Kingstonian, Wimbledon, Chelsea and football’s responsibility to protect clubs from homelessness
Kingstonian, Wimbledon, Chelsea and football’s responsibility to protect clubs from homelessness
The Royal Borough of Chelsea FC Women upon Thames
The case for a winter break, scrapping FA Cup replays and the abolition of the League Cup tends towards the matter of player welfare. There are player safety issues that are worth addressing but English football would be better off treading lightly than trampling over tradition.
Heritage counts for something. It should be part of the conversation, not dismissed as old-fashioned whimsy. My rebuttal to the lobby for less football is that tradition matters more than the team selection of a Premier League manager on any given weekend.
I’ve singled out Premier League managers because complaints about fixture congestion and arguments for less football very often come from them. But they aren’t helpless bystanders. They have agency and, more to the point, they have resources. They also have a duty of care.
If you’ve swiped through FotMob looking for matches to watch in the coming weeks you’ll have spotted that the Premier League operates a sort of rolling winter break at the start of the second half of the season. It’s quietened the clamour for a more solid winter break and left festive football untouched, so I’m all for it.
Saturday is the first day of the 2023 (yes, 2023) Africa Cup of Nations. We’re used to AFCON in January but it’s played in the summer now except when it isn’t. This tournament, in Côte d'Ivoire, was moved for reasons of climate.
A bunch of Premier League players will be there. They’ll play from the middle of January to the middle of February then come back to England and play some more. And just in time for European competitions too. Lovely.
So, whose responsibility is the welfare of those players? The football authorities, yes, but more so the club managers who use their wellbeing to moan about fixture congestion and demand the dismantling of tradition to suit their needs.
If the job of a manager is to manage then the football calendar structure in which they work is just part of the deal.
Kingstonian, Wimbledon, Chelsea and football’s responsibility to protect clubs from homelessness
Football supporters are well attuned to the red flags that wave unashamedly above a club at existential risk. Whether it's a self-inflicted and gradual slide towards the abyss or the sudden shock of a sale to asset strippers, history has trained us well.
We see through promises of future glories beyond a club's wildest dreams. We sniff out overspend like cadaver dogs. We know the lies because we've heard them before. We know the moves because they've been pulled by carpetbaggers for decades. We might be jaded but we are experienced in matters of boardroom bullshit.
One red flag in particular stands out. A club being forcefully separated from its stadium by its ownership isn't a harbinger of doom, exactly, but it certainly steps up the threat level. “That’s not good,” we grumble, secure in the knowledge that it seldom ends well.
There are many reasons to unshackle a stadium from its football club. Often it's a case of the owner being more interested in the land all along. Increasingly, it's an accounting trick that's intended to release transfer clout or service other financial commitments but which leaves a club vulnerable.
It wouldn't be true to say all clubs own their grounds unless and until they've been shafted by unscrupulous suits. Some non-league clubs rattle along quite nicely – albeit with that risk always present – in shared or council-owned facilities. In other parts of the world it's the norm for municipal stadiums to be in use even at the top level.
But in England there's usually a reason behind a club not owning its home or at least holding a very long lease on it. When clubs move from owning the ground to not owning the ground, we can assume something has gone wrong or has the potential to go wrong in the future.
Kingstonian can vouch for that and theirs is a particularly unusual and unfortunate case. What happened was, broadly, football stuff. It was football demonstrating an ability to damage itself even without prominent and nefarious outside influences. It’s a story of three clubs, their needs and wants, and the evolving patch of real estate that tore one of them apart.
Construction at Kingsmeadow in Norbiton was completed in 1989 and Kingstonian called it home until they left at the end of the 2016/17. What happened in the last twenty years should serve as a lesson for English football irrespective of where Ks end up in the future. Six years after the last game at Kingsmeadow they were one place outside the relegation zone in the Isthmian League Premier Division and still playing outside the borough.
In 2003 the stadium lease was sold by the owners of Kingstonian to resurgent AFC Wimbledon. Kingstonian stayed at Kingsmeadow but the money reportedly did not. Kingstonian were in difficulty at the time but there’s no denying that this was the decision that unlocked the end.
Wimbledon continued to rise and the possibility of building a new stadium at their traditional home at Plough Lane finally presented itself as they became established as an English Football League club. The parallels between what happened next and how Wimbledon ended up in Norbiton in the first place weren’t lost on anybody.
