While Barcelona were busy schooling Manchester United in how to play the game on Saturday night, two hundred miles away and nine divisions below the level at which the latter of those giants operates, Northern League champions Spennymoor Town held a presentation evening on to honour the players who had helped the club to its second successive title.
Next season will see the County Durham club try to make it three for three. The prospect of promotion and of playing at a higher level was met with part disdainful shrug and part wariness borne of bitter experience. “Been there, done that” meets “once bitten, twice shy”.
Their previous incarnation, Spennymoor United, played in the Northern Premier League – the dizzy heights of the pyramid’s seventh and eight levels – until dire financial circumstances caused the club to fold after 33 games of the 2004–05 season.
Revenue had taken a heavy blow after the clubhouse burned down on Christmas day 2003 – no more sales of pints and pies left little money for wages, and many of the team’s players upped and left. High travel costs (and low attendances) didn’t exactly help, but were an inevitable result of being so far away from many of the other clubs in their division.
This would be worse still had Moors decided to have another crack at the higher league now. The year that the predecessor club collapsed, there were three other north-east teams up there with them. Now, in the recently split league’s three divisions, there is just one. Blyth Spartans and Gateshead have gone on to bigger and better things in the Conference North and Conference Premier respectively, while neighbouring Bishop Auckland plummeted right alongside their local rivals. They have been replaced by Durham City, who won promotion to the Northern Premier League from the Northern League back in 2008.
It’s not that the fans and players are totally averse to travelling. It certainly at least appeared that Spennymoor supporters outnumbered those of Bristol-based Cadbury Heath on the latter’s own ground in an FA Vase game in January, and they probably matched those of Poole Town during the defeat in the next round of the competition the following month. But those are special occasions, made so by being rare.
In the league, the furthest Moors currently have to travel is Penrith in Cumbria. Had they elected to go up, trips to Cheshire and Greater Manchester would not be the exception but the norm. Frankly, nobody can be bothered.
It’s too far to expect all but a hardcore of supporters to travel on Tuesday nights in the depths of winter – and it’s tough on the players too. At an amateur level, when players have day jobs to go back to the following morning, a reluctance to return home from a match in the early hours of the morning is not entirely unreasonable. (The club may have enough of a struggle to keep its squad intact during the close season as it is, with several members who would feature regularly in most sides in the division being only bit-part players at Spennymoor.)
And more than anything else, it costs too much money. A geographical centre-of-mass around the north west, and being one of the most distant teams, would mean that away fans’ attendance would be low too. Home crowds of perhaps a few hundred – and this while winning most weeks – aren’t enough to make up the shortfall.
A relatively poor area that is relatively sparsely populated is always going to have that problem. Towns such as Spennymoor have too few people, and too little money. Scotland in disguise.
Although the chairman, former Aston Villa player Bradley Groves, had initially injected cash into the club, he has said that he wants it ultimately to be self-sustaining, and that attempting dominance of the current division is the means to achieve this, along with perhaps the odd cup victory if it ever becomes possible to prise the Vase out of the hands of Whitley Bay. Any greater ambitions are effectively out of bounds. Even lower strata of the footballing pyramid have glass ceilings, and geography means that the playing field is anything but level.
This is a guest post by Chris White.
Tags: Northern League, Spennymoor Town