All is not quite what it seems at apparently well run and financially secure League One side Walsall as stay-away fans battle a want-away chairman over the role of the club’s stadiums in his pension plans.

Overview

One of the really great things about Britain is that you’re rarely more than walking distance away from a football club of reasonable standard.

A cursory glance at the AtoZ will reveal that LFW Towers is situated about a mile away from League Two strugglers Barnet but look closer and you’ll also find Ryman Premier League outfit Wingate and Finchley the same distance in the other direction. Similarly, when I was based in Sheffield it was two miles in either direction depending on whether you were a United or Wednesday sympathiser, but it was also two minutes down the road to Northern Counties League outfit Hallam FC – proud owners of what they say is the oldest football ground in the world. To get to work on the local paper in Matlock from there I’d embark on a daily car journey through the Chatsworth Estate (the stately home, not the set of Shameless) and dodge the lambs and cattle scatted liberally across the road. It was a bit different to the Northern Line I can tell you, but it still ended by coming over the brow of the hill and down into Matlock town centre where, right at the heart of the town, sat Causeway Lane the picturesque home of Evo-Stik League side Matlock Town. They would play local derbies with Alfreton, Belper, Buxton and others. Even in the High Peak of Derbyshire everywhere has a football team.

The basic economic principal of supply and demand dictates that all of these football clubs cannot continue to survive, and indeed right up to the top of the sport in this country leagues are littered with problem clubs spending money they don’t have on things they can’t afford and making huge losses.

Credit then, you would think, to League One mainstays and QPR’s League Cup opponents this evening Walsall. Tucked away in a steel box under the M6 the Saddlers are, on the face of it, one of the country’s better run clubs. The Bank’s Stadium (previously The Bescott) holds just over 11,000 spectators but rarely troubles its capacity – the average gate here last year was 4,274 – but despite that Walsall were able to amass a sufficient number of points to survive once more last season in a division that included both Sheffield clubs, Preston, Huddersfield, Charlton Athletic and others.

They’re also bringing in enough money to remain relatively debt free and solvent despite vying for attention on the same patch as Birmingham City, Aston Villa, West Brom, Wolves and, slightly further afield, Coventry City. Some of their methods of doing so are quite innovative: they bring in a six figure sum each year from a giant advertising hoarding that sits on top of the away end and looks out over the M6 and it’s never ending stream of vehicles; a new stand built behind the goal in 2003 houses an entertainment suite and there are conference facilities as well.

Not only that but Walsall have been a division higher still in recent years. QPR beat a team managed by Ray Graydon and containing one Gino Padula and future England international Michael Ricketts in the First Division here in 2000, and despite relegation that year Walsall returned and stayed from 2001 to 2004, regularly giving their more illustrious neighbours a bloody nose.

Why then does chairman Jeff Bonser, who bought into the club as it moved from its old Fellows Park ground into the Bescott back in 1991, no longer attend matches for fear of abuse from the supporters? Why have 2,000 of those supporters stopped attending games themselves? Why did CEO Stefan Gamble tell supporters at a fans forum last year that Bonser felt his presence at matches was now a “negative” one?

The answer to that begins nearly 25 years ago when Walsall moved grounds. They sold fellows Park for a fee just shy of £6m which paid off their debts and funded the new stadium development. The Bescott Stadium (as was) was built on an old sewage works owned by Seven Trent Water. The water company retained ownership of the land, and charged Walsall a rent of about £75,000 a year. When Bonser bought into the club he kept the arrangement where the ground was a separate entity – buying a 78% stake in the club with his own money, and then later in 1995 buying the freehold to the land the ground was situated on with his pension fund.

