As hordes of Fleetwood Town fans swarmed on to the pitch to celebrate their astonishing victory over Premier League champions Arsenal on Tuesday night, the local millionaire who had made it all possible wasn't there.
asserted
it → swarm → night
Sharp-elbowed businessman Andy Pilley, who bought the tiny Lancashire club for buttons when it was so broke it couldn't pay the players' wages, was 14 miles away – in His Majesty's Prison Kirkham.
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it → buy → Prison
Sources tell me he was permitted to listen to the match on the radio, and 'danced around his cell' as 19-year-old Conor Haughey scored the penalty that sent the mighty Gunners, whose squad cost £1.16billion – 500 times more than Fleetwood's – to one of the unlikeliest defeats in football history.
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squad → tell → history
It was a shock so seismic it even made headlines in The New York Times.
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it → make → Times
Without wishing to rain on the parade of a blighted former fishing port whose 26,000 souls are desperately in need of something to lift their jaded spirits, it is worth recounting why Pilley, 56, is serving a 13-year jail term, handed down at Preston Crown Court in 2023.
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Pilley → wish → 2023
The wheeler-dealer who once sold cheap football shirts on Fleetwood market struck gold by founding BES Utilities, a company that purported to supply competitively priced electricity and gas to small businesses.
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that → sell → businesses
It became one of the town's biggest employers and made him an estimated fortune exceeding £100million.
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It → become → 100million
It was with this that he was able to plough £40million into transforming his beloved club.
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he → plough → club
However, the court heard how he secretly employed agents posing as independent energy advisers to cold-call potential clients, before conning them into signing lengthy rip-off contracts with BES.
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he → hear → BES
Fleetwood Town players celebrate after Jay Lynch saves a penalty from Bruno Guimaraes of Arsenal to win the match
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Lynch → celebrate → match
In harrowing personal statements, 28 of his victims – who ran cafes, hair salons, a dog-grooming parlour and even a children's cancer charity – told how they were driven into debt by Pilley's 'inhumane' scam.
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they → run → scam
Some said their marriages had broken up under the strain, and one was on the brink of suicide.
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one → say → suicide
As Judge Graham Knowles told Pilley: 'Yours could have been a remarkable story of redemption, success, local heroism and philanthropy.
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Yours → tell → redemption
Given that he inflicted such misery, we might have expected Fleetwood's largely blue-collar fans, the salty 'Cod Army', to be well rid of him.
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fans → give → him
Indeed, their Highbury stadium still displays a giant poster showing him kissing one of the trophies Fleetwood won under his stewardship, and before every match the supporters sing his praises to the tune of Winter Wonderland, substituting 'sleigh bells ring' for 'there's only one Andy Pilley'.
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bells → display → Wonderland
In the club shop, where sales of replica red-and-white shirts and scarves are booming on the back of Tuesday's win, I meet Charles Kellett, who began sneaking over a perimeter wall to watch Fleetwood almost 70 years ago, and has followed them ever since.
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who → boom → them
'Everybody here loves Andy, even though he's away on his "holidays" at present,' he winks.
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he → love → holidays
'The first time I met him, on an away trip to Torquay, he was in the pub with us, and he shook my hand and bought me a pint.
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he → meet → pint
Gesturing to the 5,300-capacity stadium, stylishly rebuilt with Pilley's millions (albeit that embittered Arsenal fans are moaning the pitch was 'too small' for their pampered stars), Mr Kellett added: 'Without Andy, none of this would be here.
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none → gesture → this
Did you see the state of this place before?'
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you → see → place
Well, as it happens, I did.
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I → happen → ?
For I was raised in Morecambe, 14 miles north, as the seagull flies, along the coast, and during the late Sixties, when Fleetwood's ambitions extended no further than beating my home-town club in the county league, I ventured there.
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I → raise → league
If Arsenal's superstars felt they had been plunged into a Stone Age bearpit on Tuesday, it was nothing compared with the febrile atmosphere at the Cods versus Shrimps derby.
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it → feel → derby
In those days, Fleetwood's ground resembled an allotment.
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ground → resemble → allotment
They played on a cabbage-patch pitch surrounded by a disused speedway track, and we fans gathered beneath a corrugated iron shed which we would kick repeatedly, sending out a deafening metallic echo that amplified our earthy chants.
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that → play → chants
After one match, when I was about 12 years old, I was set upon and head-butted by another boy as I made my way to the coach.
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I → set → coach
Stuart Murdoch, who became Fleetwood's goalkeeper aged 18, in 1968, recalls being 'paid' with fish from the local docks when there were insufficient funds for his £5 match fee.
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who → become → fee
'We managed to eat for a week, if nothing else,' he laughs.
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he → manage → week
Today, the squad are reasonably well-paid professionals; back then they included a postman, a window cleaner, and – inevitably in a town whose fishing industry employed 9,000 people – various dockworkers and trawlermen.
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industry → pay → people
Murdoch says his contemporaries marvel at the dizzy heights they have reached under Pilley and his 29-year-old son, Jamie – who succeeded his father when his fraud conviction forced him to relinquish ownership, and took over BES Utilities, rebranding it Ruby Energy.
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conviction → say → it
'If you'd said to anyone of my era that Fleetwood would one day beat the champions of the First Division, as it was then, they would have said 'bring in the men in white coats', he says.
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he → say → coats
Designed by Queen Victoria's favourite architect, Decimus Burton, who arranged its streets like a semi-circular fan, it boasted a fine pier, manicured gardens and rivalled its gaudier neighbour, Blackpool, as a tourist resort.
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it → design → resort
Fleetwood also housed a big ICI chemicals plant, and though on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, it had good transport links, with a mainline railway station and a passenger and car ferry service to Northern Ireland.
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it → house → Ireland
However, its wealth came from its 120-strong fleet of deep-sea trawlers, which hauled in 180,000 tons of cod, haddock and hake from the North Atlantic each year, making it the biggest fishing port on England's west coast at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.
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it → come → 1920s
During the Second World War, when eastern ports such as Hull and Grimsby were under blockade, Fleetwood's catch nourished the nation.
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catch → nourish → nation
Mr Pilley founded BES Utilities which he used to fund Fleetwood Town and also con customers
The disastrous decline began in the late 1950s, when Britain became embroiled in the first of three 'Cod Wars' with Iceland, whose government objected to our trawlers plundering their prized fishing grounds and set out a 200-mile exclusion zone.
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trawlers → found → zone
Fleetwood's old seadogs still talk of the skirmishes they fought with Icelandic gunboats in the gale-lashed Arctic Circle.
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they → talk → Circle
As the Icelanders rammed their boats and tried to cut their trawl nets, they would attempt to scare them off by playing 'Rule Britannia' over their loudspeakers.
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they → ram → loudspeakers
When that didn't work, Fleetwood's finest used tougher tactics, one of which, from 1973, has passed into local folklore.
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one → work → folklore
When a gunboat steamed menacingly towards the trawler, Wyre Victory, skipper Tom Watson used a wartime device known as a 'fog buoy' – a heavy wooden pallet towed by a thick rope – to tangle around the enemy's propeller and sheer it off, disabling its engines.
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device → steam → engines
…and 45 more, not listed.
The Aporia
