Oldhams new owner is no miracle man, but Frank Rothwell feels like a good fit

Frank Rothwell left school at 14 to repair tractors but then built a multi-million-pound business. He is also the oldest man to row across the Atlantic, raising another million for charity in the process, is one of only 10 sailors to circumnavigate both North and South America, has survived cancer and has built the world’s only coal-powered Land Rover.

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But he is not promising any miracles at Oldham Athletic, the 127-year-old football club Rothwell has just rescued from four years of rancorous decline and almost certain bankruptcy.

“Every football club has a natural level,” said the 72-year-old at a press conference arranged to announce his family’s takeover of the club on Thursday.

“Where’s Oldham’s? It’s at the top of League One, banging on the door of the Championship. That’s where we want to be.

“It’s going to take a lot of hard work, and fun, along the way. We can’t start promising the Premier League. It’s happened before but that’s a long way off.

“Let’s get the people of Oldham proud of the club again. Get them talking about it again in the chippy and the work canteen, and kids going to school with Oldham scarves on. I want the people of Oldham to feel like they own the football club. Let’s get on a steady keel.”

A steady keel, a fitting aspiration for a man who has crossed oceans and a massive improvement on the sad, capsized, storm-tossed vessel Oldham Athletic have been in recent years.

A founding member of the Premier League, Oldham were relegated to the National League, the fifth tier of English football, for the first time in their history in April.

The game that sealed their fate — a home defeat by local rivals Salford City, a former non-League team from the other side of Greater Manchester — was interrupted by fans protesting against the club’s deeply unpopular previous owner, Abdallah Lemsagam.

With 11 minutes still to play, Oldham Athletic told their supporters the match had been abandoned in an attempt to disperse them, so there would be nobody to witness the last rites. But two hours later, the match resumed.

It was meant to be behind closed doors but — typically for the Lemsagam regime — they forgot about the fans who had gathered for an impromptu wake in the Joe Royle Stand’s bar. They could see the action through the windows in the executive boxes in the stand, which is named after the manager who took Oldham to the top flight in 1991 and two FA Cup semi-finals in five seasons. What followed were the embarrassing and farcical scenes of club staff trying to block their view with advertising hoardings.

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Oldham Athletic had become a football club so adrift that its owner was actively trying to stop its fans from watching the team.

Which is why that same bar was packed with fans, staff, media and assorted well-wishers at 5pm on Thursday to find out who had stepped forward to save them. As the Oldham Evening Chronicle put it: “As the Chronicle went to press, a takeover of the club — by a ‘longstanding, successful local businessman’ — remained imminent.” And that word, “imminent”, was the headline on the front page.

And it was not only the bar that was busy. The news that Oldham’s new skipper was about to be announced had brought a crowd of a few hundred fans to the stadium.

Darren Royle, Joe’s son and the club’s new chief executive, opened the proceedings.

“It’s a very important day… an emotional day,” he said. “It’s a new start, a new opportunity for the club, town and fans. Some of us will remember the glory days, and some of us (will remember) the more barren times, but today is to draw a line, bow our heads and salute those times, and then look up with excitement.”

He then turned to those sat alongside him and introduced the club’s new owners, the Rothwells: Frank, his wife Judith and their children, Luke and Sue. The latter was sat alongside Frank and will be joining the board with him.

“This is a dream ticket for the town,” added Royle. “It’s local people with the best interests of the community and club at heart — I’m choking up talking about this — it’s a wonderful opportunity, a great point in history.”

He is right, of course. Frank Rothwell and his family are the perfect owners for Oldham Athletic for reasons we will get into, but it was telling that Royle sounded most emotional when he stressed that the club was being bought by local people who get it.

Lemsagam, a former football agent, did not fail at Oldham because he is a Moroccan who lives in Dubai. He failed because he did not understand the club or town and made no effort whatsoever to do so.

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Royle has been here before. He was Wigan Athletic’s executive chairman and, in 2018, oversaw the sale of the club from the Whelans — another family of local, self-made millionaires — to a company from Hong Kong. Two years later, that firm passed the club on to a Hong Kong-based investment firm, and a month after that, the fund put Wigan into administration.

Royle’s central role in the unequivocally good news at Oldham did not go unnoticed by Wigan fans on social media, and many of them have not forgiven him. But, as he said, Thursday was a day to bury the past and look ahead. And in Frank Rothwell, Oldham fans have plenty to look forward to.

When asked by a journalist to say a little bit about himself and why he had bought the club, Rothwell raced through some — but not all — of the achievements mentioned in the first paragraph, but quickly got onto what makes Oldham such an amazing place to live, start a family, grow a business, have a curry and watch football.

He explained that Darren Royle came to see him in April to ask if Rothwell would introduce him to local business people who might be interested in forming a consortium to buy the club. Rothwell listened to his pitch and thought, “I could do that.” So he did.

The company he founded “as a one-man band” in 1979 is now called Manchester Cabins, one of the UK’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of portable cabins — you will find them everywhere from building sites to music festivals. And its parent company, Portcullis Oldham Limited, now run by his children, made a profit of £5million ($6m) in 2021, on revenue of almost £14m.

Last year, it bought a company that makes demountable car parks for £4.5m. That is significant because Rothwell clearly loves Oldham — he is the town’s first business ambassador and an honorary freeman of the borough — but his family have not bought the football club purely as an act of charity. That would not help in the long run, anyway.

No, there is a plan to breathe life into Boundary Park and its surroundings.

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Thursday marked the completion of the deal to buy the club from Lemsagam but, in the coming days, the Rothwells will also complete the purchase of the Joe Royle Stand, the stadium’s newest and best facility, from another former owner, Simon Blitz.

The total outlay will be £12m, of which about £9m is for settling debts. That is a remarkable amount of money for a loss-making club in the National League, but it makes more sense when you realise how much land it comes with. More than enough to build a car park, for example, which will be handy for Boundary Park Hospital, which is where Frank and Judith’s children were born. There should also be room to build the indoor cricket centre that was first mooted 15 years ago.

The improvements, for club and community, will not stop there.

“I want the ladies who come to Oldham to feel happy and for their toilets to be good,” said Rothwell. “I am passionate about ladies’ toilets. You go to a lot of events and they’re absolutely rubbish and the ratio between men’s and women’s toilets is one for one — that doesn’t make sense to me.”

This drew more laughter from the room, which already felt like a win based on recent history.

“Sorry, am I going on too much?” he asked his daughter Sue, who nodded.

Getting back to his script — and there was one, although he was only loosely following it — he explained the “initial objectives” are to “survive, stabilise, taste success and broaden the club’s appeal”.

By the latter, he meant to fill the stadium again, starting with the club’s first home game against Dorking — “Where’s Dorking? Does anyone know?” — on August 13, but also, further down the road, to widen the club’s ownership, perhaps via a share issue for fans.

There were plenty of other promises — getting the academy up to Category Two status, inviting troupes of dancing girls, brass bands and the national media to the stadium, and complete support for the manager, club legend John Sheridan — but mostly there was just optimism, cheers, pies and pints.

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Joe Royle, who will be joining the new board, was asked how well he knew Rothwell.

“I’ve only met him tonight,” answered the former striker and veteran manager. “But I feel like I’ve known him a long time.”

Familiar, fun and flat-capped, Frank Rothwell and Oldham Athletic are a good fit.

(Top photo: Eddie Garvey/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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