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The Football League
The English football league system has gone through several different nomenclatures over the years. In 1958 the two regional third tier leagues (Third Division North and Third Division South) were merged into two national leagues. The four divisions then became, from best to worst, First Division, Second Division, Third Division and Fourth Division, with promotion and relegation between the four leagues. Occasionally a team would be promoted from the Fourth Division to the First after a sustained run of success (Wolves, Wimbledon, Northampton); likewise, a team trapped in a cycle of misery could do the opposite and plummet from the First to the Fourth Division (Northampton, Wolves, Swindon).
In 1992 the 22 clubs of the First Division broke away from the Football League and formed their own League, the Premier League. Promotion and relegation between this league and the Football League remained in place; however, the clubs in the Premier League could arrange their own TV broadcasting deals which would give them more money. This has made a lot of people very rich and been widely regarded as a good move – for some. The Football League continued in a similar form, rebranding in 2004 into what we know today, the four tiers of English football becoming Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two. What was the Fourth Division in old money is now League Two in new.
It is the (old) Fourth Division in which the following takes place. For ease of comprehension, I will refer to the Divisions with their contemporary names rather than current.
Background
Kent is a reasonably sized county in the south of England, to the southeast of London. A number of people may be familiar with the city of Canterbury, home to the best cathedral in the UK, a popular pilgrimage destination, and was one end of the first regular passenger steam railway in the world. Football representation, though, was only found in the west of the county. For many years the only professional team in the county was Gillingham, who at this point in their history had not pulled up trees – winning one trophy (the Fourth Division in 1964) and generally bouncing between the Third and Fourth Divisions.
Due to the county’s position in relation to London, and the Southern Railway’s electrification programme making it a viable commuter destination, a lot of the population influx post World War II came with previous attachments to London teams. Despite a population of over a million people, crowds at Gillingham rarely indicated that another Kent team would be sustainable.
Nobody mentioned this to Maidstone United. After bouncing around various local leagues in the first seventy years of their existence, in 1979 they became founder members of the Alliance Premier League, an amateur league directly below the Fourth Division. Unlike in the Football League, where promotion (and relegation) was based on the finishing position in the league at the end of the season, clubs wishing to enter the Football League from the Alliance had to apply for election, standing against existing Football League clubs. As the Football League clubs voted on who got to stay in the league and who didn’t, it was very rare that a non-league club would replace an existing Football League one. After all, why grant entry to an upwardly mobile club with momentum, when you can continue winning against a confirmed straggler?
Between the resumption of the Football League following the end of World War II in 1946, and the end of the re-election system in 1986, only six clubs were voted out in the 40 seasons. Thirty-four non-league clubs applied for election to the Football League but were denied. Included in this batch were Maidstone, who won the Alliance Premier in 1984 – wearing shirts sponsored by the furniture store MFI – but were not elected.
Promotion attempts
The Alliance Premier League had a familiar face in charge from the outset as the chairman of the League was Jim Thompson – who was also chairman of Maidstone United, and had been for several years. Thompson, the Newcastle-born former managing director of the local Kent Messenger group, had a reputation for modernisation. He transformed the flagship newspaper of the KM Group from a stodgy broadsheet to a flashy tabloid, and overhauled the running of Maidstone from one being run by a committee to one run as a business, turning the club semi-professional in the process and dragging them into the modern era.
Thompson’s takeover was, according to the ousted board, a devious and underhanded act. Thompson’s company had produced the matchday programme for the club, and also stored the club’s accounts in their offices. The directors thought he was doing this voluntarily – instead, unbeknownst to them, he was charging them for this work. Once this debt reached a certain level he converted it to shares and instantly became the majority owner. Devious and underhand? Maybe. Ethically dubious? Certainly, but not illegal.
As the club’s chairman, Thompson put in place a plan to the club promoted to the Football League. He was a hard man to please. Bringing in almost an entirely new playing squad in 1971 – including future England manager Roy Hodgson – and finishing second, only a point behind the champions, wasn’t enough to keep manager Bobby Houghton in his job. (Houghton landed on his feet though – his next job, at Malmo, saw him become the only man to manage a Swedish team to a European Cup final.) The 1980s saw the managerial position at the club have as much job security as drumming for Spinal Tap, as a number of different incumbents (including the father of comedian Alan Carr) came and went. Thompson’s plan expired with the club still one league below, but behind the scenes Maidstone had been reformed into a limited company, reducing Thompson’s personal liability if the side went bankrupt.
The 1986-1987 season brought a raft of changes in the Football League. Playoffs were introduced to give more teams a chance of being promoted - instead of the teams that finished in the top three positions in the Division (or four, in the Fourth Division) being promoted automatically, the top two teams would go up, and positions three to five would play a mini tournament, including a team fighting to avoid being relegated from the league above, to determine who would get a place in the higher tier next season.
The promotion/relegation shake-up extended out of the Football League to non-league. The re-election system was banished, and the team finishing at the bottom of the Football League (24th in the Fourth Division) would be replaced by the team who finished top of the Alliance Premier, newly renamed the Football Conference – but only if their home stadium was up to scratch. Several teams would be denied promotion on these grounds in the mid 1990s. These ground improvements were not without foundation, though, after several incidents in the 1980s it was decided to improve the safety for fans.
Scarborough FC were the first team to be promoted automatically to the Football League in May 1987, replacing Lincoln City. It would be a short stay in non-league for Lincoln as they went back up the following season, replacing Newport County. Newport’s stay in non-league was also a short one, but for different reasons - the club folded two thirds of the way through the season due to outstanding debts of £330,000 and their record was expunged.
Grounds for complaint
The 1988-89 season was one of great joy in certain parts of Kent. Having realised that their home stadium, London Road, would not meet the Football League’s stringent ground requirements, the land was sold to furniture retailer (and former sponsors) MFI for £2.8m and Maidstone moved into Dartford’s Watling Street ground, 20 miles up the road – or just a stone’s throw away. Planning permission for MFI to redevelop the site had been applied for in 1987, so it appears that this had been in the works for a while. Dartford - who were in the league below Maidstone, and narrowly missed out on promotion to the Conference that same season – did not have a ground that met the League’s standards either, so required extensive improvements costing around £500,000 – a relative bargain compared to the work needed to bring London Road to league standards, valued at £600,000, with maintenance at London Road costing £35,000 a year.
Thompson would later explain that on taking over the club, he was faced with three options. Declaring option 1 (raising cash in advance of a promotion push) to be a “non-starter” and option 2 (sticking with the status quo) to be too easy, he stated that the only option available to him was the “revolutionary” third option - selling the stadium and using the proceeds to invest in the playing staff. It was “The Football League, a new Stadium… or bust“ (his emphasis).
On the pitch, the new surroundings and additional income seemed to benefit Maidstone, as they won 25 of their 40 league games that season to win promotion into the Football League, with two Maidstone players jointly sharing the top goalscorer trophy for that division. It wasn’t all rosy in Kentish football, though. Gillingham finished second-bottom o…
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