedule is surveyed on Saturday, icy weather conditions tell only a fraction of the story. A disrupted season has reached crisis point, with cash-strapped smaller clubs adamant it should be declared null and void while others aim to press on. The campaign’s continuation is being put to a vote but, in the meantime, temperatures across England’s fifth and sixth tiers are rising amid a standoff wrenching at the domestic game’s very fabric.
“To put us under this pressure is quite incredible,” says Wayne Salkeld, chairman of the National League North club Curzon Ashton. “It’s unacceptable from the league, especially considering the position some clubs are in. We need a resolution.”
Curzon Ashton have told Brackley Town that Saturday’s game will not be going ahead, having already called off fixtures against Boston United and Hereford in the past week, and were among those charged on Thursday. The reasoning is straightforward: the club say they cannot afford to play without financial assistance they say they had been led to believe was forthcoming before the season began.
There would have been no 2020-21 campaign had National League clubs not received a £10m National Lottery grant in October, designed to mitigate the financial problems wrought by Covid-19 and the absence of fans. But that money was intended to cover only the subsequent three months; the league is understood to have thought such support would continue if the picture did not improve, but no further blanket injection of cash has been forthcoming.
Many clubs feel they effectively started playing under false pretences and have now been left high and dry. “We wouldn’t have kicked a ball this season if we’d known this was going to happen,” Salkeld says.
There appears to have been a misunderstanding about the support available beyond the new year. “Money was needed very, very quickly to save clubs,” Jim Parmenter, chairman of the National League top-flight club Dover Athletic, says. “So people took it on trust and understood it would happen. But it hasn’t.”
Parmenter resigned from the National League board this week, saying he could “no longer support the direction of travel”. Clubs are being invited to apply for low-interest loans from Sport England under the government’s winter survival package or, in exceptional cases, further grants but the processing time is unclear and there is widespread horror about the prospect of being saddled with debt in such an uncertain climate.
“We’ve been told it could take two or three weeks but that’s too late for us,” says the Tonbridge Angels chairman, Dave Netherstreet, whose club have bitten the bullet and asked for a loan. “I could see us suspending our matches until we’re in a financial position that means we can carry on. It really is a muddle.”
The department for digital, culture, media and sport told the Guardian no ongoing funding was promised in the form of grants. There is understood to be frustration on the DCMS’s side, particularly at the slowness with which clubs have opened their books in applying for assistance. The implication is that, had they done so earlier, the money would be more quickly forthcoming. In the event other sports have moved ahead in the queue.
Dover have, like Curzon Ashton, applied for a grant but Parmenter is pessimistic about seeing any money before March. That would be too late for Dover so this week he announced his intention to cease all football operations and effectively put the club in cold storage.
“I want to make sure the club survives as a company and won’t go bankrupt,” Parmenter says. “If we continue as we are we won’t exist. My responsibility is to save the club and keep us going forward, so it’s there for the future.”
Clubs were asked at the start of the month, following a two-week halt to the regional divisions while solutions were discussed, to vote on continuing or voiding, and on which levels that would apply to. They were given a 28-day deadline but an outcome is believed to be close. The tealeaves suggest top-flight clubs, a number of whom covet a Football League spot, will vote to play on. The situation lower down seems less clear-cut, with southern clubs largely in favour of continuing but those in the northern section favouring a halt.
That impasse is why many are uneasy about playing games that could be erased from the record, or prove irrelevant if only the top flight continues and relegation is scrapped. Gateshead have refused to face Fylde on Saturday.
The National League is understood to feel it has a responsibility to those members who do want to keep playing, which it believes are in the majority, which is why clubs were charged for postponements this week. The risk is a league with 66 clubs and any number of competing motivations will eat itself. One National League North chairman says the situation is breeding considerable animosity between members with differing resources. Parmenter believes Covid-19 has accelerated divisions that have been several years in coming.
“Ultimately I want us to get the grant, play on and fulfil our fixtures,” Salkeld says. “We don’t want to be in this position.”