The ground and the club remain separate to this day and here’s where the problem lies. While Walsall’s average attendance, geographical location and history suggests they’re currently at their level - they’re only staying there by the skin of their teeth each season. Currently campaigns are falling into a set pattern of six months of struggle followed by a three month burst of results at the end when Bonser loosens the purse strings and strengthens the team with short term signings and loan deals. Last year Emmanuel Ledesma returned to the club for the final ten matches, scored four important goals, and then left again. And while it’s easy to say they’re doing well to even be in the same division as former Premier League sides like Sheffield United, the fact that they bring in such admirable income suggests they could be doing a bit more on the field.

However, every year, £460,000 of that income leaves the club and goes into the Bonser pension fund as rent. According to The Guardian’s excellent football business reporter David Conn the pension fund has taken £4.5m in rent from Walsall since Bonser bought the lease from Seven Trent in 1995. The club, it would seem, is being used as a vehicle to feather the chairman’s nest for retirement.

Bonser has been saying for 18 months now that the ground and the club up for sale – although were the stadium to be flogged, it’s likely the millions it would fetch would go to his pension fund rather than the Saddlers themselves. That theory was given weight when the club announced last year that its landlord Suffolk Life Annuities Limited (holders of the pension fund) had informed the club of its intention to sell their freehold interest in the Banks's Stadium site.

Bonser says his pension fund has invested in the stadium – the lucrative billboard, the new stand, the Jeff Bonser suite – in a way other landlords simply wouldn’t have done. He says he’s loaned £1.9m to the club interest free and never drawn a salary. In total, he says, his pension fund has invested £3.8m into the club, but Conn points out that the rent increases by 7% of every investment made. So that £460,000 a year is rising all the time. And the investments made would make it an attractive purchase for any potential new landlord, with the money they pay for it going straight into Bonser’s pension.

One of the really sad things about Britain today is that, chances are, the football club you’re walking distance from will have a story along similar lines to tell.

Interview

Walsall supporter James Poole kindly took time out of his day to answer a few questions on the current situation with The Saddlers for LFW. Thanks as always to our guest contributors.

Well, it’s been a while since QPR faced a Ray Graydon Walsall side that included Michael Ricketts and Gino Padula among their number in the First Division. Was that the golden era? What’s the current situation at the club? I see many ‘experts’ have them down as a relegation tip this year, is that fair?

The Ray Graydon era was most defiantly the golden era for the club, not only - despite being tipped for relegation - did we come second in the Second Division to gain promotion ahead of Manchester City (What happened to them?) but once in the promised land of the First Division we managed to beat the Wolves, Blues and West Brom.

Back to 2012, we are once again tipped for relegation, but I can’t see any fairy-tale ending this time, I think the majority of Walsall fans would be very happy with mid table obscurity. We have basically signed the majority of our players over the summer from Hereford United who have just been relegated out of the Football League

What are the club’s medium and long term ambitions? Is it likely to make it back to the second tier any time soon? What’s the financial situation?

The medium and long term ambition for the fans would most defiantly be to reach the Championship and then establish ourselves. I very much doubt this is the ambition of the chairman - he is far too happy taking is £1k+ a day rent from the club and pretending it’s for sale. If we come too close to relegation, he seems to free up wages to bring in players to keep us up, but will sell any half decent player we ever manage to produce for a pittance.

What do the fans think of the manager and the board? What’s the general mood like around the support base?

Walsall fans are pretty much split over Dean Smith but I like him. He came in after the disaster of the man that is Chris Hutchings and achieved the great escape, he didn’t really build on that last season and we were once again very much relegation threatened. His budget has once again been cut and the general mood is that we’ll have another season of struggle to look forward to.

As a general rule Walsall fans have been wanting chairman Jeff Bonser out of the club for a number of years. Splitting the club and the ground up (the ground being owned by his pension fund) means that we have a rented stadium and the majority of income goes to pay the annual rent to our self-claimed number one fan. Telling the fans we are divorced from financial reality and to go and support Luton or Rotherham hasn’t helped his popularity and he now no longer attends games due to the abuse he receives.

Who are the players QPR should watch out for? Where are the weak links in the team? What sort of approach are Walsall taking this year – defensive, offensive, passing, long ball etc?