Kingsmeadow was sold to Chelsea in the summer of 2016 and is now the home of Chelsea Women. Kingstonian left ten months later and have groundshared at Leatherhead (very much not in the borough) and Corinthian-Casuals (inside the borough, though Ks consider themselves a Kingston club not a Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames club anyway) and Tooting & Mitcham United.
Morden and Kingston aren’t far apart. Tooting’s Imperial Fields is about six miles away from Kingsmeadow. Spiritually they might as well be in different cities. Kingsmeadow’s address still places it at Jack Goodchild Way.
The progress being made in women’s football means that there are chapters yet to be written into the Kingsmeadow manuscript. In the 2023 portion of the 2023/24 season Chelsea played seven home matches in the Women’s Super League and the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
Only three were played at Kingsmeadow. The Champions League fixtures and WSL games against Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur were played at Stamford Bridge. This trend is happening across the WSL, with the likes of the Emirates Stadium and Villa Park hosting women’s matches as either a response to demand or an intended catalyst for it.
It’s a positive development for WSL and the women’s game but where does it leave Kingsmeadow? With a couple more good tournaments for England and continued success in domestic and European football, Chelsea Women could feasibly outgrow it in fairly short order. What then?
The hopefully imminent independent regulator is perhaps the most important weapon football has in its arsenal when it comes to preventing this kind of situation from happening in the future. We’ve seen from the Kingsmeadow debacle as well as other more straightforward stadium uncouplings that it’s a complex matter. It requires insightful and impactful measures.
The regulator would have (and, let’s face it, government and Parliament already do have) a number of options to consider. They range from the obvious to the creative, and the most obvious of all is to legislate.
Stadium protection measures in law would include regulatory protections for clubs against their owners, specifying some extremely strict conditions under which a club could be uncoupled from its stadium. They would also provide supporters with legal recourse should it be necessary, most likely through an officially recognised supporters’ trust.
Legal safeguards could also be included in the sale of a club to new ownership, or, if necessary after the fact, in any sale of a stadium. In essence, there’s a need to recognise that football grounds matter and that they serve as protective tissue around our clubs, and to codify that in law in order to make it almost impossible for a club and a ground to be owned by different entities.
This should all have happened long ago but the independent regulator would do well to look very seriously at some fresh options too. Tight regulation around the geographical location of clubs would be complicated and probably more of a hindrance than a help in the long run, but it’s worth thinking about. The recent history of Kingsmeadow highlights both the rationale and the difficulty.
Community status mandates would enshrine stadiums as community assets and give them greater protection from asset strippers, sketchy owners and unnecessary sales in the name of financial chicanery. Such protection would be contingent upon a stadium’s use by the community, encouraging greater ties with local people and businesses through subsidised use of facilities.
But existential risk calls for radical responses and the independent football regulator should consider the unthinkable. Maybe clubs and their stadiums being separated isn’t just the problem. Maybe it’s the solution too.
Imagine, if you will, an English football in which every club’s stadium is protected or even owned by supporters by way of an independent stadium trust.
Supporters would have more than a say on the sale of a stadium and on matters of multifunctional usage or redevelopment. They’d have a veto. Not every club can be supporter-owned but putting control of important community assets in their hands would be a long stride in the right direction.
The point of all this isn’t to criticise Wimbledon. They wanted to rise back through the divisions and go back to Plough Lane. Nor is the intention to chastise Chelsea Women. They took the opportunity to adopt a relatively local base and their shift back towards Stamford Bridge will be in good faith. There are legitimate criticisms to be levelled but they’ve been covered elsewhere.
Kingstonian, Wimbledon and Chelsea Women are just three clubs operating in a regulatory environment that’s left one of them out on a limb. Really, this isn’t about Kingstonian being collateral damage from Wimbledon and Chelsea’s ambitions but football’s responsibility towards itself.
Ultimately this is a bigger question even than stadium trusts or legal protections for community assets.
The answer has to be that the independent regulator has actual power over this matter and others. More importantly, it demands supporter representation with teeth – big, pointy, sharp, ferocious teeth – in the boardroom.
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Salty beef extracts
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Balancing the Cultural Tightrope – A Battle We Underrate (Football Paradise)
Dessert
adidas and Arsenal’s superb No More Red campaign returned for another go around in the FA Cup at the weekend.
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