The magic of the FA Cup will not be readily observable when Blackpool take on Arsenal at Bloomfield Road on Saturday evening. On paper the tie looks tasty enough, with Unai Emery’s first experience of FA Cup football coming at the home of a League One side who fully extended Arsenal in the Carabao Cup fourth round, though little at Blackpool nowadays is exactly as it looks.
The most recent home attendance of 10,994, for instance, was unusually high for a club being boycotted by many of their own fans. That was because Blackpool were playing Sunderland, who brought along 7,804 of the paying spectators. The average Blackpool gate this season has been a little over 4,000, a fraction of the 16,000 they used to attract when they reached the Premier League nine years ago.
While relegation can have that effect, in a short space of time Blackpool were relegated all the way down to League Two; largely, supporters argue, due to lack of interest and investment from the club owners.
Sharp-eyed observers at the Sunderland game will have noticed something unusual going on outside the ground, with protest pamphlets being distributed and “Oyston Out” scarves on sale. Just before Christmas, Blackpool made another odd thing happen; Newcastle’s Mike Ashley came only second in a poll of supporters designed to find the league’s most unpopular club owner. The opprobrium in which the Oyston family are held even has what might be termed official backing – a high court judge ruled just over a year ago that the club’s assets had been “illegitimately stripped”.
According to Christine Seddon of the Blackpool Supporters Trust (BST), the present chairman, Owen Oyston, is less of a pantomime villain than his son Karl, whose time in charge was marked by unseemly spats with supporters and threats of court action. Owen’s more emollient approach and claims to care for the club were effectively undermined by the court case brought by Valeri Belokon, a Latvian businessman whose allegation that the Oystons had misused his financial input was upheld.
Most Blackpool fans breathed a sigh of relief when the Oystons were ordered to repay Belokon almost £30m in what seemed a watershed moment, though a year has passed since then, most of the money is still owed, and the club remains in the family’s hands.
“We can’t see what Owen is getting out of the current situation, but he is clinging on and there’s not much we can do about it,” Seddon says. “That’s how we have ended up with a boycott, because although we love the club we do not want to give the Oystons a penny more. When the owners turned on their own supporters, threatening them with legal action and in some cases costing them money, a line was crossed. There’s no going back, the relationship has deteriorated to the point where we can never trust them, there’s no proper future for the club while they own it.”
Rather awkwardly, however, whatever the investment at boardroom level the club have pulled out of a downward spiral on the pitch and are now making their way back up the league. Promotion was achieved last season, even if a disillusioned Gary Bowyer resigned as manager a week into the present campaign.
The assistant, Terry McPhillips, took over and results have generally been encouraging. A poor festive period saw Blackpool pick up one draw and three defeats, yet they are still in the top half of the table. “Under normal circumstances a home fixture against Premier League opposition would be cause for great excitement,” the BST spokesman and boycott promoter Steve Rowland says. “Unfortunately circumstances here are anything but normal. We are fighting for the future of our football club – the game will be televised and we have a chance to show those watching at home that things are not as they seem. The FA and the EFL should be embarrassed.”
McPhillips and his players are caught in the middle, trying to stay focused on their work and unaffected by the strife around them. “We think we might get a decent crowd for the Cup game,” the manager said. “Maybe not as big as the Sunderland one, but still decent. It’s great occasion for us and I think the lads deserve it.”
While BST feels the Football League should have the same tests for fit and proper owners as the Premier League, at present it does not and maintains Oyston has not broken any of its rules. Under current ownership Blackpool would fall foul of top-flight regulations, as in fact they did nine years ago when the Premier League was belatedly attempting to disbar Oyston Sr over his 1996 rape conviction when relegation saved it the trouble. With a money-laundering conviction against him Belokon is unlikely to come riding to the rescue either, though he did make the somewhat pointless observation in a new year message to supporters that the club was going through “perhaps the darkest time in its history”.
That is quite the understatement. Matt Scrafton, the Blackpool Gazette football writer who has had to document this sorry tale on a daily basis, has a far starker description. “It’s been like Brexit,” he says. “People who used to be friends no longer speak. Supporters who sat next to each other for years don’t see eye to eye. One fan may have one stance, another a completely different one, friendships have been completely broken.” The newspaper finds it can no longer publish action pictures from games where fans in the crowd can be identified. There has been abuse and ill-feeling between those ignoring the boycott and those picketing outside the stadium.
Blackpool were a fun club when they reached the Premier League under the idiosyncratic guidance of Ian Holloway, but though they immediately announced themselves with a thumping 4-0 win at Wigan in 2010, they did not emulate their opening-day opponents in sticking around in the top flight.
The breakthrough season turned out to be the beginning of the bad times, in that the sinister expression regime change has been a feature of Fylde coast conversations ever since. Blackpool is no longer noted for fresh air and fun, as Stanley Holloway used to maintain. Even on FA Cup third-round day, perhaps especially on FA Cup third-round day, the atmosphere is toxic.