Football / Fan's View
‘Goodbye Nick, hello Wael Al-Qadi’
“I have waited 50 years for this,” said my friend, as he demolished his first pint of generic lager last Friday evening. “All the dead wood gone and now we’ve got more money than the City!”
I don’t know about more money than the City; we’ve got more money than God now. Little old homely Bristol Rovers, familiar with playing at tatty, dilapidated stadia, accepting our place at the bottom of the pecking order. We’re Ragbag Rovers and proud of it!
Except that not all of us were proud of the Ragbag Rovers image and, indeed, reality. Some of us wanted better. It was touching that the football club was one of make and mend, relying on plucky volunteers and director loans.
But with that mentality came something else: boom and bust. Haemorrhaging money, always losing our best players and gambling with the very future of the football club.
In 2006, the boardroom split, Nick Higgs became chairman and eventually majority shareholder. In the interests of unity going forward, I shall pretend that the last 10 years never happened.
Now Mr Higgs has sold his shares and Bristol Rovers has new owners. It would be very easy to conduct a post mortem over the Higgs era but I’ll just say, once and for all, for better but usually worse, it’s over. Goodbye Nick, hello Wael Al-Qadi.
My loyal reader will know that I have never been a fan of overseas owners, of clubs benefiting from the wealth of others, giving them an unfair financial advantage over others, but what was left?
Fan ownership was tried, tested and ultimately failed; the model of local businessmen propping the club up with loans has failed. Sometimes, you just have to accept the reality that is was either more of the same – and maybe even worse – or a move to the overseas owner.
I have absolutely no idea how this new ownership model will play out and frankly I don’t care either. We have wasted far too long engaging in futile debates and arguments at Bristol Rovers which have brought nothing but division.
Like many of those who argued for change, my only regret was that I wasted so much time engaged in off the field stuff that I forgot on the field stuff; the whole reason we attend games in the first place. When I go back, I will not be casting an angry eye at the directors’ box and that will apply whatever happens. Life really is too short.
For the supporters, like my friend, this is their day, hopefully my day too. Once again, I have hope in my heart and at long last the arguments are all but over. I cannot tell you how good this feels.
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