Walsall are really trying to play football this season, in the opening couple of games we’ve really tried to get the ball down and play it from the back. I’m not 100% convinced we have the players to do this, but is most defiantly an improvement on the last few season’s style of play. The player to look out for is Florent Cuvelier on loan from Stoke - he is a classy player and destined for great things. Why he returned to us this season I’ll never know.

How did Emmanuel Ledesma get on in his two spells? What did Walsall fans think of him? He must have done alright to get a move to Middlesbrough?

On his day Ledemsa was brilliant. He was never going to be chasing back and getting stuck in but had amazing talent and scored some very important goals for us. He was always too good for us and hope it works out at Boro for him.

How was pre-season and how has the season begun performance and results wise?

We usually ‘sell out’ in pre-season and use it as a money making exercise which involves our magnificent neighbours coming down and filling our stadium which makes the club a bit of money. This year we had to suffer a 3-0 defeat to Wolves and a 3-1 defeat to Albion. We also got beat by Burton but managed a 0-0 draw with the mighty Telford and a 3-2 win over Kidderminster Harriers.

Manager

QPR are traditionally vulnerable to lower league sides at this stage of this competition, as Walsall boss Dean Smith knows only too well. He was on the Leyton Orient coaching staff in 2007 when the League One side beat John Gregory’s Championship Queens Park Rangers at Loftus Road.

He told the Express and Star newspaper: ““Hopefully, that’s an omen. The one thing we tell the players is to enjoy every game and this will be no different. If you play with a smile on your face, for me, you get better performances. But we are not going there to make the numbers up and let them play silky football. It’s not an impossibility for us to go there and pull off a shock. We certainly won’t be in awe of them.”

Smith spent the majority of his playing days at Walsall and Orient. He played 166 times for the Saddlers between 1989 and 1994 as a centre half suffering relegation to the Fourth Division in 1990 and then play off semi-final heartbreak against Crewe in 1993.

He then had a three year spell with Hereford, who spent a club record £80,000 to buy him in the 1994 close season, which went along similar lines. They lost a Third Division play off semi final to Darlington in 1996 but were then relegated out of the Football League altogether in 1997 on that extraordinary final match of the season against Brighton where the Seagulls stayed up at Hereford’s expense courtesy of goals scored across the season.

A six year spell followed at Orient where he made more than 300 appearances. He suffered a third play off defeat in 1999, losing in the final this time to Scunthorpe United who won 1-0 with a goal from Alex Calvo Garcia. In 2001 they made the Millennium Stadium final once more but despite leading twice eventually lost 4-2 to Blackpool. He finished his career with an 18 month spell at Sheff Wed and a brief Indian summer at Port Vale.

After coaching at Orient from 2005 to 2009 he moved to Walsall to lead their youth set up and then graduated up to the first team manager position, initially as caretaker, when Chris Hutchings was sacked last year. Smith took over in January 2011 with the club nine points adrift of safety but they lost only six of their last 21 matches, beating Bristol Rovers 6-1, Southampton 1-0 and Charlton 2-0 along the way to stay up ahead of Dagenham and Redbridge by a point. Last season they finished seven points clear of the drop zone but struggled to convert draws into wins – 25 stalemates in total, including an extraordinary run of 12 draws from 15 games from the start of November to the end of January.

Links >>> Official Website >>> Express and Star Newspaper >>> Up The Saddlers Message Board >>> Walsall Web Fans >>> Vital Walsall

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Pictures – Action Images

Photo: Action Images

isawqpratwcity added 12:06 - Aug 28 For years I thought that owning a football club was an ego trip that owners had to dig deep to enjoy. Then along came T&C who refused to let f*cking the club over to stop them from cashing in on Premier promotion. Apparently, rooting clubs over for profit isn't as rare a situation as I thought.
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TacticalR added 12:36 - Aug 28 Thanks for your report. It's good to find out more about a club we haven't played against recently.
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