Cod Almighty | Diary

We don't have Fenty anymore

3 August 2022

It was almost a throw-away line. When he was asked yesterday whether the transfer fee we receive for John McAtee will be reinvested, the club chair Jason Stockwood said, as an aside, that the club's historic debts were being paid off 18 months ahead of schedule. We no longer owe John Fenty anything.

Middle-Aged Diary doesn't feel quite what I expected to feel about that. Certainly not a rush of euphoria and the dance around my office singing "We don't have Fenty any more" that might have enlivened the lives of my co-workers (if I'd captured the moment on our remote-working facility) or got me sacked.

The early repayment was made possible because Stockwood and Andrew Pettit put an extra half a million pounds each into the club. Given they were prepared and able to do that, it is not hard to think of more satisfying uses for the money than paying off Fenty. And Stockwood's answer made clear how far the club is from being self-sustaining, despite the surge in season ticket sales. We have a clean slate, but nothing else.

The question was whether whatever money we have - in this case from a transfer fee but in future it may be from unexpectedly large ticket sales or a cup run (we can dream) - will be reinvested. And the answer was how should it be invested? In that mythical beast, the guaranteed 20-goal-a-season striker? In improving our facilities and investing in our backroom personnel so that our existing players can find an extra 20 goals between them? Or in our youth development networks so that in a decade we might have grown our own male and female 20-goal-a-season strikers?

I don't have an answer, as it has to be all of them. It is far easier to build on success than to reverse failure, so we can't entirely neglect the here and now in pursuit of the fantasy that one day we'll be back in the second tier with players all born within sight of the Dock Tower. And it is easier to write about the Mariners than to run them. It is only slightly galling to admit that Jason Stockwood is better at doing both.

Still, I bet he never spent days on end in Grimsby Library digging out the newspaper reports that went into this.

UTM.