Holt – Who Goes There

Accrington Stanley are perpetually the 91st-best-supported team in the top four divisions but their owner is optimistic for the club’s future – though he isn’t so glowing about those who run the game in general.

- Tom Lines

David Burgess still remembers his wife’s response when she found out he was considering taking a job at Accrington Stanley. “She told me I was absolutely wrong in the head.” Burgess was chief executive of the Lancashire FA at the time and says he’d have been quite happy to stay there until retirement. Then he got a call from Andy Holt.

Holt had just become Stanley’s third owner in as many years and was looking for a managing director to run the club. “After speaking to him for an hour I was sold,” says Burgess. But as the scale of the task ahead became apparent, Holt admits they both had second thoughts. “It was wrong everywhere you looked. I sent an accountant in and there were no tax or VAT records. People were pretty much allowed to pay what they liked on the gate and if you put the sprinklers on at half time, the taps dried up in the bar.”

A successful local businessman who made his money in plastics, Holt had become shirt and stadium sponsor at the start of the 2014-15 season but almost immediately realised he’d put his company name on something that was “sinking fast”. His first game was a pre-season friendly against Burnley where the bar ran out of beer at half time because the club hadn’t paid suppliers. After the match chairman Peter Marsden took him aside and outlined the scale of the club’s financial problems. Holt agreed to put in £100,000 to cover wages for a month.